Assemblages

Spatio-temporal imbalances in the pace of globalized competition and development have resulted in a demanding requirement for affordable housing in Australia’s undersupplied and entrenched communities further segregated from their more able neighbors. Neoliberal governance and planning policies exerts an even higher burden on non-governmental actors in remediating the discord in supply and demand with developers commanding a dominant position to negotiate more lucrative arrangements, reducing or negating their requirements in delivering target ratios of affordable housing in new developments. Through an examination of the spatial extents of the Barangaroo precinct development in its privileged position on the waterfront in Sydney and its submitted documentation, this paper finds an increasing chasm for the urban poor attempting to integrate into Sydney Global City, arguing for a re-evaluation of housing policy to shift the local condition from exclusive enclaves to cohesive social landscapes in an increasingly image-driven cosmopolitan machine.

This paper examines how international development funding and accountability requirements are implicated in the so-called disarticulation of a social movement. Based on field studies in Guatemala and El Salvador, we show and explain the way accountability requirements, which encompass management and accounting, legal, and financial technologies, constitute the field of international development through the regulation of heterogeneous social movement organizations. We highlight how accountability enables a form of governance that makes possible the emergence of entities (with specific attributes), while restricting others. Our analysis has implications for governmentality studies that have examined the interrelation of assemblages by analyzing how these interrelations are operationalized at the field level through the Deleuze-and-Guattari-inspired processes of territorialization, coding, and overcoding.

This article foregrounds how technocultural assemblages – software platforms, algorithms, digital networks and affects – are constitutive of online racialized identities. Rather than being concerned with what online identities are in terms of ethno-racial representation and signification, we can explore how they are materialized via the technologies of online platforms. The article focuses on the micro-blogging site of Twitter and the viral phenomenon of racialized hashtags – dubbed as ‘Blacktags’ – for example #onlyintheghetto or #ifsantawasblack. The circulation of these racialized hashtags is analyzed as the transmission of contagious meanings and affects, such as anti/racist humour, sentiment and social commentary. Blacktags as contagious digital objects play a role in constituting the ‘Black Twitter’ identities they articulate and interact with. Beyond conceiving Black Twitter as a group of preconstituted users tweeting racialized hashtags, Blacktags are instrumental in producing networked subjects which have the capacity to multiply the possibilities of being raced online. Thus, ethno-racial collective behaviours on the Twitter social media platform are grasped as emergent aggregations, materialized through the contagious social relations produced by the networked propagation of Blacktags.

This paper compares the development of International Baccalaureate (IB) schools in four different settings – Argentine, Chile, Spain, and Ecuador – by following two assemblages. The institutional assemblage that relates to whom promotes and funds the IB Diploma Programme (DP) and the curricular assemblage regarding new assemblages between the DP and the official curriculum, in each country.
The global comparative approach used in this study, based on actor-network theory, allows us to analyse the connections and interactions between global  actors and the plurality of national, regional, and municipal actors in a common conceptual frame – the IB network.

Extensive surveillance networks, or the Internet-enabled global surveillance societies (GSS), know no political borders. This paper turns to a country well acquainted with surveillance and censorship as well as a country engaged in frequent protest-China-to discuss what rhetorical devices citizens imbricated in the GSS can deploy to create practices of resistance. We ask the following question herein: what rhetorical devices are citizens imbricated in the GSS deploying to create practices of resistance and how can a networked approach to activism aid in thwarting surveillance? We think through these examples using Deleuze's concept of the assemblage and propose that creativity in the form of collective authorship, working under the cover of the commonplace, and organizing rhizomatically across wild public screens all prove to be useful tools for protestors surrounded by surveillance.

Siguiendo una entrevista tardía de Michel Foucault, pero además los textos que Gilles Deleuze y Giorgio Agamben escriben a propósito de la noción de “dispositivo”, propongo una articulación que, a modo de reconceptualización, permita proponer una herramienta analítica en el campo de estudios de los procesos de subjetivación contemporáneos. Se trata de un ejercicio teórico que lanza una hipótesis doble de lectura: por un lado, el hecho de que la articulación de las componentes del dispositivo tal y como acá se propone es dispuesta por y gracias a la noción de vector. Y, por otro, que la vectorización de esa noción lleva a enmarcarnos en la teoría del agenciamiento propuesta por Deleuze y Guattari.

Siguiendo una entrevista tardia de Michel Foucault, pero ademas los textos que Gilles Deleuze y Giorgio Agamben escriben a proposito de la nocion de “dispositivo”, propongo una articulacion que, a modo de reconceptualizacion, permita proponer una herramienta analitica en el campo de estudios de los procesos de subjetivacion contemporaneos. Se trata de un ejercicio teorico que lanza una hipotesis doble de lectura: por un lado, el hecho de que la articulacion de las componentes del dispositivo tal y como aca se propone es dispuesta por y gracias a la nocion de vector. Y por otro, el dispositivo como aca se propone se enmarca en la teoria del agenciamiento propuesta por Deleuze y Guattari.

The surge of oil palm production in the Neotropics has become a major concern about the potential impacts on biodiversity. In the Colombian Orinoquia, which has shown a massive landscape transformation due to the growth of oil palm plantations, the effects of oil palm agriculture on bats in this region have not been studied up to date. To understand
the impact of habitat conversion on bat diversity, we characterised bat assemblages in secondary forest and palm plantations in the Colombian Llanos foothills (Meta, Colombia). We captured 393 individuals (forest = 81, plantation = 312) of 18 species and 3 families. The forest cover presented three exclusive species while the plantation had five. Species
diversity (q1) and evenness (J’) were higher in the forest compared to the plantation. These differences derived from the increase in abundances of generalist species (Artibeus sp., Carollia spp.) in the plantation. Despite the habitat simplification caused by oil palm
plantations, this monoculture provides a cover that is used by some bats, decreasing their risk of predation and allowing movement between patches of forest habitat as steppingstones. Maintaining forest cover in agricultural landscapes favours diversity by generating a “spillover effect” of the forest towards plantations, which in the case of some bats contributes to the reduction of species isolation and the maintenance of ecosystem services provided by them. It is important to improve management practices of oil palm plantations to minimise negative impacts on biodiversity, considering the expansion of this productive system and the scarcity of protected areas in this region.

Spiders play vital ecological service of controlling many insect pest populations. However, there is limited information on the species richness, evenness, relative abundance, and guild structure of spiders in Mt. Pinukis, Zamboanga del Sur. Sampling was conducted for nine field days in three different elevations (low, middle, high) using beat netting, vial tapping, and pitfall trapping techniques. Ninety-nine spider species belonging to 16 families with 261 individuals were collected.Leucauge decorata and Nephila pilipeswere the abundant species in the study area. Spider assemblages were analyzed using PAST software 3.0. Diversity was highest (H’=3.63) at mid-elevation and lowest (H’=3.15) at high elevation. A more or less even distribution was recorded. The spiders were found to belong to six functional groups (guilds) based on their foraging behavior in the field. The orb web was the dominant guild (59%) followed by the foliage runner (18%). Results indicate that elevation affect...

This paper examines how international development funding and accountability requirements are implicated in the so-called disarticulation of a social movement. Based on field studies in Guatemala and El Salvador, we show and explain the way accountability requirements, which encompass management and accounting, legal, and financial technologies, constitute the field of international development through the regulation of heterogeneous social movement organizations. We highlight how accountability enables a form of governance that makes possible the emergence of entities (with specific attributes), while restricting others. Our analysis has implications for governmentality studies that have examined the interrelation of assemblages by analyzing how these interrelations are operationalized at the field level through the Deleuze-and-Guattari-inspired processes of territorialization, coding, and overcoding.

As new elites rise and fall the question again and again arises: how do the elite expand and maintain their grip on control and power? Central to this issue is the elite’s manifestation of military power in the weapon cult illustrated by the emergence of weapon burials in the Pre Roman Iron Age and its culmination in the weapon sacrificial rites of the Roman Iron Age.
This paper argues that military, religious and political power merged into a symbiotic co-existence in the centuries around the birth of Christ and illustrates this point by introducing a new view on the sacrificial rite, its motive, its function and its effect on the southern Scandinavia.

One of the key concepts introduced by feminist science and technology studies scholar Karen Barad is the concept of ‘intra-action’. Within Barad’s theoretical framework of ‘agential realism’, the term intra-action is a way of conceptualising the ontological and epistemological primacy of process and interaction, or ‘phenomena’, rather than the common-sense ontology of objects and the distinctions between them as self-evident. This paper will explore the utility of such new materialist concepts, drawing upon them to analyse qualitative interview data produced as part of a larger evaluation of needle and syringe program (NSP) services in Western Sydney, Australia. The work of scholars such as Vitellone and Barad introduce a new complexity in our understandings of difference and the body. The paper will consider how useful these concepts are in developing new understandings of how people who inject drugs account for their equipment-related practices, and what role injecting equipment practices play with regard to client identities and relationships. How are harm reduction services and technologies co-produced with and by harm reduction subjects? How are each of these enacted through practices of consumption? How can we consider consumption as a performative act, both in terms of constituting harm reduction subjectivity, as well as materialising objects as harm reduction technologies?