Pub Date : 2024-04-20DOI: 10.1177/23996544241246943
Carina Trabalón
This article analyzes the intensification of Haitians’ “transit migration” from South America to the United States during 2021 in the framework of disputes between the migration movements and control policies that reconfigured the South American border regime during the COVID-19 pandemic. I argue that racialized control policies are a constitutive dimension of the border negotiations that Haitian migrant engage with diverses actors in contexts of illegalization exacerbated by COVID-19 and reinforced by the expansion of North-South “transit migration” as a matrix of political intervention. Through a qualitative methodological approach based on document analysis and online interviews with Haitian migrants, this article synchronously and asynchronously reconstructs the collective travel strategies of four groups of Haitians that left the Southern Cone heading toward the United States and the political scenarios being restructured around the activation, facilitation, diversion, or obstruction of their mobility. The analysis reveals the racialized character of the control policies inscribed in institutional frameworks of “transit migration” based on the new velocity and magnitude of South-North migration and their institutional construction in terms of a “migration crisis” on the Colombia-Panama border between July and September 2021. Similarly, it proposes that the COVID-19 pandemic has contributed to strengthening the Southern Cone-Andean Region interface as a by-product of the amplification and diversification of South-North routes and a constitutive dimension of the infrastructures of violence and resistance that spatially and temporally connect the migratory and border dynamics of South, Central, and North America.
{"title":"Racialized control policies in the south American border regime: The intensification of “transit migration” in times of COVID-19","authors":"Carina Trabalón","doi":"10.1177/23996544241246943","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544241246943","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyzes the intensification of Haitians’ “transit migration” from South America to the United States during 2021 in the framework of disputes between the migration movements and control policies that reconfigured the South American border regime during the COVID-19 pandemic. I argue that racialized control policies are a constitutive dimension of the border negotiations that Haitian migrant engage with diverses actors in contexts of illegalization exacerbated by COVID-19 and reinforced by the expansion of North-South “transit migration” as a matrix of political intervention. Through a qualitative methodological approach based on document analysis and online interviews with Haitian migrants, this article synchronously and asynchronously reconstructs the collective travel strategies of four groups of Haitians that left the Southern Cone heading toward the United States and the political scenarios being restructured around the activation, facilitation, diversion, or obstruction of their mobility. The analysis reveals the racialized character of the control policies inscribed in institutional frameworks of “transit migration” based on the new velocity and magnitude of South-North migration and their institutional construction in terms of a “migration crisis” on the Colombia-Panama border between July and September 2021. Similarly, it proposes that the COVID-19 pandemic has contributed to strengthening the Southern Cone-Andean Region interface as a by-product of the amplification and diversification of South-North routes and a constitutive dimension of the infrastructures of violence and resistance that spatially and temporally connect the migratory and border dynamics of South, Central, and North America.","PeriodicalId":48108,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning C-Politics and Space","volume":"218 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2024-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140630969","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-04-15DOI: 10.1177/23996544241246945
Camila D’Ottaviano
Since the 1970s, popular movements organized around the struggle for housing have been strong in São Paulo. Based on four central agendas – slums and precarious neighborhoods upgrading; better rental conditions; urban improvements and land tenure in peripheral subdivisions; and public funding for housing production – housing movements have consolidated as an essential political player in São Paulo, intersecting with the struggles for health, education, transportation, and urban infrastructure. With local action and national organization, São Paulo’s housing movements are responsible for empowering the community, qualifying their dialogue, preparing for confrontations with the public authorities, and ensuring access to housing through public programs via organized building squatting. This paper analyzes the importance of São Paulo housing movements and its prominent female participants in São Paulo in conquering social rights.
{"title":"Brazilian housing movements and the right to the city","authors":"Camila D’Ottaviano","doi":"10.1177/23996544241246945","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544241246945","url":null,"abstract":"Since the 1970s, popular movements organized around the struggle for housing have been strong in São Paulo. Based on four central agendas – slums and precarious neighborhoods upgrading; better rental conditions; urban improvements and land tenure in peripheral subdivisions; and public funding for housing production – housing movements have consolidated as an essential political player in São Paulo, intersecting with the struggles for health, education, transportation, and urban infrastructure. With local action and national organization, São Paulo’s housing movements are responsible for empowering the community, qualifying their dialogue, preparing for confrontations with the public authorities, and ensuring access to housing through public programs via organized building squatting. This paper analyzes the importance of São Paulo housing movements and its prominent female participants in São Paulo in conquering social rights.","PeriodicalId":48108,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning C-Politics and Space","volume":"15 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2024-04-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140586603","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-03-01DOI: 10.1177/23996544241236605
Guillermo Castillo Ramírez
Since the 1990s, Mexico has been a transit country par excellence in the Americas. However, since the beginning of the 2010s, Mexican territory has been configured as an extended and violent space of migratory containment. In the regional context of Mexico and the United States, the COVID-19 pandemic accentuated state processes of migratory control and criminalization that had been in place for years (such as zero tolerance policies and migrant protection protocols during the Trump administration). Unlike other countries on the American continent, this health emergency in Mexico did not imply the adoption of strict internal measures to limit mobility. Consequently, although the influx of global migrants in transit, mostly Northern Central Americans, slowed during the first months of the pandemic, it did not cease. In fact, since mid-2020, these transitions have multiplied. However, due to the health emergency, asylum seekers and other migrants could not cross the northern border of Mexico as a direct effect of the increase in controls and strict anti-immigrant policies implemented by the United States. The blockade of the northern border, together with the continued influx of even more global migrants (many from northern Central America), meant that Mexico, in a trend that had been going on for years, consolidated itself as a regional and global territory of spatial and temporal confinement (long waiting). Therefore, this article analyzes the geopolitical implications of these processes for Mexico in the midst of a triple health, political and social security crisis.
{"title":"Mexico: Territory of confinement during the pandemic","authors":"Guillermo Castillo Ramírez","doi":"10.1177/23996544241236605","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544241236605","url":null,"abstract":"Since the 1990s, Mexico has been a transit country par excellence in the Americas. However, since the beginning of the 2010s, Mexican territory has been configured as an extended and violent space of migratory containment. In the regional context of Mexico and the United States, the COVID-19 pandemic accentuated state processes of migratory control and criminalization that had been in place for years (such as zero tolerance policies and migrant protection protocols during the Trump administration). Unlike other countries on the American continent, this health emergency in Mexico did not imply the adoption of strict internal measures to limit mobility. Consequently, although the influx of global migrants in transit, mostly Northern Central Americans, slowed during the first months of the pandemic, it did not cease. In fact, since mid-2020, these transitions have multiplied. However, due to the health emergency, asylum seekers and other migrants could not cross the northern border of Mexico as a direct effect of the increase in controls and strict anti-immigrant policies implemented by the United States. The blockade of the northern border, together with the continued influx of even more global migrants (many from northern Central America), meant that Mexico, in a trend that had been going on for years, consolidated itself as a regional and global territory of spatial and temporal confinement (long waiting). Therefore, this article analyzes the geopolitical implications of these processes for Mexico in the midst of a triple health, political and social security crisis.","PeriodicalId":48108,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning C-Politics and Space","volume":"9 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140018970","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-02-29DOI: 10.1177/23996544241236093
Isadora A Cruxên
Studies of financialization have highlighted how politics, particularly through the state, drives the increasing entanglement of financial actors and rationales in the production of urban space. This article shifts the angle to consider the challenges that uncertain politics pose for such entanglement. Looking beyond techno-calculative practices, it explores how finance works politically to sustain value extraction within fragmented regulatory landscapes. It does so through historical and ethnographic analysis of financial investment in urban water and sanitation provision in Brazil, drawing on fieldwork, interviews, and a new dataset on public-private contracts to interrogate how private water companies navigate politico-regulatory relations under financial investors like private equity. It shows that while these providers were quite engaged in local politics under their original owners (construction groups), under financial investors they sought to “escape” it by curbing ties to public officials, reducing the autonomy of local subsidiaries, and successfully lobbying for national standards on regulatory norms. It argues these centralizing efforts constituted forms of centripetal politics meant to enhance asset monitoring, increase regulatory legibility, and reduce political uncertainty. The findings illuminate how financial investors work across political scales to navigate political risk and sustain financial value, thus problematizing the conventional analytical focus on how finance capitalizes on local forms of entrepreneurial politics. Crucially, they reveal the need to treat institutional environments not simply as filters for financial investment but as objects of political contestation by financial actors. This allows for blurring the boundaries between finance and politics, and for politicizing finance.
{"title":"Securing financial returns in politically uncertain worlds: Finance and urban water politics in Brazil","authors":"Isadora A Cruxên","doi":"10.1177/23996544241236093","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544241236093","url":null,"abstract":"Studies of financialization have highlighted how politics, particularly through the state, drives the increasing entanglement of financial actors and rationales in the production of urban space. This article shifts the angle to consider the challenges that uncertain politics pose for such entanglement. Looking beyond techno-calculative practices, it explores how finance works politically to sustain value extraction within fragmented regulatory landscapes. It does so through historical and ethnographic analysis of financial investment in urban water and sanitation provision in Brazil, drawing on fieldwork, interviews, and a new dataset on public-private contracts to interrogate how private water companies navigate politico-regulatory relations under financial investors like private equity. It shows that while these providers were quite engaged in local politics under their original owners (construction groups), under financial investors they sought to “escape” it by curbing ties to public officials, reducing the autonomy of local subsidiaries, and successfully lobbying for national standards on regulatory norms. It argues these centralizing efforts constituted forms of centripetal politics meant to enhance asset monitoring, increase regulatory legibility, and reduce political uncertainty. The findings illuminate how financial investors work across political scales to navigate political risk and sustain financial value, thus problematizing the conventional analytical focus on how finance capitalizes on local forms of entrepreneurial politics. Crucially, they reveal the need to treat institutional environments not simply as filters for financial investment but as objects of political contestation by financial actors. This allows for blurring the boundaries between finance and politics, and for politicizing finance.","PeriodicalId":48108,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning C-Politics and Space","volume":"129 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2024-02-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140018968","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-02-27DOI: 10.1177/23996544241235017
Thomas Wainwright, Ewald Kibler, Will Scott, Jukka-Pekka Heikkilä
Scholars have drawn attention to educational spaces as sites of contestation and struggle. Researchers have increasingly scrutinised the power structures and relations that shape educational spaces, particularly in the mobilisation of education to further the economic competitiveness of nation-states. Adopting a dispositif lens, our ethnographic study examines digital business education in a North Korean university. In doing so, we uncover the unstable interplay between a dispositif of paternalist care and a dispositif of discipline, which are both required by the regime to control the development of new digital capabilities, examining the techniques used to develop and restrict digital education. In conclusion, our paper develops new understanding of how digital capabilities, through education, are simultaneously enabled and constrained, and how dispositifs differentially unfold across space.
{"title":"Unfolding dispositifs: Attempts at digital business education in North Korea","authors":"Thomas Wainwright, Ewald Kibler, Will Scott, Jukka-Pekka Heikkilä","doi":"10.1177/23996544241235017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544241235017","url":null,"abstract":"Scholars have drawn attention to educational spaces as sites of contestation and struggle. Researchers have increasingly scrutinised the power structures and relations that shape educational spaces, particularly in the mobilisation of education to further the economic competitiveness of nation-states. Adopting a dispositif lens, our ethnographic study examines digital business education in a North Korean university. In doing so, we uncover the unstable interplay between a dispositif of paternalist care and a dispositif of discipline, which are both required by the regime to control the development of new digital capabilities, examining the techniques used to develop and restrict digital education. In conclusion, our paper develops new understanding of how digital capabilities, through education, are simultaneously enabled and constrained, and how dispositifs differentially unfold across space.","PeriodicalId":48108,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning C-Politics and Space","volume":"84 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2024-02-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140025149","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-02-27DOI: 10.1177/23996544241236095
Kavita Ramakrishnan, Luděk Stavinoha
In this paper, we center the witnessing repertoires of grassroots volunteers and explore the ways in which they bear witness to and condemn the border violence experienced by illegalized migrants across Europe. Drawing on long-term research of volunteer solidarity structures across Greece and in Paris, our analysis of witnessing uses the ‘intimate’ as a conceptual framing across three intersections of analysis. First, we locate the ‘intimate’ in volunteers’ embodied presence in migrant spaces, where important relations of care between volunteers and migrants emerge based on physical and emotional proximity. Second, we unpack how intimate mourning over migrant incarceration and death are publicly evoked, in the affective and emotive authorship of events to which volunteers bear witness. Finally, we reflect on the multiple political potentialities of intimate witnessing, not only as an alternative to traditional modalities of humanitarian witnessing, but as a radical confrontation against racialized logics that underpin Europe’s bordering apparatus. Bringing together literature on feminist geopolitics, humanitarian witnessing, and volunteer-refugee solidarities, we argue that the distinct repertoires of ‘intimate witnessing’ are paramount to solidarity, whereby volunteers render visible the mundane violence and indignities illegalized migrants face across Europe.
{"title":"Intimate witnessing: Volunteer testimonies of everyday border violence","authors":"Kavita Ramakrishnan, Luděk Stavinoha","doi":"10.1177/23996544241236095","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544241236095","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, we center the witnessing repertoires of grassroots volunteers and explore the ways in which they bear witness to and condemn the border violence experienced by illegalized migrants across Europe. Drawing on long-term research of volunteer solidarity structures across Greece and in Paris, our analysis of witnessing uses the ‘intimate’ as a conceptual framing across three intersections of analysis. First, we locate the ‘intimate’ in volunteers’ embodied presence in migrant spaces, where important relations of care between volunteers and migrants emerge based on physical and emotional proximity. Second, we unpack how intimate mourning over migrant incarceration and death are publicly evoked, in the affective and emotive authorship of events to which volunteers bear witness. Finally, we reflect on the multiple political potentialities of intimate witnessing, not only as an alternative to traditional modalities of humanitarian witnessing, but as a radical confrontation against racialized logics that underpin Europe’s bordering apparatus. Bringing together literature on feminist geopolitics, humanitarian witnessing, and volunteer-refugee solidarities, we argue that the distinct repertoires of ‘intimate witnessing’ are paramount to solidarity, whereby volunteers render visible the mundane violence and indignities illegalized migrants face across Europe.","PeriodicalId":48108,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning C-Politics and Space","volume":"264 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2024-02-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140025231","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-02-16DOI: 10.1177/23996544241231677
Tomas Maltby, Sarah Birch, Adam Fagan, Mate Subašić
There has been growing awareness across the world of the negative health effects of air pollution. Poland is the European country that is worst affected by this problem, and the Polish government has in recent years adopted a number of measures designed to reduce coal use. This paper explores the role of civil society activism in this shift, investigating the extent to which local activists played a catalytic role in shaping popular awareness of air pollution and accounting for policy developments in this area. We draw on individual-level data from two Eurobarometer surveys together with qualitative data from a series of original elite interviews and the analysis of related policy documents, and we find little evidence that activism was a driver of variations in local popular awareness of air pollution, but support for the supposition that activism played a major role in shaping policy change at local level.
{"title":"What is the role of activism in air pollution politics? Understanding policy change in Poland","authors":"Tomas Maltby, Sarah Birch, Adam Fagan, Mate Subašić","doi":"10.1177/23996544241231677","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544241231677","url":null,"abstract":"There has been growing awareness across the world of the negative health effects of air pollution. Poland is the European country that is worst affected by this problem, and the Polish government has in recent years adopted a number of measures designed to reduce coal use. This paper explores the role of civil society activism in this shift, investigating the extent to which local activists played a catalytic role in shaping popular awareness of air pollution and accounting for policy developments in this area. We draw on individual-level data from two Eurobarometer surveys together with qualitative data from a series of original elite interviews and the analysis of related policy documents, and we find little evidence that activism was a driver of variations in local popular awareness of air pollution, but support for the supposition that activism played a major role in shaping policy change at local level.","PeriodicalId":48108,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning C-Politics and Space","volume":"38 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2024-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139955313","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-01-30DOI: 10.1177/23996544241230185
Francesca Bragaglia
This paper contributes to the debate on the ‘post-political city’ in urban studies. This debate has highlighted that the ‘post-political’ seems now an inherent condition of contemporary cities. However, empirical analysis reflects a more complex reality where dissent in urban space can challenge the idea of a ‘post-political city’ by default. Among the expressions of dissent within urban space, ‘graffiti slogans’ offer interesting insights if contextualised within the post-political theory. To support my thesis, I analyse the case study of Porta Palazzo in Turin (Italy), an urban area undergoing deep urban and social transformations. Drawing on Rancière, on the walls of Porta Palazzo, ‘politics’ and ‘police order’ are constantly intertwined through graffiti slogans created, modified and erased.
{"title":"Another sign on the wall: Graffiti slogans between dissent and post-political dynamics","authors":"Francesca Bragaglia","doi":"10.1177/23996544241230185","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544241230185","url":null,"abstract":"This paper contributes to the debate on the ‘post-political city’ in urban studies. This debate has highlighted that the ‘post-political’ seems now an inherent condition of contemporary cities. However, empirical analysis reflects a more complex reality where dissent in urban space can challenge the idea of a ‘post-political city’ by default. Among the expressions of dissent within urban space, ‘graffiti slogans’ offer interesting insights if contextualised within the post-political theory. To support my thesis, I analyse the case study of Porta Palazzo in Turin (Italy), an urban area undergoing deep urban and social transformations. Drawing on Rancière, on the walls of Porta Palazzo, ‘politics’ and ‘police order’ are constantly intertwined through graffiti slogans created, modified and erased.","PeriodicalId":48108,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning C-Politics and Space","volume":"116 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2024-01-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139955182","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-13DOI: 10.1177/23996544231212968
Sunčana Laketa, Banu Gökarıksel, Sara Fregonese
The lockdowns imposed upon cities, regions, and countries as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic are extraordinary state-sanctioned spatial interventions, both in terms of scale and scope. However, rather than a time-delimited event nor an exceptional circumstance of a temporary crisis, the pandemic lockdown was entangled with long-standing and on-going intimate and embodied histories of political violence, upheaval, militarization, displacement and dispossession. Be it as a result of war, terrorism, natural disaster, or pandemic – lockdown is more than an intervention in physical space and infrastructure alone. It is also an intervention that mobilizes, and often relies on, the sphere of the intimate along different and often unequal geographies of vulnerability. In this Theme Issue, we build on feminist geopolitics and feminist political geography to examine the intimacies of lockdown, seen through the experiences of refugees, migrants, low-income residents, as well as within the contexts of war and terrorism. Here, the politics of embodiment, domesticity and affectivity is central for understanding how lockdowns actively shape and are shaped by intimate geographies, thus advancing the theorization of the lockdown more broadly. The contributions to this Theme Issue gather around the following questions: how does the spatial politics of lockdown mobilize the sphere of the intimate? More broadly, how does the intimate help forge possibilities and places of counter-narratives of solidarity, shared vulnerabilities and care in contrast to renewed militarization, rising authoritarianism, violence, and the expanding spatialities of confinement in everyday life?
{"title":"Introduction: Lockdown and the intimate","authors":"Sunčana Laketa, Banu Gökarıksel, Sara Fregonese","doi":"10.1177/23996544231212968","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544231212968","url":null,"abstract":"The lockdowns imposed upon cities, regions, and countries as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic are extraordinary state-sanctioned spatial interventions, both in terms of scale and scope. However, rather than a time-delimited event nor an exceptional circumstance of a temporary crisis, the pandemic lockdown was entangled with long-standing and on-going intimate and embodied histories of political violence, upheaval, militarization, displacement and dispossession. Be it as a result of war, terrorism, natural disaster, or pandemic – lockdown is more than an intervention in physical space and infrastructure alone. It is also an intervention that mobilizes, and often relies on, the sphere of the intimate along different and often unequal geographies of vulnerability. In this Theme Issue, we build on feminist geopolitics and feminist political geography to examine the intimacies of lockdown, seen through the experiences of refugees, migrants, low-income residents, as well as within the contexts of war and terrorism. Here, the politics of embodiment, domesticity and affectivity is central for understanding how lockdowns actively shape and are shaped by intimate geographies, thus advancing the theorization of the lockdown more broadly. The contributions to this Theme Issue gather around the following questions: how does the spatial politics of lockdown mobilize the sphere of the intimate? More broadly, how does the intimate help forge possibilities and places of counter-narratives of solidarity, shared vulnerabilities and care in contrast to renewed militarization, rising authoritarianism, violence, and the expanding spatialities of confinement in everyday life?","PeriodicalId":48108,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning C-Politics and Space","volume":"37 5","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136346836","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-11-10DOI: 10.1177/23996544231213196
Francis Portes Virginio, Lívia dos Santos Ferreira
This article examines the trafficking of Venezuelan truck drivers for labour exploitation in Brazil. The remilitarisation of politics is increasingly a hallmark of elite-driven strategies to manage the circulation of labour and goods from extractive zones. This article introduces the notion of logistics of unfreedom to explain the growing imbrication between techniques of control by the state and corporations that confine the reproduction of migrants within the realm of logistics processes. The analysis focuses on data from participatory observations and the narratives of 22 Venezuelan refugees who were trafficked from a militarised humanitarian zone in Brazil's Amazon to work for a freight road transport company in Southern Brazil. Findings show that a concerted logistic approach to refugee employment channelled mobility, constrained statutory protection and shaped the ethno-political differentiation of Venezuelans in the labour market. This forced Venezuelans to live in trucks where both productive and socially reproductive aspects of their daily lives were overdetermined by the rhythms of goods distribution. The article concludes that this logistic rationale has converged towards a self-contained regime of labour unfreedom that facilitates the labour trafficking of Venezuelan refugees.
{"title":"<i>Logistics of unfreedom:</i> The labour trafficking of Venezuelan truck drivers in Brazil","authors":"Francis Portes Virginio, Lívia dos Santos Ferreira","doi":"10.1177/23996544231213196","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544231213196","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the trafficking of Venezuelan truck drivers for labour exploitation in Brazil. The remilitarisation of politics is increasingly a hallmark of elite-driven strategies to manage the circulation of labour and goods from extractive zones. This article introduces the notion of logistics of unfreedom to explain the growing imbrication between techniques of control by the state and corporations that confine the reproduction of migrants within the realm of logistics processes. The analysis focuses on data from participatory observations and the narratives of 22 Venezuelan refugees who were trafficked from a militarised humanitarian zone in Brazil's Amazon to work for a freight road transport company in Southern Brazil. Findings show that a concerted logistic approach to refugee employment channelled mobility, constrained statutory protection and shaped the ethno-political differentiation of Venezuelans in the labour market. This forced Venezuelans to live in trucks where both productive and socially reproductive aspects of their daily lives were overdetermined by the rhythms of goods distribution. The article concludes that this logistic rationale has converged towards a self-contained regime of labour unfreedom that facilitates the labour trafficking of Venezuelan refugees.","PeriodicalId":48108,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning C-Politics and Space","volume":"107 37","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135136796","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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