Political Geography最新文献

This article departs from the author's own critical ethnographic vignettes in Eastern Indonesian islands, suggesting that islands have not only often been constructed around colonial paradigms of smallness and remoteness but have been framed as ‘islands’ in an attempt to contain the powerful political agency of locales mastering mobility, multi-culturalism, and permeability.

Here, the tidalectics of (intertidal) islands is embodied by bagian: house streams, living matrices neither sea nor land. These island nerves are not just central and controversial features of aquaculture; they ultimately mirror kinship relations, as entanglements that regulate sociality and conviviality. This article explores islands as thriving nerve centres of relations and circulation. Local notions of ‘being’ and ‘belonging’ that generate specific conceptualisations of spaces as places are central to how islands are experienced: a complex and dynamic realm of relations that string out, instead of being a container encompassing fixed places and/or fixed movement patterns. This has consequences for how we study, describe, and theorise geopolitical and politico-ecological matters in marine and island environments. The belittlement of islands dominates in regional politics and environmental policymaking in Indonesia and elsewhere, where islands and sea-based societies are either considered marginal or not considered at all. Actual political and ecological relations and interdependencies of marine and island peoples, that link places but are not confined to places, can be overshadowed in the assumptions of socioenvironmental approaches to island environments. Daily circulations do not take place ‘in the margins’ but in a thriving mesh of movements and relations across and beyond the transboundary spaces of land-sea binaries.

Intersectional praxis - the practical application of intersectional theorizing into action - can be highly relevant for pursuing social-ecological transformations. Yet, we know little about the benefits and challenges of trying to mobilize such praxis for pursuing transformations. In this contribution to critical feminist and political ecology scholarship, we explore this gap empirically through a case study of producing a grassroots Green Deal in North Macedonia in which intersectional theory principles were employed in a process of collective visioning and grassroots organizing around that endeavor. To identify benefits and challenges related to this process, we inquire into the documents produced and the experience of organizers coordinating and catalyzing those efforts. We find that the benefits of enacting intersectional praxis relate to strategizing and mobilizing, collective action, and intersectional solidarity building. Challenges faced included fears concerning the unfamiliarity with the concept of intersectionality, and issues related to the capacity of individuals from subaltern groups to participate in collective visioning processes under conditions of precarious existence. We conclude that grassroots organizing around the Green Deal framework could have a potential to address some critiques of mainstream Green Deals, shift narratives of socio-ecological transformations (SETs), unite different movements working towards climate and social justice, and mobilize people power under an umbrella framework that dominates the policy arena, such as the Green Deal.

This study is a geographical investigation of malapportionment in the United States Senate, using national-level tables and graphs for all census years from 1790 through 2020, and state-level maps for census years 1790, 1820, 1920, and 2020. Senate malapportionment is found to have worsened over time, with geographically varying manifestations. The article proposes an expansion of the Senate using the Method of Equal Proportions, which would considerably diminish the degree of malapportionment if adopted.

This article examines the politics of prison siting on contaminated land within an endangered ecosystem in Australia, contributing to the literature on carceral geography and the burgeoning field of abolition ecology. I argue that prisons materialise in the landscape through processes of dispossession, environmental degradation and value extraction that enclose Indigenous lands for caging populations cast as ‘surplus’ to settler racial capitalism. The primary focus is the interface between prisons and the Victorian Volcanic Plain grasslands at a site called Ravenhall, a former military testing site that has been remade as a ‘prisons precinct’ and native grasslands reserve on Bunurong country in the outer Western suburbs of Melbourne. I investigate the history, ecology and political economy of prison-building at this site, unearthing the assemblage of living and nonliving entities involved in the construction of carceral geographies, and the meaning-making that guides planning and conservation processes. Rather than simply protecting and enhancing the biodiversity of the plains grasslands, neoliberal conservation practices at Ravenhall facilitate carceral development by generating more visible and ‘substitutable’ natures to gloss over the socially and ecologically toxic realities of prisons. The analysis reinforces the role that carceral geographies play in reproducing structured racial-environmental vulnerabilities and the importance of challenging sprawling prison developments as part of decolonial, abolitionist and ecological justice struggles.

Based on autoethnographic and ethnographic data from Macao, this study aims to elucidate the proposed concept of “political liminality.” This concept highlights that politics is constituted by multiple binaries with multiple ambiguities, where the overlapping, interacting, and staggering of multiple binaries occur across the political space. Political liminality also involves verb attributes, occurring in the productive process among three key binaries— macro/micro politics, state/non-state actors, and hybrid online/offline practices. Using Lefebvre's “perceived-conceived-lived” triad as an analytical frame, this study further investigates the production of political liminality in Macao. The authors not only analyze how the one-country-two-systems policy functions as representations of space intervening in spatial textures of borders, but also challenge the presumed passive role of non-state actors in nationalist activities, yielding a bottom-up political liminality in people's lived spaces. In the case of an enclave within Macao, the authors further discuss the ambiguities involved in political liminality over the geographical and digital issues of liminal sovereignty.

Nationalist visions of the future are articulated through the language and logic of science. This article extends political geography research on the future by examining “scientific nationalism” expressed at two museums of the future in Germany and the UAE: Berlin's Futurium and Dubai's Museum of the Future. The techno-science ideals narrated in the museums are projected as planetary stories about building common futures through science, technological innovation, and concern for the environment, but fundamentally reinforce nationalist ideals and aspirations about their nations' success and prosperity in the future. In Germany and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), nationalist discourses celebrate science and technology – and technoscientific prowess is framed in the two museums of the future as holding the key to solving planetary challenges like the climate crisis. But in “technowashing” social, political, and environmental challenges, they reflect a conservative approach to centering technology-centered questions about the future, while working to persevere the energy-intensive, capitalist political economy that defines their present. By projecting these extractive and nationalist presents into the future, the two future-themed museums illustrate how the future animates nationalist visions not just through stories of survivance, but also through stories of science.

In this article, I investigate how material strategies of commemoration are part of the recategorisation of public space in a series of nationalistic projects in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. I look especially at the different ways in which these commemorative territories are made present, and the specific view of history that these presences entail. The studied cases include for example the transformation of a public square into a ‘memorial square’ (Rabin Square), of a religious space into a ‘space of national significance’ (Western Wall Plaza), and of part of an urban district into a ‘archaeological excavation’ and a ‘tourist theme park’ (City of David). In the article, I trace and conceptualise five temporal modalities (or temporal perspectives) and discuss their related material designs. Finally, I discuss how studying these modalities can be fertile for exploring how memorials play a part in producing and stabilising different kinds of nationalist affects and sentiments.

This article examines the social and geopolitical power of frontiers. For some, frontiers are viewed relatively narrowly as markers of physical territory, and as relics of a past imperial age. We build on ‘critical’ or ‘revisionist’ frontier study which sees frontiers as persistent and regenerative forces of social practice that give meaning to the landscape and its inhabitants. With a focus on South Asia, and India's Northeast in particular, we show that while frontiers may appear to have disappeared they can be remade in the interests of modern hegemonic power and neo-colonising policies, sometimes within the territorial borders of nation states but between imagined worlds of civilisation and barbarism which the frontiers themselves help to define and create. This can be achieved through an ‘imperial sleight of hand’, whereby frontiers of history can be co-opted and refashioned including by post-colonial states and institutions in the service of contemporary political practice. Thus, frontiers commonly represent (manufactured) opportunities for the consolidation or advancement of power, more than challenges to be resolved or overcome. In line with the focus of this special issue, we argue that this gives frontiers the contemporary world-making capacity to permit and foreclose particular lives and subjectivities, and that racialising frontier logics play out even within the so-called ‘non-white’ or majority world.