Political Geography最新文献

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.

The computational logics of large language models (LLMs) or generative AI – from the early models of CLIP and BERT to the explosion of text and image generation via ChatGPT and DALL-E − are increasingly penetrating the social and political world. Not merely in the direct sense that generative AI models are being deployed to govern difficult problems, whether decisions on the battlefield or responses to pandemic, but also because generative AI is shaping and delimiting the political parameters of what can be known and actioned in the world. Contra the promise of a generalizable “world model” in computer science, the article addresses how and why generative AI gives rise to a model of the world, and with it a set of political logics and governing rationalities that have profound and enduring effects on how we live today. The article traces the genealogies of generative AI models, how they have come into being, and why some concepts and techniques that animate these models become durable forms of knowledge that actively shape the world, even long after a specific material commercial GPT model has moved on to a new iteration. Though generative AI retains significant traces of former scientific and computational regimes – in statistical practices, probabilistic knowledge, and so on – it is also dislocating epistemological arrangements and opening them to novel ways of perceiving, characterising, classifying, and knowing the world. Four defining aspects of the political logic of generative AI are elaborated: i) generativity as something more than the capacity to generate image or text outputs, so that a generative logic acts upon the world understood as estimates of “underlying distributions” in data; ii) latency as a political logic of compression in which (by contrast with claims to reduction or distortion) the thing that is hidden, unknown or latent becomes surfaced and amenable to being governed; iii) broken and parallelized sequences as the ordering device of the political logic of generative AI, where attention frameworks radically change the possibilities for governing non-linear problems; iv) pre-training and fine-tuning as a computational logic of generative AI that simultaneously shapes a “zero shot politics” oriented towards unencountered data and new tasks. Across each of the four aspects, the article maps the emerging contemporary political logic of generative AI.

The recent increase in Venezuelan migrants and refugees to Brazil has prompted a humanitarian response coordinated by multiple government agencies and inter/national organisations. This coordination effort sits under the umbrella of the Operation Welcome task force, in which the military is heavily involved. Situated in the northern state of Roraima, bordering Venezuela, this article explores one particular site of humanitarian care: a set of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) facilities located in the capital city of Boa Vista. Here, I investigate the militaristic design and processes of the shower block, which is available to Venezuelan refugees and migrants who are living without adequate shelter. In doing so, this paper argues that the normalisation of militarism in humanitarian intervention (re)produces exclusion and precarity for those accessing spaces of care. By understanding the water infrastructure of the site as an infrastructure of containment, this research shines light on the everyday, often invisiblised implications of migration governance that occur at the micro-scale. In particular, it highlights the conditions of slow and symbolic violence that are embedded within the military-humanitarian response.