Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1177/02637758231184881
T. White
Representations of the friction of terrain play a significant role in the production of the territorial imagination in contemporary China. As infrastructure and its attendant promises are rolled out to once-remote corners of the nation, the state has sought to memorialize the heroic experience of the friction of terrain during the Chinese Revolution and subsequent projects of territorial incorporation in Inner Asia, before the proliferation of durable infrastructure. At the same time, even as the Chinese state deploys increasingly high-tech, disembodied means to police its borders, representations of charismatic transport animals used to patrol select sections of these borders have circulated in various media. This article argues that the mobility of animal bodies is deployed to produce a distinctive form of territorial imagination in China, one which foregrounds the friction of terrain at certain sites, and conjures up state fantasies of interspecies relations as/and interethnic friendship. While much recent scholarly literature focusses on the collocation of infrastructure and state power, this article calls for attention to the ways in which states can also mobilize representations of selected sites of roadlessness, and concomitant animal-based mobilities.
{"title":"Sparks from the friction of terrain: Transport animals, borderlands, and the territorial imagination in China","authors":"T. White","doi":"10.1177/02637758231184881","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758231184881","url":null,"abstract":"Representations of the friction of terrain play a significant role in the production of the territorial imagination in contemporary China. As infrastructure and its attendant promises are rolled out to once-remote corners of the nation, the state has sought to memorialize the heroic experience of the friction of terrain during the Chinese Revolution and subsequent projects of territorial incorporation in Inner Asia, before the proliferation of durable infrastructure. At the same time, even as the Chinese state deploys increasingly high-tech, disembodied means to police its borders, representations of charismatic transport animals used to patrol select sections of these borders have circulated in various media. This article argues that the mobility of animal bodies is deployed to produce a distinctive form of territorial imagination in China, one which foregrounds the friction of terrain at certain sites, and conjures up state fantasies of interspecies relations as/and interethnic friendship. While much recent scholarly literature focusses on the collocation of infrastructure and state power, this article calls for attention to the ways in which states can also mobilize representations of selected sites of roadlessness, and concomitant animal-based mobilities.","PeriodicalId":48303,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning D-Society & Space","volume":"38 1","pages":"433 - 450"},"PeriodicalIF":3.8,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79710224","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1177/02637758231178031
L. Gibson
The single-use plastic bag is the most legislated item of plastic in the world, banned in over 92 countries. The bans are largely concentrated in Africa and the Caribbean, where the plastic bags are often black and the plastic footprints small. The bans have destabilised essential economic, social, and technical arrangements of marginalised communities reliant on plastic engagements and adaptations to improvise against multiple, overlapping, incursive forms of violence. This article seeks to understand the spatial and material nature of these legislative actions and the particular item of single-use plastic they target. Acknowledging the (spatialised) material realities of the single-use plastic bag, this article argues that these bans are a legislative response to the black plastic bag as spatialised, racialised, sexualised, abject Other. Drawing from monster theory, the article reflects on the trans-corporeal body burdening of black plastic bags and the black hands, black bodies, black markets, and black, corrupt, illicit actions with whom and which they are associated. Reconceptualising the (black) single-use plastic bag as an agape, plastic monster that defines, patrols, and transgresses cultural/economic boundaries, this article calls for making explicit the vermicular activities within economic marginalisation and distinguishing them from the discursively constructed amorphous, tentacled mass.
{"title":"Plastic monsters: Abjection, worms, the Cthulhic, and the black single-use plastic bag","authors":"L. Gibson","doi":"10.1177/02637758231178031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758231178031","url":null,"abstract":"The single-use plastic bag is the most legislated item of plastic in the world, banned in over 92 countries. The bans are largely concentrated in Africa and the Caribbean, where the plastic bags are often black and the plastic footprints small. The bans have destabilised essential economic, social, and technical arrangements of marginalised communities reliant on plastic engagements and adaptations to improvise against multiple, overlapping, incursive forms of violence. This article seeks to understand the spatial and material nature of these legislative actions and the particular item of single-use plastic they target. Acknowledging the (spatialised) material realities of the single-use plastic bag, this article argues that these bans are a legislative response to the black plastic bag as spatialised, racialised, sexualised, abject Other. Drawing from monster theory, the article reflects on the trans-corporeal body burdening of black plastic bags and the black hands, black bodies, black markets, and black, corrupt, illicit actions with whom and which they are associated. Reconceptualising the (black) single-use plastic bag as an agape, plastic monster that defines, patrols, and transgresses cultural/economic boundaries, this article calls for making explicit the vermicular activities within economic marginalisation and distinguishing them from the discursively constructed amorphous, tentacled mass.","PeriodicalId":48303,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning D-Society & Space","volume":"70 1","pages":"529 - 548"},"PeriodicalIF":3.8,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81573541","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1177/02637758231181398
Alexandrine Boudreault‐Fournier
Pressure refers to a force exerted on humans, objects, and ecosystems that prevents or facilitates the flow and growth of things, movements, bodies, and ideas. Cuba has to cope with a lot of pressure due to the collapse of the tourist industry in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, an aging infrastructure, a malfunctioning system, and the long-lasting U.S. embargo. I propose to think through pressure in order to highlight some of the strategies adopted by people and other organisms to deal with or lower the pressure felt in their daily life. In reflecting on the current Cuban economic, social and humanitarian crisis, I aim at catching the pulse of the moment to shift the crisis-based discourse to one based on pressure. I focus on two types of pressure – air and blood – to think through the pulse of the post-COVID Cuban crisis. Pressure allows for a cross-sectorial and multi-scalar understanding of the connections between how people live and how they strive to develop coping mechanisms to face pressure.
{"title":"Under pressure: Catching the pulse of a Cuban crisis","authors":"Alexandrine Boudreault‐Fournier","doi":"10.1177/02637758231181398","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758231181398","url":null,"abstract":"Pressure refers to a force exerted on humans, objects, and ecosystems that prevents or facilitates the flow and growth of things, movements, bodies, and ideas. Cuba has to cope with a lot of pressure due to the collapse of the tourist industry in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, an aging infrastructure, a malfunctioning system, and the long-lasting U.S. embargo. I propose to think through pressure in order to highlight some of the strategies adopted by people and other organisms to deal with or lower the pressure felt in their daily life. In reflecting on the current Cuban economic, social and humanitarian crisis, I aim at catching the pulse of the moment to shift the crisis-based discourse to one based on pressure. I focus on two types of pressure – air and blood – to think through the pulse of the post-COVID Cuban crisis. Pressure allows for a cross-sectorial and multi-scalar understanding of the connections between how people live and how they strive to develop coping mechanisms to face pressure.","PeriodicalId":48303,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning D-Society & Space","volume":"78 1","pages":"392 - 410"},"PeriodicalIF":3.8,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74216014","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1177/02637758231185134
C. Wrigley
On the Kola Peninsula in the Russian Arctic lies an innocuous iron disc about the size of a dinner plate. If one were to prise this disc open, they would find the remains of the world’s deepest vertical hole. Reaching a depth of over 12 kilometres, the Kola Superdeep Borehole was drilled in the pursuit of excavating scientific knowledges for a better understanding of the Earth’s crust. Whilst the borehole produced some important findings, and hosted an international delegation of researchers, once the Soviet Union collapsed, it fell into disrepair. Since its closure, the Kola Superdeep has become lost to history, but its existence as a ruin has generated new artistic engagements with the underground. This article uses the geological notion of discontinuity – a structural break in the rock – to imagine how discontinuity might be found within the borehole itself. It does this by identifying three access points: excavation through drilling and coring, collaboration through cross-border scientific work, and imagination through art and the weird. By resisting the notion that the subterranean can be objectively known through science, I reveal how the Kola Superdeep produces other relations, knowledges, and ways of sensing the subterranean.
{"title":"Going deep: Excavation, collaboration and imagination at the Kola Superdeep Borehole","authors":"C. Wrigley","doi":"10.1177/02637758231185134","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758231185134","url":null,"abstract":"On the Kola Peninsula in the Russian Arctic lies an innocuous iron disc about the size of a dinner plate. If one were to prise this disc open, they would find the remains of the world’s deepest vertical hole. Reaching a depth of over 12 kilometres, the Kola Superdeep Borehole was drilled in the pursuit of excavating scientific knowledges for a better understanding of the Earth’s crust. Whilst the borehole produced some important findings, and hosted an international delegation of researchers, once the Soviet Union collapsed, it fell into disrepair. Since its closure, the Kola Superdeep has become lost to history, but its existence as a ruin has generated new artistic engagements with the underground. This article uses the geological notion of discontinuity – a structural break in the rock – to imagine how discontinuity might be found within the borehole itself. It does this by identifying three access points: excavation through drilling and coring, collaboration through cross-border scientific work, and imagination through art and the weird. By resisting the notion that the subterranean can be objectively known through science, I reveal how the Kola Superdeep produces other relations, knowledges, and ways of sensing the subterranean.","PeriodicalId":48303,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning D-Society & Space","volume":"1 1","pages":"549 - 567"},"PeriodicalIF":3.8,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77667335","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1177/02637758231184255
Laurel Mei-Singh
Hawai‘i faces a crisis of homelessness due to the high cost of housing across the islands. Many without formal housing establish interdependent communities unsanctioned by property regimes and refer to themselves as “houseless” because intimate relations with place and expansive practices of care provide an adequate home. Attending to the experiences of Hawai‘i’s houseless, I unpack the meanings and practices of organized abandonment while proposing that some face structural neglect by “living with abandon.” I argue that the rupturing of life-giving relations entwined with particular places serve as a foundation of organized abandonment. Devolution, state retrenchment, the intensification of land use for revenue-oriented development, and a punitive carceral state layer upon this foundational rupture to propel the continual abandonment of shared resources. This enables the ongoing circulation of capital through the environment. In response, people live with abandon by rejecting, or holding an ambivalent relationship with, aspirations to thrive within capitalism. Living with abandon is a form of creative improvisation that cultivates connections in the face of broken relations, yet remains defined by uncertainty and heartbreak. It both invokes the fullness of time and space and mourns the losses that have produced the tenuous present.
{"title":"A broken heart and fear of the bulldozer: Organized abandonment and living with abandon in Hawai‘i","authors":"Laurel Mei-Singh","doi":"10.1177/02637758231184255","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758231184255","url":null,"abstract":"Hawai‘i faces a crisis of homelessness due to the high cost of housing across the islands. Many without formal housing establish interdependent communities unsanctioned by property regimes and refer to themselves as “houseless” because intimate relations with place and expansive practices of care provide an adequate home. Attending to the experiences of Hawai‘i’s houseless, I unpack the meanings and practices of organized abandonment while proposing that some face structural neglect by “living with abandon.” I argue that the rupturing of life-giving relations entwined with particular places serve as a foundation of organized abandonment. Devolution, state retrenchment, the intensification of land use for revenue-oriented development, and a punitive carceral state layer upon this foundational rupture to propel the continual abandonment of shared resources. This enables the ongoing circulation of capital through the environment. In response, people live with abandon by rejecting, or holding an ambivalent relationship with, aspirations to thrive within capitalism. Living with abandon is a form of creative improvisation that cultivates connections in the face of broken relations, yet remains defined by uncertainty and heartbreak. It both invokes the fullness of time and space and mourns the losses that have produced the tenuous present.","PeriodicalId":48303,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning D-Society & Space","volume":"20 5 1","pages":"373 - 391"},"PeriodicalIF":3.8,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81175682","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1177/02637758231181401
Lorena Gazzotti
This article investigates the social life of excision at the Southern Spanish border. Scholars have documented how excision expands the border project, and how it uses the law to make it more defensible as a practice. Less attention has been paid to how excision is challenged by activist networks, and how the law is used as an instrument to un-make borders. I expand literature on the complex relation between the law and geography in bordermaking by arguing that excision is rather dynamic in nature. A comparative ethnography of Melilla and the Canary Islands reveals that de facto borders created through excision are vulnerable to legal activism. The strategic use of the law can set back the expansion of the border project, tenuously restoring some rights for asylum-seeking and undocumented foreigners. Such setbacks are tenuous because excision is, nevertheless, deeply integrated into a dense web of containment tactics. ‘The undesirables’ might thus recuperate some of their rights at one point but then still face exclusion at another point of the expanded frontier.
{"title":"As if there was a border. Bordering through excision in Melilla and the Canary Islands","authors":"Lorena Gazzotti","doi":"10.1177/02637758231181401","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758231181401","url":null,"abstract":"This article investigates the social life of excision at the Southern Spanish border. Scholars have documented how excision expands the border project, and how it uses the law to make it more defensible as a practice. Less attention has been paid to how excision is challenged by activist networks, and how the law is used as an instrument to un-make borders. I expand literature on the complex relation between the law and geography in bordermaking by arguing that excision is rather dynamic in nature. A comparative ethnography of Melilla and the Canary Islands reveals that de facto borders created through excision are vulnerable to legal activism. The strategic use of the law can set back the expansion of the border project, tenuously restoring some rights for asylum-seeking and undocumented foreigners. Such setbacks are tenuous because excision is, nevertheless, deeply integrated into a dense web of containment tactics. ‘The undesirables’ might thus recuperate some of their rights at one point but then still face exclusion at another point of the expanded frontier.","PeriodicalId":48303,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning D-Society & Space","volume":"14 1","pages":"451 - 470"},"PeriodicalIF":3.8,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75290637","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1177/02637758231183719
Martín Tironi Rodo, Matías Valderrama Barragán
The public–private initiative Data Observatory Foundation was created to make large databases, such as those of astronomical observatories, available to expand and transfer of so-called “data-centric tasks” to various domains and thereby boost the development of the digital economy, data science and artificial intelligence in the country. However, in this article, we argue that data-centric initiatives like the Data Observatory Foundation may prove to be defuturing or enacting exhausted futures that reproduce the historical extractivism and coloniality of power in Latin America. Through a qualitative case study, we analyze the narrative and economic technologies of justification deployed by the Data Observatory Foundation to justify the value of its data and the organization itself. We discuss how the narratives and economic relationships developed by the Data Observatory Foundation manifest national wounds and technological dependency that enact a data-centric coloniality. Whether by attempting to define data as the copper of the future or establishing cloud computing credits as new salary tokens in the development of artificial intelligence, the Data Observatory Foundation reproduces past mentalities within innovation circuits. Rather than replicating futures based on modern colonial extractivist logics, we propose expanding possible engagements with data and speculating alternative designs.
{"title":"From copper mining to data extractivism? Data worth making at Chile’s Data Observatory Foundation","authors":"Martín Tironi Rodo, Matías Valderrama Barragán","doi":"10.1177/02637758231183719","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758231183719","url":null,"abstract":"The public–private initiative Data Observatory Foundation was created to make large databases, such as those of astronomical observatories, available to expand and transfer of so-called “data-centric tasks” to various domains and thereby boost the development of the digital economy, data science and artificial intelligence in the country. However, in this article, we argue that data-centric initiatives like the Data Observatory Foundation may prove to be defuturing or enacting exhausted futures that reproduce the historical extractivism and coloniality of power in Latin America. Through a qualitative case study, we analyze the narrative and economic technologies of justification deployed by the Data Observatory Foundation to justify the value of its data and the organization itself. We discuss how the narratives and economic relationships developed by the Data Observatory Foundation manifest national wounds and technological dependency that enact a data-centric coloniality. Whether by attempting to define data as the copper of the future or establishing cloud computing credits as new salary tokens in the development of artificial intelligence, the Data Observatory Foundation reproduces past mentalities within innovation circuits. Rather than replicating futures based on modern colonial extractivist logics, we propose expanding possible engagements with data and speculating alternative designs.","PeriodicalId":48303,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning D-Society & Space","volume":"197 1","pages":"411 - 432"},"PeriodicalIF":3.8,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76998905","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-01DOI: 10.1177/02637758231181399
René Kreichauf
In response to the difficulties refugees face in finding housing, Berlin’s government has developed new housing-like shelters that offer longer-term accommodation. Drawing on literature concerning racial capitalism and urban migration governance, I explain how these shelters represent a multilayered business opportunity for revenue extraction, resulting in the ongoing displacement, spatial fixing, and continued racialization of refugees. Notably, I reveal the prominent roles of Berlin’s government, city-owned housing, and public real estate agencies. They use the construction of new refugee shelters in an entrepreneurial way in order to revitalize their own fiscal budgets, as well as to put urban land into production. This allows them to develop and then turn refugee shelters into substandard, racialized, and highly profitable forms of new urban housing for refugees and other racialized and low-income populations. Expounding the ways the building of accommodation as substandard urban housing leads to race-based pursuit of profit, I argue that refugee housing serves as an urban migration fix and is developed within the logic of racial capitalism. This article contributes to attempts to use racial capitalism as a framework to scrutinize urban and migration processes, helping us comprehend the distinctly racial logics of urban and migration governance, and housing precarity.
{"title":"Accommodation for profit, not for refugees: Racial capitalism and the logics of Berlin’s refugee accommodation market","authors":"René Kreichauf","doi":"10.1177/02637758231181399","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758231181399","url":null,"abstract":"In response to the difficulties refugees face in finding housing, Berlin’s government has developed new housing-like shelters that offer longer-term accommodation. Drawing on literature concerning racial capitalism and urban migration governance, I explain how these shelters represent a multilayered business opportunity for revenue extraction, resulting in the ongoing displacement, spatial fixing, and continued racialization of refugees. Notably, I reveal the prominent roles of Berlin’s government, city-owned housing, and public real estate agencies. They use the construction of new refugee shelters in an entrepreneurial way in order to revitalize their own fiscal budgets, as well as to put urban land into production. This allows them to develop and then turn refugee shelters into substandard, racialized, and highly profitable forms of new urban housing for refugees and other racialized and low-income populations. Expounding the ways the building of accommodation as substandard urban housing leads to race-based pursuit of profit, I argue that refugee housing serves as an urban migration fix and is developed within the logic of racial capitalism. This article contributes to attempts to use racial capitalism as a framework to scrutinize urban and migration processes, helping us comprehend the distinctly racial logics of urban and migration governance, and housing precarity.","PeriodicalId":48303,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning D-Society & Space","volume":"75 3 1","pages":"471 - 493"},"PeriodicalIF":3.8,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90957740","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-31DOI: 10.1177/02637758231173416
M. Abdelrahman
A market for mental health apps, designed to help millions of refugees manage symptoms of Post Traumatic Syndrome Disorder and other mental health issues, has proliferated since the outbreak of the so-called refugee crisis in 2015. These bite-size, on-the-go, mindfulness-based apps have emerged at the intersection of new investment models, state-of-the-art AI and surveillance and border control regimes. Conceived of as a more cost-effective approach to refugee mental health care, mental health apps are part of a larger endeavour to create the 'smart' refugee. Self-monitoring, agile, entrepreneurial and resilient in the face of adversity, the smart refugee is expected to emerge as a node in a network of information flow, constantly connected to digital technology, at once receiving and providing real-time data. Biometric and data markets, some of the fastest growing in the world, have already been eagerly collecting refugee fingerprints, iris scans, facial images and other genomic information. To add to this arsenal of data, the new apps are harvesting, storing and selling what I call the mental prints of refugee trauma, turning the human experience of loss, grief and suffering into quantifiable and marketable commodities.
{"title":"Trauma apps and the making of the ‘smart’ refugee","authors":"M. Abdelrahman","doi":"10.1177/02637758231173416","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758231173416","url":null,"abstract":"A market for mental health apps, designed to help millions of refugees manage symptoms of Post Traumatic Syndrome Disorder and other mental health issues, has proliferated since the outbreak of the so-called refugee crisis in 2015. These bite-size, on-the-go, mindfulness-based apps have emerged at the intersection of new investment models, state-of-the-art AI and surveillance and border control regimes. Conceived of as a more cost-effective approach to refugee mental health care, mental health apps are part of a larger endeavour to create the 'smart' refugee. Self-monitoring, agile, entrepreneurial and resilient in the face of adversity, the smart refugee is expected to emerge as a node in a network of information flow, constantly connected to digital technology, at once receiving and providing real-time data. Biometric and data markets, some of the fastest growing in the world, have already been eagerly collecting refugee fingerprints, iris scans, facial images and other genomic information. To add to this arsenal of data, the new apps are harvesting, storing and selling what I call the mental prints of refugee trauma, turning the human experience of loss, grief and suffering into quantifiable and marketable commodities.","PeriodicalId":48303,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning D-Society & Space","volume":"22 10 1","pages":"513 - 528"},"PeriodicalIF":3.8,"publicationDate":"2023-05-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82915696","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-15DOI: 10.1177/02637758231174453
Stephen Legg
This article explores a relatively rare archival account of female subjectivity, experience, mobility, and voice within a carceral institution in late-colonial Delhi. The capital’s “Rescue Home” was created to house women and girls removed from the city’s brothels under new legislation. While no brothels were closed in the first year of the laws functioning, the home accepted 18 women and girls and detailed their circumstances and experiences in its 1940 report. It was able to forcibly detain girls and was run upon disciplinary and racial lines, like other colonial institutions. But its inhabitants were not subject to detailed surveillance. Rather, their lives were ones usually beyond recording or whose stories were actively silenced. The 1940 Rescue Home report provides us with rich details of the commonplace, quotidian struggles which women and girls faced in colonial Delhi. The 18 case geographies of the Home’s inhabitants help us understand how sexuality and motherhood, education and character, and race all shaped routes into the home and destinations when people left. The accounts tell us of a carceral governmentality with influence beyond the disciplinary institution’s walls, but also of female subjects who resisted, spoke back, and absconded. This relationship between forced immobility and willed mobility suggests that brothels and rescue homes were not just connected, through the intended transfer of inhabitants, but can be directly compared as carceral domesticities.
{"title":"Carceral and colonial domesticities: Subaltern case geographies of a Delhi rescue home","authors":"Stephen Legg","doi":"10.1177/02637758231174453","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758231174453","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores a relatively rare archival account of female subjectivity, experience, mobility, and voice within a carceral institution in late-colonial Delhi. The capital’s “Rescue Home” was created to house women and girls removed from the city’s brothels under new legislation. While no brothels were closed in the first year of the laws functioning, the home accepted 18 women and girls and detailed their circumstances and experiences in its 1940 report. It was able to forcibly detain girls and was run upon disciplinary and racial lines, like other colonial institutions. But its inhabitants were not subject to detailed surveillance. Rather, their lives were ones usually beyond recording or whose stories were actively silenced. The 1940 Rescue Home report provides us with rich details of the commonplace, quotidian struggles which women and girls faced in colonial Delhi. The 18 case geographies of the Home’s inhabitants help us understand how sexuality and motherhood, education and character, and race all shaped routes into the home and destinations when people left. The accounts tell us of a carceral governmentality with influence beyond the disciplinary institution’s walls, but also of female subjects who resisted, spoke back, and absconded. This relationship between forced immobility and willed mobility suggests that brothels and rescue homes were not just connected, through the intended transfer of inhabitants, but can be directly compared as carceral domesticities.","PeriodicalId":48303,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning D-Society & Space","volume":"3 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.8,"publicationDate":"2023-05-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82169739","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"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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