Antipode最新文献

This article explains the recent rise to prominence of Barcelona's digital economy, and, specifically, the role played by the city's “talent”. After developing a Marxian approach, we show how Barcelona's success rests upon a good supply of low-cost, appropriately skilled labour fit for insertion into labour processes that can generally not be described as innovative or of high-knowledge, high-skill intensity. There is, in fact, a dearth of highly skilled labour-power in the city, and inflows of foreign labour and outflows of freshly trained “talent” from the city's bootcamps are only swelling the ranks of a lower-paid, moderately skilled knowledge workforce—many of whom work in low-quality jobs. Finally, we show how leading startups in the digital economy are contributing to the expansion of “non-standard” forms of precarious work. We conclude by highlighting the limits to the development and realisation of human productive subjectivity or talent under capital today, even in a widely hyped technopole such as Barcelona.

People's oppositions to planning decisions are on the rise even in exclusionary-repressive systems. However, in such contexts, decades of dismantling social networks, repressing the circulation of information, and criminalising dissent make oppositions short-lived, fragile, and risky. Rightful resistance, studies suggest, presents a modality of contestation which mitigates such risks. This paper seeks to contribute to the literature on this modality, focusing on, first, the intermeshed and co-evolving relations of the rightful resisters and different sections of the state in the context of contingent citizenship, and second, the interactions of rightful resisters with the larger community. Through a detailed analysis of a case study of rightful resistance in Tehran, the paper complicates the often one-sided narratives of improvisation of individuals that the literature depicts. More importantly, the paper reveals the possibilities that such modalities of contestation reproduce, reinforce, and re-affirm the exclusionary-repressive practices of the state.

Fragmentation is a key colonial strategy to which Palestinians enact resistance, evident most prominently in the 2021 Unity Intifada. In this article, I take inspiration from such Palestinian resistance to theorise fragmentation as a central logic of Zionist/Israeli settler colonialism. I make three related points. First, I employ the metaphor of the earthquake to consider the fractality of settler colonial fragmentation across the dimensions of land, time, and bodies. Second, understanding the settler colonial logic of elimination as ultimately attempting to extinguish a Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty, I argue that the logic of fragmentation drives towards elimination. Finally, I demonstrate that, in fragmenting Palestine, Zionism seeks to render Israel a coherent entity. Ultimately then, the Zionist project works to fragment Palestine to eliminate Palestinian bodies from land and time, to render Israel a seamless nation across these dimensions. However, Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty is not something that can be broken or extinguished.

While international asylum law includes race as the first protected category—followed by religion, nationality, particular group membership, and political opinion—Haitians’ ongoing racialised persecution and denial of refuge across the Americas reveals the failures of this framework. Drawing on academic literature, documentary evidence, and primary sources, we analyse the racial and neocolonial logics constituting Haitians’ experiences at home and as migrants through the Americas. Focusing on Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico as nodes of migration trajectories, we argue that Haitians confront a “hemispheric frontier regime”. Unlike a single border that impedes passage, this multilayered frontier regime constantly uproots Haitians, even while states evade their responsibilities vis-à-vis asylum seekers. Over time, mutually reinforcing frontier logics of policing, dispossession, extraction, and empire at various scales—urban, domestic, transnational—structure Haitians’ and other migrants’ racialised exclusion from rights regimes across geographies from Haiti to South, Central, and North America.

Studies on rental housing financialisation have blossomed over the last decade. Studies are often concerned with issues around affordability and displacement, while less focus has been on how financialisation reconfigures the materials of housing, home, and the residential environment by subordinating maintenance to aggressive and unsustainable renovation strategies. We look at the case of Sweden and zoom in on a working-class Stockholm suburb where part of the housing stock is owned by the German, publicly listed real estate company Vonovia. We discuss how national and international regulations remain insufficient in ensuring that every day and structural maintenance is conducted properly by financialised landlords, leaving tenants stuck with delayed and poor-quality repair and replacement work as well as insufficient communication, severely affecting their quality of life. We propose to discuss the concepts of “housing as infrastructure” to account for these complex consequences.

In this paper, I argue that the high-rise elevator comprises a particularly important and yet heretofore undertheorised space for understanding narratives about failure and breakdown in public housing in the US and beyond. Using Chicago as a case study, I draw upon historical newspaper articles and interviews with former public housing tenants, as well as interviews with former police officers who worked in public housing developments, to show how broken and vandalised elevators became a metonym in public discourse for the widely perceived “brokenness” of high-rise public housing writ large. Insofar as malfunctioning elevators symbolised social immobility, were seen as a locus of crime, and drained the housing authority's finances, they also became a site of intensive policing. When that intensive policing failed to solve structural problems in Chicago's public housing high rises, policymakers demolished them.

The sub-title of this essay refers to Antonio Gramsci's concept of “prevision”—understood as neither foresight nor prediction, but a method of political work that enables intervention in the present in order to change it. Prevision forms part of conjunctural analysis, which remains powerfully salient and urgent in our own time. Over the past decade attention to conjunctural analysis has surged across a number of disciplines. Yet some distinctly different modalities of conjunctural analysis are at play in this burgeoning work. The first two sections of this essay offer close readings of the conjunctural analyses of Gramsci and Stuart Hall; their respective relationships to the work of Louis Althusser; and the political work that conjunctural analysis was doing for each of them in relation to fascism and Thatcherism. Building on but moving beyond these analyses, the third section focuses on what it might mean to “globalise” conjunctural analysis in relation to the urgent challenges of the current conjuncture, in a way that sheds light on articulations of racist, gendered, sexualised, and other exclusionary and oppressive forms of difference in relation to class and capitalism.

The past few years have seen the rediscovery by political and media commentators of areas in post-industrial Britain characterised as “left behind”. It is rarely acknowledged that this attention to regional inequality has only come about after decades of political neglect and cultural erasure of these areas following deindustrialisation. Current ideas about regional inequality and proposed solutions to it—from the “Red Wall” to “levelling up”—are often conceptualised in ways that in fact continue this neglect, by homogenising these regions and imposing top-down narratives about their demographic and political nature. This paper will contrast these developments with new approaches in several parts of the UK, focusing on democratic localism or “community wealth-building”, which have seen communities in “left behind” areas already addressing regional inequality, and offering their own alternative economic and social models, in a way that presents a more nuanced picture of both class and regional identity.

The task of teaching about acute ecological crisis presents a vital pedagogical challenge and an important provocation for critical scholars. Across various environmental subfields, educators are revisiting fundamental and politically significant questions concerning what to teach, how to teach, and even why to teach as their traditional subject matter transforms around them. In this article, we explore how environmental educators are grappling with the implications of what they are teaching and consider the politicising effects of this predicament. We show how this distinctive educational context, beyond posing bewildering learning challenges, is also creating unique openings for radical scholarship in higher education. Through interviews with educators endeavouring to teach about planetary environmental crisis (from within an exceedingly dire planetary environmental crisis), we examine diverse attempts to interpret the radical demands of this learning challenge and to negotiate its many complexities, practical difficulties, and political possibilities.

Agricultural technologies in dairy farming facilitate increased animal productivity while simultaneously supporting appeals to animal welfare. Dairy producers operationalise these technologies to shape cows’ subjectivities to be compatible with industrial production and consumer preferences. Through this subject formation, cows are incorporated into human society as political subjects, a shift that signifies a reorientation of bovine discipline and exploitation on the farm. This emergent political subjectivity is conceptualised here in the archetype of the “bovis sacer”, an inversion of the “homo sacer” concept that describes an unkillable but sacrificial subject. We examine, primarily in Europe and North America, how welfare certification, labelling schemes, and agricultural technology in the dairy industry facilitate material and discursive changes in producer and consumer relations before exploring how these industrial transformations bring about this shift in bovine subjectivity.