Antipode最新文献

Popular politics—a heterogeneous set of grassroots demands and subjectivities antagonistic to dominant power blocs—finds itself at a crossroads in Latin America. In Argentina and Chile, progressive governments have failed to curtail a resurgent populist-right despite, as recently as 2019, appearing to be on the brink of a new centre-left hegemony. This paper argues that paying attention to the spatiality of popular politics demonstrates a failure to articulate popular politics within a national movement, either neglecting them (under Boric in Chile) or incorporating them in a top-down strategy that erased particularities (under Fernández in Argentina). It does so from the vantage point of two neighbourhoods at the urban margins in Buenos Aires and Santiago. Bringing together Ernesto Laclau's work on populism together with Henri Lefebvre's relational understanding of urban space, it analyses how popular demands and subjectivities have been articulated in relation to national progressive politics.

The Ennore wetlands in North Chennai, India were once dense with diverse habitats and interwoven histories. Many of these histories began to unravel from the 1960s onwards, when state-sponsored heavy industry began encroaching into and polluting the wetlands. Local fishers, whose lives, livelihoods, and cultural worlds were ignored by these changes, fought back in a campaign to reclaim and restore the wetlands. This paper analyses how the Save Ennore Creek Campaign and Ennore fishers used counter-mapping strategies to reveal the state's wilful suppression of fisher knowledge and worldviews using maps and plans. It draws from decolonial and ignorance studies literatures to analyse the campaign's counter-maps as cartographic, performative, and affective insurrections of subjugated knowledges and counter-histories that un-made the state's maps and plans, exposed the state's knowledge as wilful ignorance and spotlighted geographical knowledge from the margins as a way of remaking reality and opening up possibilities of alternative futures for the creek and its communities.

In mid-2020, the municipal authority of Accra, Ghana levelled the dwellings of approximately 450 residents remaining in an informal beach settlement in Jamestown, long the centre of an artisanal fishing economy. The destruction marked the culmination of at least four demolition cycles to clear ground for a Chinese-financed commercial harbour. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between demolitions, we demonstrate how residents erected smaller, more precarious structures designed for ease of disassembly/reassembly using cheaper, salvaged building materials—a tactic we term dis/incremental dwelling. We interpret these practices of everyday refusal as asserting residents’ “right to the beach”—a claim to access beach and marine space, to participate in convivial associative life and the informal fishing economy, and to resist political marginalisation from infrastructure development and ocean grabbing. The right to the beach provides a conceptual and political vocabulary to centre just coastal futures in urban West Africa and beyond.

In this paper, we aim to understand how long-term state neglect of public infrastructure coexists with a renewed emphasis on profit-driven infrastructure development in urban contexts. We focus on Exarcheia, an Athens neighbourhood known for its radical character, where a lack of public infrastructure investment aligns with plans for new transport infrastructure and urban regeneration. Using a participatory action research approach and engaging in collective discussions with grassroots organisations opposing these plans, we argue that prolonged austerity following the 2008 economic crisis has redefined state-funded public infrastructures, aligning them more closely with the speculative interests of real estate, commercial, and infrastructure capital. The interplay of austerity infrastructure, gentrification, and spatial violence manifests as a form of slow urbicide, paving the way for revanchist urban regeneration that prioritises the commercial exploitation of urban space at the expense of the historical, political, and cultural identities of affected neighbourhoods.

Rent gap theory has long been a staple of gentrification studies, and given that gentrification and territorial stigma have been shown to be closely related, the distinct ways in which the rent gap operates in territorially stigmatised spaces demands attention. This paper examines how governance approaches within territorially stigmatised spaces shape the particular ways in which rent gaps are opened. It illustrates how the rent gap theory has operated in practice across two contexts within Middlesbrough, a town in the North East of England. By tracing the governance approaches which shape the form that rent gap production takes across these contexts, this paper provides evidence for how the rent gap theory operates in practice in stigmatised areas, and indicates how the form which the process of rent gap production takes is contingent upon the particular logics of governance operating within a locality at the point of production.

In this paper, I illustrate the interplay between infrastructure and racialised differentiation through the case of the Maya Train—a contentious megaproject aimed at constructing 1,554 km of rail tracks across southeast Mexico, led by the López Obrador federal administration. Drawing on an analysis of narratives produced by the state, I argue that the Maya Train sustains and reproduces racial capitalism. The argument is developed by putting Gargi Bhattacharyya's and Nancy Fraser's understanding of the racial capitalism framework in conversation with Mónica Moreno Figueroa's conceptualisation of mestizaje. I show how the Maya Train functions as a project of mestizaje by promising homage, social justice, and development while also acting as a homogenising and oppressive force. The racialising practices embedded in the megaproject reproduce and extend colonial legacies in a heartland of expropriation and are transformed into materiality through the power of the state.

This article examines how settler legal orders in Eastern Navajo Agency produce conditions of impasse that defer investments in life sustaining infrastructures, like roads. Focusing on the conjuncture of infrastructural decay and jurisdictional friction amid an oil and gas boom, I elaborate a concept of “gridlock” as a deadly effect of settler governance. Unfolding stories about road maintenance, school access, and emergency medical transport, the article describes gridlock as a space of both impasse and improvisation that Diné residents inhabit in moving through a region engineered for their immobility.

The objective of this article is to set out lines of international complicity in Israel's war on Gaza towards establishing not merely a refreshed agenda for research but also strategic sites of accountability and intervention. The article surveys Israeli military activities in Gaza since the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks, drawing focus on three key points of international military collaboration: the F-16 fighter jet; the GBU type bomb; and the weapons manufacturer, Elbit Systems. We then turn to multiple other geographies of exchange that are visible through a global frame, including military aid, ideological support, and the deployment of military personnel from overseas. The article thus substantiates an argument that Israeli military violence in Gaza depends on a global network of supply, demand, and complicity whose extraneous relationship with the state indicates politically urgent sites of critical inquiry and intervention.

Through the enrolment of big data, deep learning, sensor fusion, and computer vision technologies, Amazon Go and similar shops pursue the automated management of retail subjects, goods, and transactions. Tracing the logics of automated shop technology, the paper makes two contributions. First, it proposes a theory of “retail transparency” to attend to how automated shops reimagine space as a series of pockets of excess (actions that escape circuits of capitalist valuation) to be countered through acts of making-transparent (datafication for integration into digital systems of control). Retail transparency is underpinned by interventions aimed at perceiving, incorporating, and productivising excess. Second, we argue that logics of deep learning raise important challenges to traditional conceptions of resistance in digital geographies, as these tend to rely on a celebration or cultivation of excess. Instead, we offer a speculative reflection outlining a politics of “circuit-breaking” which refuses to engage algorithmic logics on their own terms.