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This paper studies the infrastructural and organisational forms that facilitate labour exploitation within maritime logistics. My entry point is the rising wave of seafarer abandonments, which I approach not as isolated incidents of mismanagement but as an intensification of the flexibilising tendencies underpinning contemporary capitalism. I trace the recent history of these dynamics, examining their effect on shipping labour. I then investigate some of the specific legal and economic mechanics of shipping, focusing on debt, insurance, and bordering. Using supply chain mapping software, I study supply systems in a way that centres labour rather than the commodities being moved. I close by claiming that abandonments are not an accident, but an inevitable endpoint of a system designed to precaritise labour while protecting shipowners’ profits. Against this, I sketch out a new way of conceiving of supply chains—as supply nets, matrices of interconnected lines, prone to becoming tangled.

Canadian nightcrawler (Lumbricus terrestris) worms, the most popular live bait for recreational freshwater anglers, are hand-picked from Ontario dairy farmers’ fields by an immigrant labour force working in the middle of the night with limited equipment. Though no picker enjoys the arduous activity of picking worms, they do express feelings of “freedom” and “autonomy” in the job. Such expressions are surprising coming from mostly non-English-speaking immigrants, labouring with bent backs under dreary conditions producing profit for their employers in an unregulated industry. To understand these counterintuitive conceptions of freedom, I connect debates around “un/free labour” and “constrained agency” with the Marxist concepts of formal and real subsumption of labour and nature to reveal how the ecological conditions of commodity production shape capitalist control over labour. I argue worm-picker agency should be understood by seeing how the subsumption of labour is related to the subsumption of nature.

Despite Toronto's motto of diversity and inclusion, the municipality has recently mobilised exclusionary spatio-legal tools against unhoused populations using claims to law and order. This article examines one such case of legal action, its precedents, and its constitutive effects on urban citizenship and governance. In 2021, amidst a homelessness crisis aggravated by COVID-19, Toronto police executed violent raids against encampment residents in three public parks. In response to the public relations backlash, the municipality changed course, issuing suspension notices to encampment leaders that barred them from public spaces and services. The suspension notice, while unenforceable, allows municipal administrators to exclude those whose conduct allegedly disturbs the quiet enjoyment of property from public space. Building on critical planning and socio-legal debates on propertied urban citizenship, we use legal research and semi-structured interviews to identify how these arbitrary yet legal tools exacerbate permanent displaceability, banishment, and colonial modes of governance.

In this article, we extend a theory of disorientations to reveal how attempts to fix and control both water and people are disrupting once-fluid relationships between the Tonle Sap Lake and communities who have lived with-on the lake for generations. Using ethnographic and participatory mapping methods, we examine the socio-ecological dynamics that preceded and succeeded in the forced relocation of three floating communities in 2018. We argue that communities’ experiences challenge land-centric and event-centric understandings of displacement that pathologise fluid lifeways and fail to account for the materiality of water that has shaped floating villages’ multi-generational relationships with their wetland ecology. We develop the concept of disorientations to illuminate villagers’ experiences of relocation within a collapsing aquatic ecosystem—a collapse catalysed by state efforts to impose fixity on both hydrological flow and community mobility. The lens of disorientations invites displacement debates to consider materialities of place—whether pulsing water or living, shifting soils.

This article theorises the processes of colonisation, wealth accumulation, and inequalities creation that the current paradigm of a resource-hungry green transition enacts on the most vulnerable populations. We suggest that the extractivist logics and related technical fixes are leading to a “climate necropolitics”. In this, the socio-economic system is increasingly defined by classes’ carbon exposure and consumption. Through the “green growth” of late capitalism, we theorise the advent of four carbon-defined classes. Bounded by the access to climate tech capital and consumption of low-carbon products, these include the ultra-carbonised, decarbonised, still-carbonised, and uncarbonised classes—with the first two acting as dominant classes and necropolitical agents sustained by the remaining lower classes. Inspired by Marxist scholars, we suggest that the current status quo is untenable and will result in class warfare during which coalitions between classes could reorient the “make live and let die” of the current green transition paradigm.

The practice of conflating green with a social and moral good is a historically specific social process. The purpose of this article is to show how that process has made particularly good company for carceral humanism and legitimisation. By tracing initiatives integrating gardening at New York City's Rikers Island jail complex, I argue that projects and narratives cloaked in visions of green, nature, and sustainability obscure and reproduce both popular and institutional claims to expansionist carceral reform in the name of offering an inherently rehabilitative service. Drawing on conversations around commodity fetishism, urban political ecology, sustainability, and carceral reform, this article shows how holding nature as an inherent source of moral high ground that, by default, rehabilitates all who take advantage of it, is to disregard the social mechanisms that in turn naturalise the prison-industrial complex.

The UK's asylum and social welfare systems have both been transformed by major organisational changes, funding cuts, and privatisations through a decade of austerity. With this, asylum-seeker accommodation and the impacts of welfare reform have become increasingly concentrated in already-impoverished, peripheral urban areas such as Rochdale, Greater Manchester. Despite these parallels, scholarship and commentary in the UK has tended to consider welfare and border regimes in relative isolation. Based on ethnographic work conducted in two charity drop-centres in the town, this article addresses this gap by exploring how the UK's converging politics and geographies of asylum and welfare governance shape everyday negotiations of deservingness and social in/exclusion.

As scholars apply the concept of “the carceral” to more and increasingly diffuse spaces of containment, displacement, and cordoning across free society, I call for a means by which “carcerality” is measured and understood as a productive force in the denial of constitutional rights and protections. I therefore provide a legal reading of carcerality, which establishes prisons as the sine qua non of the carceral landscape, preceded by an analysis of how the reliance on civil law, nuisance ordinances, and other methods of constitutional circumvention in the absence of criminal procedure works within the public sphere to punish residents residing within what Foucault called the carceral archipelago. Along the way I provide vignettes about my own experience with the legal and insidious forms of criminalisation and non-criminal punishment that comprise the carceral continuum.

The critical platform studies literature is increasingly considering the role of social difference as a structuring logic in the platform economy, complementing understandings of worker precarity facilitated by worker misclassification and algorithmic management. Contributing to this literature, this paper demonstrates how platforms and police produce carceral geographies that manage and exploit immigrant delivery workers as surplus populations. The carceral geographies of the platform economy account for both how carceral space produces and manages the surplus populations from which platform capital draws its workers, facilitating the disposability and exploitation of workers. Focusing on South Asian delivery workers in New York City, the paper uses the example of bike registrations to show how police and platforms expand carceral spaces in immigrant communities, increasing their vulnerability to premature death and violence. Finally, it suggests how delivery worker organising offers instances of situated resistance that challenge platform capital and carceral logics.

Labour research in geography has long been fascinated with the role of affects and emotions in capitalism. This article foregrounds ambivalent moments when labour creatively uses affection and intimacy to make claims over autonomy and agency. Set against a backdrop of increasing automation of infrastructural work, we draw on interviews with personnel at Jakarta Soekarno-Hatta Airport (CGK). In culturally situating these automations, we evince how the “heart” (or the Indonesian notion of curahan hati), with semblances to customer-facing labour management practices, and other affective dispositions under neoliberal life, is repeatedly deployed to “fill in the gaps” for where automation may fail. We illuminate how these workers navigate wearying, uncertain, and demanding facilitation, security, and customer service situations by emphasising “heart-to-heart” relations, even as they stave off technology's encroachments (and withdrawals). This plastic automaticity offers a template by which the pressures of capital's technologisation could be relieved, beyond emotional labour.