Both in public imagination and scholarship, begging is often associated with passivity, waiting, inactivity and as such defined as the opposite of ‘real work’. During two years of fieldwork with people sleeping rough in Paris, I observed my informants to the contrary describe begging as their occupation. In this paper, I present an ethnographically grounded argument that the people experiencing homelessness

This paper contributes to emerging conversations at the intersection of critical geographies of property and race by centering political grammars of reckoning and redress. Grammar is more than syntax. It is about structures of language, including the ways that words are arranged, inflected, and imbued with meaning. A focus on political grammars elucidates the rules of reference that make private property

The refugee makeshift settlement of Calais, globally known as the “Calais Jungle”, was dismantled in October 2016. Its existence, as a spectacle repeatedly spread by the media all over the world, was a key element in the representation of the so-called “migration crisis” in Europe. One year after the end of the camp, this article focuses on a new scenario in which dispersed settlements keep reappearing

Drawing on an ethnography of life in a Ghanaian weaving workshop, this article traces the intersections between young rural weavers’ affective labour, hope and their experiences of immobility. Hope is explored as an ambivalent resource which shapes the shared, social materiality of their craftwork, the spiritual beliefs which give meaningful shape to the challenges of craft livelihoods and the imaginaries

Colonial difference is a story of national infrastructures. To understand how colonialism works across Indigenous lands, we need to appreciate the physical, legal, and political factors involved in the building and expanding of national infrastructures in different historical contexts; infrastructures that arrive in some places while denied in others. Using archival documents, this article accounts

Hope is not singular or fixed; instead hopes take multiple forms that constitute precarity. Drawing on interviews with white women ‘on benefits’ in the North East of England, in a period before Brexit, I explore different kinds of hope that surfaced in relation with neoliberal forces of, and beyond, austerity. (1) Multiplied hopes, hedging bets and holding several possibilities together; (2) Conflicted

The essays in this forum originated out of a roundtable at the American Studies Association meeting on the occupied territory of the Kanaka Maoli (Hawaii) in 2019, sponsored by Environment and Planning D: Society & Space.1 Our roundtable was conceptualized around an open question about Black feminism’s relation to “settler colonialism,” a term that is understood as a critical framework, categorical

I pay close attention when I hear Black and Native/Indigenous women speak in the idiom of flesh. The flesh as folding and unfolding matter that is both a site targeted by relations of conquest for ruin and a site of our shared hopes for regeneration. I experience “the flesh” as a Black and Native feminist gathering place or connective tissue. I argue that the fields of Black and Indigenous feminist

I was humbled and honored to take part in the original panel for which I prepared the following comments, and I thank the panel organizers for their invitation to participate in this ongoing conversation on “Black Feminism and Settler Colonialism.” This invitation prompted me to share my efforts toward the study of race, culture, incarceration, and living struggle in the U.S. Western region: an investigation

When black women first began disappearing and turning up dead in my hometown of Peoria, Illinois, in the summer of 2003, I was completely oblivious. At the time, I was in law school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign—which is to say, I was living only about 90 miles away from home during the course of the 15-month killing spree. Yet months would go by before I would come to know about

This article is an ethnographic study of potholes in roads in urban India. The article describes different forms of attention to potholes, including cases of media advocacy, clinical reflections on injury and attempts by an accident survivor to document danger on the roads. Throughout, it argues for attention to the embodiment of infrastructure, and particularly, how people move through infrastructures

In this paper, I propose the notion of ‘German Theory’ to allude to the processes of translation and circulation of theoretical ideas discussed in the German humanities and German geography across and beyond the linguistic boundaries of its origin. However, these ideas did not travel, at least not to Anglophone geography. This paper investigates why not, and it maps out the lost theoretical potential

This paper asks how the logics of globalized supply chains—particularly through fixes, risk, speed and stoppages, and motility—are articulated in carceral space. We employ critical logistics in conversation with carceral geographies and critical mobilities to examine prison transfers, the routine movement of incarcerated people between carceral sites, as a logistical system designed to fix carceral

Cities are promising machines always holding out prospects for better lives, always attempting to guarantee that things will not remain the same and that whatever changes do ensue are for the better. We propose a notion of “promise” not as simply another descriptor in a long line of adjectives about the city. Rather, we argue that the urban institutional landscape constantly generates new promises

In Washington, DC, Black residents have experienced unprecedented levels of cultural and physical displacement since 2000. Because of gentrification, the first “chocolate city,” long been defined by its blackness, has experienced shifts in the economy and commitments by the local government, that privilege policies that facilitate the displacement of Black families. Everyday struggles against gentrification

This paper explores the policy concept and community enactments of ‘shared responsibility’ for disaster resilience in the context of wildfires in Victoria, Australia. Since the state-wide Black Saturday fires of 2009, we contend, first, the State’s decreasing ability to protect its citizens has shifted the responsibility for adapting to uncertainty to individuals, and second, this responsibility has

In this article, I examine normative assumptions about cash transfers as public goods and the lived experience of cash transfers as private debts. Policy makers and social scientists often assume cash transfers are apolitical, value-neutral monetary instruments, which improve upon inappropriate, top-down, universalizing development projects. Instead, I show how cash transfers introduce their own universals

Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted aboard a cargo boat on Colombia’s Magdalena River, and on historical accounts of fluvial transport, this article examines the racial formations on which logistics depends. Logistics is organized around flows at the heart of capitalist modernity, which are made possible by labour regimes whose racial underpinnings have both persisted and changed over time. Tracking

This article interrogates the “anomalous” case of Black-founded towns, so-called because of their relative absence from discourse on Black place, their unique struggles for self-determined development, and their externally ascribed narratives of absent or dysfunctional governance, frequently invoked to explain their lack of access to basic infrastructure. We propose illuminating some of these so-called

The European Commission’s (EC) choice of the term ‘hotspot’ for the block’s policy response to the 2015 border crisis is revealing. In its general use, the word refers either to an area or position of heightened risk or danger, or to a point on a surface that is of higher temperature than its surroundings. In geology, the term refers to places on the earth’s surface where a plume of hot rock in the

This article enhances our understanding of the thoroughly embodied nature of knowledge production in relation to automation by demonstrating how making sense of automation is a generative process, rather than the demystification of an already existing object of analysis. It argues that the process of knowing automation involves situated encounters that transform bodies at the level of their indeterminate

Literatures on sustainability transition and transformation increasingly emphasise the role of spatiality and local agency. This paper argues that relational thinking has much more to offer this debate than presently acknowledged, particularly in revealing the geographical interconnections between dispersed nodes of action and innovation. We use relationality to show the interconnections at work in

This paper seeks to understand the mutually affecting intensities in family households that occur through the use of energy for parenting, care and making home in the societal context of energy capitalism. Our work draws on sensual energy ethnographies with 13 families in regional New South Wales, Australia. We extend Deleuze and Guattarri’s related concepts of molar and molecular lines and lines of

The enclosure of urban ecological commons into private property has facilitated the growth of the neoliberal service sector in Mumbai, India. These changes are brought forth through a reworking of communally managed land into narrowly understood public space, which has paved the way for private development. At the helm of Mumbai’s urbanization is a power alliance between state and elite non-state actors

In recent years, scholars have examined the non- or more-than-human world from a variety of unique positions. This article draws on contemporary archaeology and assemblage theories in geography to put forward an understanding of everyday geopolitics that includes the presence of objects in the formation of state subjectivity. Our approach, however, reveals not only this disciplining force of objects

This article traces the labours of hope embedded in the everyday social reproductive practices of urban poor homeowner association members in Metro Cebu, the Philippines. It explores how aspirations for housing and land tenure security and the (failed) promises of opportunity bound in the urban materialise in the narratives and activities of women and men living in informal settlements. I argue that

Digital technologies enable the dispersal of office work from physical office buildings. The same technologies involve a counter tendency of concentration where offices are shared by different businesses, often for short periods, via the ‘space as service’ model. These opposing tendencies of workspace dispersal and concentration indicate the contingencies of technologies of work, in which their operations

Civil society actors aiding border crossers in Europe have been subject to systematic criminalization through prosecutions and attempted prosecutions, extensive police harassment, public scapegoating, and the imposition of bureaucratic barriers. We seek to explain why this is occurring through the analysis of field research data, collected in Greece between 2017 and 2019, through the lens of Derrida’s

Accepting frameworks promulgated by the Israeli occupation, public discourse has often debated Gaza as a “problem” to be solved, treating it more like a political quandary than a concrete city. Recent scholarship on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict explicitly problematized this approach and resisted the subsumption of Gaza city into the larger geopolitical unit of the eponymous Strip. This article

Ever since its disappearance in the mid-19th-century, the fate of the ‘Franklin expedition’ has attracted interest and intrigue. The story has been told and re-told but remained one of ‘mystery’ into the early 21st-century. When the expedition’s two ships were finally located, the narrative shifted with the reappearance of long-absent objects and materials – in turn, posing challenges for museum curators

‘We are in the process’ was the phrase used by my Nepali interlocutors, soon-to-be migrants, who were waiting for their departure abroad for months on end. Based on conversations with irregular migrants, this paper explores the relationship between time and power, focusing on the political economy of waiting. It suggests that making people wait has become a key technique of governmentality used by