This article details Yaseen Aslam’s experience of organizing at Uber. Yaseen is the National General Secretary of UPHD (United Private Hire Drivers), a branch of the IWGB (Independent Workers Union of Great Britain). He is a co-claimant, with James Farrar, in the employment rights court cases against Uber in the UK. The article is the outcome of co-writing with Jamie Woodcock, presenting Yaseen’s first-person

The Le Mardi Gras Listening Collective is a group of friends who listen to music together and is named after a bar in Pittsburgh where the collective was conceived. In this article we consider ways by which music might be a mode of planning opposed to individuation and measure, and beyond the instrumentalities to which music itself is often submitted. We do so by thinking about how jazz—where it takes

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On November 14, 2017, a video documenting the auction of sub-Saharan African migrants in Libya was circulated on social media, giving rise to an international wave of outrage. The video was filmed by Nima Elbagir for CNN, and featured her investigation of an auction outside Tripoli (Elbagir 2017). Following the broadcast of this video, political figures, artists, and militants all over the world made

When a group of young Tunisian men from Redeyef found themselves stuck in the temporary migrant detention center of southern Italy’s island, Lampedusa, in October 2017, “in very difficult humanitarian conditions” and threatened with being expelled back to Tunisia, they announced with a public letter that they were going on hunger strike “against deportations and for the freedom of movement,” asking

This article takes the encounters between migrant travelers at sea and Alarm Phone activists on land as a starting point to inquire into recent transformations in maritime migrant mobilities and EUropean and North African attempts to govern them, with a focus on the western Mediterranean Sea. The Alarm Phone, an activist hotline assisting migrants in distress at sea, has been involved in everyday struggles

This essay examines the evolving symbiosis of authoritarian state power and neoliberal governance in the Middle East in the wake of the 2007–8 economic crisis and popular uprisings in 2011–13. I revisit the debates on “authoritarian resilience” in the region to highlight that the efforts to push through neoliberal reforms in the face of popular opposition have expanded the scope of authoritarian rule

The article addresses the current restructuring of academia in Turkey through the example of the Academics for Peace petition and the institutional mechanisms of repression it instigated. We focus on the Solidarity Academies as alternative spaces of education and a unique form of collective resistance against the academic purges. We provide an empirically informed analysis of Solidarity Academies as

In late June 2015, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) declared a refugee emergency situation in the Eastern Aegean Islands. At the time, the number of arrivals to the islands amounted to one thousand per day, and the “reception”/detention system had completely collapsed. In the absence of state-organized reception, the passage to the islands of the Eastern Aegean Sea was developing

It was spring in Athens. Can you remember that? Somebody would say that the spring started on a Sunday, in January 2015, with the victory of Syriza at the national elections. A new “radical left coalition” party founded in 2004, Syriza, and its young leader, Alexis Tsipras, had been able to catalyze the imagination and hopes of the Left throughout Europe in the previous years, positioning themselves

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Has Europe been experiencing a migration or refugee “crisis” since 2015? It would be fair to stress that the periodic eruption of crises has haunted and, in a way, prompted migration control and border management both in specific countries and at the level of the European Union at least since the early 1990s. “Crisis” has indeed been an internal moment to the workings of the border and migration regime

The diagnosis of a migration crisis has prompted multiple processes of rebordering in Europe and beyond. These include the build-up of physical barriers like walls and fences, the tightening of asylum regimes, the expansion of biometric databases and the enrolment of authoritarian regimes in controlling Europe’s borders. These developments have prompted a revival of the image of the ‘fortress’ in critical

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) “Faculty Issues and Concerns” listserv at the University of Washington (UW) presents an interesting case for examining the question of academic norms and free speech. As an open online forum with over seventeen hundred subscribers, it allows faculty to communicate across departments and campuses on a variety of topics. With the stated purpose

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Duke University Press via the DOI in this record.

This article relies on an ethnographic study of formal and informal chains of mediation triggered by administrative procedures that Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza have to follow in order to obtain a permit of entry into Israel. By studying the networks these interactions structure it attempts to apprehend the spatial dimensions of the Israeli permit regime beyond national and territorial

This essay analyzes some key moments of transnational Palestinian solidarity politics as a basis for considering the possibilities for challenging the status quo ignited by the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement. Throughout modern Palestinian history, political efforts have been built on nationalist identifications and the nation-state as a goal. Alongside the nation as reference point

Palestinian refugees in Lebanon are often described as living in a condition of waithood, suspended from law and awaiting return to their national homeland, where they will finally turn into qualified political lives. This frame, stemming from Hannah Arendt‟ legacy, fetishizes rights and the nation-state as the spheres where the human ceases to be a mere biological body subject to humanitarian relief

“He-she, come here!” Defiantly looking away with her arms and legs crossed, Duanna Johnson refuses the hail of Bridges McRae, an officer with the Memphis Police Department. “Faggot, I’m talking to you!” McRae’s demand grows with angered force against Johnson’s resistance. Johnson, a black transgender woman, had been arrested earlier that evening under the suspicion of prostitution, a charge often levied

Early responses to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement from black public figures, intellectuals, journalists, and elected officials ranged from thoughtful reflection on its emergence and core demands to romantic hopes for a new civil rights movement, criticisms of its decentralized organizational structure and lack of identifiable leadership, censure for its lack of clear policy proposals, and even

Recent global trends in the policing deaths and antipolicing protests of black people urge a reconsideration of the orientations and scope of black political thought. One of its central considerations must be black politics and its anticolonial/antiracial conditions of possibility. This is because the solidarity logics of blackness implicated in the signifier “black politics” continue to be insurgent

At the end of the nineteenth century, the African American thinker, journalist, and antilynching crusader Ida B. Wells (1970: 70) observed that the cause of the pervasive antiblack violence and racial terror that characterized the post-Reconstruction era was the white Southerner’s “resentment that the Negro was no longer his plaything, his servant, and his source of income” (emphasis added). Wells’s

In what was the age of Barack Obama the term postracial has come to serve a particular purpose. Although racism and white supremacy are claimed to be relics of the past, current social conditions signal an intensification of those same phenomena without the same public debate. The very notion of a black president of the United States seems to stand in for evidence that a racial democracy or even a

The affects of transfeminine life and their relationship to the material conditions undergirding such life are undertheorized in transgender studies and queer studies. This creative and critical essay conceptualizes transfeminine brokenness through negative experiences and emotions, drawing connections between such negative states to transmisogyny and material precarity. The essay intends to politicize

The contemporary lexicon of black politics contains a litany of emotive reactions to the entrenched racism of American society. After the murder of nine African Americans in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, Claudia Rankine (2015) argued that “the condition of black life is one of mourning.” Christopher Lebron (2013) maintains that, as a society, our collective response to pervasive racial inequality

Feminists (Spelman 1982; Young 1990; Gatens 1996) have long concerned themselves with Western approaches to the body as well as the relationship between the body and politics and the impact of both on women. While these approaches and ways of thinking about the body are important and worthy of black feminist exploration, I think the most important issue regarding the relationship between the body and

During the spring of 2016—a season overshadowed by North Carolina’s anti-trans House Bill 2 (HB2)—I received a security alert from the University of Michigan Police Department containing the following account of an assault: “A student reported that while she was in a women’s restroom, a male subject entered the restroom and forcibly hugged her before she could flee. An unauthorized, handmade ‘out of

Energy’s mobility within and out of the Persian Gulf has been a structural feature of war over the last four decades in the Middle East. Since the 1970s, the region has been the epicenter of energy “crises” and struggles by various powers to control oil’s availability, its extraction, and how (or whether) it moves. American political-economic and military interests have been at the center of much of

Chicago is known for its blues bars, its futures markets, its gun crimes, and the sprawling rail yards that make it the freight hub of North America. What’s missing from that list is a vast nexus of underground pipes that exerts a subterranean influence on the entire metropolitan region. Without the knowledge of most inhabitants, the “Windy City” has become the Midwestern capital of the oil industry

The rise and desired fall of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria have reopened the question of borders in the Middle East. Many commentators point to the long-term negative effects of joining disparate ethnic and religious groups within artificial borders, and view both the Syrian civil war and the dissolution of Iraqi federalism as indicators of the crumbling nation-state. Others insist that citizens

Far from being inert technological infrastructures, pipelines are transformative social and political projects. Materially, pipelines are little more than tubes of highly engineered steel interspersed with pumping stations that meander through rugged and remote or sometimes populated landscapes, carrying the vital fluids (oil, liquefied natural gas, water) that fuel modern urban and industrial societies

The absence of a reflection on revolutionary practices and subjects is the main weakness of the radical critique of the Anthropocene. The risk is to envision the Anthropocene as a space for villains and victims but not for revolutionaries. In this respect we believe that it is crucial to challenge the (in)visibility and (un)knowability of the Anthropocene beyond geological strata and planetary boundaries

Abstract: How is it possible to account for the double dimension of the “anthropos” of the Anthropocene ? At once both a responsible, historical subject, and a neutral, non-conscious and non-reflexive force? According to Chakrabarty, the “anthropos” has to be considered a geological force; according to Smail, it has to be considered an addicted brain. A subjectivity without being for the former, an

In 2000 the Cape Farewell project was born, and over the subsequent fifteen years it has given rise to an outpouring of creative activity that, in varying ways, addresses the scientific reality of climate change through the lens of cultural and civic engagement. The scientists have stated the problem and articulated the challenge; the solution to averting catastrophic climate disruption is embedded

ed spaces that have no continuities and thus, they claim, “no cultural significance.” This is how wastelands are produced as a part of the ongoing process of land seizure in Hawaiʻi. To borrow Fujikane’s phrase, Indigenous relations to and conceptions of land shatter such “fragile fictions” and settler logics.6 Protectors, Not Protestors The same month that the Pacific Climate Warriors blocked Newcastle

Indigenous peoples in Latin America, who have substantial constitutional rights in various countries, are positioned as major political actors with respect to climate change policies. The effects of climate change on territories and resources are effectively refiguring local indigenous dynamics. Included among the many changes in indigenous life, particularly for women, are the ways that transnational

Here are two sets of statements from far-distant opposites in the climate change debate. The first is from Naomi Klein (2014: 60), who in her book This Changes Everything paints a bleak picture of a global socioeconomic system gone wrong: “There is a direct and compelling relationship between the dominance of the values that are intimately tied to triumphant capitalism and the presence of anti-environment

Several meters back from the riverbank, the microphone points out and slightly upward, as if trying to hear the treetops on the far bank, or the distant mountains. The river and wind roar, amplified through the headphones, louder than my normal hearing. The sound is also spatially altered by the microphone characteristics. Small spectral shapes dance in the noise; am I imagining them? Perhaps they

What do humanists have to offer in the ongoing discussion of anthropogenic climate change or the Anthropocene? The science is not ours but viewed at a distance. Meanwhile, pragmatic action is seldom driven by humanist prose, and only in the rarest of cases are humanities professors placed so as to have much impact on climate policy. Our tendency in this situation—it is not the only one where this happens—is

The convergence of posthumanism and postanthropocentrism is currently producing a field of posthuman critical enquiry that is more than the sum of its parts and points to a qualitative leap in new directions (Braidotti 2013). The critique of the humanist ideal of Man as the allegedly universal measure of all things, on the one hand, and the rejection of species hierarchy and human exceptionalism, on

Climate scientists today enjoy an extraordinary epistemological privilege. They make claims about the global atmosphere that are simultaneously claims upon the totality of humanity. Summarized as average temperature targets, shrinking carbon budgets, and parts per million concentrations of greenhouse gases, these scientists’ findings and predictions are provocative. They invite us to identify and eliminate

By now, the facts and futures of human-induced climate change have been well rehearsed. Before the end of this century, global temperatures could approach 3 degrees Celsius warmer than average temperatures in the 1990s. Sea levels could rise up to a meter or more, threatening millions living in coastal areas. In these conditions diseases will likely spread more rapidly, food will become more and more

The brouhaha over Hillary Clinton’s bathroom break during the third Democratic debate in December 2015 brings together two interrelated themes: the obstacles surrounding women’s access to bathrooms and the broader cultural discomfort with elimination that makes inequities in access difficult to address. Clinton’s delay in returning to the stage after using the toilet was not just a sign of the barriers

A long-simmering moral panic over the presence of transgender people in sex-segregated public toilets has reached an acute state since the spring of 2015, as an unprecedented wave of mass culture visibility for trans* issues has intersected with recent court decisions guaranteeing trans* people access to gender-appropriate toilets. When we drafted this article in March 2016, only one state, South Dakota

Since the mid-1990s, the number of public toilets in Britain that are open and effectively available as sites for sex between men has reduced dramatically. In 2004 Clara Greed (2004) had already noted a drop of 40 percent in the number of public toilets across the country, while a state policy of austerity in Britain since 2010 has meant that many more public toilets have closed. Those toilets that

This personal reflection traces some of the interconnections between Stuart Hall's work and the “new” cultural geography. The author, in the context of his own intellectual biography and indebted to Hall and to those geographers whose work has been influenced by him, is interested in “routes” rather than “roots” and in the traffic between cultural studies and “critical” human geography. Drawing on

Most readers of this article will be able to “flush and forget” their bodily waste, conveniently and hygienically, at any time, almost wherever they are. However, this is far from the case for a huge proportion of the global population. About one in every three of us do not have access to an effective toilet— one that satisfactorily separates us and everybody else from our potentially disease-carrying

This article makes three specific and interrelated arguments. First, it argues that the power of Stuart Hall's pedagogy can be understood as having established a “third space” between political activism and academic research, a space that in the 1970s and early 1980s permitted the development of British cultural studies as an anti-elitist, theoretically informed approach to the field of culture, in

For a critical frame that has been with us for decades, biopolitics has proven extraordinarily resilient. Writings about human life on almost any scale—from the molecule to the species, from pharmacological development to the stewardship of life, from the rhetoric and poetics of animacy to the logic of genocide—draw deeply from the wells of biopower. The keyword biopolitics is vastly inclusive. Yet

A few days after the shocking attacks on the offices of Charlie Hebdo in January 2015, several French political leaders called for the revival of the “crime of national indignity” as a possible sanction against terrorists of French citizenship. As the prime minister Manuel Valls put it, such a measure—backed up, according to surveys, by 76 percent of the French population—would “mark with symbolic

The title for this symposium, “Queer Theory after ‘Marriage Equality,’” suggests a distinct social and historical event and changed context that queer theory must pause for, grapple with, and perhaps even rethink itself in relation to. I understand “marriage equality” as naming the US legal institutional movement that sought state and federal marriage contracts, with their associated rights and recognitions

In 1993 Michael Taussig's Mimesis and Alterity revitalized the power of the mimetic faculty to craft a vision of nature that was neither the alienated subject of modern science nor the passively malleable medium of late twentieth-century social constructivism. Taussig drew explicitly on a tradition of earlier twentieth-century scholarship—Walter Benjamin, Roger Caillois, and Max Horkheimer and Theodor

In 2013 the passage of France’s “marriage for all” law broadened the institution of marriage and extended its political privileges, but a refusal by the French government to accept medically assisted procreation for nonheterosexual couples, collectives, and individuals upholds hegemonic methods of reproduction and confirms that France’s Socialist Party supports a policy of state heterosexualism: normative

There is growing agreement that, in liberal societies, it is becoming untenable to deny same-sex couples equal access to marriage and the rights it confers. As I will show, it is certainly untenable from the perspective of liberal political philosophy. Yet it has also often been noted—with good reason— that these rights are caught up with a series of significant dangers and difficulties, including

Amid the shock that followed the massacre at the Lonmin Marikana platinum mine, on August 16, 2012, when the South African police killed thirtyfour striking black miners and wounded approximately eighty others, a team of sociologists from the University of Johannesburg produced an “instant book” detailing the events, based on the oral narratives of survivors (see Alexander et al. 2012). The interviews

Given the chance, what resident of Chicago’s troubled public housing projects wouldn’t leap at the possibility of landing an apartment in a gleaming new condominium tower? Especially if rent on that apartment was heavily subsidized and if it stood in a building that featured amenities unheard of in the city’s housing projects? That, anyway, is what managers and developers of West­ haven Park Tower

The Little Cities of Black Diamonds area of Appa­ lachian Ohio was settled largely by coal miners and their families after the American Civil War. Drawn by the possibility of work, miners built lives and solidarities supported by an industry that largely abandoned the region by the begin­ ning of the twentieth century. The inequality and structures of indebtedness that sustained min­ ing communities

Previously, a majority of South Africans were denied welfare in the sense of state provided public or social assistance. Such benefits were largely the preserve of a white minority; black South Africans, by contrast, were forced to develop a variety of strategies for delivering “aided self-help” including the construction of informal housing, the extension of lay care to the elderly and dying, and

It is over a decade since South Africa’s leading mining companies first rolled out an HIV treatment and well-being program for their employees. With seroprevalence at South Africa’s mines estimated at over 20 percent, HIV management has become the object of the most intensive exercise of corporate social responsibility (CSR). This essay focuses on HIV/AIDS management at Anglo American—the world’s third-biggest