Migration is often understood through the lives of migrants, but the experiences and desires of those who stay behind are important in understanding how the world is shaped by movement across borders. In this article, I put the work of a Mam Maya women's collective in conversation with Indigenous and communitarian feminist theory to illustrate the home as an infrastructure where temporalities of migration are made visible and from which new social infrastructures emerge toward Indigenous futures. In Toj Coman, Guatemala migration has become a life plan for boys and men, and associated local infrastructures reflect this pattern: migrants build houses for an imagined future return. However, this elsewhen doesn’t always manifest as planned. Houses are built slowly, ebbing and flowing with funds and momentum or lack thereof. Violent border policies create conditions in which men leave with delayed or impossible return. Families who stay behind live with temporal inconsistencies that affect their daily lives, often waiting through displacement and disconnection. Homes are the center of both the temporal disruptions generated through migration and collective strategies to mitigate them. The Toj Coman women's collective formed around women's infrastructural needs but now serves as scaffolding for the community in this context.
Cities have long been stages where contradictory forces of accommodation and banishment, encounter and exclusion, arrival and expulsion unfold in tandem. Responding to the heightened political closures of this last decade, this article reimagines the city by attending to what has been and is being done in the interstices of the city in the face of seemingly insurmountable trouble. Focusing on Berlin, we examine the spatial practices through which urban dwellers make and remake the city beyond normative categories of home, work, and integration . Drawing on ethnographic engagements since 2017, we explore three typologies of shared space – the field, the stage, and the café – where migration politics and everyday life intersect. These sites reveal how ordinary practices of inhabitation constitute forms of rehearsal and prefigurative politics: experimental modes of city-making that resist the violence of bordering and discourse of othering from above, while organising other ways of living from below. In advancing a re-reading of Berlin as a palimpsest city – continually rewritten through ordinary gestures of those who inhabit it – we explore how the affective, material and dramaturgical practices can form a counter-archive of city-making and collective living.
This talk examines how US empire operates as a topological formation that projects security and war power through mediated arrangements of power, mobile technologies, and blurred genres of rule that link far-flung sites in intimate and often indeterminate ways. Drawing on over a decade of research conducted in Palestine on the embedding of Washington's counterterrorism regime into monetary transactions and aid flows inbound to the Palestinians, this talk presents a different analytic of the US war state—one that realizes its destructive effects not only through spectacular modalities of violence and warfare, but increasingly so, through a quieter, temporally stretched process of constriction that progressively erodes conditions of livability through forced disconnection and isolation, or what we might call “asphyxiatory violence.” Tracing the political work the terrorism designation performs on racialized life, from the shores of the Mediterranean to the governing and repression of populations within the United States, this talk, constructs a different theoretical apparatus of war and empire—one enacted through the point of the terrorism list.
This review examines Erin McElroy's Silicon Valley Imperialism: Techno Fantasies and Frictions in Postsocialist Times and its critique of Silicon Valley imperialism as it intersects with Romania's socialist past. I center my review on how the book illuminates technocapitalist logics, reframes ingenuity under precarity as collective experimentation, and imagines futures beyond dominant technological and political formations. In this way, McElroy's book invites us to dwell in interstices where resistance and reinvention become blueprints for living otherwise.
At the contiguous ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, dockworkers frequently deploy conspiracy theories to explain the securitized, containerized, and automated spaces in which they live and work. Contra extant explanations of conspiracy theory as irrational, deviant, or simply shoddy epistemology, this article argues that longshore paranoia should be taken seriously as an expressive form of political critique and spatial praxis. Drawing on 16 months of ethnographic research carried out at the L.A./Long Beach port complex, the argument plays out in four parts. First, I situate longshore paranoia in relation to existing scholarship on conspiracy theory. Second, I analyze instances of paranoid expression at L.A./Long Beach, describing how dockworkers use conspiracy theory to make sense of their increasingly mediated working environments. Third, I argue that longshore paranoia effectively transforms the port into what I call a paranoid space. Finally, fourth, I briefly take up the crucial political dimensions of conspiracy theory, showing how dockworkers’ spatial praxis shifts responsibility for logistical violence onto capitalist shipping companies and terminal operators. Longshore paranoia can thus be understood as a critical effort to hold logistical power to account.
This article examines the 2019 Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) strike as a spatial counter-hegemonic project that reconfigures the relationship between education, urban governance, and public infrastructure. Building on Antonio Gramsci's concept of counter-hegemony and its recent spatial reinterpretations, I analyze how CTU used the strategy of bargaining for the common good not only to expand the scope of labor demands, but to contest the fiscal, racial, and spatial logics of neoliberal urban development in Chicago. Drawing on participant observation, content analysis, and case study methods, I trace how the strike's protest routes, coalition-building, popular education, and creative practices worked across scale to produce an alternative spatial imaginary rooted in care, redistribution, and collective life. While the strike did not achieve all its demands and was met with both internal tensions and external resistance, I argue that its significance lies in the everyday practices and solidarities through which educators asserted a different vision of what schools, and cities, can be. This case contributes to scholarship on teacher unionism, labor geography, and urban social movements by foregrounding space as a key terrain of both constraint and possibility in counter-hegemonic struggle.
This article examines the Miskitu concept of Blasi pyua wina wan raitka nani ba (Our ancestral rights) as a foundational framework for Indigenous autonomy, positioning it as a direct challenge to state-imposed multiculturalism in Eastern Nicaragua. Rooted in communal land ownership and stewardship, reciprocity networks, and self-determined governance systems, this framework contrasts with the neoliberal legal structures that have historically undermined Indigenous sovereignty. By tracing the trajectory of Indigenous resistance movements in Eastern Nicaragua, from mid-twentieth-century grassroots mobilization to contemporary struggles for land rights, this study argues that Indigenous resistance is both a spatial and epistemological challenge to state territorialization. Using a combination of ethnographic fieldwork and oral histories, this study critiques Nicaragua's multicultural legal framework, particularly Laws 28 and 445, for perpetuating neoliberal governance rather than ensuring genuine Indigenous autonomy. Findings reveal that while these laws ostensibly recognize Indigenous land rights, they have failed to prevent land dispossession, settler encroachment, and resource extraction, exacerbating socio-economic marginalization. Furthermore, the study highlights how Indigenous autonomy has been co-opted by political structures that constrain community-led governance. In response, Blasi pyua wina wan raitka nani ba emerges as an alternative political framework that reclaims land and governance beyond state-imposed legal mechanisms. This work contributes to scholarship on Indigenous and legal geographies by demonstrating how land struggles intersect with broader racial and economic dynamics. Ultimately, it advocates for Indigenous movements to reclaim territorial autonomy on their own terms, reinforcing Indigenous relational geographies and self-determination.
This article contends with illiberal modes of territorial securitization as forms of urban governance that secure authority through bureaucratic practices that destabilize territorial archives and the presumed fixity of property, land, and planning. Drawing on cases from Ho Chi Minh City and Mumbai, it examines the disappearance of a ratified planning map in the Thu Thi & ecirc;m New Urban Area and the recalibration of eligibility lists in Mumbai's Slum Rehabilitation Scheme-both are instances of archival revision that produce elastic rather than fixed territorial and population categories. Rather than treating these practices as corruption or breakdown, the article argues that they are patterned techniques of rule emerging from the overproduction of liberal bureaucratic instruments.
Public housing redevelopment in the United States is increasingly delivered through complex public-private partnerships (PPPs) that disperse responsibility for planning, environmental review, remediation, and construction across public agencies, private developers, consultants, and financiers. This article examines how contemporary PPP governance reconfigures environmental decision-making by orienting it toward maintaining redevelopment feasibility. Under these conditions, accountability is fragmented such that no single actor is structurally positioned to delay or halt projects without undermining financing, enabling redevelopment to proceed despite unresolved environmental risk. Drawing on a qualitative study of the Jordan Downs redevelopment in Watts, Los Angeles-based on interviews, archival research, regulatory documents, environmental reports, and sustained site observation-the article shows that environmental review functioned as a calibrating process through which acceptable levels of harm were administratively produced over time. I identify three institutional mechanisms-compartmentalized mandates, financing-driven temporal pressures, and knowledge gaps generated by technical opacity-that collectively authorized the persistence of environmental harm within the bounds of regulatory compliance.
