Abstract: This article argues that the Islamic Republic of Iran's codified and institutionalized gender apartheid created a unique form of militarized women's domestic role from which grief and mourning became protected, even expected, forms of expression for maternal subjects. Bringing Iran's unique historical and political context to bear on an analysis of bereaved mothers' affective resistance during the "Woman, Life, Freedom" (WLF) uprising, it demonstrates how mothers' expressions of "shared grief" constitute a life-affirming form of affective resistance that not only challenges sovereign erasure but also subverts traditional motherhood to perform a feminist politics of lamentation that enacts equality—revealing a maternal politics that threatens the performative undoing of Iran's essentialist gender apartheid and exposes the fragility of its theocratic rule.
Abstract: In On Populist Reason , Ernesto Laclau takes Freud as his point of departure to argue that populism is not a pathological form of democracy, but its intrinsic rationality and possibility, and already embedded in democratic practices, ideals, and struggles. I delineate three of Laclau's Freudian premises and identify limitations or flaws in his appropriation. In distinguishing between a primary populism and a secondary populism, I argue that both Laclau's conception of symbolic representation and his presentation of the leader's role in group psychology fall prey to a version of sovereign loyalty that undermines independent agency and judgment.
Abstract: Self-defense cases evince a primal scene of political life because they reveal the vulnerability to violence citizens may feel and highlight the power of discretionary judgment by jurors about which killings are excusable and which carry the liability of punishment by the state. This paper includes an account of a self-defense trial in La Plata, Argentina, which the author attended in May of 2024 and an interpretation of the factors, including the framework of "justifiable homicide," public distrust in the police, and empathy for the defendant, that led to the surprise acquittal.
Abstract: Perhaps the most disorienting feature of the long socioecological disaster that makes ever-sprawling environmental disasters amplify the effects of ongoing and uneven conditions of poverty, violence, and dispossession, is not its urgency, but its permanence: that there is no foreseeable future in which redemption would prevail. What might it take to refuse the cruel hope for a redemptive future without seeking consolation in the despair that such forlorn hope precipitates? At a time when everyone is exhorted to save the world or be damned, this article explores the irreverent pessimism of what, after Camus, one might call a planetary “life without appeal.” Refusing to be content with what is now deemed proper to the damned of the earth, irreverent pessimism affirms the insubordinate disposition of a life lived in the most radical immanence of a freedom born not of hope, but of the ongoing improvisation of a revolt without future.
Abstract: In recent years, affective concerns have become increasingly central to debates in the environmental humanities. Adding to this conversation, this essay introduces the present symposium by developing the notion of sensorial tactics. With this concept, we’re referring to a deliberate organization of perceptual and affective responses that work in various ways to tackle current socioecological disasters. Engaging each contribution, the essay outlines three such tactics: affective coping strategies , post-extractivist sensibilities , and non-human sense-making . In that way, the essay aims ultimately to widen our vocabularies for affective routes to follow by developing strategies for sensing the world differently.
Abstract: For Helsinki Biennial 2023, we were commissioned to write an environmental audiotour that would narrate the city and its surroundings as sites of environmental sensing and even data. While oriented toward the broader audience, and accessible as downloadable podcasts, the episodes drew on recent years of points in critical data studies as well as experimental practices where performance, narrative, and other poetic methods become involved in outlining what could be called the affective data assemblage. Our interest in questions of landscapes already as data—as models in-situ, as Jane Hutton puts it—as well as in methods such as autographic visualization were one underlying reference point for the task of cultivating particular relational sensibilities in ways that can link to artistic methods, curatorial research, as well as contemporary discourses on materiality of data.
Abstract: This article examines property from the standpoint of modern chattel slavery and what I posit as a racial theory of labor. Taking cues from Cheryl Harris’s proposition of whiteness as property and Brenna Bhandar’s discussion of “racial regimes of ownership,” colonial/racial regimes of ownership refer us to a critical interrogation of property as the ownership of human persons. If slavery supplies capitalism with a defining horizon for all labor and Blackness names the ultimate condition of labor’s subordination to capital, then the affinity between whiteness and capital suggests the whiteness of property.
Abstract: This article argues that the COVID-19 eviction moratoria and their rollback reveal housing to be tool of social reproduction, as well as a tool against it. Following Fraser’s work in Cannibal Capitalism , I argue that the eviction crisis and the broader housing crisis it indicates show the overlap between social reproduction and racial expropriation. I argue that treating housing as an asset is rooted in the constitutive exclusion of housing as a basic infrastructure of social reproduction. And I show that the social reproduction of Black and queer lives indicates housing as a collective means of social reproduction.
Abstract: In 1923, oil was discovered in my hometown of Long Beach, California. Soon, it was one of the richest cities in the world. Cut to the present day and Long Beach is a gritty, queer, and racially diverse city, often derided for its high crime, ugly beaches, and environmental injustices—including the highest ozone pollution in the US. What remains are the weathered symbols of its “glory days”—from a liquor store shaped like an oil derrick to a bar named The Petroleum Club. While scholars such as Jennifer Wenzel have suggested that fossil fuels are concealed in everyday contemporary life, that’s not the case here. In this essay, I analyze the strange affects of this scenario. Playing off scholar Stephanie LeMenager’s coining of “petromelancholia”—“the grieving of conventional oil resources and the pleasures they sustained”—I argue for the existence of a more perverse relationality to fossil fuels, encapsulated in kitschy remnants.
Abstract: “Epistemophilia”—a love of knowledge—is key feature of colonialism. It includes the belief that knowing more is better, that knowledge should be shared, and that knowledge is separable from context. Settler-colonial education systems are in part systems of epistemic extraction and theft that buttress material and relational extractivism, attempting to steal land, relations, and practices. In this paper I explore how white settlers doing research, learning, and teaching can resist extractivism in our work, including creating space to not know, to recognize situated and embodied forms of knowledge that are not transferable across context, and to respect boundaries.
Abstract: Why didn’t Marx write about advertising? While not a few Marxist theorists have attempted to account for advertising’s role in the later development of capitalism, Marx’s own inattention to this economic form has only rarely been recognized as the genuine puzzle that it is. Here we examine the role of advertising in Marx’s own time and his strange silence about it in his work. We demonstrate that prevailing Marxist accounts of advertising’s development not only fail to explain its absence from Capital but also underplay its significance for capitalist dynamics today. Yet we argue as well that Marx’s own concepts can in fact clarify fundamental aspects of how advertising functions in our time, as in his—but only if those concepts are turned against his own apparent view about how advertising should be understood.
Abstract: What role should the sciences play in a politically vibrant and just response to the Anthropocene crises? To engage this question, I contrast Latour’s and Arendt’s understanding of the role of sensing and sense-making in political action. Latour’s Gaian theory (especially his “sensing loops”) privileges the scientific ontology as a starting point for terrestrial politics. In contrast, Arendt’s phenomenological approach rooted political action in embodied experience contextualized through dialogue with others: in “common sense”. Emplaced and embodied transdisciplinary inquiry, I argue, offers a fertile starting point for an epistemologically just Anthropocene politics.
Abstract: What is the meaning of "time" when one is "doing time'? Through a phenomenological analysis of first-person accounts, this article considers the imprint incarceration enacts upon a person's primary experience of time. This is termed carceral time, and includes experiences such as the social death of incarceration, temporal stasis, natal alienation, carceral captivity, and the foreclosing of diachronic agency. Retributivists—including Kant and Hegel—assert that punishment is justified when it is proportional to the crime. Yet, the proportionality of a prison sentence hinges on the assumption that carceral time can be calculated in terms of its equivalency or economic exchangeability to free people's experience of time. In evaluating whether incarceration is just, one must consider the impact it has on the incarcerated person. The testimonies on carceral time evince that incarceration indelibly inscribes the whole of an individual's temporal horizon and is not quantifiably proportional to ordinary 'free" experiences of time. This undermines the concept of proportional time at the heart of retributivist arguments, but also, potentially, the justness of the justice system. This article concludes by drawing on prominent carceral theorists, abolitionists, and critical phenomenologists to consider possible tactics of temporal repair termed 'decarceral time."
Abstract: This essay includes a political repertoire for thought and action rooted in Black feminism that I call a politics of futurity . It consists of four parts: purpose, strategy, tactics, and goal. The first builds on the politics of care that I developed in Reckoning . The second adapts and extends Saidiya Hartman's method of critical fabulation augmented by a notion of political fabrication. The third suggests tactics derived from the folkloric character of the Trickster. And the fourth forwards the goal of democratic redesign and reconstruction, which we can think of as worldbuilding.
Abstract: Under contemporary digital conditions, political myth operates through memes that collapse the temporal interval liberal deliberation requires. Reading the case of Luigi Mangione, I show how memetic speech acts convert resistance into spectacle, foreclosing the possibility of revolt. Drawing on theorists of myth, performativity, and revolt—from Sorel and Foucault to Barthes, Butler, and Fanon—I argue that authoritarian myths thrive on virality's affective compression, while oppositional myths are metabolized as engagement before they can mobilize rupture. The Mangione phenomenon confronts liberal complicity: when systemic violence is normalized as order, refusing counter-violence may become yet another alibi for sanctioned death.
