ABSTRACT Agricultural social sustainability is often promoted as a solution to agrarian crises, yet we show that, in practice, it operates as (non)performative: it promises justice while reproducing the very exclusions it claims to remedy. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic research with queer farmworkers in Switzerland, this article exposes how sustainability frameworks are anchored in and, in turn, anchor the traditional family farm. This normative grounding stabilizes cisheteropatriarchal, racialized, and nationalist agrarian relations. By tracing the everyday practices through which queer farmworkers sustain agriculture, we demonstrate that justice is not delivered by metrics and documents alone but through ongoing negotiation, care, and subversion on the ground. Rather than treating queer lives as supplemental or exceptional, we show how attending to the everyday negotiations through which queer farmworkers navigate and remake agriculture reframes social sustainability as relational, contested, and world‐making—and opens space for plural, joyful, and livable agrarian futures.
ABSTRACT This paper shows how India's wind electricity regime does not simply decarbonize electricity; it reorganizes power through a distinctive wind masculinity—a caste‐coded, infrastructural mode of rule that keeps money, machines, and people moving. It extends the notions of petro‐/solar masculinities to a South Asian scholarship on caste, Hindu nationalism, and rural patriarchy. Drawing on 7 months of multi‐sited ethnography in Kutch, Gujarat, the paper traces how wind's dispersed materialities elevate men who can convert engineering expertise, upper caste authority, party ties, and police access into uninterrupted logistical flows. Three empirical strands anchor the argument: (1) wind masculinities are extractive, where site‐making and engineers domesticate land and schedules; (2) they are caste‐coded masculinities, where dominant caste brokers perform the “dirty business” of energy politics; (3) Hindu nationalist masculinities take shape in border wind corridors, where saffron symbols and discretionary gaze mark Muslim villages as suspect spaces to penetrate, surveil, and reclaim.
ABSTRACT Water is at the centre of climate change emergency concerns in coastal cities. It constitutes here a fluid entry point to investigating the socio‐ecological politics of toxicities for residents dwelling with and against contaminated waters in Cartagena, Colombia's urban extensions. We propose the concept of ‘fluid toxicities’ to refer to the wateriness of toxic contamination in amphibious urban spaces marked by histories of harm linked to the city's colonial‐racial formations. Drawing on ethnographic work, we argue the unrelenting flows of toxicities dilute historical trajectories of racialised dispossession, overlapping forms of violence and environmental degradation, shaping both embodied endurance, mundane relations of care and collective forms of contestation. We further introduce the concept of ‘violent affective ecologies’ to show how the violence of toxic environments is mediated through sensory, emotional and relational engagements with contaminated waters. Environmental futures are imagined through entanglements of racial ecologies and toxic ecologies.
ABSTRACT While Black and visual geographies have examined the image's racial and spatial power, more work is needed to analyze how racial frames of view become spatially embedded. This paper advances such a practice by analyzing news images of homelessness in Oakland. Methodologically, I analyze images for photographic techniques of depth of field, scale, color, and composition and how they construct subjects, race, and space. Empirically, I find that these images present homelessness as a (Black) problem to be solved in an otherwise unproblematic white visual order by: (1) rendering homeless people faceless yet over‐identified by their blackness; (2) visually portraying encampments as disruptive to logics of orderliness, market logics, and racial harmony; and (3) visually constructing encampments as out‐of‐place domestic spaces against norms of private social reproduction. I argue that these visual‐spatial strategies further a forced perspective that communicates an artificial sense of white spatial normativity and inevitable Black non‐belonging.
ABSTRACT How does sound chart a different story of anticolonialism? Sound could perhaps draw out another map of space in history. Mirroring the form of sound waves, this article travels across borders, following the way sound waves themselves move. This is partly what makes sound so important, and what made the radio so central to anticolonial movements: Sound waves built new relations of solidarity because they could not be confined within colonial borders. From official state radio stations such as Voice of the Arabs in Egypt to pirate radio stations run by rebel movements, such as the Voice of Palestine, Radio Freedom in South Africa, and Voice of the Free and Fighting Algeria, the sounds of anticolonialism were often broadcast through radio waves. In this article, we draw out the rich landscape of radio broadcasting, from cultural programming to armed struggle and labor organizing.
ABSTRACT The introduction to this Symposium outlines how actually existing movements contest various forms of “colonial Natures,” from settler property regimes to extractive frontiers and conservation landscapes. The authors of the six papers highlight the situated praxis of grassroots communities and organic intellectuals in Bolivia, India, Iran, Paraguay, Tanzania, and the United States, and show how they resist, reshape, and strategically engage colonial and capitalist logics of nature in defense of their own ontologies and life projects. Contributors emphasize how decolonizing struggles are contingent, ongoing, and full of compromise, conflict, and “making do.” Informed by the communities they are in conversation with, the editors of this collection and the authors of the papers build on diverse and entangled genealogies of anti‐colonial and postcolonial thought to further debates and actions to decolonize Nature, territory, land, and politics. We hold material and epistemic approaches to anti‐colonial thought in productive tension and mobilize feminist and other critical methodologies to parse the ambivalences of representation, responsibility, and the ethics of locating ourselves as scholars and allies in anti‐ and de‐colonial debates and in the political economy of knowledge production. In doing so, we critically question key terms (Nature, gender, land, indigeneity, territory, property, decolonization, and more) of knowledge production, politics, and contestation.
Canada's Limited Dividend (LD) program was the federal government's main instrument for inducing private rental construction of low- and moderate-income households. This article reframes LD as a racial-capitalist housing formation that institutionalized organized abandonment by protecting investor returns and normalizing infrastructural neglect, temporary affordability, and weakened tenant security. Mapping Toronto's LD stock shows a disproportionate concentration in racialized inner suburbs, especially Black renter-majority areas, redirecting affordability mandates into zones of disposability. Using archival files, land registry records, and ownership tracing, we reconstruct the Chalkfarm Drive towers' passage from subsidized housing to financialized assets marked by rent hikes, eviction pressure, and chronic disrepair. We read Chalkfarm as both an archive of state-enabled extraction and a site of tenant refusal, documentation, and collective care. We argue that LD's afterlife is necropolitically ordered, governing life chances through cumulative exposure, and we close by situating abolitionist housing politics as a necessary response.
This paper focuses on how Rohingya people, legally admitted as refugees to the United States, become available as workers by being violently separated from their places of origin, from family members, and even their own bodies. We argue that resettlement releases labor from its attachments to places and people, thus making it available for higher-value, higher-intensity exploitation elsewhere. This, however, exposes workers to an extraordinarily high risk of injury-risks native-born workers will not take. We argue that the right to maim, lodged here in the US meatpacking industry, is an essential part of the extraction of surplus value from refugee workers. These features of capitalism are not just racialized, as we argue, but also significantly related to migration status-a feature that leads us to rethink the nature of racial capitalism writ large.
ABSTRACT This article examines rehearsing abolition and creating spaces of life, refusal, and mutual aid within and against the violence of the EUropean “peace,” entangled in racial capitalism. Interrogating imaginaries of Europe as a peace project, we show how “peace” is produced through exclusion, bordering, and the management of populations across frontiers. Rather than redefining peace, we ask how this violence is confronted through relationality as praxis and cross‐border insurgent solidarity. Focusing on mutual aid collectives, t.i.c.t.a.c. in Barcelona and the Europe Other Collective in Tirana, we trace how fugitive rehearsals of abolition take shape through care, legal support, political education, and transnational organizing. Emerging within interconnected border geographies, these practices transform sites of containment into anticolonial interstices: fragile, ongoing processes that refuse anti‐relational logics and make life possible. Centering abolition as “life in rehearsal,” we foreground collective practices that forge alternative relations across difference, opening possibilities beyond racial capitalism.
ABSTRACT This paper develops the concept of materialist solidarity: political connection that emerges when peripheralized subjects discover shared position within traceable circuits of violence rather than through sympathetic identification or abstract ideology. Between 2023 and 2025, favela activists in Rio de Janeiro built transnational ties with Palestinian resistance networks by tracing Israeli‐manufactured rifles, surveillance drones, and counterinsurgency training deployed in both contexts. Drawing on in‐depth conversations with activists, participant observation at key mobilizations, and document analysis of weapons procurement contracts, I examine how this recognition reshapes political subjectivity and generates theory through praxis. The analysis challenges sequential epistemologies dominating solidarity scholarship, demonstrating that political knowledge emerges recursively through entanglements of material discovery, affect, and cultural production rather than through linear stages. This South–South internationalism, organized autonomously from the peripheries, contributes to radical geography by showing how shared infrastructures of violence—not analogy—produce the ground on which transnational solidarity is built.
This article examines the commodification of the human corpse from the point of view of its disposal. Whilst offering some analysis on the circulation and harvesting of repurposed human tissues, existing literature does not discuss how these are discarded. Drawing on ethnographic findings from clinical waste incinerators, I evaluate the technologies' and desensitised labour's role in stripping a dead body of its moral and legal status. Evaluating the resulting necropolitical divisions across the corpse's commodity geographies, I argue for the importance of industrial machinery and labour for the overall capitalist operation of scientifically and financially benefitting from commodified bodies. Using drawings by the author and by waste workers, the article visually pieces together this multi-stage operation, referred to as decouplement. In examining how industrial technologies and alienated work across dispersed localities are instrumentalised to decouple dead bodies, the article offers a radical geographic perspective on human tissue commodification.
Through a radical re-reading of Orlando Fals Borda's conceptualization of participatory action research (PAR), I argue that PAR is more adequately grounded within the broader Fals Bordian framing of ciencia popular, defined as science for, with, and propelled by social movements. I problematize key elements of Fals Borda's works that illuminate the historical silencing of feminist thought and street-level movement leaders of the Colombian left. Using the space created by Fals Borda's conceptual shortcomings, I share lessons learned through my friendship and shared movement space with Jhon Restrepo and Daniela Maldonado, organizers who embody a new kind of ciencia popular, which I call reparative science. I conclude with forward thinking on next steps for reparative science and articulate possible pathways forward toward a science that centers collective care in protective spaces that grow in distance from the dehumanizing structures of the nonprofit and academic industrial complexes.
How do land claims articulated around belonging and the environment (re)shape claims to legitimacy? This article examines social mobilizations led by activists involved in environmental organizations, who define themselves as "autochthone", and who take part in the contested co-production of political forests in Cote d'Ivoire. It introduces the concept of ethno-environmentalism, which reveals how the environment and autochthony are mobilized as political repertoires within a politics of recognition, enabling the renewal of long-standing land struggles in the aftermath of the war, experienced by these activists as a form of political marginalization. The environmentalization processes of land struggles, centered on deforestation attributed to "foreigners", allow them to both contest and ally with state institutions. This article opens a dialogue between the literature on political forests and that on land and belonging, offering new ways to analyze processes of environmentalization of political struggles articulated around belonging.
This article advances the concept of deep segregation to theorise how social exclusion is produced through the everyday organisation of market access rather than through spatial separation alone. Deep segregation refers to a relational and processual form of segregation constituted through segmented routes of access, intermediary networks and communalised market logics that translate social prejudice into ordinary practices of valuation, trust and risk. Drawing on a 3-year ethnography (2017-2020) of rental housing markets in Delhi and Mumbai, the article develops this concept through an analysis of how Muslim tenants navigate urban housing under conditions of informality. We show that discrimination is not merely the outcome of landlord bias or episodic refusal, but an immanent logic of the rental market itself, enacted through trust-based brokerage networks, reputational economies, housing-collective gatekeeping and digital platforms. Muslim tenants may reside in close spatial proximity to Hindu neighbours, yet arrive there through truncated, contingent and communally segmented market pathways long before a tenancy is secured or denied. By conceptualising segregation as a matter of how access is organised rather than only where people live, the article reframes debates on housing discrimination, urban informality and market-mediated inequality. Although grounded in Indian cities, the analysis offers a transferable framework for understanding how exclusion is reproduced through intermediated markets across the urban Global South and beyond.
This article investigates the relationship between militarization and land grabbing in the context of rapid urbanization and protracted violent conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Drawing on two case studies of the dispossession and privatization of public urban land in Goma, Eastern Congo, during the state of siege, the paper examines how militarized land grabs are tied to broader capitalist transformations of land. It shows how violent dispossession carried out by military actors under military rule facilitated and accelerated capitalist accumulation by converting public land as a use value into exchange value. The article argues that the institutionalization of military urban land governance under the state of siege facilitated a logic of militarized capitalism, significantly scaling up ongoing processes of accumulation by dispossession. This militarized capitalism operates through the growing repression of popular resistance to dispossession. The paper clearly shows that the state of siege not only expanded the ability of Congolese military actors to use coercion and violence in land grabbing processes but also increased their capacity to suppress opposition and silence contestation. Finally, it shows that military rule reduced fragmentation in land governance and competition over land, thereby accelerating land grabbing through the logics of what we refer to as militarized capitalism. Cet article examine la relation entre la militarisation et l'accaparement des terres dans un contexte d'urbanisation rapide et de conflit violent prolong & eacute; en R & eacute;publique d & eacute;mocratique du Congo. & Agrave; partir de deux & eacute;tudes de cas portant sur la d & eacute;possession et la privatisation de terrains publics urbains & agrave; Goma, dans l'est du Congo, durant l'& eacute;tat de si & egrave;ge, l'article analyse la mani & egrave;re dont les accaparements fonciers militaris & eacute;s sont li & eacute;s & agrave; des transformations fonci & egrave;res plus larges de type capitaliste. Il montre comment la d & eacute;possession violente men & eacute;e par des acteurs militaires sous r & eacute;gime militaire a facilit & eacute; et acc & eacute;l & eacute;r & eacute; l'accumulation capitaliste en transformant les terres publiques d'une valeur d'usage en valeur d'& eacute;change. L'article soutient que l'institutionnalisation de la gouvernance militaire des terres urbaines sous l'& eacute;tat de si & egrave;ge a favoris & eacute; une logique de & laquo; capitalisme militaris & eacute; & raquo;, intensifiant consid & eacute;rablement les processus en cours d'accumulation par d & eacute;possession. Ce capitalisme militaris & eacute; fonctionne & agrave; travers une r & eacute;pression croissante des r & eacute;sistances populaires & agrave; la d & eacute;possession. L'article montre clairement que l'& eacute;tat de si & egrave;ge n'a pas seulement & eacute;largi la capacit & eacute; des acteurs militaires congolais & agrave; recourir & agrave; la coercition et & agrave; la violence dans les processus d'accaparement des terres, mais qu'il a & eacute;galement renforc & eacute; leur capacit & eacute; & agrave; r & eacute;primer l'opposition et & agrave; faire taire toute contestation. Enfin, il montre que le r & eacute;gime militaire a r & eacute;duit la fragmentation de la gouvernance fonci & egrave;re ainsi que la concurrence autour des terres, acc & eacute;l & eacute;rant ainsi les processus d'accaparement foncier selon les logiques de ce que nous appelons le capitalisme militaris & eacute;.
Even in Eastern Europe, whiteness organises space, race, class and environmental justice research. Inspired by whiteness theory, we draw on a case of environmental injustice affecting the Roma community of D & abreve;roaia-a segregated neighbourhood in Rosia Montan & abreve;-in the context of the mining conflict over the eponymous gold mine. We analyse how whiteness as 'gadjoness' dehumanises Roma communities through institutionalised mundane practices of spatial and discursive exclusion. Whiteness operates as an insidious power relation, which we set about to expose. Following a historical approach to racial exploitation in Eastern Europe and analysing 31 interviews with local actors, we apply a reflexive methodology to question the constitution of race and whiteness in Romania. Our results show how socio-environmental injustice is reproduced through racism and whiteness, is inscribed in space and normalised through racist institutional practices, but is also exposed and challenged by Roma agency.
Pre-emption, a legal instrument allowing settlers to acquire Indigenous land via occupation and improvement, is a vital means of colonial dispossession in North America, yet has received relatively little critical attention. Our analysis outlines its significance, shedding new light on the way in which private property power and state authority worked together to shore up colonial jurisdiction, title, and sovereignty in British Columbia. Pre-emption enrolled "private" actors in sustained forms of ongoing dispossession, removing the Indigenous presence from the land. Pre-emption created the conditions for violence that was "illegal" on the face of the legislation yet was effectively granted impunity by colonial authorities. That pre-emption was designed to take place on unsurveyed land and to the exclusion of "Indian settlements" empowered settlers to self-administer and regulate the appropriation of land, and to define what was open for settlement and what was not, shaping the (il)legal practices of land appropriation.
This paper deploys a Gramscian theorisation of the conjuncture to argue that the contemporary global political economy is becoming constituted through the destruction of Gaza. It contends that Gaza's destruction illuminates the current conjuncture as an intensification of earlier authoritarian neoliberal tendencies. First, Gaza functions as a key testing ground for technologies of containment, policing and destruction-technologies that are central to an increasingly militarised global political economy and are subsequently deployed across other geographies. Second, Gaza operates as a globally significant site of (un)creative destruction, where speculative and utopian plans for the redevelopment of the territory have been rolled out to sustain processes of financialised accumulation. Finally, Gaza plays a central role in legitimising these dynamics through the mainstreaming of a racist and ethnonationalist worldview, reinforced by the failure of the 'rules-based' international order. Gaza should therefore be understood relationally: as emblematic of wider processes unfolding across other geographies, as central to understanding contemporary global capitalism and as a critical locus for thinking about possibilities of resistance and solidarity.
This article examines the emergence of "green fintech," a diverse subset of new financial technologies with expressly environmental aims. We suggest that an analysis of "green fintech" offers us a useful lens on the contradictions of green finance more generally. The paper looks at a range of examples, spanning processes of AI-enabled investment screening, tokenization, and gamification, and draws recent debates about the Marxian category of "fictitious capital" into conversation with critical geography debates about processes of valuation in green finance. Green fintech applications reveal especially clearly how green finance relies on specific forms of fictitious capitalization. In particular, we argue that green fintech makes visible how green finance as a form of fictitious capital is reliant not just on articulating abstract, quantified valuations of nature, but also valorizing them through exchange.
What does it mean to fear a place-not for what happens there, but for what it symbolises in the urban imagination? This paper examines Tuan's topophobia as it emerges through the affective textures and moral geographies of everyday life in Siliguri, a medium-sized Indian city. Drawing on photo-ethnography, night walks and interviews, it traces how sites-an abandoned theatre, a dim underpass, a silent corridor-become charged with dread through neglect, symbolic marginalisation and ambient threat. These are not sites of spectacular violence, but fragments rendered uninhabitable by infrastructural decay and informal territoriality. Engaging with postcolonial urbanism and affective theory, the paper argues fear here is politically assembled-shaped by uneven care, persistent neglect, and the quiet withdrawal of the state. In a city where neglect and congested spaces shape daily routes, who moves unafraid-and who must reroute or retreat through its uneven geographies of care and belonging?
