This article reads Arctic imperialism through urbanism, taking chronopolitics – the politics of time – as its analytical entry point. It examines three projections of urbanity onto Kalaallit Nunaat: the US military's ‘city under the ice’ (Camp Century, 1959–1967), Danish welfare colonial urbanism (1950s–1970s), and the Silicon Valley ‘freedom city’ proposal (2025–present). Each is read as a colonial urbanity – a distinct urban form, language, or imaginary through which an external power claims territory and orders time on colonised land. Each enacts a distinct politics of time – frontier time , developmental time , disruptive time – through material and imaginary registers, evicting existing Kalaallit lifeways to an anachronistic past. The article further argues that this temporal ordering constitutes domestication : of the hostile environment, of Indigenous life, and of sovereignty itself. Each urbanity encounters, however, an active past – an existing order of inhabitation that refuses to be displaced. Together, the three cases reveal that the urban imaginary is itself an instrument of territorial claim-making, doing chronopolitical work in advance of, or instead of, built form.
This article develops the concept of “green masculinity” as a socio-political order grounded in patriarchal structures that legitimizes car fetishism, large-scale technological control, extractive dominance, and violence against feminized bodies and territories as central strategies of climate action and energy transitions. Through an ecofeminist lens, we examine how these gendered orders shape mobility transitions and their extractive foundations by emphasizing the multi-sitedness of green masculinities across electric vehicle expansion in Germany and nickel mining in Indonesia. We argue that green masculinity sustains car-centered, techno-fix approaches to mobility, foreclosing more fundamental energy transformations and embedding gendered hierarchies within ostensibly sustainable practices. The article highlights how visions of “green” mobility transitions align with ecomodern masculinities and reinforce (re)patriarchalization processes and capitalist power relations across transnational arenas. Finally, we call for re-imagining energy and mobility futures beyond extractivist and patriarchal paradigms, emphasizing feminist energy systems grounded in care, solidarity, interdependence, and justice.
This paper examines how contemporary ocean governance in the Andaman Sea operates as a technology of abjection, transforming maritime spaces into abject seascapes where irregularised migrants become trapped subjects of intensified state management: intercepted, punitively expelled and abandoned rather than rescued and disembarked. We demonstrate how South(east) Asian states exploit the juridical ambiguities of ocean space to enforce migration control while evading protection and rescue obligations. Through maritime interceptions that result in push-backs, delayed or deliberate non-assistance to boats in distress, and even illegal maritime deportations, state actors weaponise the ocean against migrants, creating zones of expulsion and prolonged strandedness at sea while maintaining plausible deniability of responsibility through sovereignty claims. The paper contributes to critical ocean governance debates by exposing how seemingly technical and humanitarian maritime policies, including search and rescue operations, function as bordering technologies. We term the pattern governing these abject seascapes haphazard oceanic governance : dispersed and often unilateral modes of sovereign power that exploit jurisdictional ambiguities at sea to evade rescue and protection obligations, remaining rooted in territorial paradigms of control and abandonment.
Real-time sensing technologies are increasingly promoted within highly capitalized and platform-integrated agricultural systems as solutions to ecological crisis, promising sustainability through precision, predictive coordination, and continuous responsiveness. This article interrogates the ontological and political work performed by that promise. It develops the concept of threshold ontology to describe a regime in which phenomena become real, urgent, and governable when they cross predefined quantitative thresholds, triggering operational intervention. Drawing on science and technology studies, critical agrarian studies, and chronopolitics, the analysis argues that contemporary sensing infrastructures reorganize temporality by coupling measurement to intervention through systems of triggerability embedded within processes of data-mediated governance. This coupling stratifies who and what are interruptible, visible, and responsible across actors and processes. In doing this, it privileges deviation management at the expense of structural processes such as labor precarity, land concentration, groundwater depletion, and agrarian dependency. Agriculture is an analytically revealing site because ecological, labor, and capital temporalities intersect within platform-mediated production systems that tie sensing infrastructures to supply-chain coordination, financial risk management, and labor surveillance. The article reframes sustainability as a chronopolitical question concerning how infrastructures rank temporal processes, define crisis, and shape which forms of structural transformation become politically imaginable.
Migration has become increasingly synonymous with ‘crisis’. Drawing on longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork with Ukrainian nationals in Warsaw (2020–2025), this article asks what ‘crisis times’ mean for migration research methodologically and what remains obscured when forced displacement is narrated as crisis. It contributes to debates on the temporalities and geographies of crisis by engaging critiques of the ‘migration crisis industry’ alongside post-colonial, critical race and feminist perspectives that re-read crisis as ordinariness and duress. The article argues that crisis frameworks not only reproduce state emergencies but also shape knowledge production, delimiting what becomes knowable. Framing crisis as a time-bound event normalises slow and protracted forms of harm that operate beyond emergency frameworks and risk remaining invisibilised. While Ukrainian displacement initially generated accounts of rapid solidarity and ‘unprecedented’ responses, war fatigue and shrinking humanitarian funding have shifted crisis management onto migrant communities themselves, rendering crisis slow, ordinary and prolonged. Moving beyond exceptionalist understandings, the article shows how crisis becomes embedded in daily routines of communal care among displaced individuals and communities. Finally, it calls for longitudinal ethnography and practices of ‘ethnographic returning’ to bear witness to the long-term unfolding of harms that endure beyond the spectacular.
