This review paper builds on research in feminist economic geography on social reproduction to explore how non-normative sexualities and gender identities have been and might further be conceptualized within this framework. The paper synthesizes existing research to show how a queer and trans social reproduction moves beyond sites, spaces, and theories premised upon privatized systems of property and care, such as the home and the family. It analyzes the (re)turn to Marxism in queer and trans theory to theorize how emphasizing the property status of cisheteronormativity further advances our understandings of social reproduction, while continuing to conceptualize gender and sexuality as inextricably linked to race. I argue that centering queer and trans subjects and theories allows us to outline with greater accuracy how cisness and straightness underwrite our current regimes of social reproduction. The review distills four key starting points for a theory of queer and trans social reproduction: space, work, care, and property. It contributes to the feminist idea that the production of difference—with specific reference to non-normative forms of sexuality and gender identity—is central to social reproduction.
On the international stage, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has sought to present Canada and other “intermediate” powers as alternatives to U.S.-led imperial aggression under President Trump. Yet Canadian foreign policy remains steadfast in its support of the American Empire. In this short intervention, we argue that Canada continues to support American imperial power by providing diplomatic, ideological, and logistical support for U.S. military interventions in the Global South, alongside increased defense spending and securing supply chains for “defense-critical” minerals. This policy orientation—which reflects Canada's position as a secondary power in a U.S.-led capitalist Empire—is implemented at the expense of the peoples of the Global South, as well as workers and Indigenous people living in Canada.
Still enjoying the image as a liberal, creative and non-hierarchical industry associated with fun and play, the global gaming industry is often seen as antithetical to work and waged labour. However, beyond the labour that goes into the production, distribution and publication of video games, the digital spaces of these games themselves have also become sites for service work, which a growing number of people across the globe are dependent on to make ends meet. In this article, I analyse the spatial politics of game service work, a form of digital work that manipulates the playful spaces of multiplayer video games and, in the process, reshapes the political economy of gaming. In doing so, the article situates the fast-growing political economy of game services in the tradition of labour geography by tracing the spatial conditions and politics of this form of digital labour. Through a discussion of the much-analysed example of ‘Chinese gold farmers’ and a discussion of the recent, yet under-researched growth of game services on what I call ‘Elo platforms’, the article suggests that the digital spaces of online multiplayer video games are not only sites for capital accumulation but also emerge as economic spaces for labour to make a living. The article argues that the reappropriation of these digital game spaces not only grants insights into current struggles between capital and labour but also illustrates the crucial role of workers in making new economic spaces of and for production in contemporary capitalism.
This article introduces heortotopia as a contemporary form of spatial otherness: an ephemeral, embodied and conflictual spatiality produced through festive collective practices mobilized in protest and political struggle. It asks how other spaces might be understood as practices of collective becoming. The concept is developed through a critical engagement with Foucault’s heterotopia, reworked through the philosophies of Deleuze and Guattari and Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque. While heterotopology has been influential in mapping spatial difference, its emphasis on regulation limits its capacity to account for chaotic, creative, and generative forms of spatial production. Drawing on Bakhtin, the article reconceptualizes other spaces as spaces of becoming, produced through embodied excess, wild joy, methexis and creative rage. Heortotopias are theorized as procedural spatialities that temporarily territorialize alternative worlds-in-progress and reconfigure political actions through festive disruption. Empirically, the article draws on qualitative research with grassroots collectives in five Greek regions. The findings demonstrate how grassroots collectives mobilize festivity as an embodied and dialogical practice of becoming, producing temporary spatial formations through which alternative forms of coexistence, care and collective existence are enacted in the present.
By reviewing the current trajectories of social movement theory (SMT) and scholarship, this piece exposes three specific dangers that exist by theorizing (progressive) social movements. The first recognizes how SMT can produce legitimizing narratives that sanitize contentious politics, reinforce liberal assumptions of ‘legitimate’ protest and render dissent legible through neat analytical categories. Second, it examines ‘scholar-activism’ within academia, considering the repercussions of professionalization of activism and the institutional incentives that reward production of movement knowledge. Third, it reviews how social movement research risks producing and enriching surveillance, open-source intelligence and counterinsurgency from state and corporate geographies, undermining movements and exposing them to (increasing) repression. Through this review, possible avenues emerge for methodological and politically engaged forms of geographical research that pursue engaged, enraged and insurgent knowledges, capable of enabling, rather than endangering, political struggles.
In this article, we propose an insurrectionary theoretical framework for approaching prison abolition. We argue that transformative change arises not merely from top-down legislative reforms and grassroots consciousness-raising but also from sustained, collective resistance generated from within carceral spaces. This analysis is grounded in 20 years of support and political collaboration with prisoners and detainees across the United States, the authors’ own experiences of incarceration, as well as careful observation of prisoner and detainee resistance. We use insurrectionary theory to frame our analysis of a strategy for prison abolition that begins with direct resistance and disruption to prisons from the inside, in the form of strikes (including hunger strikes, work stoppages, protests, and boycotts), uprisings, and escapes. Drawing upon 15 years of empirical data collected via Perilous Chronicle (a research project one of us helped found, which focuses on the United States and Canada), we illustrate that organized prison resistance constitutes an ongoing movement capable of rendering prisons ungovernable. We end with a call to abolition geographers and other scholars and activists to integrate analyses of prisoner and detainee resistance into their theoretical frameworks and reassess strategic priorities. While an insurrectionary strategy may not be the only or at all times most effective route for dismantling prisons, it does represent a potent, ongoing strategy that many prisoners and detainees themselves choose to wield in confronting the carceral state in the United States.
This essay reflects on artistic practices as contextually grounded research inseparable from socio-political action through four temporary, limited and site-specific artistic interventions in Scarborough, Toronto's racialized suburb. Drawing from Flyvbjerg's long advocacy for phronesis in critical social sciences, phronetic approach is a problem-driven theoretical methodology that allows scholars, practitioners and activists rooted in the desire for political transformations and social practice to better participate in contested geographies of settler-colonial capitalist sub/urbanization. I demonstrate how applying phronetic approach to artistic interventions creates situated knowledge that cannot be learned nor taught a priori, but produced out of intimate, grounded practice that builds reciprocally upon each engagement with the specific actors, institutions and structures, instead of abstract concepts and problems transplanted from afar. While contextually specific and attuned to the spatial day-to-day struggles, these reflexive counter-projects realized through technical know-how and practical wisdom can still participate in the broader challenge against the ongoing settler-colonial capitalist project.
As global environmental crises intensify, movements advocating for the Rights of Nature are gaining momentum, aiming to reshape legal frameworks that have historically reinforced human domination over the natural world. This movement seeks to end the commodification of nature as mere resources for exploitation and to restore a more balanced relationship between humans and ecosystems – viewed by its advocates as essential for a political and legal revolution. Progress has been notable in countries such as Ecuador, Bolivia, and New Zealand, where indigenous rights movements have successfully championed the intrinsic value of nature; however, in Ireland – both North and South – Rights of Nature campaigns have emerged outside traditional indigenous contexts. Irish activists, identifying as ‘environmental protectors’, have mobilised to promote these rights, but paradoxically, projects deemed ‘green extractivist’, such as gold mining in the Sperrins, continue to be implemented despite some local councils passing motions to recognise the Rights of Nature. This contradiction highlights that the Rights of Nature need to go beyond legal recognition and involve broader political implications for decision-making processes, which warrant thorough examination. This paper critically assesses the current state of the Rights of Nature in Northern Ireland, exploring their implications, analysing relevant planning cases, and examining political developments since the adoption of these motions. It contends that the Rights of Nature framework provides environmental defenders with a complementary yet essential tool to anchor their anti-mining resistance and to promote greater participation in environmental law and governance.
Low-carbon transitions are framed as technocratic fixes to climate crisis but function instead as spatial regimes of governance and accumulation. They reorganise power, territory and legitimacy while extending, not rupturing, carbon modernity. Under the moral sign of sustainability, decarbonisation reorders value through new infrastructure, financial instruments and scalar hierarchies. The green economy governs through crisis, turning ecological repair into control and profit. Reading transitions as regimes of low-carbon futurity exposes how climate governance consolidates authority yet remains open to contestation, where struggles over energy futures are, ultimately, struggles over the geography of power itself.
The rapid proliferation of digital technologies has increased interest in extractivism beyond traditional resource sectors. This article provides a review of the Anglophone literature on digital extractivism(s) and advances a new term – digitally-facilitated extractivism(s) – to improve conceptual clarity. It traces the expansion of extractivism from its roots in large-scale mineral and hydrocarbon exploitation to data, finance and ‘green’ energy systems. It argues that digital extractivism applies only when inherently digital resources – such as personal data or cryptocurrencies – can be extracted at an intensity and scale to be extractivism through digital technologies. The article also addresses misuses of the term digital extractivism, and the misclassification of any form of extractivism that involves digital technologies as digital extractivism. To address the issue of misclassification, the article introduces digitally-facilitated extractivism(s) to describe cases where digital systems mediate or exacerbate existing extractivisms without transforming them into digital extractivisms. Examples include fintech-enabled financial extractivism and green extractivisms using sensors, AI and blockchain technology. The article concludes by identifying emerging avenues of research and calls for more nuanced analyses of how digital infrastructures reshape socioecological relations and extraction frontiers.
This qualitative study examines the spatial, social, and psychological impacts of systematic internet and electricity blackouts imposed on the besieged population of Gaza. Through 30 in-depth interviews with displaced residents in Rafah and Jabalia, the research evaluates these blackouts as acts of infrastructural violence and settler colonialism. Rather than passive consequences of war, the findings demonstrate that digital blockades operate as deliberate strategies of territorial and demographic control. Participants describe how the forced severance of telecommunications dismantles essential bonds of care, immobilizes bodies, obstructs humanitarian relief, and enforces severe spatial isolation. The testimonies reveal how the deprivation of connectivity is weaponized to inflict psychological trauma, transforming the basic human need for communication into a hazardous pursuit of survival. By situating these lived experiences within broader geographies of communication, the analysis illustrates that digital deprivation in Gaza reflects wider global patterns where warfare relies on severing contact to amplify civilian suffering. This study conceptualizes enforced digital isolation as an architecture of collective punishment, highlighting the urgent need to recognize infrastructural blockades as central tools of modern subjugation.
Globally, Indigenous communities are working to decolonise to contribute to marine management. Although there is an increasing recognition of their value, linguistic and bio-cultural importance, many Indigenous peoples, their marine environments and their cultures are going extinct. Relevant to the UN Ocean Decade Challenge 10 Restore society's relationship with the ocean, the article reviews 200 Indigenous communities facing environmental injustices from nine major economic development impacts, mining, port development, oil and gas, military impacts, nuclear, aquaculture, sewerage, and migratory fisheries. The evidence shows Indigenous communities defence of marine ecosystems makes for a more just and sustainable starting point for decision making. We acknowledge that while traditional tenure systems in some cases need to modernise for the Anthropocene, there are more benefits if resource management is Indigenous led. We conclude that while Indigenous nations and communities have considerably progressed with legal recognition to ownership over land rights, the benefits of management, use and right of their marine areas still needs greater decolonisation.
This article examines the intensification of demolition drives in urban India over the past decade. It situates forced evictions within the history of “development” induced displacement and the contemporary rise of Hindutva nationalism. The Indian development model has historically relied on large-scale displacement for infrastructural expansion, conservation projects, and urban redevelopment. Policies to produce a “world-class” city have increased the incidence of forced evictions, even as avenues for rehabilitation have diminished. In recent years, punitive demolitions—popularly termed “bulldozer justice”—have emerged as a key instrument of repression targeting Indian Muslims, particularly migrant workers. The recent coupling of punitive demolition with mass deportation has further deepened the crisis of housing precarity and internal displacement, while simultaneously resulting in statelessness and external displacement for Muslims. Forced evictions across the Global South have long accompanied urban beautification, mega-events, and capitalist redevelopment, and have also served as mechanisms of nationalist consolidation and rising fascism. India participates in both trajectories, offering an instructive example of how right-wing nationalism converges with capitalist development, worsening housing precarity for urban workers in the informal urban economy. Drawing on reports, policy documents, and case studies, this article demonstrates how demolition drives operate simultaneously as an economic strategy to capture land for private real-estate capital and as a punitive tool deployed against political dissent and the country’s Muslim population.
This article intervenes in debates on how law, ecology, and urban governance produce the idea of “green space.” Using Indonesia's 30% Green Open Space (GOS) mandate as a critical case, it argues that the legal abstraction of ecology into measurable quotas transforms environmental care into bureaucratic representation. In Jakarta, where land scarcity and political competition make the target unattainable, compliance is performed through the counting of roadside strips, cemeteries, and ornamental medians as green space. Drawing on Lefebvre's concept of the production of space, Harvey's spatial justice, and Jacobs's notion of lived urban vitality, the article shows how this abstraction privileges visibility and legitimacy over ecological function. Jakarta exemplifies a global urban condition in which sustainability becomes esthetic, green space becomes arithmetic, and law becomes landscape. The debates call for a redefinition of GOS as spatial care—a relational practice that distinguishes but connects ecological integrity and public accessibility. Moving beyond green quotas toward spatial care, it invites urban geography to reconsider how space is known, governed, and lived in the name of sustainability.
The climate crisis is a lived reality in the Pacific. In Vanuatu, slow-onset and extreme weather events threaten coastal infrastructures, food security, and socio-cultural practices. Addressing these impacts requires substantial financial resources to address adaptation and losses and damages. Multilateral climate finance has been positioned as a mechanism of climate justice, yet access to these funds remains highly constrained. Drawing on a governmentality-informed political ethnography grounded in Pasifika scholarship and fieldwork in Vanuatu's climate finance nexus, this paper shifts analytical focus from flows of finance to its infrastructures of access. It argues that green funds – particularly the Green Climate Fund – operate as disciplinary regimes that produce parallel governance structures and donor-centred accountability relations. The paper shows what it means to become ‘ready’, yet remain disciplined in a global system that continues to equate justice with compliance. Via projectification, audit cultures and risk frameworks, green funds restructure local institutions around donor logics, often undermining locally defined priorities. Engaging Tracey Banivanua Mar's notion of imperial literacy, the paper further illuminates the epistemic labour required to navigate legibility and compliance within climate finance governance. While remaining contested in Vanuatu, these practices normalise external control and translate historically entrenched inequalities into seemingly neutral technical standards. By treating climate finance as a constitutive site where accountability, discipline and legibility are produced, the paper adds empirical depth to critical climate geographies by extending debates into the highly technical – yet deeply political – empirical and epistemic terrain of climate finance access infrastructures.
In this contention article, we look at recent events and narratives shaping formal green transition practices in Africa, and interrogate whether financing, demanded by both states and activists, will actually enable a recalibration in the power and energy relations on the continent. Our position is that, against the imperial scaffolding and unequal historical assemblages that are the foundation for the world today, forms of finance—whether as “loss and damages” or the “new global financing pact”—proposed by multiple African actors can serve to deflect and deny local impetus for structural change. We explore the counterinsurgent work of this financing through two key movements: the first is via discussing how energy transition narratives on the continent are increasingly framed as the opportunity for an agential “African Century,” rather than the continuation of racialized extractivism—business as usual. The second is through calling for more radical attention to that which is being off-staged in formal climate conversations: this is the expansion of state violence to enact a “green transition” and in response to communities’ resistance to forms of green coloniality.
In 2023, images of diminished Amazonian river channels, small ribbons of bluish-brown surrounded by massive sand banks, captivated Brazilian and international audiences. Eco-social activists, concerned government officials, and the international environmental movement brought attention to these apocalyptic landscapes: The seemingly infinite water resources of the expansive Amazon Basin reduced to a trickle. This paper calls for a local territorialization of rivers, specifically in Brazil's eastern Pará state where the pressures of development arrived with the opening of the Belém-Brasília Highway (1960), Trans-Amazonian Highway (1972), and Tucuruí Dam (1984). We write from a region accustomed to devastation under the mantra of economic growth and development. We offer three principal interventions within the framework of the river as territory. First, we emphasize the importance of the small tributaries, referred to locally as igarapés , which nourish these rivers. Next, in order to arrive at the affective power of rivers in Quilombola societies, we must consider the historical role of rivers as landscapes of flight, fear, and expert knowledge–factors in the formation of hydro-survivance which connects the layers of the past to the present moment in the Quilombola politics. Finally, rivers create the possibility of movement, and in this case, eco-social movements which network dispersed Quilombola communities with each other, but often go further, resulting in coalitions between Quilombolas, Indigenous groups, traditional populations (such as ribeirinhos ), and environmentalists.
The dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) marks more than a break in the global order, but the exhaustion of a liberal technocratic consensus forged in the postwar era. Despite the resulting rupture, modernization projects continue—not only through Washington, Beijing, or the World Bank but via a heterogeneous set of East and Southeast Asian actors operating in the physical and ideological spaces between competing empires. I refer to these actors as middling modernizers or development institutions and corporate consortia that translate and repackage the practices of postwar development through flexible instruments of influence. Through comparative sketches of these middling modernizers, this commentary seeks to foreground how development persists through recombinant strategies in the interstices of empire and development.
The importance of the microscopic world in human and more than human health has been gathering momentum in recent years, particularly in human and soil microbiomes. Their potential to reconfigure human health, agriculture and ecologies is an exciting prospect which is also being exploited as a green capitalist enterprise amidst the scale and pace of destruction of the capitalist industrial system that operates globally. However, it is important to highlight that before the violent and genocidal establishment of the ongoing colonial capitalist project, an intimate relationship, a relationality forged between soils, plants, people and territories existed. Plant-soil microbial interactions in indigenous agricultural systems cannot be separated from specific human and ecosystemic practices developed over millennia. The milpa system in Mesoamerica is explored as a human–plant–microbial continuum because soil microbiomes along with their potential to reconfigure the current state of dysbiosis within these territories cannot be considered in isolation from the long-term relationalities from which they evolved.
We problematise the concepts of ‘infrastructure’ and ‘sabotage’ using a decolonial lens based on insights from recent acts of political resistance in Aotearoa. 1 By tracing three case studies we ask: what is the infrastructure? Who is the saboteur? And how do temporalities inform these questions? We hold infrastructure as a contested concept in settler-colonial states that incorporates both state infrastructure which acts as the vehicle for colonial violence, and Indigenous infrastructures which have been subject to, and resist, that violence. This understanding provides the potential to read the state as a saboteur that continues to implement ways to challenge, undermine, and reduce Indigenous sovereignty, perpetuating colonial processes and world views. Using publicly available documents and media reports, we mobilise these insights using three case studies in Aotearoa that relate to debates about the place of the Treaty of Waitangi, Aotearoa's key constitutional document, in contemporary politics. We use these examples as a heuristic to trouble the boundaries of the concept of infrastructure sabotage in the context of settler-colonialism. We argue that there is value in considering how our understandings of infrastructure and sabotage enact colonial violence, and demonstrate this by examining state sabotage and resistance to it, while avoiding applying colonial terms to Indigenous movements for justice.
