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This article investigates why and how efforts to control Desert Locusts in Northwestern Africa became a strategic concern for the French Resistance during the Second World War. I analyze the record of a 1943 conference convened to discuss on-going locust plagues in Northwestern Africa. The analysis suggests that the “locust problem” provided a field for technocrats to innovate and re-present new modes...
The paper explores empirically how contemporary security and surveillance practices and techniques permeate the production and management of everyday urban spaces. It does so from three interrelated perspectives, focusing on separation and access control, the management of circulations, and the internal organisation and monitoring of specific spatial enclaves. This analysis draws upon empirical insights...
Legislative shifts in the first decade of the 21st Century altered the rights and protections for lesbians, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) people in England in disparate and uneven ways that have yet to be fully investigated. This paper explores the possibilities and pitfalls for LGBT insider activists- LGBT people who undertake LGBT activism and work with/for state institutions (such as local government)...
The discussion of the Anthropocene focuses attention on the changing geological context for the future of humanity, change wrought by practices that secure particular forms of human life. These are frequently discussed in geography in terms of biopolitics. In particular liberal societies powered by carboniferous capitalism and using their practices of war secure ‘biohumanity’. Climate change is one...
The discourse that has dominated the public debate over wetland management in Alberta, Canada, is one that calls for economics to be ‘balanced’ with wetland conservation. Yet within this ‘balance discourse’, there is little understanding of how, by whom, and for whom economic prosperity and wetland conservation should be balanced. Using Q methodology, we strive to uncover whether key decision makers...
This paper develops literatures on affective atmospheres to rethink the status of technical objects in human geographical analysis. Suggesting that narratives of affect and affordance have difficulty accounting for objects when they are not directly encountering one another, the paper draws upon Levi Bryant’s discussion of allopoietic objects and Graham Harman’s analysis of space and time to advance...
This paper argues that the emergence of electric utility holding companies in the early 20th century coincides with a number of developments related to the materiality of electricity, principally the necessity that electricity generation and demand be temporally matched. While this material limit posed significant barriers to capital accumulation in the early years of electric utilities, innovations...
Social science researchers interested in human health have generally neglected the production of health care spaces and the experience of medical workers, particularly physicians. Health care researchers have contributed to our knowledge of the discursive and material construction of disease and ill health, the embodied experience of ill-health, and the socio-spatial relations of care networks. Yet,...
This paper engages debates regarding the human right to water through an exploration the recent legal battle between San and Bakgalagadi and the government of Botswana regarding access to water in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. The paper reviews the legal events that led to the realization of the human right to water through a decision of the Court of Appeal of Botswana in 2011 and the discursive...
The giant tortoises of the Galápagos Islands, a species Charles Darwin called ‘antediluvian,’ are the focus of one of the world’s most successful conservation breeding programs. This paper explores the paradox of the breeding program, examining how ‘prehistoric’ life has been actively produced through nearly a century of work by scientists and conservationists dedicated to saving this endangered species...
Gay villages, usually defined as spatially concentrated configurations of bars, entertainment venues, community spaces, and homes associated with a gay-identified population, have received considerable attention from urban geographers studying gentrification. Frequently, gay villages have been critiqued as commodified spaces that serve mostly upper- and middle-class patrons. Yet they are also culturally...
Despite a growing trend of migration to countries in the global South fueled by their natural amenities (i.e., natural amenity migration), research on this topic has predominantly been conducted in the global North. This is problematic given the notable socioeconomic, attitudinal, and behavioral differences between amenity migrants (often urbanites from developed countries) and local people (often...
This is a paper concerned with security, surveillance and notions of atmosphere and ambience. Whilst surveillance and security research has been excellent at examining socio-spatial relations drawn into the production and consumption of surveillance technologies, systems and practices, it has been far less well attuned to the material–affective relations, presences and absences it comes to constitute...
Emerging out of a study conducted in Durban of white, English-speaking South Africans (WESSAs) who had previously lived in the UK and elsewhere, this article argues that, because of South Africa’s past and current liminal position within a global meta-geography of whiteness, “imaginative geographies” are centrally important to the construction of transnational WESSA identities. This article uses an...
This paper examines how certain inner city spaces in Toronto, Canada are being transformed in part due to changing sexual and gendered identities, and practices variously described as ‘post-gay’ or ‘post-mo.’ Drawing on a June 2011 Grid article entitled ‘Dawn of a new gay’ and related commentary, I argue that in seeking to understand various spatial transformations underway in Toronto, one element...
Portland cement production accounts for ∼5–7% of total global anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions. Therefore, the cement industry is an important target for emissions–reduction strategies. However, according to industry projections, global cement demand will increase 43–72% by 2050, with growth concentrated in such economically-developing regions as India, Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America...
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