In this article, I argue that post-truth politics is best understood and investigated as a distin... more In this article, I argue that post-truth politics is best understood and investigated as a distinct style of epistemological politics which embraces conspiracy to reject competing truth claims and evidence. I show the Flat Earth Movement to be a posttruth political formation with a unique geographic imagination forwarding specific ideas about the role of locales, landscapes, scale, and one's embodied senses in knowledge production. I demonstrate how Flat Earthism's geographic imagination prioritizes a person's embodied senses, particularly vision, over other ways of knowing, codifying experiential interpretations of locales and landscapes into a generalized scalar knowledge applied to the planetary and cosmic scales. The contribution to the literature on post-truth politics in Geography I would like to make is threefold. First, I would like to show that posttruth politics is not merely the intentional circulation of lies, misinformation, disinformation, fake news, or alternative facts. Such conceptualizations can miss that post-truth politics can be reflective of actual publics with unique epistemologies, geographic imaginations, and knowledges. Second, and related, I want to demonstrate that post-truth politics transcend the discourses of specific politicians. Third, and finally, I seek to demonstrate the need for greater empirical and analytic consideration of conspiracy theorizing in post-truth politics.
ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2022
The international refugee regime is defined by a dearth of responsibility-sharing between states ... more The international refugee regime is defined by a dearth of responsibility-sharing between states and proliferation of border externalizations to contain refugees in their regions of origin. This has resulted in refugees and asylum-seekers having differing access to international protection based on their nationality and location, with states in the Global South housing a disproportionate share of the world's displaced. To reform the international refugee regime the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and International Organization for Migration (IOM) have furthered a politics of scale encouraging non-binding supranational regional approaches to forced migration management. In this article, I document and assess UNHCR and IOM's regionalist politics of scale, and regional approaches to forced migration management more broadly. I argue that regional approaches, the territorialization of unequal treatment of refugees based on their nationality and location, and the containment of refugees in the Global South are interwoven, and because of this, regionalism is an unjust means of reforming the international refugee regime. In furthering this argument, I draw from moral cosmopolitanism's philosophy of justice and explain its relevance to debates about borders, responsibility-sharing, and refugee protection. In doing so, I build upon critical geography's tradition of identifying how power produces marginalization and what should be done about it. I conclude that justice in the international refugee regime is best ensured through a binding global framework of responsibility-sharing.
This article shows how politics of scale influence states' conceptions and performances of asylum... more This article shows how politics of scale influence states' conceptions and performances of asylum-seeker and refugee responsibility and risk. The resettlement and border security initiatives that result have dramatic consequences for the forcibly displaced, shaping their experiences in displacement based on who they are, where they are and how they got there. Using Australia's refugee, asylum-seeker, and border externalization policy from 1976 through 1999 as a case, I document the Australian Government's embrace of the idea that proximity engendered special responsibilities to 'regional' asylum-seekers, yet that over time the Government came to reject 'the regional' as a unique scale of responsibility, replacing it with 'the global'. The article also demonstrates how social contexts influence conceptions of risk and obligation and become codified into moral geographies of forced migration management; embodied and territorialized through programmes of refugee resettlement, border militarization and externalization.
Migration management expresses the idealizations of policymakers: how they view the world's ideal... more Migration management expresses the idealizations of policymakers: how they view the world's ideal biopolitical and geopolitical organization. This article presents an analysis of an anti-irregular migration campaign funded by Australia and administered by the International Organization for Migration to deter "potential people smugglers" in Indonesia. The article demonstrates that the campaign attempted to normalize the idea that transporting irregular migrants was immoral and a sin. The Indonesia-Australia border and the Westphalian nation-state system were structured as moral geographies. The campaign framed immigration law as the ultimate determinant of moral and immoral migration, proclaiming a righteousness in immobilizing irregular migrants, regardless of circumstance. Per the campaign, moral migration is to be managed, and borders to be guarded, by unaccountable consultants for hire like the International Organization for Migration-states' deputized migration managers. The article analyzes how irregular migration was structured as subverting and exploiting territorialized nations, how the campaign associated emplacement and boundedness with safety and irregular migration with a threatening , foreign, immorality. Finally, the article investigates how everyday spaces were infiltrated by bordering practices designed to normalize the campaign's purported "truths" about morality and migration, showing the varying temporalities and scales of border-making and migration management.
Australia’s irregular migration information campaigns: border externalization, spatial imaginarie... more Australia’s irregular migration information campaigns: border externalization, spatial imaginaries, and extraterritorial subjugation. Territory, Politics, Governance. This article analyses the Australian Government’s ‘Overseas Public Information Campaigns’ (OPICs). OPICs are transnational marketing campaigns disseminating advertisements in asylum seeker source and transit countries to ‘educate’ people about the risks of irregular migration. The article argues that these campaigns are a practice of externalized border security extraterritorially acting on people’s perceptions of migration in ways intended to discourage it. Specifically, the article demonstrates how campaigns are designed to reshape the symbolic and imaginative dimensions of the transnational space of irregular migration to Australia among ethnic groups the Australian Government deems at risk of asylum seeking. Campaigns do this by disseminating narratives about the spaces and places of clandestine boat travel to Australia. These narratives are designed to normalize a spatial imaginary deterring irregular migrants through portraying ‘home’ as safe and financially stable while irregular migration to Australia as dangerous and destined to fail, a financially irresponsible waste of time hurting families and leading to island detention. The article analyses the campaigns themselves and 103 Australian Government documents related to their use, shedding light on how campaigns are used to preemptively exclude undesired refugees paradoxically through including them as specific kinds of extraterritorial subjects.
Human geographers have produced a diverse, and growing, body of literature documenting the existe... more Human geographers have produced a diverse, and growing, body of literature documenting the existence and consequence of spatial imaginaries. However, reviews explaining and evaluating how geographers conceptualize and empirically verify spatial imaginaries, along with the field’s tensions and potential directions, are lacking. This article addresses this gap by assessing geography’s spatial imaginary literature. I identify shared features across the literature, while arguing geographers have, in fact, verified three different kinds of spatial imaginaries: imaginaries of places, idealized spaces, and spatial transformations. The article recommends researchers better account for these three, both their differences and relationalities. I also explain and evaluate geography’s four competing conceptions of spatial imaginaries’ ontology. Some geographers see them as semiotic orders, other geographers believe them to be worldviews, yet spatial imaginaries are predominantly viewed as representational discourse.Recently, however, some geographers have argued them to be performative discourses. This article advocates viewing spatial imaginaries as performative; arguing this view – among other things – clarifies the association between spatial imaginaries and material practices while offering new research directions for the field.
For many migrants and refugees, place provides a common sense of territorial identity despite the... more For many migrants and refugees, place provides a common sense of territorial identity despite these groups having roots elsewhere. Using the case of the Hmong diaspora, the following calls for a reconsideration of how place is theorized in planning and introduces the term “translocal placemaking” to better reflect new social formations and the overdetermination of locality. This relational conception of place captures the complexity of spatial and temporal relations as locales are not isolated from one another and draws attention to the various entanglements that historically shape spatial practices including the memories and ties to extralocal places.
In this article, I argue that post-truth politics is best understood and investigated as a distin... more In this article, I argue that post-truth politics is best understood and investigated as a distinct style of epistemological politics which embraces conspiracy to reject competing truth claims and evidence. I show the Flat Earth Movement to be a posttruth political formation with a unique geographic imagination forwarding specific ideas about the role of locales, landscapes, scale, and one's embodied senses in knowledge production. I demonstrate how Flat Earthism's geographic imagination prioritizes a person's embodied senses, particularly vision, over other ways of knowing, codifying experiential interpretations of locales and landscapes into a generalized scalar knowledge applied to the planetary and cosmic scales. The contribution to the literature on post-truth politics in Geography I would like to make is threefold. First, I would like to show that posttruth politics is not merely the intentional circulation of lies, misinformation, disinformation, fake news, or alternative facts. Such conceptualizations can miss that post-truth politics can be reflective of actual publics with unique epistemologies, geographic imaginations, and knowledges. Second, and related, I want to demonstrate that post-truth politics transcend the discourses of specific politicians. Third, and finally, I seek to demonstrate the need for greater empirical and analytic consideration of conspiracy theorizing in post-truth politics.
ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2022
The international refugee regime is defined by a dearth of responsibility-sharing between states ... more The international refugee regime is defined by a dearth of responsibility-sharing between states and proliferation of border externalizations to contain refugees in their regions of origin. This has resulted in refugees and asylum-seekers having differing access to international protection based on their nationality and location, with states in the Global South housing a disproportionate share of the world's displaced. To reform the international refugee regime the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and International Organization for Migration (IOM) have furthered a politics of scale encouraging non-binding supranational regional approaches to forced migration management. In this article, I document and assess UNHCR and IOM's regionalist politics of scale, and regional approaches to forced migration management more broadly. I argue that regional approaches, the territorialization of unequal treatment of refugees based on their nationality and location, and the containment of refugees in the Global South are interwoven, and because of this, regionalism is an unjust means of reforming the international refugee regime. In furthering this argument, I draw from moral cosmopolitanism's philosophy of justice and explain its relevance to debates about borders, responsibility-sharing, and refugee protection. In doing so, I build upon critical geography's tradition of identifying how power produces marginalization and what should be done about it. I conclude that justice in the international refugee regime is best ensured through a binding global framework of responsibility-sharing.
This article shows how politics of scale influence states' conceptions and performances of asylum... more This article shows how politics of scale influence states' conceptions and performances of asylum-seeker and refugee responsibility and risk. The resettlement and border security initiatives that result have dramatic consequences for the forcibly displaced, shaping their experiences in displacement based on who they are, where they are and how they got there. Using Australia's refugee, asylum-seeker, and border externalization policy from 1976 through 1999 as a case, I document the Australian Government's embrace of the idea that proximity engendered special responsibilities to 'regional' asylum-seekers, yet that over time the Government came to reject 'the regional' as a unique scale of responsibility, replacing it with 'the global'. The article also demonstrates how social contexts influence conceptions of risk and obligation and become codified into moral geographies of forced migration management; embodied and territorialized through programmes of refugee resettlement, border militarization and externalization.
Migration management expresses the idealizations of policymakers: how they view the world's ideal... more Migration management expresses the idealizations of policymakers: how they view the world's ideal biopolitical and geopolitical organization. This article presents an analysis of an anti-irregular migration campaign funded by Australia and administered by the International Organization for Migration to deter "potential people smugglers" in Indonesia. The article demonstrates that the campaign attempted to normalize the idea that transporting irregular migrants was immoral and a sin. The Indonesia-Australia border and the Westphalian nation-state system were structured as moral geographies. The campaign framed immigration law as the ultimate determinant of moral and immoral migration, proclaiming a righteousness in immobilizing irregular migrants, regardless of circumstance. Per the campaign, moral migration is to be managed, and borders to be guarded, by unaccountable consultants for hire like the International Organization for Migration-states' deputized migration managers. The article analyzes how irregular migration was structured as subverting and exploiting territorialized nations, how the campaign associated emplacement and boundedness with safety and irregular migration with a threatening , foreign, immorality. Finally, the article investigates how everyday spaces were infiltrated by bordering practices designed to normalize the campaign's purported "truths" about morality and migration, showing the varying temporalities and scales of border-making and migration management.
Australia’s irregular migration information campaigns: border externalization, spatial imaginarie... more Australia’s irregular migration information campaigns: border externalization, spatial imaginaries, and extraterritorial subjugation. Territory, Politics, Governance. This article analyses the Australian Government’s ‘Overseas Public Information Campaigns’ (OPICs). OPICs are transnational marketing campaigns disseminating advertisements in asylum seeker source and transit countries to ‘educate’ people about the risks of irregular migration. The article argues that these campaigns are a practice of externalized border security extraterritorially acting on people’s perceptions of migration in ways intended to discourage it. Specifically, the article demonstrates how campaigns are designed to reshape the symbolic and imaginative dimensions of the transnational space of irregular migration to Australia among ethnic groups the Australian Government deems at risk of asylum seeking. Campaigns do this by disseminating narratives about the spaces and places of clandestine boat travel to Australia. These narratives are designed to normalize a spatial imaginary deterring irregular migrants through portraying ‘home’ as safe and financially stable while irregular migration to Australia as dangerous and destined to fail, a financially irresponsible waste of time hurting families and leading to island detention. The article analyses the campaigns themselves and 103 Australian Government documents related to their use, shedding light on how campaigns are used to preemptively exclude undesired refugees paradoxically through including them as specific kinds of extraterritorial subjects.
Human geographers have produced a diverse, and growing, body of literature documenting the existe... more Human geographers have produced a diverse, and growing, body of literature documenting the existence and consequence of spatial imaginaries. However, reviews explaining and evaluating how geographers conceptualize and empirically verify spatial imaginaries, along with the field’s tensions and potential directions, are lacking. This article addresses this gap by assessing geography’s spatial imaginary literature. I identify shared features across the literature, while arguing geographers have, in fact, verified three different kinds of spatial imaginaries: imaginaries of places, idealized spaces, and spatial transformations. The article recommends researchers better account for these three, both their differences and relationalities. I also explain and evaluate geography’s four competing conceptions of spatial imaginaries’ ontology. Some geographers see them as semiotic orders, other geographers believe them to be worldviews, yet spatial imaginaries are predominantly viewed as representational discourse.Recently, however, some geographers have argued them to be performative discourses. This article advocates viewing spatial imaginaries as performative; arguing this view – among other things – clarifies the association between spatial imaginaries and material practices while offering new research directions for the field.
For many migrants and refugees, place provides a common sense of territorial identity despite the... more For many migrants and refugees, place provides a common sense of territorial identity despite these groups having roots elsewhere. Using the case of the Hmong diaspora, the following calls for a reconsideration of how place is theorized in planning and introduces the term “translocal placemaking” to better reflect new social formations and the overdetermination of locality. This relational conception of place captures the complexity of spatial and temporal relations as locales are not isolated from one another and draws attention to the various entanglements that historically shape spatial practices including the memories and ties to extralocal places.
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Papers by Josh Watkins
and consequence of spatial imaginaries. However, reviews explaining and evaluating how geographers
conceptualize and empirically verify spatial imaginaries, along with the field’s tensions and potential
directions, are lacking. This article addresses this gap by assessing geography’s spatial imaginary literature.
I identify shared features across the literature, while arguing geographers have, in fact, verified three
different kinds of spatial imaginaries: imaginaries of places, idealized spaces, and spatial transformations.
The article recommends researchers better account for these three, both their differences and
relationalities. I also explain and evaluate geography’s four competing conceptions of spatial imaginaries’
ontology. Some geographers see them as semiotic orders, other geographers believe them to be worldviews,
yet spatial imaginaries are predominantly viewed as representational discourse.Recently, however,
some geographers have argued them to be performative discourses. This article advocates viewing spatial
imaginaries as performative; arguing this view – among other things – clarifies the association between
spatial imaginaries and material practices while offering new research directions for the field.
and consequence of spatial imaginaries. However, reviews explaining and evaluating how geographers
conceptualize and empirically verify spatial imaginaries, along with the field’s tensions and potential
directions, are lacking. This article addresses this gap by assessing geography’s spatial imaginary literature.
I identify shared features across the literature, while arguing geographers have, in fact, verified three
different kinds of spatial imaginaries: imaginaries of places, idealized spaces, and spatial transformations.
The article recommends researchers better account for these three, both their differences and
relationalities. I also explain and evaluate geography’s four competing conceptions of spatial imaginaries’
ontology. Some geographers see them as semiotic orders, other geographers believe them to be worldviews,
yet spatial imaginaries are predominantly viewed as representational discourse.Recently, however,
some geographers have argued them to be performative discourses. This article advocates viewing spatial
imaginaries as performative; arguing this view – among other things – clarifies the association between
spatial imaginaries and material practices while offering new research directions for the field.