Migration by Katharyne Mitchell
Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2022
Sanctuary, which comes from the Latin sanctus, meaning “holy,” has played a strategic role in pol... more Sanctuary, which comes from the Latin sanctus, meaning “holy,” has played a strategic role in political
resistance for hundreds of years. Today the concept has returned as one of importance in the protection of
refugees worldwide. In this article, which focuses on sanctuary practices in Germany, we examine the
importance of the spaces of church-based asylum—the structure, physical spaces, and neighborhood of the
church itself. We investigate the ways in which these spaces are constitutive of collective memories of
alternative justice and resistance and how these memories are used to transform the actions and possibilities
of the present. The article builds off other nonlinear, counterhegemonic concepts of space and time, such as
the demonic, as ways of moving beyond normative assumptions of the cultural landscape. The demonic
challenges both the abstract space of modern liberalism as well as the absolute space of the sacred; it is a
radical reworking—one that relies on forgotten or hidden pasts yet remains new and open-ended. For
sanctuary to contest the racialized violence of modern state governance it likewise must both remember and
rework the idea of sacred space and sacred time in new, materialist, and fluid forms. Drawing on a case study
from Berlin, the article explores ways to conceptualize the temporal and spatial anchoring of alternative,
nonliberal memories and their potential for contemporary resistance. The Heilig-Kreuz church and its pastors
and allies, as well as an associated church network, the German Ecumenical Committee on Church Asylum,
provide the empirical case studies. Key Words: memory, race, refugees, sanctuary, space.
Society and Space, 2020
This article examines how contending constructions of safe space for migrants reflect the geo-pol... more This article examines how contending constructions of safe space for migrants reflect the geo-politicization of humanitarianism and its geosocial discontents. It contrasts geopolitical constructions of safe space that have been used by European authorities to justify and administer Hotspots with geosocial efforts to construct safe space through practices of solidaristic accommodation. The article documents the ways in which Hotspots have made migrants unsafe, even as they have been simultaneously justified in humanitarian terms as making both Europe and refugees safer. It further illustrates, by contrast, how counter-constructions of safe space can take divergent geo-social forms. These varied geosocial formations of accommodation emerge out of embodied space-making struggles for physical safety, personal dignity, organizational autonomy, radical democracy, spatial liberty, and social community. They create context-contingent alternatives to Hotspot geopolitics as well as opportunities for migrants and their allies to critique the limits of official humanitarianism. But they also remain overdetermined by the dominant border politics that Hotpots are supposed to secure. For these reasons, the borderlands between the abstract geopolitics of Hotspot humanitarianism and the embodied geosocial constructions of solidarity show safe space to be at once complex, compromised, and constantly contested.
Handbook on Critical Geographies of Migration, 2019
In this chapter we investigate the formation and management of the sanctuary network
in Europe by... more In this chapter we investigate the formation and management of the sanctuary network
in Europe by focusing on several key institutions and players and some critical events. The
constitution of these types of relationships and practices over decades as well as across
national borders is important to study because it can show us how counter-hegemonic
ideas move over time and space, as well as how they become institutionalized, embedded
in the landscape, and activated at different moments in time.
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2018
Safe space sounds simple and easy to identify. However, in this paper we show how contested const... more Safe space sounds simple and easy to identify. However, in this paper we show how contested constructions of safe space for migrants in Europe contend with one another, creating complexly interconnected experiences of relative safety and precarity. We contrast geopolitical constructions of safe space that have been used by European authorities in the creation of Hotspots with what we describe as geosocial efforts to construct safe space through practices of solidarity. These solidarity practices by activists and refugees in open camps and accommodation centers demonstrate a practical concern with making migration safer in situated, embodied and relational ways. They involve transnational but also local space-making struggles that we explore in terms of physical safety, personal dignity, organizational autonomy, radical democracy, spatial liberty, and social community. By contrast, the geopolitical depictions and declarations of safe space by European officials have endangered migrants by variously curtailing and channeling their movements. Instead of making movement safer, they have thereby imposed a mix of coercive immobility and mobility together in ways that undermine efforts to construct embodied spaces of migrant safety.
Critical Philanthropy and Humanitarianism by Katharyne Mitchell
EPE: Nature and Space, 2021
With the growing global recognition that environmental and social crises are pushing systems of s... more With the growing global recognition that environmental and social crises are pushing systems of social and ecological reproduction to their breaking points, governments, philanthropists, and the private sector are proposing a variety of strategies that aim to shift the social and environmental role of finance capital from an extractive process to a reparative one. A frequent refrain is that only finance capital promises the scale of investment necessary to address Earth's complex social and environmental problems, and that trillions of private investment dollars wait in the wings ready to mobilize for the right kinds of projects. A hallmark of these approaches is their promise of "triple bottom line" outcomes, with social, environmental, and financial benefits-what the industry refers to as "responsible investing." This symposium interrogates the political dynamics and financial mechanisms underlying ongoing experiments in so-called responsible finance, including various forms of impact investing and financial "solutionism" to social and environmental problems. We develop the term "reparative accumulation" to conceptualize the divergent forms and continuities in how these new financial devices function across sectors, what types of futures the industry is attempting to create, the effects on socionatures, and what resistance might look like both within and outside these systems.
Much of the recent scholarship in critical philanthropy and humanitarianism focuses on the relati... more Much of the recent scholarship in critical philanthropy and humanitarianism focuses on the relationship between the origins of humanitarian governance and the development and expansion of imperialism. Imperial exploitation and dispossession were frequently linked in paradoxical ways with the protection and management of colonised populations. This paper explores these types of connections as they pertain to the relationship between humanitarianism, imperialism and the governance of African Americans in the United States (US). I focus, in particular, on how humanitarian initiatives in black education were mobilised in relation to differing moments of international and domestic colonialism, nation-building, national security and global aspirations at the heart of American empire. The paper advances this line of inquiry through a genealogy of humanitarian reasoning and webs of belief about the proper intellectual development of African Americans at three historic moments of national development: the periods of Reconstruction, the Efficiency Movement and Pax Americana. In each different context, philanthropic foundations and humanitarians sought to provide education to African Americans, who were disenfranchised and disconnected in different ways in each period. But although the specific moral reasoning and techniques of care employed in the provision of education were particular to time and place, the underlying rationalities of a 'progressive imperial agenda' connecting African American enfranchisement and connection to national development and imperial aspirations, was manifest. The paper employs a genealogical method in order to link the excavations of the past to the present, indicating some of the ways that these interconnected logics continue to affect humanitarianism in the US today.
" It is not enough just to incentivise social investments. We need a robust way of measuring thei... more " It is not enough just to incentivise social investments. We need a robust way of measuring their value... " Thus spoke Prime Minister Cameron at the start of the G8 Social Impact Investment Forum in July, 2013. In this paper I investigate the elite narratives and practices of measuring social value in the rapidly expanding arena of social impact investment. Assumptions about the neutrality and transparency of metrics, translated through popular terms such as 'best practices' and 'evidence-based policy,' give legitimacy to new forms of governance, such as are manifested in contemporary instruments of social finance now emerging in Europe. Many of these terms and practices are derived from influential philanthropic actors such as the US-based Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; they are further disseminated globally by celebrity humanitarians like Bono, who connects policy-makers, financiers, and philanthropists in a rapidly widening network of social impact investment stakeholders. These now global webs of belief about efficiency and modern forms of measurement in philanthropic practices are mobilized by political elites in Europe, who draw on the scientific rationalities of expertise to nudge governments towards market oriented solutions to contemporary social problems.
New actors and ideas about poverty management and humanitarian
assistance have arisen in recent y... more New actors and ideas about poverty management and humanitarian
assistance have arisen in recent years. The underlying
context of this shift includes a growing awareness of the
limitations and failures of both military forms of humanitarian
intervention and unfettered market-based solutions to aid and
development. This paper explores the particular form that
global humanitarianism is taking in this millennial context. I
argue that a new configuration of humanitarian reason is
emerging that draws on both neoliberal and pastoral rationalities
of governance. The former can be associated with efficiency,
transparency, and quantitative evidence, while the
latter is articulated with individual compassion, devotion, and
Christian duty. Using the celebrity humanitarian Bono and his
rhetoric of ‘factivism’ as an illustrative example, the paper
explores the way that this message is transmitted through
geosocial discourses and networks. It indicates some of the
ways that the personal and media dissemination of this new
ideology of charismatic, yet rational care helps to weave pastoral
rationalities into forms of political authority.
The paper outlines the emergence of a New Washington Consensus associated with leading philanthro... more The paper outlines the emergence of a New Washington Consensus associated with leading philanthropies of the new millennium. This emergent development paradigm by no means represents a historic break with the market rationalities of neoliberalism, nor does it represent a radical departure from older models of early 20th century philanthropy. Rather, it is new in its global ambition to foster resilient market subjects for a globalized world; and new in its employment of micro-market transformations to compensate for macro-market failures. Focusing on reforms pioneered by the new philanthropic partnerships in education and global health, the paper indicates how the targets of intervention are identified as communities that have been failed by both governments and markets. The resulting interventions are commonly justified in terms of ‘return on investment’. But the problems they target keep returning because the underlying causes of failure are left unaddressed.
Global Networks, 16, 3 , 2016
Celebrity humanitarianism is a form of advocacy for the poor and ill, primarily those populations... more Celebrity humanitarianism is a form of advocacy for the poor and ill, primarily those populations residing in developing regions of the world. Often the celebrities attempt to galvanize support and care for these distant populations through various kinds of emotional practices, which are promoted and sustained across space through the invocation of community
and the use of new social media. The articulation of community, empathy, and fan activism creates an experience of citizenship that appears to transcend national borders and enable affective relations between distant individuals and places. This paper analyzes the mechanisms of emotion in
the constitution of these deterritorialized networks, including the specific practices and pastoral language through which individuals are drawn into feelings of transnational solidarity through fan groups and fan-celebrity engagement. Further, it addresses the ways in which the emotional enrollment of individuals in this vein can be read as part of a larger process
of neoliberal citizenship formation and depoliticization, in which subjects are subtly directed away from state-based responses to problems of poverty and ill health and towards more individualized, enterprising, and market-mediated forms of social aid
Brady, M. and Lippert, R. eds, Neoliberal Governmentalities and the Ethnographic Imaginary. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016
Parental activism in education reform, while often portrayed as an exemplary manifestation of par... more Parental activism in education reform, while often portrayed as an exemplary manifestation of participatory democracy and grassroots action in response to entrenched corporate and bureaucratic interests, is in fact carefully cultivated and channeled through strategic networks of philanthropic funding and knowledge. This paper argues that these networks are characteristic of a contemporary form of neoliberal governance in which the philanthropic “gift” both obligates its recipients to participate in the ideological projects of the givers and obscures the incursion of market principles into education behind a veneer of progressive activism. Drawing on archival research as well as personal interviews with Seattle-based reform advocates, representatives of philanthropic organizations, and school administrators, the paper points to the need to critically evaluate the “grass” in grassroots movements and trace their connections to larger institutions and agendas.
Mapping/Children by Katharyne Mitchell
Re ecting wider debates in the discipline, recent scholarship in children's geographies has focus... more Re ecting wider debates in the discipline, recent scholarship in children's geographies has focused attention on the meanings of the political. While supportive of work that opens up new avenues for conceptualizing politics beyond the liberal rational subject, we provide a critique of research methods which delink politics from historical context and relations of power. Focusing on the use of nonrepresentational theory as a research methodology, the paper points to the limits of this approach for children's political formation as well as for sustained scholarly collaboration. We argue instead for a politics of articulation, in the double sense of communication and connection. An empirical case study is used as an illustrative example.
Katharyne Mitchell and Sarah Elwood, published in Space and Polity, 2013, Vol. 17(2) 33-55
To cite this article: Katharyne Mitchell & Sarah Elwood (2012): From Redlining to Benevolent Societies: The Emancipatory Power of Spatial Thinking, Theory & Research in Social Education, 40:2, 134-163, 2012
This study highlights the power of place, and reconceptualizes geography education as integral to... more This study highlights the power of place, and reconceptualizes geography education as integral to the larger project of teaching for democratic citizenship. Using an interactive web platform, the researchers asked 29 seventh grade girls to research and map significant cultural and historical places associated with an ethnic group, or women, in the city of Seattle. The students worked in teams and commented frequently on each other's contributions. Adopting a participatory action research method, the researchers studied the multiple ways in which a greater understanding of spatial production, such as processes of exclusion and inclusion, or mapping and counter-mapping, can give students the knowledge and will to challenge prevailing norms about the “naturalness” of a segregated urban landscape, or the inequitable allocation of resources. This approach follows recent feminist, anti-racist, and internationalist articulations of citizenship education, which advocate a social justice or emancipatory component to teaching and learning.
Neogeography – the use of interactive online mapping technologies, often by laypersons or grassro... more Neogeography – the use of interactive online mapping technologies, often by laypersons or grassroots groups – continues its rapid growth, as do debates about its implications for spatial data and map quality, public spatial literacy, and the digital divide. Ongoing efforts to understand whether and how neogeography might enable the participation, influence, and agency of less powerful social actors require greater attention to theorizing neogeography politics. Existing work, tacitly or explicitly, tends to theorize these politics in ways that align with Michel de Certeau's notion of ''strategy'' or its conceptual partner, ''tactics. '' We argue that a neogeography politics conceived as ''strategy'' has inherent limits and that the political significance of neogeography ''tactics'' is even more foundational than has been understood thus far. Recent work has shown neogeography to be a powerful site of political action or engagement, but our evidence suggests further that visual spatial tactics in neogeography are also key sites of political formation. Neogeography tactics are significant not just as a site of resistance or political action by less powerful actors but also as practices that contribute to the formation of political subjects, mobilized social groups, and shared knowledge. Recognizing neogeography as a site of political formation paves the way toward realizing its broader potential in the development and practice of a critical spatial citizenship. We develop these arguments from a three-year neogeography project conducted with young teens. Si la néogéographie – l'utilisation de technologies pour la cartographie interactive en ligne, souvent par des amateurs ou des groupes communautaires – poursuit sa croissance rapide, il en est de même des débats concernant ses répercussions sur les données spatiales et la qualité des cartes, la littératie spatiale publique et le fossé numérique. Il faudrait consacrer plus d'efforts et d'attention afin de mieux comprendre comment la néogéographie pourrait favoriser la participation, ainsi que l'effet et le rôle d'agents sociaux moins puissants, afin d'e ´tablir une théorie concernant les politiques de la néo-géographie. Les travaux existants ont tendance, implicitement ou explicitement, a ` e ´laborer des théories sur ces politiques d'une manière qui s'harmonise avec la notion de « stratégie » de Michel de Certeau ou celle de son partenaire conceptuel, « tactique ». L'argument e ´noncé dans l'article est qu'une politique de la néogéographie conçue comme « stratégie » pos-sède des limites inhérentes et que l'importance politique des « tactiques » néogéographiques serait encore plus essentielle que ce qu'on a cru jusqu'a ` présent. De récents travaux ont montré que la néogéographie peut devenir un moyen puissant d'action politique ou d'engagement, mais nos résultats suggèrent que les tactiques spatiales visuelles en néogéographie sont aussi des sites clés de formation politique. Les tactiques néogéographiques sont importantes non seulement comme site de résistance ou d'action politique par des agents moins puissants, mais aussi en tant que pratiques qui contribuent a ` la formation de sujets politiques, a ` la mobilisation de groupes sociaux et au partage des connaissances. Reconnaitre la néogéographie comme lieu de formation politique pourrait permettre de mieux comprendre son vaste potentiel pour le développement et les pratiques d'une citoyenneté spatiale essentielle. Ces arguments sont développés a ` partir d'un projet de néogéographie mené auprès de jeunes adolescents pendant trois ans.
To cite this article: Katharyne Mitchell & Sarah Elwood (2012): Engaging Students through Mapping Local History, Journal of Geography, 111:4, 148-157, 2012
This article argues that the integration of local history and geography through collaborative dig... more This article argues that the integration of local history and geography through collaborative digital mapping can lead to greater interest in civic participation by early adolescent learners. In the study, twenty-nine middle school students were asked to research, represent, and discuss local urban sites of historical significance on an interactive Web platform. As students learned more about local community events, people, and historical forces, they became increasingly engaged with the material and enthusiastic about making connections to larger issues and processes. In the final session, students expressed interest in participating in their own communities through joining nonprofit organizations and educating others about community history and daily life.
New social and spatial media and other modes of pervasive computing are altering ways of knowing,... more New social and spatial media and other modes of pervasive computing are altering ways of knowing, remembering, and engaging across time and space. This collection explores how the digital, interactive, and collaborative nature of these technologies contributes to transformations in the nature of knowledge and memory. In particular, the contributions focus on theorizing the collective or social subjectivities and impacts of these technologically mediated rememberings. What are the processes and relationships through which shared knowledge and memory can be transmitted and transformed across time and space? How does memory become socially and politically meaningful? The contributing authors consider how new social and spatial technologies transform space/time connections, reconfigure the forms and practices through which collective memory is transmitted or attention is paid, and impact social relations.
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Migration by Katharyne Mitchell
resistance for hundreds of years. Today the concept has returned as one of importance in the protection of
refugees worldwide. In this article, which focuses on sanctuary practices in Germany, we examine the
importance of the spaces of church-based asylum—the structure, physical spaces, and neighborhood of the
church itself. We investigate the ways in which these spaces are constitutive of collective memories of
alternative justice and resistance and how these memories are used to transform the actions and possibilities
of the present. The article builds off other nonlinear, counterhegemonic concepts of space and time, such as
the demonic, as ways of moving beyond normative assumptions of the cultural landscape. The demonic
challenges both the abstract space of modern liberalism as well as the absolute space of the sacred; it is a
radical reworking—one that relies on forgotten or hidden pasts yet remains new and open-ended. For
sanctuary to contest the racialized violence of modern state governance it likewise must both remember and
rework the idea of sacred space and sacred time in new, materialist, and fluid forms. Drawing on a case study
from Berlin, the article explores ways to conceptualize the temporal and spatial anchoring of alternative,
nonliberal memories and their potential for contemporary resistance. The Heilig-Kreuz church and its pastors
and allies, as well as an associated church network, the German Ecumenical Committee on Church Asylum,
provide the empirical case studies. Key Words: memory, race, refugees, sanctuary, space.
in Europe by focusing on several key institutions and players and some critical events. The
constitution of these types of relationships and practices over decades as well as across
national borders is important to study because it can show us how counter-hegemonic
ideas move over time and space, as well as how they become institutionalized, embedded
in the landscape, and activated at different moments in time.
Critical Philanthropy and Humanitarianism by Katharyne Mitchell
assistance have arisen in recent years. The underlying
context of this shift includes a growing awareness of the
limitations and failures of both military forms of humanitarian
intervention and unfettered market-based solutions to aid and
development. This paper explores the particular form that
global humanitarianism is taking in this millennial context. I
argue that a new configuration of humanitarian reason is
emerging that draws on both neoliberal and pastoral rationalities
of governance. The former can be associated with efficiency,
transparency, and quantitative evidence, while the
latter is articulated with individual compassion, devotion, and
Christian duty. Using the celebrity humanitarian Bono and his
rhetoric of ‘factivism’ as an illustrative example, the paper
explores the way that this message is transmitted through
geosocial discourses and networks. It indicates some of the
ways that the personal and media dissemination of this new
ideology of charismatic, yet rational care helps to weave pastoral
rationalities into forms of political authority.
and the use of new social media. The articulation of community, empathy, and fan activism creates an experience of citizenship that appears to transcend national borders and enable affective relations between distant individuals and places. This paper analyzes the mechanisms of emotion in
the constitution of these deterritorialized networks, including the specific practices and pastoral language through which individuals are drawn into feelings of transnational solidarity through fan groups and fan-celebrity engagement. Further, it addresses the ways in which the emotional enrollment of individuals in this vein can be read as part of a larger process
of neoliberal citizenship formation and depoliticization, in which subjects are subtly directed away from state-based responses to problems of poverty and ill health and towards more individualized, enterprising, and market-mediated forms of social aid
Mapping/Children by Katharyne Mitchell
resistance for hundreds of years. Today the concept has returned as one of importance in the protection of
refugees worldwide. In this article, which focuses on sanctuary practices in Germany, we examine the
importance of the spaces of church-based asylum—the structure, physical spaces, and neighborhood of the
church itself. We investigate the ways in which these spaces are constitutive of collective memories of
alternative justice and resistance and how these memories are used to transform the actions and possibilities
of the present. The article builds off other nonlinear, counterhegemonic concepts of space and time, such as
the demonic, as ways of moving beyond normative assumptions of the cultural landscape. The demonic
challenges both the abstract space of modern liberalism as well as the absolute space of the sacred; it is a
radical reworking—one that relies on forgotten or hidden pasts yet remains new and open-ended. For
sanctuary to contest the racialized violence of modern state governance it likewise must both remember and
rework the idea of sacred space and sacred time in new, materialist, and fluid forms. Drawing on a case study
from Berlin, the article explores ways to conceptualize the temporal and spatial anchoring of alternative,
nonliberal memories and their potential for contemporary resistance. The Heilig-Kreuz church and its pastors
and allies, as well as an associated church network, the German Ecumenical Committee on Church Asylum,
provide the empirical case studies. Key Words: memory, race, refugees, sanctuary, space.
in Europe by focusing on several key institutions and players and some critical events. The
constitution of these types of relationships and practices over decades as well as across
national borders is important to study because it can show us how counter-hegemonic
ideas move over time and space, as well as how they become institutionalized, embedded
in the landscape, and activated at different moments in time.
assistance have arisen in recent years. The underlying
context of this shift includes a growing awareness of the
limitations and failures of both military forms of humanitarian
intervention and unfettered market-based solutions to aid and
development. This paper explores the particular form that
global humanitarianism is taking in this millennial context. I
argue that a new configuration of humanitarian reason is
emerging that draws on both neoliberal and pastoral rationalities
of governance. The former can be associated with efficiency,
transparency, and quantitative evidence, while the
latter is articulated with individual compassion, devotion, and
Christian duty. Using the celebrity humanitarian Bono and his
rhetoric of ‘factivism’ as an illustrative example, the paper
explores the way that this message is transmitted through
geosocial discourses and networks. It indicates some of the
ways that the personal and media dissemination of this new
ideology of charismatic, yet rational care helps to weave pastoral
rationalities into forms of political authority.
and the use of new social media. The articulation of community, empathy, and fan activism creates an experience of citizenship that appears to transcend national borders and enable affective relations between distant individuals and places. This paper analyzes the mechanisms of emotion in
the constitution of these deterritorialized networks, including the specific practices and pastoral language through which individuals are drawn into feelings of transnational solidarity through fan groups and fan-celebrity engagement. Further, it addresses the ways in which the emotional enrollment of individuals in this vein can be read as part of a larger process
of neoliberal citizenship formation and depoliticization, in which subjects are subtly directed away from state-based responses to problems of poverty and ill health and towards more individualized, enterprising, and market-mediated forms of social aid
global cities. These metropolises, which function as key command centers in global
production networks, manifest many of the social, economic, and political tensions and
inequities of neoliberal globalization. Their international appeal as sites of financial
freedom and free trade frequently obscures the global city underbelly: practices of labor
exploitation, racial discrimination, and migrant deferral. This chapter explores some of
these global tensions, showing how they have shaped the strategies and technologies
behind urban crime prevention, security, and policing. In particular, the chapter shows
how certain populations perceived as risky become treated as pre-criminals: individuals
in need of management and control before any criminal behavior has occurred. It is
demonstrated further how the production of the pre-criminal can lead to dispossession,
delay, and detention as well as to increasing gentrification and violence.
democracies, and how it manifests a new type of sovereign spatial power. This power operates
through the capacity to exile individuals and populations who are defined—in advance—as
risk failures. I investigate further the ways that these pre-known risk failures are determined
through historical and geographical processes of racial formation, arguing that certain kinds of
bodies have become vessels for concepts of risk formed in anticipation of an inevitable future.
This “inevitable future” involves the formation of populations, which I term Pre-Black, who are
projected as outside of the enabling web of pastoral power. Moreover, as a consequence of this
pre-failure, individuals and populations can be forcefully and, more importantly, “justifiably”
removed from commonly held spaces and resources in a contemporary liberal form of sovereign
dispossession.
war, but few examine the forces which produce peace. This article is a broad,
comparative examination of three variables that were important in the relative lack of
ethnic conflict in Marseille, France, during an intense period of national rioting and
tension in 2005. The three processes highlighted in the research are: a) Marseille’s
particular form of transnational, highly networked, ethnicity-based capitalism; b) the
specific geography, public infrastructure, and social organization of the city; and c) the
communitarian (difference-oriented) cultural approach of local officials. The case for
Marseille’s unique position is made through a comparative investigation of the economic
and cultural development of Paris. While both cities are globally integrated, they have
developed in quite different ways in these three areas. I argue that these differences are
important in explaining the dissimilar outcomes for the two cities during the
October/November riots of 2005. While the particular constellation of these three
historical processes may not continue through time, it is worthwhile to consider why and
how certain historical moments and places can become shelters of tolerance in violent
times."
increasingly influence the organization and management of urban space. Two institutions
are especially powerful in this regard: bond-rating agencies and global security
firms. Bolstered by a discourse of risk and the need to securitize cities, these institutions
have garnered enormous amounts of power with respect to urban social and spatial
control. They are implicated in the imprisonment and displacement of marginalized
populations, the intensification of gentrification, and general shifts in municipal funding
priorities. The authors illustrate these themes through a case study of New York
City, followed by an example of the transnational movement of these forces and their
exportation to sites such as Mexico City.
socioeconomic change. The focus of change is the rise of neoliberal policies,
practices, and forms of governance in advanced industrial societies in the early
twenty-first century. Three thematic areas are pursued: citizenship formation,
technological change, and philanthropy. Evidence is presented that in each of
these three areas, educational ideas and practices are affected by the growing
dominance of free market ways of thinking. The state promotion of multicultural
education has shifted to a more instrumental and strategic promotion of competitive
success in the global knowledge economy; new digital technologies marketed
under consumer capitalism have engendered short-term interests among youth and
an increasing difficulty to pay deep attention across generations; the incursion
of philanthropy into educational policy has encouraged more school choice and
attempts to recruit parents and students into competitive and entrepreneurial subjectivities. It is argued that these processes are currently accelerating and have
negative repercussions for children and society.
and policy of three countries over the past two decades. Using England, Canada and
the United States as case studies, I argue that the spirit of multiculturalism in education
has shifted from a concern with the formation of tolerant and democratic national citizens
who can work with and through difference, to a more strategic use of diversity for
competitive advantage in the global marketplace. This shift is directly linked with and
helps to facilitate the entrenchment of neoliberalism as it supports a privatization agenda,
reduces the costs of social reproduction for the government, and aids in the constitution
of subjects oriented to individual survival and/or success in the global economy.
educational sector of the European Commission. This is especially the case vis-a©-vis the institutional
philosophy of how immigrants and second-generation `minorities' should be best integrated into
European society. Both the policies and the programs associated with education and training are
becoming more oriented towards the formation of mobile, flexible, and self-governing European
laborers and less oriented towards an institutionalized affirmation of personal development and
individual or group `difference'. This represents a fairly substantive philosophical and practical trans-
formation over the past five to ten years, with significant implications for conceptions of European
citizenship, multiculturalism, and social belonging.
circles of belonging reaching from the self and family to the ethnic group, the nation
and, finally, to all humanity. Debates over the role schools should play in educating “world
citizens” versus national patriots follow suit: Should educators work to maintain the reputedly
natural, warm, and necessary scale of national allegiance, or should they attempt to
produce new subjects oriented to Earth and the human family?
Purpose: In this paper, we critique the spatial assumptions that underlie this discourse. We
question the assumption that affinity is attached to particular scales, that these scales are
fixed rather than flexible, and that they are received rather than produced. Our examination
focuses on Nussbaum’s celebrated proposal that civic education be freed from its
national tether and allowed to embrace the whole world.
a way of conceptualising the contemporary constitution of subjects and spaces
within transnational relations. While there has already been a good amount of
individual research that could be characterised as geosocial, we think there remains
a need in geography for a larger statement on the explanatory power and theoretical
value of foregrounding these types of relationships. Socially reorganising
transnational relations take many forms and are established by various individual
and collective actors. The key characteristic informing our conceptualisation here
is the power of these social relations to constitute new transnational geographies
through situated, relational practices.
Our conceptualisation of the geosocial draws from older concepts vis-à-vis the
reciprocal constitution of society and space, as well as from more recent ideas
about topological spatial formations.1 The traditional usage of the term topology
comes from geometry: the study of the properties of space and spatial relations in
the context of stretching and bending and other ‘deformations’. Social topologies,
instead, describe the spatial properties of society that have no fixed form, but rather
are outlined by lived worlds organised through ongoing social relations, discourses,
and networks.2 In investigating transnational topologies, we use the
geosocial as a focus for examining the dynamic relations by which, on one hand,
the borders and territories of the world order are maintained, challenged, and (re)
defined; and on the other hand, people constitute themselves as subjects and
communities capable of transformative agency across and within such borderladen
realities. In short, we set out to ask how geosocial subjects are constitutive of
transnational topological space and vice versa.
the veil in public institutions in Turkey and France. France’s adoption of a law that
banned all conspicuous religious and political symbols from public schools was a
focal point in these debates. A restraining attitude towards veiling is even more
extensive in Turkey. In this article we focus on the historical and contemporary
connections between these two secular republics, as well as the ideological context of
global neoliberalism and the policies of suprastate and transnational organizations to
analyse how the discourses and practices of secularism have been employed with
respect to the question of wearing veils in public institutions. We argue that the
concept of secularism, of which the veil debate is one component, has been important
for state formation and economic development in both Turkey and France, and that in
the contemporary period it is also employed with respect to the image of a particular
kind of unattached and unbiased neoliberal subject. France and Turkey provide
revealing cases of the ways in which contemporary secularism as a technology of
governance reflects both historical patterns and new trends in the neoliberal era.
thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
there in the starless dark the poise, the hover,
there with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
there in the sudden blackness the black pall
of nothing, nothing, nothing—nothing at all."
-Archibald MacLeish, The End of the World
and entrenched through time. The case study focuses on a federal immigration policy
in Canada in the 1980s, which encouraged the rapid entry of wealthy entrepreneurs
and investors from Hong Kong. One of the many impacts of the arrival of this Chinese
business élite in British Columbia was the rapid growth of a key volunteer organization
in Vancouver dedicated to social service provisioning for immigrants. With the
donations and volunteerism of the new Chinese arrivals, this organization grew from
a small, narrowly focused social service institution, to one of the largest and most
extensive providers in the lower Mainland, supplying numerous goods and services
formerly controlled primarily by the province and the federal government. As a result
of the actions of this voluntary organization, a type of interstitial organization that
some scholars have termed under the rubric, ‘the shadow state’, conservative politicians
in the 1980s were able to roll back many welfare state programmes in British
Columbia without a corresponding loss of legitimacy occurring from the immediate
truncation of services. The Business Immigration Programme thus aided in the
entrenchment of a neo-liberal agenda both through the increased circulation of capital
and articulation with Asian networks, and also through the devolution of direct
welfare-state governance. I argue that this immigration programme thus represents
one good example of the multiple ways that seemingly simple policy shifts can have
much broader effects, and can entrench neo-liberal policy socially, culturally and institutionally
as well as economically."
produce value in all domains of their lives. We are particularly interested
in the relationship between the production of value “at work”
and the social reproduction of labor-power along with the conditions
that enable its deployment.