Search

Kurzfassung: The governing of urban drug use and its economies represents a central aspect of urban governmentality and has played an important role in the production and control of public space in numerous cities of the Global North since the 1970s. Urban drug cultures are often the subject of moral panics and urban policing. At the same time, geographical engagement with the spatial dimensions and effects of governing urban drug cultures is surprisingly rare. Using the example of Görlitzer Park in Berlin's Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg district, this paper examines the spatializing discourses and practices of urban drug policies and shows how looking at the governing of illicit drugs provides a productive lens for analysing forms of urban exclusion, marginalization, and normalization. From a geographical perspective, it is particularly interesting to examine how this form of urban governance mobilizes spatial approaches and representations of space, i.e., how urban drug cultures are spatialized in multiple ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kurzfassung: „German Theory" is a theory that has not yet been written, but could have been. „Theory" is here understood as a "territory of thought" that transcends the boundaries of its origins, and travels to other sites. „French Theory", for example, is the label for the travel of French poststructuralism to Anglophone humanities. In this sense, „German Theory" does not exist (yet), but as this paper will argue, it exists as a potentiality that has not (yet) actualized. To show this potential, this paper turns to the work of Friedrich A. Kittler. To illustrate why Kittler did not become a cornerstone of „German Theory", and to discuss how it could have been, this paper proceeds in two steps: first, it traces the recent history of the reception of Foucault in German language geography and the humanities. This analysis shows that Kittler and German language geography morphed Foucault's discourse theory into two distinct thought styles – the „discourse school" in German language geography into a „textual" one; Kittler into a „materialist" one. This incompatibility of thought styles, this paper asserts, obstructed the travel of Kittler to Anglophone geography, although Kittler's notion of „materiality of communication" resonates with the „material turn" in Anglophone geography. Nor did the Foucault of the „discourse school" travel to Anglophone geography. Kittler's „German Foucault" travelled to Anglophone media studies as „German School", though. In the last part of the paper, I ask the question how Kittler's „German Foucault" could have travelled to (anglophone) geography and what could have been gained theoretically through this travel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kurzfassung: Sustainable development is of equal concern to Geography as an academic discipline and Geography Education. Given Geography's explicit conceptual and thematic affinity to sustainable development, various professional organizations developed normative documents proclaiming Geography to the main carrier subject of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). The aim of this paper is to explore what effects the special proximity of school Geography to the promotion of ESD has on the design of geographical specialist knowledge. Lower secondary Geography curricula (1992–2022) of the federal state of Berlin served as sample for content analysis. Viewed in light of work from the History of Education, Sociology of Education, and Subject Education, the results show a progressive loss of disciplinary identity accompanied by a concurrent shift in focus from factual judgments to value judgments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kurzfassung: While a broad debate on carceral geographies has been part of human geography and related disciplines in English-speaking academia, there are only scarce publications among German-speaking geographers. This special issue aims at bringing different researchers (Tobias Breuckmann, Julia Emprechtinger, Sarah Klosterkamp, Nadine Marquardt, Marco Nocente, Marina Richter and Anna Schliehe) and their rich and diverse research insights in the carceral field into a dialogue. What started with a session at the 2019 conference of German-speaking geography (Deutscher Kongress für Geographie), developed into a special issue that encompasses papers based on the contributions to the session as well as additional papers that round up the insights into current research in carceral geographies in German-speaking countries. The papers show the importance of applying a carceral geography perspective to research in German-speaking geography to focus on different institutions, places and spaces that share common carceral characteristics. In addition, the focus on German-speaking researchers also adds to the international debate on carceral geographies with specific insights from the national contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kurzfassung: This paper examines whether and to what extent the application of the method of hermeneutic photography can contribute to reducing epistemic relations of violence and thus to decolonizing empirical social research. To this end, an empirical study by the author is subjected to a re-reading and methodological reflection from postcolonial perspectives. On the basis of this, it will then be worked out which potentials and limits the work with the method of hermeneutic photography offers for research projects that are carried out in countries of the so-called Global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kurzfassung: This article examines the constitution of affective atmospheres that arise through the encounter of scientific and theatre practices. Using an autoethnographic approach, the presented work focuses on a collaborative theatre project on the climate crisis. Here, the author performed in the role of a scientific expert next to colleagues that have a climate change-related research background. Three aspects of affective atmospheres emerging in the rehearsal process are analysed: one's position in the interplay of powerful materialities, the relationality of sensual bodies, and the (in)stability of scientific identities. This paper shows that the artistic collaboration opens up space for reflecting on science that seek to overcome ostensible dualisms of subject/object, mind/body, and reason/emotion. It emphasizes the opportunity of art to bring into account body, more-than-humanity and relationality as part of scientific practices in times of anthropocentric debates facing climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kurzfassung: In early summer 1980, radical geography students rallied around the slogan „Geografe nüme schlafe!" („Geographers, stop sleeping!") to take part in the radical youth movement that shook the city of Zurich at that time. In turn, these activist students brought these struggles back into the university and the geography department, where they confronted the professorate with their demands for a new curriculum. This paper argues that the antagonistic Stimmung , in which these struggles took place, produced a radical „thought style" that flourished in a specific constellation of „thought events": a prominent theory seminar in 1980, the AK WissKri, a network of radical geography students, the „Geoscope" journal and, finally, a number of diploma theses on feminist, urban and historical geography. In these thought events, a radical geography materialized outside and beyond the mainstream of German language geography. Building on archival material and narrative interviews, this paper documents these student initiatives for a radical geography, and illustrates the precarious conditions of possibility of radical geography, in Zurich, and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kurzfassung: Thirty years after the Cold War, many aspects of the West's self-identification are still shaped by othering ‚the East'. This geographical identity-building in Western media discourses is indicated by terms like geopolitics and the (New/Second) Cold War. The paper scrutinizes ‚grand' narratives behind the appearances of such concepts and observes their continuities, dislocations, and disruptions. Taking a critical geopolitical perspective informed by discourse theory and based on Foucault's conceptualization of the archive, the paper introduces aspects of the transformation of geopolitical imaginations of the East and the West: (1) it reconstructs phases of the rebirth of geopolitics after WW2 until today. (2) It focuses on the changes in the East-West relations after 1990 and shows how the imagination of the ‚cold war' disappears from media discourse. (3) Finally, it analyses the revival through rising geopolitical risk-narratives since the crises and wars in Georgia and Ukraine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kurzfassung: This paper develops three analytical categories – range, supporting capacity, exigency/notability – to capture how supra-individual phenomena affect the people studied by empirical research. Researchers face a tension between constructivist and realist perspectives as the examined phenomena are simultaneously social constructs, in the way people perceive and understand them, and social facts in their consequences. Taking a critical perspective on the notion of large social phenomena – popularized by Theodore Schatzki – the paper develops an explorative terminology that aims to facilitate practice-oriented field research. Examples of empirical research on transition and degrowth initiatives illustrate how research subjects estimate the range of a phenomenon by trying to grasp whether they are in or out of its reach; the supportive capacity of a phenomenon by exploring how far it carries certain processes; and they experience the exigency of a phenomenon and ascribe a certain notability to it. Taken together, this terminology grasps the way phenomena are matters of concern, rather than matters of fact, for the research subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kurzfassung: A central diagnosis driving research around social relations of nature is the thesis of the "end of nature". In an era marked by climate change and global warming, the image of nature as a pristine and stable foundation of human existence seems outdated. In light of this, recent scholarship demonstrates how environmental changes and conflicts increasingly affect people's daily lives and present significant threats to psychic well-being. In contrast, in this paper we investigate the conditions under which nature continues to function as an effective source of 'ontological security'. As part of an international comparative research project that engages geographical imaginaries of security and insecurity in Berlin, Vancouver, and Singapore, we analyze how nature is imagined by city dwellers as an object of desire that offers a place of refuge to escape the burdens from urban everyday life. Against this background, we emphasize imaginary nature as a powerful everyday source for the ontological security of subjects even under today's postnatural conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution of a literary scholar to the history of geopolitics argues for the consideration of literary sources as constituents of the „classical" geopolitical discourse (Ratzel, Kjellén, Haushofer). It exemplifies this claim by revealing the geopolitical components through which Gustav Freytag's novel Soll und Haben (Debit and Credit, Freytag, 1855, 1858) creates spaces, civilizations, and stories. Approaching these issues from the perspective of literary history and the history of knowledge, this paper turns to Freytag's novel to examine whether the literature of the period of the so-called „bourgeois" or „poetic" realism belongs to the genealogy of German political geography and geopolitics and how to study its impact on their increasingly manifest political program after the beginning of the First World War. Especially the establishment of the topos of the „Volk ohne Raum" (people without space) in the east of the German Reich and the reorientation of geopolitics „gen Osten" (toward the east) in the early twentieth century find a highly compatible antecedent in Soll und Haben. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kurzfassung: With their donation appeals aid organisations procure a polarised worldview of the self and other into our everyday lives and feed on discourses of "development" and "neediness". This study investigates how the discourse of "development" is embedded in the subjectivities of "development" professionals. By approaching the topic from a governmentality perspective, the paper illustrates how "development" is (re-)produced through internalised Western values and powerful mechanisms of self-conduct. Meanwhile, this form of self-conduct, which is related to a "good cause", also gives rise to doubts regarding the work, as well as fragmentations and shifts of identity. On the one hand, the paper outlines various coping strategies used by development professionals to maintain a coherent narrative about the self. On the other hand, it also shows how doubts and fragmentations of identity can generate a critical distance to "development" practice, providing a space for resistant and transformative practice in the sense of Foucauldian counter-conduct. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kurzfassung: This paper is an empirical mixed-method study on car use in an urban context. It explores the questions: What mobility practices do people in the city display? What role does car use play in this context? What is the guiding, underlying logic behind personal car use? The findings help to understand mobility practices and their underlying logic. The central component is a user typology based on a quantitative survey and qualitative interviews. The study aims to present an empirical description of mobility practices and the guiding logic of different mobility types in Berlin. The findings offer starting points for user-specific measures to encourage people to use new mobility concepts instead of their personal car. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper links two strands of Peter Sloterdijk's sphere project - his theory of the environment and his theory of dwelling - and mobilizes them for an analysis of entanglements between spaces of the environment and the space of the home in contemporary sustainability policies and smart home experiments. First, we retrace how Sloterdijk's topology of the environment combines a historical phenomenological methodology with ecological thinking. In the next step, we discuss Sloterdijk's theory of dwelling, which is closely linked to his thinking of the environment and is central to his conception of a plural spherology, yet has so far largely been overlooked in the reception. Sloterdijk's emphasis on the importance of dwelling in the „world's inner space" („Weltinnenraum") under conditions of a no longer externalizable environment helps to theorize how humans dwell on this earth in the 21st century. In the third part of the paper, we bring together both themes - environment and dwelling - to analyze contemporary ecological and digital home experiments from the perspective of a plural spherology. By showing how recent digital experiments in „smart homes" entangle spaces of dwelling with environmental concerns we build on Sloterdijk's analysis but also extend it with insights from STS and governmentality studies to better capture the power effects inherent to digitalized dwelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The quantitative revolution in the field of geography is commonly recalled as a story of scientific success, overcoming parochial, regionalist and ideographic modes of geography. This paper, however, suggests a different, yet parallel narrative. It reveals that the methodological reorientation towards statistical geography was a coping strategy, adopted by researchers from within and outside the discipline of geography in order to defend the analysis of ecological (i. e., spatially aggregated) data against the powerful critique of producing "ecological fallacies". Through emphasizing how the quantitative revolution was an expression of both modernizing and protective tendencies within the field of geography, the paper contributes to a more concrete understanding of what motivates methodological change in geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The potentiality of crowds, in terms of possibilities for achieving a livelihood in the big and dense cities, gains centre stage in contemporary urban studies dealing with the global South. These emergent effects of crowds act as dissociation of further work in urban theory from the global North that often displays a universalistic claim. However, contemporary urban theory both from the global South and North has astonishing less to say about internal processes of crowds that could be interpreted as emerging effects. The paper analyses the work on crowds by Peter Sloterdijk and the performative theory of assembly by Judith Butler in terms of theoretical possibilities to enrich contemporary thinking on urbanity in the South. The paper accentuates two important arguments for urban theory that could be fit into existing work in the field. Sloterdijk emphasises the "affective synthesis" of crowds and the build environment as an important mechanism of interaction between crowds and urbanity, whereas Butler elaborates the performative effect of crowds to articulate the right of owning attested rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kurzfassung: The contemporary metropolis is characterised by an increasing diversity of its population, which is called "super-diversity" or "hyperdiversity" in the urban discourse. This epistemological realignment breaks new ground away from the classic Chicago School. Associated with this "diversification of diversity" (Vertovec, 2007:1025) is a fragmentation of the different social and ethnic groups in the city. However, the concept of super-diversity camouflages a separateness of these groups that is called newguineaisation in this paper. With that said, this new urban reality claims for empirical investigations of the societal implication of this phenomenon especially with regard to social cohesion in contemporary cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kurzfassung: The focus of this intervention follows the ongoing COVID-19 crisis and its consequences. With both health and the economy as central to this crisis, besides each amplifying the other, in some regards, the two also might stand in conflict. However, both are definitely delivering a number of consequences for humans in different regions and life circumstances across the globe. With the help of several examples, this paper sets out to visualize the unequal distribution of duties, strains, exposure and aftermath of the current health crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kurzfassung: Entrepreneurial and social urban policies contradictorily depend from each other: growth policies aiming to increase investment and population numbers produce a crisis of reproduction (i.e. housing or care); and social policies aiming to resolve this crisis allegedly require entrepreneurial policies as fuel for tax resources financing social goals. We investigate this interrelationship along the recent housing and childcare policies in the city of Hamburg, Germany. We show that as long as growth and competition are primary objectives of urban governments, a compensatory social policy is needed to legitimate the entrepreneurial axiom – and therefore has a specific character: social policy in the social-entrepreneurial city is actually addressing inequalities, but it eventually is aimed at all classes, secures capital accumulation and is gendered. This paper contributes to understanding urban crises of reproduction by exposing that current social policies aiming to solve this crisis merely consolidate the crisis-prone growth policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kurzfassung: Public libraries are an important public service of general interest and, as part of social infrastructures, contribute to educational justice. This article discusses their development against the background of the interaction of digitization and austerity. As voluntary services they are particularly affected by the current austerity policy and have to increasingly justify their services and structures. At the same time, they are being rediscovered in the course of local authorities' urban development strategies. Based on empirical results from Bonn, the paper discusses central municipal strategies for the further development of the local library system and sheds light on the associated ambivalent socio-spatial implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kurzfassung: In Germany, strategies of "social mixing" aiming at the development of "disadvantaged" neighborhoods have been widely established in urban politics. Such strategies are oriented towards attracting middle class residents and therefore are discussed as drivers of displacement and exclusion of "the disadvantaged". In our paper, we analyze such urban transformation processes focusing on the productivity of racial classifications. We present results of a research project in which we examine the appropriation of urban resources (such as housing, neighborhood infrastructures, and public spaces) by residents in such quarters. Using an interactivist approach "from below" and qualitative research methods, our case study on the former "declining", currently "stagnating" quarter Essen-Altendorf shows the productivity of racial classifications in the residents' negotiations on "rules" in the closer neighborhood or on the use of public spaces. Yet, racializing articulations correspond with the policies of social mixing as well as with the observed selective policing of a "dangerous quarter". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses family migration amongst highly-skilled professionals. Drawing on the concept of linked lives, it analyses how the linked lives of parents and children affect integration processes after international migration. The article is based on qualitative interviews with highly-skilled migrants and their accompanying partners in Germany and Great Britain. The analysis illustrates how parents try to reestablish stability and security in their children's lives after migration. It reveals common concerns. However, some of the parent's strategies are location-specific. The results indicate that the parent's efforts for their children's integration also have an effect on their own integration. Given the importance of children in the integration process, the paper suggests paying more attention to the children's perspective in future migration research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on Foucault's notion of governmentality and on ethnographic fieldwork in a German city, this paper addresses practices of governing "Muslims" and "Islam" at the level of local politics. It conceptualises these practices as a governing through friendship, that is, a type of "liberal" conduct-of-conduct that focuses on trust-building and practised "togetherness". The paper analyses techniques of governance and processes of subjectivation, putting an emphasis on how emotionality becomes integrated into governmental practices. I show how governing through friendship unfolds in the spatio-political context of a local dialogue with "Islam", how the latter is linked to the interfaith paradigm and thus becomes a religiously-sensitive, post-secular political technology in which religious sensibilities are becoming elements of governmentality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last ten years, several uprising organizations such as the so called "Islamic State" have become a new challenge for civil societies in facing and defeating international terrorism. This paper, as part of a bigger research project, presents theoretical and methodical approaches for analyzing those organizations in the way they operate abroad and how they are connected with foreign fighters, sympathizers and supporters. By using ethnographic tools, we have observed and analyzed 14 "Islamic State"-related criminal proceedings in front of high-secured regional appeal courts. The paper presents the first results of this study in showing how German islamists are using transnational logistic networks to join or support terrorist organizations (Part 1) and gives insight into the way the logics of jurisdiction in democratic societies constitute them as "threatening subjects" (Part 2). In this way, it addresses a new approach of court-based research from the perspective of political geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The German energy transition is not only characterized by wide technological changes but also by spatial restructuring. The decentralization of energy supply potentially increases the importance of the regional or local scale. The Anglo-American debate on the Politics of Scale addresses the production and transformation of scale while energy issues have not yet been systematically addressed. This paper combines the theoretical paradigms of scale, rescaling and scalar strategies with empirical examples from the German energy transition. Using the cases of energy regions, remunicipalizations and social movements, the implications of the German energy transition are analyzed regarding the role of scale. The paper argues that the perspective of the Politics of Scale can contribute not only to a better understanding of the different dimensions of energy transitions but also to critical energy geographies in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kurzfassung: The housing question is a topic of increasing concern in a number of European cities. Rising housing costs burden many households. Since the outbreak of the global economic crisis in 2008, housing has increasingly come under spotlight of investors. Institutional and private actors invest in real estate not only in metropolitan areas but also in middle and small-sized towns. Tourism-induced demand increases the pressure on housing markets particularly in tourist-dominated cities. The manifestation of these processes varies on a small scale and is influenced by regional-local planning and politics. Based on the example of the city of Salzburg, the article shows that the housing question manifests itself strongly aside metropolises as well. Financial investments by private and institutional actors in real estate and different forms of tourism demand exacerbate the housing shortage. By linking the discussions about the effects of (mass-)tourism and financial investments on regional housing markets, this paper provides additional insights. The additional demand for (residential) space by tourism is used to increase or secure the return on investments in real estate. Financial investments in housing offer additional (problematic) potential for tourist use, such as short-term rentals. Owners benefit from both processes. Due to the prevalent power relations, planning and politics have little to counter the current challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kurzfassung: This paper takes Foucault's and Sloterdijk's reception of the Greek cynics as an intellectual resource to critically examine critical geography's moralizing high ground. I analyse how, in 1983, Foucault and Sloterdijk paint the cynical impulse as a political practice of provocative truth-telling against the moral high-grounds of the dogmatic left of the 1970s: For Foucault and Sloterdijk, the cynics are anti-dogmatic, anti-theoretical and anti-scholastic. I will argue, however, that the cynical impulse is itself in danger of speaking from the moral high ground of anti-critique, a disposition that needs the anti-dote of skepticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper undertakes a creative exploration of bulky rubbish [sperrmüll] in the City of Bonn by expanding on and utilising what has come to be known as non-representational thinking. Through a nonrepresentational engagement with sperrmüll, I shed light on waste as a significant human-nonhuman ecology as it appears in an especially routinised manifestation in urban space. In doing so, the paper contributes to a discussion about enacting non-representational methodologies within German-speaking human geography. Here, there are three methodological interventions for a non-representational endeavour: (1) interfering, (2) material thinking, and (3) writing and presentation. These interventions are supported by revisiting Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of assemblage; using it as a way to attend to sperrmüll as an area-sized fabrication connecting humans and various other materialities, and which directs thought towards a wide array of agencies. In conclusion, nonrepresentational perspectives are advanced as a way to expose the affective ecologies that enable certain actions and hamper others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Religious spaces" can become a powerful nucleus of (geo-) political imaginations, identities, and conflicts. The paper outlines this aspect using the example of Tibet. Considering the prominent position of Buddhism in Tibet, the tense relationships between religion, space and nation come into view. In this respect the paper does however not primarily discuss the quite well known antagonistic constructions of pro-Chinese and pro-Tibetan geopolitical discourses. Rather, it addresses the far less publicized yet for the development of Tibetan Nationalism equally important fact that differences in the production of religious spaces and respective identities can also be found within Tibetan society. Tracing these discursive inventions of tradition helps to better understand, why the establishment of a national project in Tibet has been difficult and why it only started to gain traction and visibility in the face of mounting threads by an antagonistic exterior and the precarious Tibetan exile situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article serves as introduction for a themed issue on Peter Sloterdijk's enormous philosophy of space. It invites scholars from various disciplines to critically engage with Sloterdijk's thought and discusses briefly the contributions made in this special issue. The paper gives some orientation on the anthropological and social philosophy Sloterdijk deploys within his oeuvre, and illuminates the various fields of social and cultural research his ideas have informed so far. The editorial identifies four possible fields of interest within human geography that could gain by engaging with Sloterdijk's thought, namely urban and architectural theory, new technologies, political geographies and critical social geography. The article also discusses the necessity of a critical distance to the philosophical premises on which Sloterdijk grounds his philosophy as well as his role as notorious commentator on political issues in Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper outlines an approach to right wing populism in recent years not only in critizing the use of so called alternative facts but using the concept of a regressive modernisation as a debate which includes populist movements into a broader social theory and diagnosis of western societies. The evolution of regressive modernisation reveals both, the success of a neoliberal globalization and a rise of marginality and perceived dangers of a downward mobility. These findings are used in order to explain certain transformations of academic fields in general and social geography in particular. It is argued that the success of postmodern geographies may be seen as an overcoming of hegemonic discourses of positivism as well as of marxism, but was and is unable to counteract geographies of recent right wing populism. Even the positions of the „march for science" which has been a major initiative to fight for academic integrity are seen as not being sufficient to rebuilt an „antipopulist" social geography. This situation leads to some suggestions and recommendation for further work in this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This short paper provides the initial provocation for a themed issue that emerges from a conference on the topic of geographies of social crises/crises of social geographies. The article calls for a (re)consideration of the "social question" in the 21st century. We call for social geographers to engage with the historical dynamics of places and milieus to understand novel class societies and the violence that underpins social inequalities. The article makes a case for an empirically saturated social geography. We believe this provides a useful programme which helps to understand current phenomena of political, social and economic crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Publications from the early quantitative revolution in geography saw a significant change in the use of visual material. While the old regionalist paradigm of "Länderkunde" was dominated by images of "geographical individuals" the new geography was dominated by abstract models and visualized laws and theories. Overall visual material gains in importance, both quantitatively and qualitatively. This paper follows the changed functions, possibilities and promises of visualizing epistemic things in geography's new paradigm. This is done by following the translations, transformations and mobilizations of the famous hexagon Walter Christaller published in his 1933 "Theory of central places in South Germany". Since the 1940s this Hexagon has become not only an icon of the new geography, but an instrument for making quantitative-theoretical thinking in the geography plausible and at the same time to build a visual bridge between the old and the new geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the role of materiality was understudied in most social sciences, there was a sensibility for these issues in political ecology. The different approaches of political ecology focused on the political character of ecology and the ecological (and thus material) character of politics. But a conceptual framework that captures the different dimensions of the societal nature relations was seldom explicitly elaborated. Following the considerations of Michel Foucault, this article explores whether dispositive analysis as a concept and as a method offers a way to integrate both social and material conditions into studies of political ecology. By examining water infrastructure and the dispositive of drought in Northeastern Brazil, this paper displays how dispositive analysis is a means to identify different elements, their autonomies as well as their interconnectedness. Focusing on the entanglements of discourses, institutionalizations, subjectivity, practices and materiality allows capturing the materiality of discourses and the discursivity of material orders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]