Search

This paper presents the first spatial analysis of racial disparities in the UK welfare sanction regime. As part of their austerity programme, the UK government tightened the conditionality of welfare programmes and intensified the use of financial penalties against welfare claimants who failed to demonstrate compliance with these conditions. Analysing Jobseeker's Allowance (JSA) data from the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) and the Office for National Statistics between 2012 and 2019 we draw attention to the spatially uneven and highly racialised geography of welfare sanctions in England. Claimants from racially minoritised backgrounds are consistently more likely to be referred for a sanction by Jobcentre caseworkers and receive an adverse decision at the hands of institutional decision‐makers. Within this, however, there are important scalar and spatial differences that warrant critical attention. In rural England, the risk of being sanctioned is substantially higher for all groups, but especially for Mixed heritage and Black/Black British claimants who in some areas are over twice as likely to be sanctioned as their White counterparts. Since ethnicity data have not been published for Universal Credit sanction decisions, the presented evidence offers critical insight into the potential persistence of racial injustice in applying welfare sanctions. We identify ‘hotspots’ of racism in the sanction regime, most of which are in rural areas, before offering three interpretative frameworks through which spatial and racial disparities might be explained. Any suggestion that such disparities simply derive from the behaviour of DWP staff fails to adequately account for deeply entrenched histories of welfare racism, rural racism and the role of welfare sanctioning in dynamics of racial capitalism: that is, disciplining and impoverishing racialised populations in ways that generate conditions for capital accumulation. By contributing new empirical and theoretical insights to the often neglected study of rural austerity and welfare, the paper calls for scholarship to investigate the variegations of welfare, austerity and racial capitalism in diverse rural contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Creative and feminist geographers position listening as a way to build more responsive, ethical, and reciprocal relations to people and environments. In this paper I argue that for geographers to situate listening – in the broadest definition as 'sensing, attuning, and noticing' – as part of a creative approach to reparative practice, we must first understand how Anglo‐European modes of listening and interpreting the world through sound are shaped by 'sonic colonialities'. These are encultured ways of apprehending and narrating environments that are derived from the Eurocentric fetish for pre‐colonial natures, imagined as discrete, unmediated, and possessable. Given the now prolific interest of geographers in sonic practices, this paper argues for a closer and more critical attention to how listening and sound methods are inherently determined by sonic colonialities. Using the example of field recordings, I show how such practices create and perpetuate divisive ideas of nature and place within contemporary ecological sound art. For geographers to situate listening – in the broadest definition as 'sensing, attuning and noticing' – as part of a creative approach toward reparative practice, we must first understand how Anglo‐European modes of listening and interpreting the world through sound are shaped by 'sonic colonialities'. These are encultured ways of apprehending and narrating environments that are derived from the Eurocentric fetish for pre‐colonial natures, imagined as discrete, unmediated, and possessable. Using the example of field recordings, I show how such practices create and perpetuate divisive ideas of nature and place within contemporary ecological sound art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

George Floyd's murder by a white policeman has sparked the largest urban uprising in US cities since the 1960s. By contextualising this wave of uprisings in the broader context of similar uprisings in twenty‐first‐century US cities, this paper shows that such an uprising has long been in the making with the violence, murders and revolts that have marked US cities since the turn of the century. My argument in this paper is against the pathological framing of these uprisings that evokes the alleged irrational anger of those who participate in the uprisings and the bad behaviour of a few police officers. Such a framing directs attention away from the structural violence that is at the source of these uprisings, and perpetuates racialised images of those who participate in the uprisings as irrational and impulsive. These uprisings, I argue, are not the actions of irrationally angry individuals mindlessly following the crowds; they cannot be reduced to gratuitous looting and burning, and they are not triggered by some police officers behaving badly. The sources of this urban rage lie in systematic, mostly unchecked, violence. The rage that erupts in these uprisings is a political emotion guided by cognition and judgements about right and wrong, just and unjust, rather than a pathological reaction spurred by uncontrollable impulses. It is a deliberate response to white contempt and the violence associated with it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the foundational role of race in humanitarianism, its historical geographies, genealogy, and contemporary practice. I pay particular attention to the work of Sylvia Wynter on the overrepresentation of (white bourgeois) Man in modernist understandings of the human that form the basis of humanitarianism in the present. Building on Wynter's work, I offer an alter‐historical geography of humanitarianism – locating its genus in the voyages of 1441 and 1492 – that unsettles other critical work on the colonial origins of humanitarianism as both a normative and instrumental form of governance and their geographies. In following what Wynter terms a "human view", I explore the racist orderings of Rational Man and his irrational, racialised "others" that work to structure humanitarianism's subjects. Alongside this, I consider the parasitic relations of humanitarianism to the negation of life enacted through the genocide of Black and Indigenous peoples, arguing humanitarianism's claims to save lives and relieve suffering cannot be divorced from conquistador violence. I argue that grappling with what Wynter calls "category problems" is necessary as humanitarianism – or huManitarianism – faces the contemporary challenges raised by Black Lives Matter that undermine and question its universalist legitimacy. This paper explores the foundational role of race and racism in humanitarianism. Building on Sylvia Wynter's "human view" and the overrepresentation of Man, it offers a alter‐historical geography of humanitarianism that centres race, racism, and genocidal violence in our contemporary understandings of humanitarianism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The urban bench has been romanticised as a location of intimacy and benign social serendipity, and problematised with regard to perceptions of unwelcome loitering. In this paper we explore embodied practices of sitting on benches within an urban context characterised by corporate‐led regeneration and impacted by austerity urbanism, imperial history and ongoing racisms. Our schizocartographic methodology enables us to attend to the differentiated and shifting subjectivities and temporalities of bench users, and to emerging counter histories of space. The research is based on the case study of a central square in Woolwich, south‐east London. This involved an eclectic combination of methods, including film‐making, ethnography and interviews, and a cross‐sectoral team of activists, academics and an artist. The paper starts by conceptualising public space with respect to lived experiences of marginalisation, arguing that architectural design is intrinsic to understanding micro‐geographies of conviviality and care. The case study material is used first to provide a visual sketch of sitting and watching others in the square and then to address conviviality and the value of visibility and relative proximity in framing a mostly un‐panicked multiculture. Third, we discuss agentic, yet critically aware, acts of self‐care. Finally, our focus shifts to the design of the benches and the “touching experiences” of bodies sat in various ways, impacted by structural inequalities, yet differentiated by the particularities of individual or collective priorities. In conclusion we argue that attending to the precision of sitting on a bench can illuminate multiple temporalities of urban change in relation to both individual subjectivities and hegemonic structures. Further, the counter histories that emerge can inform policy and practice for inclusive urban design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Insular Cases are a set of early twentieth‐century US Supreme Court cases establishing the legal relationship between the United States and its territorial acquisitions. The Insular Cases have received limited scholarly attention in geography, despite their integral role in continuing to deny full constitutional protections to over 3.5 million American citizens and nationals. Informed by conceptualisations of territory as both process and political technology, political geography offers a critical lens through which to interpret the spatial implications of the Insular Cases. This article conducts a discourse analysis of the Insular Cases, tracing the US Supreme Court's creation of incorporated and unincorporated territorial statuses as they are positioned within contemporaneous racist logic and international norms. I argue that, by inventing differentiated categories of territory, the Insular Cases sought to spatially accommodate white supremacist imaginaries. This paper advances political geography by centring the judicial production of American territorial categories, and adds a geographic perspective to existing literature that interrogates the white supremacist, imperialist source of territorial status today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper extends existing debate about the relationship between climate change and migration by locating this debate within the registers of race and difference. The paper argues that the discourse on climate change and migration generates a particular racial orientation to climate change called ‘white affect’. To make this argument, the paper connects up two related phenomena: racial neoliberalism and the relationship between affect and biopower. The white affect of climate change and migration discourse is here understood to be an ‘object-target’ of biopolitics. White affect thus becomes an important concept for understanding how racial neoliberalism functions through affective proxy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geographers have, in recent years, attempted to develop an anti-racist research and teaching agenda. Critical to this endeavour has been an engagement directly with the theories and philosophies of key activists and scholars, such as W. E. B. DuBois and Richard Wright. Contributing to this effort, I provide a study of Malcolm X. As an activist and outspoken member of the African American Civil Rights Movement during the 1950s and 1960s, Malcolm X re-articulated Black radical thought in significant ways. In particular, Malcolm X placed a territorial dimension at the heart of the Civil Rights Movement and in so doing re-conceptualized the theoretical and practical linkages between the African American movement and other ‘Third World’ movements. The immediate purpose of this paper therefore is to delineate the territorial dimensions of the revolutionary thought of Malcolm X. Heuristically, this paper is situated within four broad areas of inquiry: revolutions and social movements; the thinking of space; anti-racist geographies; and the imbrication of gender and revolutionary thought. More broadly, however, this paper reiterates the call for a more sustained engagement by geographers on the theories and philosophies of Black radical intellectuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the response of the global Anglican Communion to the issue of homosexuality, drawing on case studies of parishes in three different national contexts (UK, USA and South Africa). It traces some of the complex connections (e.g. through flows of money, resources and discourses) between places differently located within this transnational religious network to identify a complex geometry of power. Through its attention to the deployment of racist, disablist, colonial and sexist discourses in debates about homosexuality, this paper contributes to geographies of difference by showing how prejudices can intersect in complex ways to facilitate but also to undo or cancel each other out. The conclusion reflects on issues of authority, the meaning of 'communion' and how local insights might be scaled-up to imagine a practical response to the institutional crisis about homosexuality in the global Anglican Communion. In doing so, the paper contributes to understanding how differences may be reconciled within a transnational religious context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically engages with debates on race, conviviality and the geography of encounters. Where much of this work is undertaken in multicultural places, far less is known about the doing and undoing of conviviality in mainly white localities. The study further contributes to this work by offering a richly embodied account of racism and belonging based on the biographical testimonies of British Bangladeshi Muslim young women. Through these accounts, I identify topographies of power, social inequality and forms of exclusion that disrupt the melody of multicultural conviviality. I demonstrate the visceral aspects of race as it is summoned to life in live encounters, where it is lived on the body, bleeds into the locality and congeals around imaginary ideas of the nation state. I argue that antagonistic encounters that serve to mark out British Bangladeshi Muslims as 'Other' perform a bigger role: purging the nation, detoxifying it from encroaching multicultural intimacies and stabilising it as white. Despite this ritual cleansing I demonstrate how respondents are implicated in new forms of civic belonging, laying claim to nationhood, locality and rights to the city that subvert and hollow out the fantasy of a white nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geographers have recently progressed the debate on NIMBYism by demonstrating that opposition to new development is frequently motivated by white residents’ desire to exclude non-white groups. In this paper, I extend this argument by exploring community opposition to a proposed accommodation centre for asylum seekers in Nottinghamshire (UK). Herein, I detail a rhetoric of opposition that ignored the multiple origins and ethnicities of asylum seekers to depict them as an undifferentiated Other group. Though local campaigners rarely referred directly to their own‘whiteness’, I argue their campaign can only be understood within a racialized problematic, constituting an attempt to defend the privileges of an‘unmarked’ whiteness against the imagined threat of a racialized Other. In conclusion, I argue that studies of NIMBYism must take careful account of the contingency of racial identities if they are to effectively contribute to the geographic literature that seeks to de-centre white privilege. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this short contribution, I witness the underrepresentation of Black PhD students and scholars in the UK academy, and I reflect on my use of Twitter to build a constellation of connections to Black PhD researchers, academics, and activists to think with and learn with. I write this in the form of a tweet thread, a method of scholarly writing that I learned from Black activists, students, and academics on Twitter, and I use this space to mention meaningful learnings from individuals in my own constellation of connections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning with an engagement with Kay Anderson's recent post-humanist approach, I propose an alternative explanation for the rise of an innatist discourse of race around the mid-nineteenth century. I argue that the shift to innatist ideas of racial difference has to be seen as a matter of specific geographies of political contestation and trans-imperial mobilisation emerging in the spatial assemblages of colonial frontier zones during the early nineteenth century. I suggest that, aside from their violent struggles with indigenous peoples in these dispersed but interconnected locales, what prompted the refinement, dispersal and repetition of biologically determinist racial thought was emigrant British settlers' mobilisation against the critique of fellow Britons inspired by a religious humanist doctrine of universality. This explanation shares Anderson's focus on the affective realm of a colonial frontier, but it differs from her interpretation with its emphasis on the contested politics of colonial conquest and above all on the lingering political possibilities of humanism. In engaging with a specific post-humanist interpretation of innatism, this article seeks to address some of the implications of post-humanism more broadly for histories of race. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]