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Books by Margath Walker
The Marcusean Mind, 2024
This chapter aims to extend and update Herbert Marcuse’s philosophical contributions to technolog... more This chapter aims to extend and update Herbert Marcuse’s philosophical contributions to technology by taking up the broad question of what a critique of instrumental rationality might look like today. As one of the foremost theorists of opposition, Marcuse had a complicated and nuanced relationship to technology’s uses within advanced industrial capitalism. From early perspectives in 1941’s “Some Social Implications of Modern Technology” to later iterations in and beyond One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse saw technology as complicit in the destruction of individuality yet fundamental to human existence and thus malleable to historical circumstances. Tapping into the dialectical tension characteristic of Marcuse’s historical intellectual legacy, the chapter draws on his accounts of reason and rationality to undertake an analysis of artificial intelligence (AI). A central aim is to think through the degree to which instrumentalization and domination are built into emerging technologies while holding open possibilities for envisaging AI otherwise. AI, defined as a “general purpose technology”, encompasses a wide set of technological developments, including machine and deep learning and neural networks, and is often viewed as signaling a paradigmatic shift. For this reason, AI is touted as the new social logic of our time with the potential to fundamentally transform our life-worlds. A rereading of Marcuse’s poignant positions vis-à-vis technology highlights how reason and rationality continue to be enlisted in and through the capitalist economy.
Bristol University Press, 2022
This fresh appraisal of philosopher Herbert Marcuse’s work foregrounds the geographical aspects o... more This fresh appraisal of philosopher Herbert Marcuse’s work foregrounds the geographical aspects of one of the leading social and political theorists of the 20th century.
Margath A. Walker considers how Marcusean philosophies might challenge the way we think about space and politics and create new sensibilities. Applying them to contemporary geopolitics, digital infrastructure and issues like resistance and immigration, the book shows how social change has been stifled, and how Marcuse’s philosophies could provide the tools to overturn the status quo.
She demonstrates Marcuse’s relevance to individuals and society, and finds this important theorist of opposition can point the way to resisting oppressive forces within contemporary capitalism.
Papers by Margath Walker
Radical Philosophy Review, 2024
Authors of two new and different but related books on Herbert Marcuse’s contemporary relevance pr... more Authors of two new and different but related books on Herbert Marcuse’s contemporary relevance present their respective arguments and then engage in discussion. Spatializing Marcuse: Critical Theory for Contemporary Times argues that a central problematic in Marcuse’s work—the containment of social change—is at root a spatial problematic. Walker undertakes the unexplored geographical elements of Marcuse’s thought. The Revolutionary Ecological Legacy of Herbert Marcuse—The Ecosocialist EarthCommonWealth Project is a praxis-oriented appeal to those engaged in a range of contemporary social justice struggles. It is keyed to what we are struggling for, not just what we are struggling against. Each author develops revolutionary alternatives to the present system. Ultimately, what intertwines both works is the presentation of a new Marcuse.
This article reviews geographic work on artificial intelligence in the context of labor, surveill... more This article reviews geographic work on artificial intelligence in the context of labor, surveillance, and activism, paying particular attention to developing strengths, as well as current gaps, in the discipline's critical engagement with this emerging topic. Across its sections, we frame artificial intelligence as a societal transformation that cannot and should not be contained to one field or subdiscipline within geography, arguing, instead, that this emerging technology must be drawn into conceptual and empirical debates within all parts of our scholarly community. To conclude, the article identifies ways that geography, especially critical human geography, can contribute to better understanding the complicated and proliferating geographies of artificial intelligence in the world around us and bring a multi-faceted framework to discussions of this disruptive technology.
Recently, a series of so-called "crises" along the United States-Mexico border have drawn signifi... more Recently, a series of so-called "crises" along the United States-Mexico border have drawn significant attention to bordering practices, immigration enforcement, and international migration in the U.S. In Summer 2014, thousands of women and children from Central America arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border along the Rio Grande Valley in south Texas. While many of these arriving migrants voluntarily turned themselves over to immigration authorities to claim asylum, the Obama administration was quick to declare "an urgent humanitarian situation" and "crisis on the border", requesting more than $3.7 billion to expand detention facilities, increase surveillance efforts, and hire additional Border Patrol agents (USBP) and immigration judges (Shear & Peters 2014; Rose 2019). This emphasis on deterrence, rather than aid or assistance, exposed not only the federal governments' inability to respond to the sudden increase in migration
In this introduction, the editors of the special section situate the study of the Mexico-Guatemal... more In this introduction, the editors of the special section situate the study of the Mexico-Guatemala border, lay out the themes of the collection, and summarize the individual contributions.
Big Data & Society, 2020
The Central American migrant caravans of 2018 are best understood as having been precipitated by ... more The Central American migrant caravans of 2018 are best understood as having been precipitated by entangled multi-scalar geopolitical histories among the United States, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Unsurprisingly, the migrants traveling north to the United States garnered widespread attention on social media. So much so that the reaction to the caravan accelerated plans to deploy troops to the US southern border and deny Central Americans the opportunity to seek asylum. This example showcases how the digital world can have exponential material effects. While coverage on border security and migration has been extensive, within political geography, such concerns have rarely been paired with social media. In this article, we take as our object of analysis the digitality or “digital life” of the migrant caravan. Mapping the patterns of migrant caravan-related tweeting paired with the exploration of Twitter’s networked dimensions reveals the platform to be a fundamentally...
International Migration Review, Apr 8, 2020
Against a backdrop of increasingly vitriolic migration policy and practice, The Migrant Passage r... more Against a backdrop of increasingly vitriolic migration policy and practice, The Migrant Passage reminds us with empirical grace that those fleeing Central America and Mexico may be squeezed by the state in different ways, but they will rarely be deterred. Brigden plumbs the ethnographic depths of the transit route from the perspective of the many who have experienced and enacted this sometimestreacherous geography. Composed of nearly 300 interviews with migrants, clergy, human-rights activists, community members, government officials, and family members, the author's method of performing ethnography seeks to mirror migration practice. Like the migrants themselves, Brigden uses improvisation to encounter strangers and rugged terrain ranging from Salvadoran sending communities to the Mexican transit corridor. The research comes to life visually through map-making workshops, which yield powerful pictorial depictions of the route. The Migrant Passage uses a theatrical metaphor to evince the tragedy of clandestine journeys and somewhat expectedly is divided into three acts: Exposition, Rising Action, and Climax. In spite of this choice, the survival plays are both heartwrenching and moving and they provide new insights into some of international migration's more overlooked dimensions. Foremost among the contributions is the importance of improvisation. Migration studies, so long focused on migrant destinations and sending communities, has spent less time on the micro-politics of the inbetween: those encounters along the dangerous and uncertain passage. Unpacking the scholarship beyond conventional points on a map allows for multiple nuanced observations. There is, for example, an acknowledgment of the importance of "the long-reaching shadow of the border for people who may never set foot in the US" (p. 7). Borders, and el norte more generally, figure prominently in Mexican and Central American imaginations, both colloquially and through the mediascape. We hear that longing tinged with hopefulness across nearly every story. Trekking north involves significant hardship and danger, a point adeptly International Migration Review 1-3 ª The Author(s) 2020 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions journals.sagepub.com/home/mrx
Space and Polity
Artificial Intelligence (AI) increasingly shapes our lives, yet a geographic approach to AI has n... more Artificial Intelligence (AI) increasingly shapes our lives, yet a geographic approach to AI has not solidified. This article maps the genealogy of AI across the discipline of geography. Building on claims that AI produces and is bound up with different kinds of geographies, we examine key intersections between AI and human geography's engagement with territories, borders, and the political geographies of war. In the process, we interrogate how and where these new technologies bump up against the larger onto-epistemological landscape of the complicated articulation of space and politics. The goal is to identify a research agenda for engaging AI geographically.
Space and Polity
Artificial Intelligence (AI) increasingly shapes our lives, yet a geographic approach to AI has n... more Artificial Intelligence (AI) increasingly shapes our lives, yet a geographic approach to AI has not solidified. This article maps the genealogy of AI across the discipline of geography. Building on claims that AI produces and is bound up with different kinds of geographies, we examine key intersections between AI and human geography's engagement with territories, borders, and the political geographies of war. In the process, we interrogate how and where these new technologies bump up against the larger onto-epistemological landscape of the complicated articulation of space and politics. The goal is to identify a research agenda for engaging AI geographically.
Human Geography
This paper employs the concept of “invisible colleges” to explore the processes through which spa... more This paper employs the concept of “invisible colleges” to explore the processes through which spaces of critical urban theory are imbricated within a gendered power nexus. It assesses the degree of dominance in hegemonic knowledge production by clusters of scholars, their co-authors, and academic mentors and mentees. Using the example of critical urban theory, we use network graphs to map these concentrated hidden geographies understood collectively as “invisible colleges”. The resultant visualizations reflect the dominance of key scholars and their similarities (e.g. doctoral education, academic mentors, current institutional affiliations, etc.). These heretofore unmapped networks of connectivity provide insight into the masculinized spaces of critical urban theory bringing to the fore important topics for consideration. These include the politics of citation and “double dipping”, or frequent publication in the same journal outlets. In bringing attention to invisible colleges, a co...
Gend Place Cult, 2005
This article explores the ways in which Mexican media works to construct gender and difference in... more This article explores the ways in which Mexican media works to construct gender and difference in relation to the US–Mexico border. Through a discourse analysis of one Mexican newspaper, I argue that discursive violence,'narratives of eviction'and silences are implicated in the construction of women as weak, sexualized objects, and Mexicans as raced, backward 'others'. In so doing, I elaborate several discursive moments, specifically,'woman as anonymous, replaceable body';'woman as victim of the border city';' ...
Big Data and Society, 2020
The Central American migrant caravans of 2018 are best understood as having been precipitated by ... more The Central American migrant caravans of 2018 are best understood as having been precipitated by entangled multi-scalar geopolitical histories among the United States, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Unsurprisingly, the migrants traveling north to the United States garnered widespread attention on social media. So much so that the reaction to the caravan accelerated plans to deploy troops to the US southern border and deny Central Americans the opportunity to seek asylum. This example showcases how the digital world can have exponential material effects. While coverage on border security and migration has been extensive, within political geography, such concerns have rarely been paired with social media. In this article, we take as our object of analysis the digitality or "digital life" of the migrant caravan. Mapping the patterns of migrant caravan-related tweeting paired with the exploration of Twitter's networked dimensions reveals the platform to be a fundamentally spatial technology. Rather than reflect, refract or distort, Twitter produces and (its power) is in turn produced through spatial mechanisms. We present multiple cartographic visual-izations in support of this claim and highlight the ways in which a contextual knowledge of the subject under study-the migrant caravan-can further inform analyses of Big Data.
Walker, Margath A. 2020 “Securitizing Insecurity along Mexico’s Borders” in Bissonnette, A., & Vallet, É. (Eds.). (2020). Borders and Border Walls: In-Security, Symbolism, Vulnerabilities. Routledge., 2020
BOOK CHAPTER
Human Geography, 2019
This paper employs the concept of "invisible colleges" to explore the processes through which spa... more This paper employs the concept of "invisible colleges" to explore the processes through which spaces of critical urban theory are imbricated within a gendered power nexus. It assesses the degree of dominance in hegemonic knowledge production by clusters of scholars, their co-authors, and academic mentors and mentees. Using the example of critical urban theory, we use network graphs to map these concentrated hidden geographies understood collectively as "invisible colleges". The resultant visualizations reflect the dominance of key scholars and their similarities (e.g. doctoral education, academic mentors, current institutional affiliations, etc.). These heretofore unmapped networks of connectivity provide insight into the masculinized spaces of critical urban theory bringing to the fore important topics for consideration. These include the politics of citation and "double dipping", or frequent publication in the same journal outlets. In bringing attention to invisible colleges, a concept that has largely escaped attention in urban studies and geography, we highlight the usefulness of visibility as a technology of equity. En route, the paper describes and visualizes some of the impacts of the proliferation of uneven knowledge production through the coalescing of factors such as path dependency, cumulative advantage, expected inequality and the Matthew and Matilda Effects.
Journal of Latin American Geography, 2018
The Marcusean Mind, 2024
This chapter aims to extend and update Herbert Marcuse’s philosophical contributions to technolog... more This chapter aims to extend and update Herbert Marcuse’s philosophical contributions to technology by taking up the broad question of what a critique of instrumental rationality might look like today. As one of the foremost theorists of opposition, Marcuse had a complicated and nuanced relationship to technology’s uses within advanced industrial capitalism. From early perspectives in 1941’s “Some Social Implications of Modern Technology” to later iterations in and beyond One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse saw technology as complicit in the destruction of individuality yet fundamental to human existence and thus malleable to historical circumstances. Tapping into the dialectical tension characteristic of Marcuse’s historical intellectual legacy, the chapter draws on his accounts of reason and rationality to undertake an analysis of artificial intelligence (AI). A central aim is to think through the degree to which instrumentalization and domination are built into emerging technologies while holding open possibilities for envisaging AI otherwise. AI, defined as a “general purpose technology”, encompasses a wide set of technological developments, including machine and deep learning and neural networks, and is often viewed as signaling a paradigmatic shift. For this reason, AI is touted as the new social logic of our time with the potential to fundamentally transform our life-worlds. A rereading of Marcuse’s poignant positions vis-à-vis technology highlights how reason and rationality continue to be enlisted in and through the capitalist economy.
Bristol University Press, 2022
This fresh appraisal of philosopher Herbert Marcuse’s work foregrounds the geographical aspects o... more This fresh appraisal of philosopher Herbert Marcuse’s work foregrounds the geographical aspects of one of the leading social and political theorists of the 20th century.
Margath A. Walker considers how Marcusean philosophies might challenge the way we think about space and politics and create new sensibilities. Applying them to contemporary geopolitics, digital infrastructure and issues like resistance and immigration, the book shows how social change has been stifled, and how Marcuse’s philosophies could provide the tools to overturn the status quo.
She demonstrates Marcuse’s relevance to individuals and society, and finds this important theorist of opposition can point the way to resisting oppressive forces within contemporary capitalism.
Radical Philosophy Review, 2024
Authors of two new and different but related books on Herbert Marcuse’s contemporary relevance pr... more Authors of two new and different but related books on Herbert Marcuse’s contemporary relevance present their respective arguments and then engage in discussion. Spatializing Marcuse: Critical Theory for Contemporary Times argues that a central problematic in Marcuse’s work—the containment of social change—is at root a spatial problematic. Walker undertakes the unexplored geographical elements of Marcuse’s thought. The Revolutionary Ecological Legacy of Herbert Marcuse—The Ecosocialist EarthCommonWealth Project is a praxis-oriented appeal to those engaged in a range of contemporary social justice struggles. It is keyed to what we are struggling for, not just what we are struggling against. Each author develops revolutionary alternatives to the present system. Ultimately, what intertwines both works is the presentation of a new Marcuse.
This article reviews geographic work on artificial intelligence in the context of labor, surveill... more This article reviews geographic work on artificial intelligence in the context of labor, surveillance, and activism, paying particular attention to developing strengths, as well as current gaps, in the discipline's critical engagement with this emerging topic. Across its sections, we frame artificial intelligence as a societal transformation that cannot and should not be contained to one field or subdiscipline within geography, arguing, instead, that this emerging technology must be drawn into conceptual and empirical debates within all parts of our scholarly community. To conclude, the article identifies ways that geography, especially critical human geography, can contribute to better understanding the complicated and proliferating geographies of artificial intelligence in the world around us and bring a multi-faceted framework to discussions of this disruptive technology.
Recently, a series of so-called "crises" along the United States-Mexico border have drawn signifi... more Recently, a series of so-called "crises" along the United States-Mexico border have drawn significant attention to bordering practices, immigration enforcement, and international migration in the U.S. In Summer 2014, thousands of women and children from Central America arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border along the Rio Grande Valley in south Texas. While many of these arriving migrants voluntarily turned themselves over to immigration authorities to claim asylum, the Obama administration was quick to declare "an urgent humanitarian situation" and "crisis on the border", requesting more than $3.7 billion to expand detention facilities, increase surveillance efforts, and hire additional Border Patrol agents (USBP) and immigration judges (Shear & Peters 2014; Rose 2019). This emphasis on deterrence, rather than aid or assistance, exposed not only the federal governments' inability to respond to the sudden increase in migration
In this introduction, the editors of the special section situate the study of the Mexico-Guatemal... more In this introduction, the editors of the special section situate the study of the Mexico-Guatemala border, lay out the themes of the collection, and summarize the individual contributions.
Big Data & Society, 2020
The Central American migrant caravans of 2018 are best understood as having been precipitated by ... more The Central American migrant caravans of 2018 are best understood as having been precipitated by entangled multi-scalar geopolitical histories among the United States, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Unsurprisingly, the migrants traveling north to the United States garnered widespread attention on social media. So much so that the reaction to the caravan accelerated plans to deploy troops to the US southern border and deny Central Americans the opportunity to seek asylum. This example showcases how the digital world can have exponential material effects. While coverage on border security and migration has been extensive, within political geography, such concerns have rarely been paired with social media. In this article, we take as our object of analysis the digitality or “digital life” of the migrant caravan. Mapping the patterns of migrant caravan-related tweeting paired with the exploration of Twitter’s networked dimensions reveals the platform to be a fundamentally...
International Migration Review, Apr 8, 2020
Against a backdrop of increasingly vitriolic migration policy and practice, The Migrant Passage r... more Against a backdrop of increasingly vitriolic migration policy and practice, The Migrant Passage reminds us with empirical grace that those fleeing Central America and Mexico may be squeezed by the state in different ways, but they will rarely be deterred. Brigden plumbs the ethnographic depths of the transit route from the perspective of the many who have experienced and enacted this sometimestreacherous geography. Composed of nearly 300 interviews with migrants, clergy, human-rights activists, community members, government officials, and family members, the author's method of performing ethnography seeks to mirror migration practice. Like the migrants themselves, Brigden uses improvisation to encounter strangers and rugged terrain ranging from Salvadoran sending communities to the Mexican transit corridor. The research comes to life visually through map-making workshops, which yield powerful pictorial depictions of the route. The Migrant Passage uses a theatrical metaphor to evince the tragedy of clandestine journeys and somewhat expectedly is divided into three acts: Exposition, Rising Action, and Climax. In spite of this choice, the survival plays are both heartwrenching and moving and they provide new insights into some of international migration's more overlooked dimensions. Foremost among the contributions is the importance of improvisation. Migration studies, so long focused on migrant destinations and sending communities, has spent less time on the micro-politics of the inbetween: those encounters along the dangerous and uncertain passage. Unpacking the scholarship beyond conventional points on a map allows for multiple nuanced observations. There is, for example, an acknowledgment of the importance of "the long-reaching shadow of the border for people who may never set foot in the US" (p. 7). Borders, and el norte more generally, figure prominently in Mexican and Central American imaginations, both colloquially and through the mediascape. We hear that longing tinged with hopefulness across nearly every story. Trekking north involves significant hardship and danger, a point adeptly International Migration Review 1-3 ª The Author(s) 2020 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions journals.sagepub.com/home/mrx
Space and Polity
Artificial Intelligence (AI) increasingly shapes our lives, yet a geographic approach to AI has n... more Artificial Intelligence (AI) increasingly shapes our lives, yet a geographic approach to AI has not solidified. This article maps the genealogy of AI across the discipline of geography. Building on claims that AI produces and is bound up with different kinds of geographies, we examine key intersections between AI and human geography's engagement with territories, borders, and the political geographies of war. In the process, we interrogate how and where these new technologies bump up against the larger onto-epistemological landscape of the complicated articulation of space and politics. The goal is to identify a research agenda for engaging AI geographically.
Space and Polity
Artificial Intelligence (AI) increasingly shapes our lives, yet a geographic approach to AI has n... more Artificial Intelligence (AI) increasingly shapes our lives, yet a geographic approach to AI has not solidified. This article maps the genealogy of AI across the discipline of geography. Building on claims that AI produces and is bound up with different kinds of geographies, we examine key intersections between AI and human geography's engagement with territories, borders, and the political geographies of war. In the process, we interrogate how and where these new technologies bump up against the larger onto-epistemological landscape of the complicated articulation of space and politics. The goal is to identify a research agenda for engaging AI geographically.
Human Geography
This paper employs the concept of “invisible colleges” to explore the processes through which spa... more This paper employs the concept of “invisible colleges” to explore the processes through which spaces of critical urban theory are imbricated within a gendered power nexus. It assesses the degree of dominance in hegemonic knowledge production by clusters of scholars, their co-authors, and academic mentors and mentees. Using the example of critical urban theory, we use network graphs to map these concentrated hidden geographies understood collectively as “invisible colleges”. The resultant visualizations reflect the dominance of key scholars and their similarities (e.g. doctoral education, academic mentors, current institutional affiliations, etc.). These heretofore unmapped networks of connectivity provide insight into the masculinized spaces of critical urban theory bringing to the fore important topics for consideration. These include the politics of citation and “double dipping”, or frequent publication in the same journal outlets. In bringing attention to invisible colleges, a co...
Gend Place Cult, 2005
This article explores the ways in which Mexican media works to construct gender and difference in... more This article explores the ways in which Mexican media works to construct gender and difference in relation to the US–Mexico border. Through a discourse analysis of one Mexican newspaper, I argue that discursive violence,'narratives of eviction'and silences are implicated in the construction of women as weak, sexualized objects, and Mexicans as raced, backward 'others'. In so doing, I elaborate several discursive moments, specifically,'woman as anonymous, replaceable body';'woman as victim of the border city';' ...
Big Data and Society, 2020
The Central American migrant caravans of 2018 are best understood as having been precipitated by ... more The Central American migrant caravans of 2018 are best understood as having been precipitated by entangled multi-scalar geopolitical histories among the United States, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Unsurprisingly, the migrants traveling north to the United States garnered widespread attention on social media. So much so that the reaction to the caravan accelerated plans to deploy troops to the US southern border and deny Central Americans the opportunity to seek asylum. This example showcases how the digital world can have exponential material effects. While coverage on border security and migration has been extensive, within political geography, such concerns have rarely been paired with social media. In this article, we take as our object of analysis the digitality or "digital life" of the migrant caravan. Mapping the patterns of migrant caravan-related tweeting paired with the exploration of Twitter's networked dimensions reveals the platform to be a fundamentally spatial technology. Rather than reflect, refract or distort, Twitter produces and (its power) is in turn produced through spatial mechanisms. We present multiple cartographic visual-izations in support of this claim and highlight the ways in which a contextual knowledge of the subject under study-the migrant caravan-can further inform analyses of Big Data.
Walker, Margath A. 2020 “Securitizing Insecurity along Mexico’s Borders” in Bissonnette, A., & Vallet, É. (Eds.). (2020). Borders and Border Walls: In-Security, Symbolism, Vulnerabilities. Routledge., 2020
BOOK CHAPTER
Human Geography, 2019
This paper employs the concept of "invisible colleges" to explore the processes through which spa... more This paper employs the concept of "invisible colleges" to explore the processes through which spaces of critical urban theory are imbricated within a gendered power nexus. It assesses the degree of dominance in hegemonic knowledge production by clusters of scholars, their co-authors, and academic mentors and mentees. Using the example of critical urban theory, we use network graphs to map these concentrated hidden geographies understood collectively as "invisible colleges". The resultant visualizations reflect the dominance of key scholars and their similarities (e.g. doctoral education, academic mentors, current institutional affiliations, etc.). These heretofore unmapped networks of connectivity provide insight into the masculinized spaces of critical urban theory bringing to the fore important topics for consideration. These include the politics of citation and "double dipping", or frequent publication in the same journal outlets. In bringing attention to invisible colleges, a concept that has largely escaped attention in urban studies and geography, we highlight the usefulness of visibility as a technology of equity. En route, the paper describes and visualizes some of the impacts of the proliferation of uneven knowledge production through the coalescing of factors such as path dependency, cumulative advantage, expected inequality and the Matthew and Matilda Effects.
Journal of Latin American Geography, 2018
This article proposes the concept of techno-cultural-rationalities to understand how border secur... more This article proposes the concept of techno-cultural-rationalities to understand how border security is enacted and " technified " along the historically porous boundary between Mexico and Guatemala. Drawing on Herbert Marcuse's description of how the technological apparatus transforms what is considered rational in a society, I examine how technology seeks to neutralize politics and instill rigid classifications on fluid and politicized realities in Mexico's Southern Border Program (Programa Frontera Sur). The effect of discursive maneuvers related to the Program leave the causes and conditions of migration aside and the victors of border fortification unremarked upon. The policy's goals are partially and ambiguously accomplished amidst an array of practices, actors, objects, desires, and discourses mediated by and through the particularities of place, which circumscribe and define technological uses. In taking seriously the emergence of situated practices, which are themselves reconfigured by diverse political contexts, I make two interrelated arguments. The first is that technological rationality operates by administering scarcity through the production of finite securities contingent upon the renewal of spatial hierarchies. The second is that informality and transgression serve as idiomatic modes of governance. Provincializing Marcuse or, directing his work to place-based practices and trans-local modes of engagement, through the analytic of techno-cultural-rationalities buttresses the applicability of such an important thinker and provides critical insight into the reproduction of border regimes across different places.
Ethics Forward Radio, 2018
Whether myth or reality, America's origin story is that of pilgrims arriving in search of a bette... more Whether myth or reality, America's origin story is that of pilgrims arriving in search of a better life and receiving an uncertain but generous welcome from the prior inhabitants. Is that what today's pilgrims can expect when they arrive?
It's the Thanksgiving episode of Ethics Forward, and host Avery Kolers speaks to University of Louisville Geography Professor Maggie Walker, an expert on Central America and the geography of borders, about what is driving the current migrants' caravan and how those who live in the US may be connected to the situation facing residents of the countries of the "Northern Triangle" -- Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. What responsibilities do North Americans have to Central Americans? What would a just policy with respect to migration and borders look like? What is a border, anyway?
thirdspace: a journal of feminist theory & culture, Jan 1, 2010
War and Conflict in Africa poses the seemingly straightforward yet astoundingly complex question ... more War and Conflict in Africa poses the seemingly straightforward yet astoundingly complex question of why Africa has experienced a multiplicity of armed conflicts after the Cold War. The author opens with what he situates as a conundrum, namely that the continent has undergone development in reverse. He places the blame squarely on warfare. The aim of the book is thus to understand why Africa has been plagued by such violence and to analyse international society's efforts to end the various wars and minimise the risk of future conflicts. In investigating the main trends in Africa's conflicts between 1990 and 2009, the text is divided into three parts: contexts, ingredients and responses. Part I is a statistical, conceptual and political background of Africa's wars. Part II explores the relationship between armed conflict and five issues: governance, resources, sovereignty, ethnicity and religion. Part III is an overview and assessment of the responses of major international efforts vis-à-vis particular armed conflicts. The central argument-not one difficult to adhere to-is that armed conflict in post-Cold War Africa is a product of regime survival strategies and politics. In other words, warfare is an outgrowth of state-society relations, a consequence of scalar intersections whereby local political dynamics converge with international networks, structures and processes. Given the ambitious scope of War and Conflict in Africa, the expectation might be that the limitations outweigh the merits. However, somewhat surprisingly, there is little that is fundamentally objectionable. A particular strength, especially if the book is to be used in the undergraduate context, is the systematic dismantlement of what Williams refers to as 'big ideas', simplistic explanatory frameworks that attribute outcomes to single factors. For example, ethnicity is occasionally presented as a rationale for conflict in Sudan or, in the case of Rwanda, colonialism. Williams argues that colonialism, a practice that was far from monolithic in both practice and place, was an underlying factor but not a cause or trigger for contemporary events. Similar critical readings are deployed for resources-which are socially constructed and a product of context-post-colonial elites and greedy criminals. In one sense, setting up the book as a challenge to popular approaches presents a dilemma. Development and geography scholars might sympathetically critique the work for constructing straw men in light of the plethora of nuanced research in this area (cf. Mercer, 1999, and Buhaug and Lujala, 2005, for just two examples), making it less appropriate for upper-level graduate students. Perhaps more successful is the sustained methodological evaluation of the differences embedded in the process of measuring armed conflict. Part I compares three frameworks and data sets that catalogue Africa's conflicts, subsequently revealing the fissures and inconsistencies imbricated in identifying what counts as armed conflict. The finding that consensus does not exist among key sources of data collection, combined with the argument that all statistics are politically charged and fraught with divergent assumptions, is a useful reminder to continuously interrogate overarching truths. The discussion of neopatrimonialism, described as a hybrid of authoritarian bureaucratic systems of governance and informal politics characterised by clientelism and patronage, is essential reading for a variety of disciplines including International Relations and Geography. The non-polemical, matter-of-fact writing style of Williams has the effect of blurring the lines between mundane and revolutionary thinking as when he urges us to shift our gaze from state to social forces and focus on armed non-state actors on the continent. Arguably, those in the NGO sector have already done so, complicating Williams contribution in emblazoning new pathways in this area of study. In addition, there is a fundamental tension throughout the book around the concept of scale, which remains inadequately resolved. Williams rejects state-centric approaches and cautiously embraces the levels-of-analysis construct, a model seeking to explain the relationship between outcome and source. In the process, he fails to elaborate a theoretical foundation for the transnational dimension of warfare while overstating the significance of the regional level. Nevertheless, Williams seems acutely aware of the reification trap and imports the notion of 'scapes' to reconcile some of the inherent contradictions that accompany complex phenomenon. Consequently, War and Conflict in Africa is a trenchant resource for international development specialists and students alike.
