The Politics of Cramped Space: Dilemmas of Action, Containment and Mobility (original) (raw)
Related papers
The People Are Missing: Cramped Space, Social Relations, and the Mediators of Politics
This article investigates the place of social relations in Deleuze and Guattari's figure of 'cramped space', a figure integral to their 'minor politics'. Against social and political theories that seek the source of political practice in a collective identity, the theory of cramped space contends that politics arises among those who lack and refuse coherent identity, in their encounter with the impasses, limits, or impossibilities of individual and collective subjectivity. Cramped space, as Deleuze puts it, is a condition where 'the people are missing'. This is not, however, a condition of asocial isolation, but one full of social relations; the loss of identity is a condition comprised only of social relations. The ramifications of this thesis are here explored through Marx's critique of citizenship, the socio-historical conjuncture of cramped space in relation to the 'communization' problematic, and the Palestinian mediator of sumud.
Allegra Lab, 2024
William Walter, Charles Heller, and Lorenzo Pezzani’s Viapolitics: Borders, Migration, and the Power of Locomotion stands as a uniquely articulated materialist engagement with the political, governmental, and scholarly objectification of migration as a “social” issue. While positioning “viapolitics” within a trajectory informed by analyses of biopolitics, the governance of populations, and the formation of the subject, the volume displaces the centrality of migrant subjectivity by foregrounding the vehicle as an “epistemic device to unravel the edifice of scholarly analyses, governmental practice, and policy discourses built around migration and borders” (11). A focus on the vehicle allows for the ambiguous intersections between people moving, the things that move them, and the spaces in which they move to emerge as complex webs of contextualisation, interpellation, and assertion. Tracing migrant mobility through spaces, experiences, temporalities, borders, landscapes, and transformations, the volume asks how questions of belonging, distinction, and common cause come to be understood in terms of movement and how movement itself takes shape as a form of power.
Geography and the Politics of Mobility
2003
Introduction to the publication documenting projects of five international art collectives, which pursue questions of global miration, changing work environments, and worldwide information systems, and outline alternative models for a new geographic praxis. Art scholars Irit Rogoff, Brian Holmes and media theorist Lisa Parks critically enlight in their theoretical essays the metaphor of Geography towards a new level of knowledge. With art projects by Bureau d’étude, Frontera Sur RRVT, Macrolab, multiplicity and Raqs Media Collective. Generali Foundation, 2003
Dynamics of globalization : mobility , space and regulation 1
2012
Dynamics of globalization: mobility, space and regulation Recent research at the Institute of Geography in Neuchâtel emphasises the pivotal status of mobility in the dynamics of globalization. Drawing on work in mobility studies, the article presents a basic analytical framework suitable for studying the «mobile constitution of society». It argues more specifically that the relationship between mobility, space and regulation offers a worthwhile analytical focus for exploring current 11
Constructing the forced migrant and the politics of space and place-making
Mobility is one of the defining concepts of globalization processes. For some migrants, however, mobility is restricted by international and national laws as well as sociopolitical discourses, which regulate the migrant body and her ability to create social relations. Based on interviews in asylum seeker accommodations in Germany, this study illustrates how asylum seekers are spatially constructed and arrested through bureaucratic labeling and assignment to heterotopias and as a discursive location of transience and difference. Those processes freeze the forced migrant in place, in social and semiotic spaces, and position it as a politicized discursive location. The positioning is indicative of monitoring the Other as a symbol of threat to the nation in times of risk. Overall, the study illustrates the tensions between transnational mobility and fixity and the intersections between globalization, communication, social, legal, and political practice, and space/place-making.
"Mobility Justice’’: a new means to examine and influence the politics of mobility
Applied Mobilities, 2019
This essay examines two recent texts that embrace and extend the kinopolitical lens of the new mobilities paradigm by creating a framework for assessing the fairness of (im)mobilities: Mimi Sheller’s 2018 monograph, Mobility Justice, and Nancy Cook and David Butz’s 2019 edited collection, Mobilities, Mobility Justice and Social justice. Both books build upon theoretical accounts of rights to space and transport by promoting a holistic valuation of (im)mobilities through the development of the concept of ‘mobility justice’. This concept combines the theoretical repertoires of the new mobilities paradigm and political philosophies of justice. In doing so ‘mobility justice’ employs a mobile ontology, which is essential to examining the constitutive processes of (im)mobilities, together with a sensitivity to the fairness of movements in terms of rights, freedoms, capabilities, distribution and domination. The concept of ‘mobility justice’ is employed through the books in a diverse range of contexts. This is particularly the case for Mobilities, Mobility Justice and Social justice, in which authors examine local political battles in terms of how fair the on-the-ground (im)mobilities are. In contrast, Sheller’s book seeks to define the ethical elements of ‘mobility justice’, in order to develop a moral and theoretical framework that can not only be used to further knowledge of real world mobilities, but also to promote more equitable mobile environments. This research and theoretical development is timely because it identifies the multi-scalar nature of mobility injustice, and subsequently connects local battles for specific mobility rights to global movements for ‘mobility justice’.
Dis-Placed: Space, Settlement, and Agency
International Journal of Islamic Architecture, 2021
This article introduces the special issue ‘Dis-placed’. Questioning the term ‘refugee’ as an identity marker and pointing at the problematic connotations it embodies, the article explores the spatial forms of refugee experience. The knowledge of space, as produced within disciplines such as geography, urban planning, and architecture, is deployed by states to limit the movements of forced migrants across and within national borders. In response, the article calls for social/spatial justice, arguing that this can only be achieved through the blurring of the boundaries between host and refugee identities. The contributions in this special issue present investigations on different facets of the spatiality of forced migration through various disciplinary approaches and methodologies. Taken together, they underline the importance of the link between space and refugee agency in tackling forced migration.
Distance matters: mobilities and the politics of distance [Mobilities]
Distance constitutes one of the foundations of geographical discourse, and yet it is among the least discussed of these foundations. Rather than contemplating distance as an explanatory tool, the paper takes distance itself, as well as its development and implications, as requiring explanation in their own right. It looks at the role played by definitions and measurements of distance in the production of territory and private property in land; in the governing of moving bodies; and in the phenomenological and affective design of space. The paper’s main argument is that distance should be de-constructed and re-politicized by being brought back into the field of mobilities.