Assemblage thinking has increasingly made its way in geographic research and scholarship. Assemblage has been approached as a means of describing socio‐spatial formations, as a set of concepts used to understand their (re)production, and as an ethos animating geographic thought. In this paper, I critically reflect on the third usage, assemblage‐as‐ethos, which remains underdeveloped in assemblage geographies. Assemblage has been heralded as contributing a new or renewed ethos to geographic scholarship in so far as it calls into question the stability and historical necessity of socio‐spatial formations. By forwarding an ontology that privileges potential, transformation, and flux over ideas of identity, structure, and system, geographers claim that assemblage opens up new avenues for thinking about politics and social change. However, I argue here that overly simplistic investments in this ethos can function to obscure the relations of power that indelibly shape socio‐spatial formations, thus rearticulating and naturalising dominant social and symbolic regimes of value. To develop these concerns, I synthesise a set of critiques levelled at assemblage geographies, ones that revolve around the place of agency, history, and structure in its formulation. Adding to these concerns, I argue that assemblage geographies' emphasis on flux, potential, and transformation can rearticulate racialised discourses of neoliberalism, thus undermining claims to being a radical or even critical geographic paradigm. In closing, I provide some avenues for developing assemblage into a more critical ethos for geography.
For several decades resilience thinking has served as a major theoretical lens for social‐ecological research, with geographers playing important roles in both advancing the theory and offering meaningful critique. In recent years resilience thinking has also emerged as a promising tool for the assessment of food systems, yet there is significant disagreement among scholars as to the best way to apply resilience thinking to food systems. At the heart of these disagreements lie a set of conceptual tensions that have long existed in the resilience community regarding best practices for operationalizing resilience and the extent to which resilience thinking can (or should) engage with issues of social justice and power dynamics. Geographers, particularly those working in the fields of political ecology and critical physical geography, are well positioned to navigate these tensions and contribute to the growing scholarship on food system resilience through what I call an instrumental‐reflexive approach to resilience thinking. Drawing on scholarship on the role of environmental science in political ecology and critical physical geography, I develop an approach to resilience that deploys empirical assessments to provide
- PAR ID:
- 10449841
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley-Blackwell
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Geography Compass
- Volume:
- 15
- Issue:
- 7
- ISSN:
- 1749-8198
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
more » « less
-
more » « less
Urban areas are dynamic ecological systems defined by interdependent biological, physical, and social components. The emergent structure and heterogeneity of urban landscapes drives biotic outcomes in these areas, and such spatial patterns are often attributed to the unequal stratification of wealth and power in human societies. Despite these patterns, few studies have effectively considered structural inequalities as drivers of ecological and evolutionary outcomes and have instead focused on indicator variables such as neighborhood wealth. In this analysis, we explicitly integrate ecology, evolution, and social processes to emphasize the relationships that bind social inequities—specifically racism—and biological change in urbanized landscapes. We draw on existing research to link racist practices, including residential segregation, to the heterogeneous patterns of flora and fauna observed by urban ecologists. In the future, urban ecology and evolution researchers must consider how systems of racial oppression affect the environmental factors that drive biological change in cities. Conceptual integration of the social and ecological sciences has amassed considerable scholarship in urban ecology over the past few decades, providing a solid foundation for incorporating environmental justice scholarship into urban ecological and evolutionary research. Such an undertaking is necessary to deconstruct urbanization’s biophysical patterns and processes, inform equitable and anti-racist initiatives promoting justice in urban conservation, and strengthen community resilience to global environmental change.
-
more » « less
Abstract Bringing human–robot interaction (HRI) into conversation with scholarship from human geography, this paper considers how socially interactive robots become important agents in the production of social space and explores the utility of core geographic concepts of
scale andplace to critically examine evolving robotic spatialities. The paper grounds this discussion through reflections on a collaborative, interdisciplinary research project studying the development and deployment of interactive museum tour-guiding robots on a North American university campus. The project is a collaboration among geographers, roboticists, a digital artist, and the directors/curators of two museums, and involves experimentation in the development of a tour-guiding robot with a “socially aware navigation system” alongside ongoing critical reflection into the socio-spatial context of human–robot interactions and their future possibilities. The paper reflects on the tensions between logics of control and contingency in robotic spatiality and argues that concepts of scale and place can help reflect on this tension in a productive way while calling attention to a broader range of stakeholders who should be included in robotic design and deployment. -
more » « less
Abstract In this paper, I examine how collaboration can yield new insights into inquiries of legal geography and transform the ways that legal work is carried out. Drawing on feminist methodologies, I put forward feminist legal collaboration – a method and praxis – through which legal geographers can address the everyday manifestations and contestations of power in relation to law and space, while at the same time build alliances with people whose (legal) rights are currently contested. I reflect on my experiences of doing everyday collaborative work with legal practitioners, activists, and forced migrants at community centres in Denmark. Through two empirical examples of legal collaboration, I show how collaboration offers insights into migration law and legal procedures that are impossible to gain from just reading the law. The process of collaborating can teach us about the politics in law and reveal political possibilities within these socio‐legal spaces. We might think of feminist legal collaboration as a method and praxis that takes place through direct engagement with the law and legal practices in order to co‐produce knowledge and radically reconfigure existing approaches to legal counselling. The feminist legal collaborative approach, which I put forward here, is not limited to research on the legal geographies of (forced) migration. Rather, I imagine that feminist legal collaboration can be used in relation to different legal issues, grounded in the local empirical context(s) and attending to the needs and injustices on the ground.
-
null (Ed.)Community geography is a growing subfield that provides a framework for relevant and engaged scholarship. In this paper, we define community geography as a form of research praxis, one that involves academic and public scholars with the goal of co-produced and mutually-beneficial knowledge. Community geography draws from a pragmatist model of inquiry, one that views communities as emergent through a recursive process of problem definition and social action. We situate the growth of community geography programs as rooted in two overlapping but distinct traditions: disciplinary development of participatory methodologies and institutional traditions of community engagement in American higher education. We then trace the historical development of these programs, identifying common themes and outlining several challenges that community geographers should prioritize as this subfield continues to grow.more » « less
