Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

In 2005 the Australian Queensland state government passed the Wild Rivers Act to preserve the natural heritage of rivers. My interest is not with all Wild Rivers but rather with those in Cape York where the public debate has been fierce and divisive. Prominent Cape York Aboriginal leaders and organisations condemned the bill. A coalition of north Queensland Traditional Owners support the policy and call for the ‘proper Indigenous management of country’ and the right people to speak for country. The conflict is an example of the argument put forward by some scholars that Cape York politics is being reconfigured: there is a schism between regionally focused visions of Indigenous futures and locally focused traditionalist visions held by community leaders ‘living on country’. Analysing the Wild Rivers debate in conjunction with Holmes's and Smith's findings, one is struck by the emerging political ecology: rivers are becoming political actors. By bringing the postcolonial into relation with more-than-human praxis, I want to prise open this debate to consider what the public controversy conceals, what political practices are emerging, and what this demands of scholarship. When rivers become political actors the concept and practice of social justice are potentially reconfigured. What happens when we take seriously rivers as actors in a multirealist world? We know that rivers sustain and reproduce life, but which life worlds are being considered?

The diagnostic of the Anthropocene proposes a new geological epoch that designates humans as beings capable of geomorphic force, shaping Earth systems on a par with inhuman forces. This social geology marks an ascendance to inhuman planetary power fuelled by fossil fuels from the Carboniferous. Yet nowhere are the geophysical, genomic, and social narratives of this geologic subjectification considered together to interrogate these geologic capacities, not just in terms of impacts on the Earth, but as forces that subjects share—geologic forces that compose and differentiate corporeal and collective biopolitical formations. I argue in this paper that the concept of the Anthropocene is axiomatic of new understandings of time, matter, and agency for the human as a collective being and as a subject capable of geomorphic acts; a being that not just affects geology, but is an intemperate force within it. This immersion of humanity into geologic time suggests both a remineralisation of the origins of the human and a shift in the human timescale from biological life course to that of epoch and species—life. The paper is structured as a modest conversation between two fossilised subjects that define the imagined origin and ending of the narrative arc of the Anthropocene—one from the prehistory of human origins, the other from the future of the Anthropocene—in a conversation about time, geology, and inhuman becomings. Examining fossils as material and discursive knots in the narrative arc of human becoming, I argue for a ‘geological turn’ that takes seriously not just our biological (or biopolitical) life, but also our geological (or geopolitical) life and its forms of differentiation. Fossils unlock this life—death, time—untimely, corporeal—incorporeal equation, suggesting the need for a theory of the geologic and a reckoning with the forces of mute matter in lively bodies: a corporeality that is driven by inhuman forces. This paper investigates what I am calling “geologic life”—a mineralogical dimension of human composition that remains currently undertheorised in social thought and is directly relevant for the material, temporal, and corporeal conceptualisation of fossil fuels. This geologic life prompts a need to rethink the coherency of the human as a territorialising force of the Earth in its prehistoric, contemporary, and future-orientated incarnation. As such, this paper proposes a speculative theoretical framework for thinking modes of geologic life within the Anthropocene.

There is often a substantial gap between ‘vision’ and ‘execution’ in neoliberal governance, yet this gap is rarely acknowledged within neoliberal discourse. In the realm of environmental governance this has manifested in increased reliance on neoliberal conservation strategies despite mounting evidence concerning their common failure to perform as intended. This paper seeks to explain this contradictory situation, drawing on Foucaultian as well as Lacanian theorization via Žižek to suggest that neoliberal conservation's ‘virtualistic’ vision commonly necessitates antineoliberal regulation, for the deeply flawed understandings of human behavior and social action in which it is grounded frequently compel intervention contrary to free market principles in order to preserve the goals that market mechanisms are intended to achieve. I contend, further, that neglect of the characteristic disjuncture between vision and execution in neoliberal conservation may take the form of ‘fetishistic disavowal’, functioning as a ‘public secret’ (something generally known but not generally articulated) in terms of which explicit identification of the disjuncture, paradoxically, intensifies its obfuscation. This analysis is illustrated through discussion of prominent conservation strategies in Latin America, particularly ecotourism and payment for environmental services, which are commonly described as neoliberal market mechanisms yet in practice operate quite differently.

Human geography's longstanding preoccupation with the intersection of time and space resonates with accounts of urban informal settlements which have indirectly highlighted change over time as a key characteristic; recent postcolonial urban research explores the implications of multiple and dynamic temporalities for marginalised groups in cities of the Global South. Drawing on these debates, this paper applies an explicit focus on the temporal dimension of space in the context of urban informal settlements. Despite decades of research into the marginalised, self-built neighbourhoods which house many urban poor residents in Global Southern cities, these settlements continue to be portrayed in terms of a reductive and simplistic formal/informal dualism, meaning they are often treated as outside ‘normal’ urban considerations. Based on research in two informal settlements in Xalapa, Mexico, this paper explores residents' perceptions of change over time in order to reveal the multiple temporalities that exist within the city and across these neighbourhoods, offering alternatives to dominant marginalising discourses through the construction of identity over time, and time-bound tactics of resistance. These narratives are contextualised by constraints expressed in diverging or ambivalent accounts; but they suggest going beyond dualistic or nostalgic discourses to frame these neighbourhoods as places in the city.

The fight against impunity continues along Mexico's border, especially in the industrial hub of Ciudad Juárez. In the 1990s feminists brought this fight to international attention as they launched a transnational justice movement against feminicidio, the killing of women with impunity. In this paper I create a feminist and Marxist frame to show that there is much to be learned from the fight against feminicidio for the ongoing struggles in a border city that is now also notorious for juvenicidio, the killing of youth with impunity, which is occurring in relation to the Mexican government's declaration of war against organized crime. By situating these justice struggles within a context of North American securitization and neoliberal gentrification along the Mexico—US border, I argue that the feminist fight against impunity exposes the synergy of symbolic and material processes within the drug war. And I argue that this synergy seeks to generate value through the extermination of whole populations, especially of working poor women and their families in this border city today.

The sensory turn has made a pronounced attempt to broaden the focus in social and cultural geography to encompass the entire sensory spectrum, with the aim of counterbalancing what is perceived to have been the disproportionate attention granted to visual geographies and the act of seeing. In respect of critically understanding the geographies of difference that characterise Deaf citizens' experience in the contemporary city, this paper calls for a moment in geography to take stock of the signature that visual awareness bears in the social life of the Deaf city, and also to consider the hearingness implicit in geographical commentary on the role of sound in the reproduction of place. Reading urban and public spaces from a Deaf-centred perspective, I draw on parallel discussions from social geography and Deaf Studies to critically deconstruct the phenomena underpinning the aural bias that is deeply embedded in the social fabric, and which finds continuous expression in the intangible aural architectures of modern life. Dispositions and attitudes towards the ‘normal’ hearing body and towards hearing ontological engagements with sound and speech serve to maintain the city's audist and phonocentric inclinations. Here, the manner in which the right to the Deaf-friendly city is jeopardised is made explicit through empirical accounts from Deaf people in Ireland and England whose everyday geographies are characterised by the negotiation of urban spaces that were designed according to the needs of an assumed homogenous hearing public.

I walk fantastically with the cows along the stock route of the former Newmarket saleyards and abattoirs, through what have become the regenerated residential estates of Lynch's Bridge/Kensington Banks in Melbourne, Australia. I challenge the practice of heritage conservation as a closed story of the past ‘as it was’, which projects a set of sanitised meanings that allow for neither subtext nor counter readings. I problematise the concrete machine of heritage protection utilising Deleuze and Guattari's ideas of faciality, where reassuring mosaic faces of cows going to the saleyards belong, but anguished faces of cows at the slaughterhouse do not. I call upon the cow's face as potential probe head to forge connections between past—present—future in hot heritage practices which challenge people to question their values and actions. Rediscovery of the cow beneath the face at Newmarket saleyards and abattoirs could intervene in people's habitual patterns of thinking and acting, triggering renegotiation of cultural meanings of ethics, welfare, and rights, regarding not only nonhuman animals, but also Othered humans, such as those penned in detention centres. Through experiential experiment rather than controlled interpretation, hot heritage practices may create evental spaces for thinking and acting otherwise.

In this paper we put forward the concept of architectural enthusiasm—a collective passion and shared emotional affiliation for buildings and architecture. Through this concept and empirical material based on participation in the architectural tours of The Twentieth Century Society (a UK-based architectural conservation group), we contribute to recent work on the built environment and geographies of architecture in three ways: first, we reinforce the importance of emotion to people's engagements with buildings, emphasising the shared and practised nature of these engagements; second, we highlight the role of architectural enthusiasts as agents with the potential to shape and transform the built environment; and third, we make connections between (seemingly) disparate engagements with buildings through a continuum of practice incorporating urbex, local history, architectural practice and training, and mass architectural tourism. Unveiling these continuities has important implications for future research into the built environment, highlighting the need to take emotion seriously in all sorts of professional as well as enthusiastic encounters with buildings, and unsettling the categories of amateur and expert within architectural practices.

Despite references to photography as a tool for consuming and constructing the tourist experience, little attention has been afforded to the effects of such practice. In this paper I therefore seek to unpack the ethics of the seemingly fleeting relationships between tourists and host communities that emerge during photographic encounters. Focusing on the emergent interactions between tourists and locals who are photographed, I explore the social and cultural values that underpin tourists' ethical considerations of whether or not to photograph local people. In doing so, I first contend that tourists draw upon a range of photographic strategies as they negotiate the moral maze of ethical considerations during photographic encounters and engagement with locals at destinations. Secondly, I suggest that the ethical considerations of tourist photographic practice find genesis in a web of partial knowledges, subjective interpretations, and reflexive performances of self and others. In doing so, I propose that tourist practice is driven by subjective interpretations of that which is appropriate, acceptable, or responsible with regard to photographing. Thus, I contend, an immanence of ethical consideration arises in the immediacy of the moment of photographing, as photography emerges as a complex fusion of both predictable and reactionary practices that align general ethical viewpoints with unpredictable ethical responses.

After the ‘Bamboo Curtain’ closed China to foreign social scientists in 1949, anthropologists shifted their attention to those ‘residues’ of China beyond the control of the People's Republic. In the process, formerly heterodox and out-of-the-way locales such as Taiwan and the New Territories of Hong Kong were made into the exemplars par excellence of Chinese culture. In this paper I argue that the peculiar spatialities of this Cold-War-era anthropology of ‘residual China’ have potentially generative consequences for a rethinking of the after-actor-network-theory (aANT) focus on social topologies. In particular, these spatialities' simultaneous enactment of the presence and absence of Chineseness evinces parallels with and prompts revisions to the notion of a “fire topology”. These revisions in turn suggest the necessity of inventing novel topological models for (more-than-) human realities in order to work against both the creeping naturalization of after-actor-network-theory analytic frames in particular and the routinization of theory more broadly.

This paper attempts to rethink the role of things in the ongoing constitution of life. It seeks to build upon existing accounts of things in the social sciences where the measure of things is taken in their capacity to trigger an emotional response in a human subject, arguing that it is also necessary to consider things where they do not disrupt and are not registered emotionally. It is argued that things can be usefully considered as a continual series of affective ‘micro-shocks’ working to generate affective atmospheres. These premises are explored through a brief empirical excursion into an autobiographical account of childhood life, Herbert Read's The Innocent Eye (1933). Read's account is sensitive to the role of things in life and adopts what might be understood as a stance of ‘childlike wonder’ towards a world full of things, where the human-as-thing is in a state of becoming in the midst of these. The paper concludes by reflecting on the implications of this discussion for three key issues: first, the usefulness of understanding things as affective; second, the thing-ness of things beyond their emotional rendering; third, the importance of experimentation in the reception and narration of things for better accounting for the work done by things.