Antipode volume 47, number 3

Today we sent Antipode volume 47, number 3 to the publishers. All of the papers, bar two, are already available online, and will be brought together as a collection in the June 2015 print edition.

It’ll be an issue of two parts, opening with a symposium: “World, City, Queer“. Edited by Natalie Oswin (McGill University), it explores the ways in which LGBT politics are tied to the world’s cities at a time when sexual difference is increasingly marshalled as a symbol of progress and modernity for the purposes of fostering national and urban competitiveness. Staging a conversation between work on sexuality and the city and debates on global urbanism, the symposium offers a framework for understanding the “worlding” of queerness that focuses on the relationships between globalisation, urbanisation and sexual politics…

Queer Worldings: The Messy Art of Being Global in Manila and New York by Martin Manalansan (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign);

The Queer Afterlife of the Postcolonial City: (Trans)gender Performance and the War of Beautification by Bobby Benedicto (McGill University);

Welcoming the World? Hospitality, Homonationalism, and the London 2012 Olympics by Phil Hubbard (University of Kent) and Eleanor Wilkinson (University of Leeds);

Pinkwashing, Homonationalism, and Israel-Palestine: The Conceits of Queer Theory and the Politics of the Ordinary by Jason Ritchie (Florida International University);

Queering Critiques of Neoliberalism in India: Urbanism and Inequality in the Era of Transnational “LGBTQ” Rights by Svati Shah (University of Massachusetts, Amherst); and

Buenos Aires Beyond (Homo)Sexualized Urban Entrepreneurialism: The Geographies of Queered Tango by Miguel Kanai (University of Miami).

The rest of the issue consists of eight papers on core Antipode themes:

Merav Amir (Queen’s University Belfast) and Hagar Kotef’s (Tel Aviv University) Limits of Dissent, Perils of Activism: Spaces of Resistance and the New Security Logic focuses on the shooting in December 2003 of an Israeli activist by the Israeli Army at a demonstration organised by Anarchists Against the Wall. Their paper examines the conditions that made this event, and similar shootings that followed, possible, situating the activism of AAtW in a context of securitisation.

Ståle Holgersen’s (Lund University) Economic Crisis, (Creative) Destruction, and the Current Urban Condition investigates the contemporary crisis through the lens of different, often competing Marxist crisis theories and other approaches developed in human geography. Both, he argues, have something valuable to offer to those thinking within and beyond the current conjuncture.

Not yet available on Early View, Maria Kaika (University of Manchester) and Luca Ruggiero’s (Università di Catania) Class Meets Land: The Social Mobilisation of Land as Catalyst for Urban Change analyses the “active yet neglected” role of local class struggle over land in negotiating new forms of urbanity, demonstrating how “local struggles over land are as relevant to globalised urbanisations as they were to industrial capitalism”. From their historical geography of the Pirelli company, its workers, and its Milan industrial space from the 19th century to the 21st, local class struggle emerges not as the outcome of, but as a condition for urban restructuring.

Alice Kelly’s (University of California, Berkeley) The Crumbling Fortress: Territory, Access, and Subjectivity Production in Waza National Park, Northern Cameroon investigates the rise of a new era in biodiversity conservation – and the consequences for older protected areas that lose funding and management and risk becoming open access spaces. Kelly mobilises work on territory and subjectivity in this study of the costs and benefits, gains and losses, as a conservation “fortress” crumbles.

Margaret Marietta Ramírez’s (University of Washington) The Elusive Inclusive: Black Food Geographies and Racialized Food Spaces evaluates efforts to make a community food project more inclusive to “vulnerable populations” and thus increase participation. Assessing how power asymmetries are (not) addressed in different organisations, the paper looks at their historical-geographical imaginations and how knowledges of slavery and dispossession can inform progressive activism today.

Jennifer Spiegel’s (Concordia University) Rêve Général Illimité? The Role of Creative Protest in Transforming the Dynamics of Space and Time During the 2012 Quebec Student Strike takes us to the spring of 2012 and student strikes against proposed tuition-fee increases. The paper brings together scholarship on protest tactics and the role of space to analyse a range of creative and affective interventions as well as the debates that emerged concerning their role within the movement.

Anna Stanley’s (University of Toronto) Wasted Life: Labour, Liveliness, and the Production of Value explores “the ways in which life links up with value” in Canadian uranium mines and at the time of a major public inquiry into mining’s health and ecological effects. Stanley puts scholarship on governmentality, risk, securitisation and waste to work to anatomise value production in the mining economy

Finally, Andrew Zitcer’s (Drexel University) Food Co-ops and the Paradox of Exclusivity examines how consumer food cooperatives wrestle with the exclusions that often accompany efforts to create conditions for a strong identification among members. What food co-ops sell, their business practices, and how they market themselves to potential members are scrutinised, and Zitcer concludes that overcoming “the paradox of exclusivity” requires moves towards affordability, accessibility, and reflective practice.

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