“Geographers can play particularly important roles in providing a constant barrage of criticism and proposals for change both within and outside the discipline…[W]e must be both vivid and convincing, employing all the techniques at our disposal for the purposes of shattering and then rebuilding the structure of conventional opinion.”
Richard Peet (Antipode 1, 1969)
In 2012, the Antipode Staff Reporters* presented both reports on events, happenings, struggles, movements, campaigns, etc. of interest to radical geographers that the mainstream media overlooked, and write-ups of reports on contemporary matters of concern that demonstrated the value of a geographical imagination by suggesting how the work of radical geographers (and their fellow travellers) might cast light on them.
Taking that work, the Reporters – working alone/together/with colleagues from outside academe – offered preliminary analyses of current affairs, sketching out some of the questions it allows one to ask, some of the problems it abstracts into focus, and some of the unexamined presuppositions it challenges. These provisional thoughts, we hope, will instigate discussion and so be drawn out and spun on in a collective process exploring the ways in which radical geography can help us understand and explain the world around us, bringing the undiscussed into discussion, straying beyond established perimeters of opinion, and rendering the familiar strange.
The Staff Reporters have gone back to their dayjobs but we continue to welcome occasional contributions from ‘freelancers’; if you have an idea for a piece please get in touch with Andrew Kent: [email protected]
*The Antipode Staff Reporters first (and last) appeared in the journal’s very first number.
Christian Anderson
PhD candidate in Geography
Graduate Center of the City University of New York
ContactChristian Anderson is a PhD candidate in Geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His research explores the relationships among social reproduction, everyday life, urban space, inequality, and ‘global’ or extra-local processes. His dissertation tries to work out some of these relationships through a close ethnographic study of everyday life on a few blocks of a single street (West 46th) in Hell’s Kitchen/Clinton, New York City. Beyond dissertation research, Christian is also thinking about social suffering and bedbugs, the international ‘precariat’, and finding interesting ways to collaborate with others. See Christian’s posts here.
Lalit Batra
PhD student, Department of Geography
University of Minnesota
ContactLalit Batra is a PhD student in the Department of Geography at the University of Minnesota. Before coming to Minnesota he spent one year at the CUNY Graduate Center. He has worked for several years with a variety of social justice movements in India; in particular, he has been involved in organising slumdwellers and informal sector workers in Delhi and other parts of the country. As part of his research he is looking at the intersection of work processes, caste networks, everyday practices, and the corporeality of the body through a study of the sewage workers in Delhi to think about the contours of post-colonial working class politics in India. See Lalit’s posts here.
Rachel Brahinsky
PhD candidate, Department of Geography
University of California, Berkeley
ContactRachel Brahinsky is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation research is on racial politics and urban development in San Francisco. Her interdisciplinary work is animated by a fascination with cities, people, and geographic histories. Rachel recently co-organised a one-day symposium at UC Berkeley, ‘Race, Space and Nature’. See Rachel’s posts here.
Nathan Clough
Visiting Assistant Professor of Geography
University of Minnesota, Duluth
ContactNathan Clough is Visiting Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. He completed his PhD in 2010 at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities where his dissertation examined social movement resistance to the 2008 Republican National Convention. Nathan’s research interests involve the spatialities of radical social movements, policing, public space and security in the United States, and autonomous Marxist theory. See Nathan’s posts here.
Andy Davies
Political geographer
University of Liverpool
ContactAndy Davies is a political geographer interested in the spaces of power, activism and resistance. He’s particularly interested in how political actions can create new identities and solidarities, and how transnational activist practices can reshape our understandings of what it means to be politically engaged. Empirically, Andy is interested in how these issues affect South Asia. His doctoral work examined the pro-Tibet Movement using social movement and postcolonial theories, and he’s currently working on a project examining transnationalism and subaltern politics in the Indian Ocean region. See Andy’s posts here.
Sean Gillon
Postdoctoral researcher
University of Wisconsin-Madison
ContactSean Gillon’s research primarily focuses on: environmental politics and governance, especially related to agriculture and energy; political ecological, political economic and institutional analyses of nature-society relations; and agrifood studies and agroecology. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher on the interdisciplinary Water Sustainability and Climate Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This work aims to identify effective institutions and interventions for improving linked social and ecological outcomes in regional resource governance. He has a PhD in Environmental Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz; his dissertation research focused on agriculture, political economy and nature in US Midwestern biofuel production. See Sean’s posts here.
Jesse Goldstein
PhD candidate in Sociology
CUNY’s Graduate Center
ContactJesse Goldstein is a PhD candidate in Sociology at CUNY’s Graduate Center. His research aims to understand the shifting forms that waste has taken through the history of capitalism. His dissertation focuses specifically on how proposals to ‘green’ capitalism are re-working the category of waste, which is increasingly being articulated at the scale of impending planetary, or biospheric, destruction. Before coming to CUNY, Goldstein received an MA in Politics at York University, and before that was a practicing artist and member of the collective art studio Space 1026 in Philadelphia. He is a founding member of the Historical Materialism: New York organizing collective, and the Space Time Research Collective. See Jesse’s posts here.
Punam Khosla
Scholar-activist
York University, Toronto, Canada
ContactPunam Khosla, scholar-activist at York University in Toronto, Canada, is currently writing her doctoral dissertation “Rethinking Marx’s ‘Primitive’ Accumulation as a materialist corporeal logic of everyday gendered, racialised and sexualised violence”. She builds on her history as an organiser and popular educator in feminist, labour, anti-racist/imperialist, LGBT, media and cultural sectors. Her work is on the socially marginalised, yet materially invaluable lives of poor women of colour which span global topographies yet are rendered invisible. She analyses how the historic and multiscalar violences of race, gender and sexual appropriation are ongoing implicit preconditions of the explicit capitalist order. See Punam’s posts here.
David Meek
Doctoral candidate, Department of Anthropology
University of Georgia
ContactDavid Meek is a doctoral candidate in the University of Georgia’s Department of Anthropology. With an MSc in Conservation Biology and Political Ecology from Antioch University New England, David’s academic interest continues to surround how people learn through political participation, and the potential impact this learning has on agricultural practices, and concomitant landscape changes. For his dissertation research, he’s focusing on the intersection of informal learning, formal education, and agrarian landscape change within the context of an Amazonian settlement of the Brazilian Landless Worker’s Movement (MST). See David’s posts here.
Naomi Millner
Doctoral student, independent researcher and advocacy worker
University of Bristol
ContactNaomi Millner is a doctoral student, independent researcher and advocacy worker based at the University of Bristol. Having focused her thesis on the political geographies of ‘irregular’ migration and solidarity activism, she plans to develop projects which focus on critical capacities for change within contested spaces. With a strong commitment to radical pedagogies and knowledge exchange, she’s interested in loci of political collaboration in the past and present, including migrant-led and solidaristic activism in post-war France; resistance to the enclosure of the ‘commons’ in England; and the experimental reshaping of settlement design. Her wider interests include global geographies of further and higher education, asylum politics, urban transformations, and critical development studies. See Naomi’s posts here.
Sara Nelson
Graduate student
University of Minnesota in Minneapolis
ContactSara Nelson is a graduate student at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. She has a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA. Her research interests include climate-related financial products and emissions trading markets, and in particular the integration of financial markets into policy ‘solutions’ aiming to foster resilience and adaptability to climate change. Her research is currently turning toward the oil-dollar crisis of the 1970s in an effort to better understand the integration of finance and energy markets in the current moment, and to place the political economy of oil in the context of the multiple crises of Fordism. See Sara’s posts here.
Kareem Rabie
PhD candidate in anthropology
City University of New York Graduate Center
ContactKareem Rabie is a PhD candidate in anthropology at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is currently writing a dissertation on privatization, new town development, and the state-building project in the West Bank. See Kareem’s posts here.