In this section of the website you’ll find material supplementing work published in Antipode, as well as some ‘creative matter’ including Cerebral Celibacy by Adrina Bardekjian Ambrosii – a poem from December 2009 about that North American rite of passage, the comprehensive exam. (Please get in touch if you’ve something to share; Antipode was home to some superb artwork in the past, and we’d love to be able to continue that tradition.)

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Dia Da Costa (2015) Sentimental capitalism in contemporary India: Art, heritage, and development in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. Antipode 47(1):74-97

Forthcoming in Antipode 47(1) in 2015, Dia Da Costa’s paper uses a critical cultural politics approach and deploys the concept of ‘sentimental capitalism’ to problematize the burgeoning creative economy discourse while analyzing spaces of art and heritage production in Ahmedabad, India. It situates the Cotton Exchange exhibit (April 2013) in an erstwhile mill in recent histories of mill closures, genocide, creative economy initiatives, and development aspirations of revitalizing degraded space. Dia argues that in remaking place, art mobilizes sentiments—here, nostalgia, and hope—while erasing violence and inequality. Sentimental capitalism is at work in the exhibition by: [i] mobilizing artisans as entrepreneurial agents not victims of capitalism; [ii] constructing art’s aura of grassroots participation and artisanal empowerment while obscuring displacement and exploitation; and [iii] fostering cult-like regard for art’s intrinsic and instrumental value as non-profit and its capacity to engender opportunity, recognition, and even property. While another spatial politics is possible, in Ahmedabad today, art is being mobilized to obscure dispossession and exploitation in the name of urban revitalization and heritage production.

The paper includes five figures, and four supplements – figures S1, S2, S3 and S4 – are available here.

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Mazen Labban (2014) Against shareholder value: Accumulation in the oil industry and the biopolitics of labour under finance. Antipode 46(2):477-496

Published in Antipode 46(2) in 2014, the point of departure for Mazen Labban’s paper is those theses on the financialisation of capitalism that postulate a shift from investment in material growth to financial channels, with the implication that the extraction of value from the labour process is no longer the central locus of corporate profitability and thus that the antagonism between labour and capital in the accumulation process has been displaced by the tension between corporate managers and financial markets. Mazen’s paper challenges claims of both financialisation and its political implications. Seven figures not included in the paper itself are available here.

Figure 1: Cash used in investing and financing activities, 1991–2012

Figure 2: Dividends and stock repurchases, 1991–2012

Figure 3: Payout ratio and effective payout ratio, 1991–2012

Figure 4: Total number of employees (average at year end)

Figure 5: Average capital employed in and earnings from upstream, downstream and chemical operations by region, ExxonMobil 1975–2012 (1975–1998, Exxon only)

Figure 6: Number of production employees and average weekly overtime hours in US refineries 1958–2012

Figure 7: Labour productivity in petroleum refineries in the US, 1987–2011. Output per hour index (1987=100)

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Hilda Kurtz (2013) Trayvon Martin and the dystopian turn in US self-defense doctrine. Antipode 45(2):248–251

Published in Antipode 45(2) in 2013, Hilda Kurtz’s intervention examines self-defence doctrine and racialised law enforcement in the US in the wake of the February 2012 killing in Florida of 17 year old Trayvon Martin, an un-armed black teenager.

Here we’re pleased to present a rendering of these concerns in the form of a poem, ‘Stand our ground‘.

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Bernd Belina, Tino Petzold, Jürgen Schardt and Sebastian Schipper (2012) Neoliberalising the Fordist university: A tale of two campuses in Frankfurt a. M., Germany. Antipode 45(3):738–759

Published in Antipode 45(3) in 2013, Bernd Belina, Tino Petzold, Jürgen Schardt and Sebastian Schipper’s paper looks at the occupation, in 2009, of the central building of the new IG Farben Campus of Johann Wolfgang Goethe University (JWGU), Frankfurt, Germany. The occupying students were protesting against the neoliberalisation of higher education, and while similar occupations at the old Bockenheim Campus were usually tolerated, if not welcomed, by the university management, this time 176 students and members of staff were forcefully evicted after only three days, when the university’s presidential board called in the police. To better understand this way of ending the protest, a level of oppression almost unheard of at a German university in the last 20 years, Bernd and colleagues reconstruct the way in which JWGU, as part of the state apparatus university, has produced the two campuses as particular places that are bound up in, and expressions of, the national and local condensations of forces of Fordism and neoliberalism respectively.

The paper contains some great maps and images, and here we include more of the campuses in question:

1 Bockenheim campus main square, seen from the north (the high rise with the flat roof in the background is the tower);

2 Bockenheim campus main square, seen from the north-east (the central building is on the left and the House of Students on the right; the students’ house is used by a variety of political and cultural groups from the university and beyond; Café KoZ is a cafe run by students);

3 Campus Bockenheim, main portal of the central building, as modified by the modernist architect Ferdinand Kramer in 1952 to emphasise the new ‘transparency’ of the post-Nazi university;

4 Campus Bockenheim, daily book/flea market under the cafeteria building, seen from the north;

5 Campus Bockenheim, weekly farmers’ market, seen from the north-east (in the background – two university buildings by Ferdinand Kramer);

6 Campus Bockenheim, interior view of ‘the tower’ (some graffiti in this building is said to date back to the 1970s);

7 The Institute for Social Research (‘Frankfurt School’), Bockenheim campus (students hung a banner with Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach – “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it”);

8 IG Farben campus, main square seen from the south (in the front – the main lecture hall; on the left – the law and economics building);

9 IG Farben campus, the House of Finance, seen from the north-east;

10 IG Farben campus, the House of Finance main entrance (university buildings in Germany don’t usually have a reception desk [it’s unmanned here]; the marble floor is modeled after Raphael’s fresco ‘The School of Athens’);

11 IG Farben campus, the white walls of the House of Finance;

12 IG Farben campus, the law and economics building seen from the south-east;

13 IG Farben campus, an interior view of the law and economics building (more white walls; the windows face the main square).