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Governmentality, Geography, and the Geo-Coded World
Abstract
A growing number of geographers are beginning to explore Foucault’s later work on ‘governmentality’, which examines the relations between the production of governmental rationalities and the technologies of modern power. The current paper traces this critical engagement between geographical scholarship and governmentality studies. Many geographical accounts consider governmentality in terms of the mechanisms of knowledge production that states have used to constitute their subjects and territories as ‘governable’. While this line of inquiry has produced considerable insights, I argue that analyses of governmentality should also explore how various non-state actors have utilized technologies of government in myriad ways. I further suggest that geo-coding was one of the main spatial prerequisites for the larger biopolitical projects of census-taking and mapping at least since the eighteenth century. A critical spatial history of the ‘geo-coded world’, therefore, is required if we are to understand the geographical underpinnings of governmental knowledge production.
... Governmentalita spočívá v propojení politické racionality vládnutí a moderních technologií moci, tedy praktických postupů implementace této kalkulované racionality (Rose-Redwood 2006). Technologie moci představují postupy, programy a instituce, zaváděné s cílem vytvořit ovladatelné populace -podobně jako v případě racionálního úsilí o dosažení nápravy odsouzených v panoptikonu. ...
... Foucaultova (2007) nedokončená analýza governmentality se stala východiskem různorodých, i argumentačně protichůdných geografických interpretací (Rose-Redwood 2006, Elden 2007. Jednou z příčin této různorodosti je to, že s přechodem z mikroměřítka instituce na měřítko populace se role prostoru ve Foucaultově analýze působení diskurzu, moci a disciplinačních praktik stává méně čitelná (Murdoch 2006). ...
Research on the conventional food system and alternative food networks has evolved largely in isolation from each other. This paper aims to narrow this gap by using a common theoretical framework to disclose the properties of spaces produced by both types of food systems. The theoretical tools used are Lefebvre’s spatial dialectic and Foucauldian analysis of discipline and governmentality. The results indicate constitutive differences in the nature of both types of spaces: while the conventional food system produces standardized relations and spaces, taking away attention from the food itself to other aspects of its sale and supressing knowledge about food provenance and ways of preparation, the diverse spaces of non-market production are shaped around the quality and “taste” of food. This means that the way out of the crisis-laden conventional food system may lead not only through frugality but also through the cultivation of “taste”, that is, the human interest to eat good food, whose taste includes the knowledge of ecological and social relations and cultures producing the spaces of food.
... Yet, while Scott sees projects of legibility as a state's response to spatial unintelligibility, the actors involved in legibility projects have also greatly proliferated. Rose-Redwood (2006 alerts us to the pitfalls of an entirely state-centric perspective. ...
... Governmental power, as these perspectives outline, is inextricably bound up with calculation, enumeration and "statistical reasoning"(Desrosières 1998). At the same time, this approach also opened lines of inquiry into the utilization of governmental technologies by non-state actors(Rose-Redwood 2006). ...
India’s Smart Cities Mission constitutes one of the most ambitious urban modernization projects worldwide. Announced by India’s prime minister Narendra Modi in 2015, the mission’s stated aim is to turn one hundred cities into so-called smart cities. Examining the mission in Pune, Maharashtra, and other cities, I discuss two threads converging in India’s Smart Cities Mission: firstly, a long history of attempts to render space legible and produce governmental knowledge via particular tools and technologies; and secondly, a history of successive developmentalist regimes, whose leitmotif are modernist forms of development. Theoretically, I employ the work of five scholars – James C. Scott, Donna Haraway, Shoshana Zuboff, Katherine McKittrick and Ananya Roy – to build up a conceptual vocabulary with which I think through this dual thread of legibility and developmentalism. Empirically, this research is based on 34 qualitative interviews with town planners, architects, decision-makers, engineers, consultants, IT professionals, activists and academics. These interviews are supplemented by content analysis of key documents and media reports, as well as participant observations at a local NGO in Pune. Through two case studies on projects in Pune – a command and control center and an attempt at "slum mapping" – I show the extent to which contingent forms of legibility relate to antithetical visions of development. Reflecting on the larger significance of what might be called the dominant colonial-capitalist episteme, I argue that smart cities not only perpetuate existing colonial-capitalist relations, they also constitute a kind of colonial infrastructure in their own right.
... This knowledge, in conjunction with the "privacy paradox" (to be discussed in the next section), has led to a high level of anxiety concerning big data (Crawford, 2014;Leszczynski, 2015). First, how big data is processed is not transparent (Richards & King, 2013). Users are often captivated by elegant user interfaces and convenient service applications (Kaasinen, 2003;Kitchin & Dodge, 2014;Thrift, 2004) without paying attentions to terms of service and their rights of personal location information. ...
... It is only when this process fails that users are provided a glimpse behind the curtain. Second, big data "constitutes identity" (Richards & King, 2013). While people try to remain anonymous, the sheer magnitude and coverage of big data enable researchers, advertisers, and attackers to make personal identifiable conclusions. ...
Traditional boundaries between people are vanishing due to the rise of Internet of Things technology. Our smart devices keep us connected to the world, but also monitor our daily lives through an unprecedented amount data collection. As a result, defining privacy has become more complicated. Individuals want to leverage new technology (e.g., making friends through sharing private experiences) and also avoid unwanted consequences (e.g., targeted advertising). In the age of ubiquitous digital content, geoprivacy is unique because concerns in this area are constantly changing and context-dependent. Multiple factors influence people’s location disclosure decisions, including time, culture, demographics, spatial granularity, and trust. Existing research primarily focuses on the computational efforts of protecting geoprivacy, while the variation of geoprivacy perceptions has yet to receive adequate attention in the data science literature. In this work, we explore geoprivacy from a cognate-based perspective and tackle our changing perception of the concept from multiple angles. Our objectives are to rehumanize this field from contextual, cultural, and economic dimensions and highlight the uniqueness of geodata under the broad topic of privacy. It is essential that we understand the spatial variations of geoprivacy perceptions in the era of big data. Masking geographic coordinates can no longer fully anonymize spatial data, and targeted geoprivacy protection needs to be further investigated to improve user experience.
... Elden (2007) argues that while population was being fashioned into a subject of governance, the government of territory was transformed rather than replaced: 'Just as the people become understood as both discrete individuals and their aggregated whole, the land they inhabit is also something that is understood in terms of its geometric, rational properties, or "qualities"' (Elden, 2007: 578). This territory is not simply the boundaries of the sovereign state but a 'bundle of political technologies' (Elden, 2013), exercised across national, supranational and subnational scales (Brenner, 2004;Novak, 2011), and by state and non-state institutions (Rose-Redwood, 2006;Antonsich, 2009). ...
... Quantification is a crucial governmental technology within liberal democratic government (Miller, 1994;Porter, 1994;Espeland and Stevens, 2008;Rottenburg and Merry, 2015). The numbering and ordering of space expand governmental knowledge and the possibilities of commensuration and comparison, aiding governmental surveillance and control (Espeland and Stevens, 1998;Hannah, 2001;Rose-Redwood, 2006). Quantification is therefore bound up with territorial practices insofar as it defines the location, boundaries, parameters, and other measurable attributes that constitute territory, and produces the knowledge upon which other practices are based. ...
A vibrant literature on territorial stigma has emerged over the past decade, detailing how particular neighbourhoods or districts have been discursively constructed as dangerous, depraved, deprived, dilapidated, and so on. Amidst this focus on the discursive, the role of numbers has been largely overlooked. In this article I argue that quantitative practices and statistical representations are central to the production of territory and to territorial stigmatization. I demonstrate how problem territories are produced through quantitative practices that reproduce forms of denigration and how statistical representations obfuscate the culpability of markets and the state and legitimize unjust interventions. I elaborate these arguments via three recent examples from public housing policy, governance and discourse in Sydney. Statistics have been deployed to portray tenants as undeserving of either the real estate they inhabit or any assistance whatsoever, and estates as pathological territories that cause disadvantage. Such representations have obscured how neoliberalization has caused such so‐called problems, and have thus legitimated privatization, displacement and a punitive policy turn. I call for greater attention to the role of quantification and statistics among scholars of stigma—not only through deconstruction and critique, but also through strategic deployment in aid of struggles against stigma.
... Many geographers place governmentality within the mechanisms of knowledge that states have used to construct their subjects and borders as "government." It can also be argued that an analysis of governmentality can explore how non-state workers use government-owned technology in myriad ways (Rose-Rewood, 2006). According to Michael Foucault, power is considered a lower-ranking property than strategy and is widely distributed across cultural paths and situations. ...
This research aims to clarify some of the global imperialist plans to divide Sudan as an integral part of the policy of political-economic globalization to control the world. The British colonial administration in Sudan laid the first building blocks for division by implementing the policy of closed areas and cultural separation between northern Sudan, the regions of southern Sudan, the Nuba Mountains, and the Anqasana region. After the British left, the environment was suitable for rebellion, which worked to separate South Sudan in 2011 AD after a long civil war. It followed the Israeli policy towards supporting the rebellion in South Sudan since 1955, then supported the rebellion in the Darfur region, and it has a plan to divide Sudan into five small states to benefit from its natural resources and weaken Sudan's role in supporting the Palestinian problem. American policy adopted re-dividing the Middle East, including Sudan, into small, weak states, where the Arab Spring revolutions began. Under the policies of global imperialism and its arm known as globalization, Sudan has become under the hammer of division into small states. Sudan's failure to achieve political governance and the lack of a clear foreign policy during most of the period of independence from British colonialism, in addition to its inherent developmental and ethnic problems since its formation as a state in 1956 AD, created appropriate opportunities for global imperialism to develop its plans to divide it. Sudan must thwart all these plans by formulating a joint political-social contract between all its ethnic and political components to achieve political stability and build the future state.
... The analytics of governmentality, defined as the 'mentalities and rationalities associated with the practices of governing' (Hunt, 1996: 167-168) -a distinctly Foucauldian construct -has become increasingly widespread in contemporary urban theory production. More plainly, it is within the analytics of governmentality that the role of space became anchored in the analysis of the 'art of government' (Certomà, 2015;Elden, 2007;Ettlinger, 2011;Falt, 2016;Huxley, 2006Huxley, , 2007Huxley, , 2008Rose, 1996;Rose-Redwood, 2006). Huxley (2007) emphasised how space is imprinted in the concept of governmentality through 'disciplining, fostering, managing and monitoring the conducts of individuals and the qualities of populations ' (p. ...
Alternative and often disruptive urban processes in the Global South, such as container urbanism, are gradually pushing urban planning institutions towards the margins of urban governance and transformation. Understanding how urban institutional actors perceive and respond to these emerging processes is thus crucial for unravelling the rationalities that actively transform the spatial configuration of cities. Drawing on the concept of spatial rationalities, this article examines the institutional dynamics of the unprecedented spatial diffusion of container urbanism in Accra, Ghana. The article makes two contributions to the literature. First, it shows that the continuation of a neoliberal urban governance agenda has shifted the institutional perception of container urbanism as a form of aberration. Second, it sheds light on how the actions by institutional actors to recuperate spatial order are often eclipsed by political interferences, creating an illusion of control in the management of urban space. Consequently, the article calls for a reassessment of impractical regulatory mechanisms that target container users and other informal modes of appropriating urban space with far-reaching consequences for urban citizenship and the right to the city.
... Cartography is an indispensable part of national governance. The practice of life politics depends on the government's ability to locate its population in geospatial space [48] , so as to shape the population as an "object" that can be effectively ruled by the state [49] . The most well-known and controversial use of maps is to shape the nation-state with clear geographical boundaries in the formation of the modern world system. ...
Map is the basic language of geography and an indispensable tool for spatial analysis. But for a long time, maps have been regarded as an objective and neutral scientific achievement. Inspired by critical geography, critical cartography/GIS came into being with the goal of clarifying the discourse embedded in cartographic practice. Power relationship challenges the untested assumption in map representation that is taken for granted. After more than 40 years of debate and running in, this research field has initially shown an outline, and critical cartography/GIS has roughly formed two research directions: the deconstruction path mainly starts from the identity of cartography subject and the process of map knowledge production, and analyzes the inseparable relationship between cartography and national governance and its internal power mechanism respectively; the construction path mainly relies on cooperative mapping and anti-mapping to realize the reproduction of map data. Domestic critical cartography/GIS research has just started, and it is necessary to continue to absorb the achievements of critical geography and carry out research in different historical periods. The deconstruction research of different types of maps also needs to strengthen the in-depth bridging between the construction path and the deconstruction path, and to be more open to the public. Impartial map application research, and actively apply the research results to social practice.
... Las primeras formas de vigilancia masiva de la población permitieron a los estados "constituir sus sujetos y territorios como 'gobernables'" (Rose-Redwood, 2006, p. 471). Esto se logró a través de "la estrategia disciplinaria de" individualización "que mejoró la capacidad del estado para registrar varios aspectos de la conducta ciudadana, incluido el uso, transferencia y venta de tierras y formas localizadas de genera-ción de ingresos, que gradualmente se han ido transformando (Rose-Redwood, 2006). ...
Un fenómeno emergente de las últimas décadas en América Latina han sido las apropiaciones comunitarias de la seguridad y la justicia. En distintos contextos, ciudadanos convocados de manera espontánea u organizada resuelven hacerse cargo de su seguridad o ejecutar castigos con relativa independencia de las instituciones estatales. Los textos compilados en este libro contribuyen a la comprensión de estos fenómenos a la luz de una revisión conceptual de la noción de vigilantismo. El lector podrá encontrar nuevas líneas de interpretación respecto a esta temática, sustentadas en la descripción y problematización de diversos tipos de acciones vigilantistas. Los estudios de caso aportan, desde una perspectiva situada, datos que permiten cuestionar y difuminar las nociones clásicas sobre seguridad y control legítimo del Estado.
Vemos que en América Latina estas violencias colectivas se configuran en función de la historia, la mediación social y el rol institucional de los estados y culturas de confrontación y resolución de conflictos que componen la región. También es posible apreciar que las cuestiones relativas a la agenda de coproducción de la seguridad emergen como un eje transversal al subcontinente que incide - aunque de manera diferenciada- en esta configuración. De ahí es posible identificar uno de los hallazgos que aflora del texto: En Latinoamérica existe una gama de variabilidad de este tipo de violencias colectivas, que va del vigilantismo duro al vigilantismo blando. Esto último permite desde ya sembrar una agenda de investigación a futuro en el estudio de estas violencias en América Latina.
... Consequently, while individuals believe to follow their own interests in governmentality, in fact they realize the authority's interests insomuch as their subjectivity depends on the power-knowledge. For instance, although psychology presents itself as a set of knowledge with anonymous intentions, in reality, what it does is to empower capitalist authority through a "technology of the self", known as healthism which utilizes individual's will to health and well-being for the ends of authority (Rose-Redwood, 2006). Likewise, neoliberalism functions in general through the ostensible individual freedom which dissimulates the power relations established through the governance of knowledge. ...
1973 Petrol Krizi’nden bu yana bilgi, pazarların en önemli emtiası haline geldi. Sanayinin değerini kaybettiği ve bilişim teknolojilerini kullanan hizmetlerin ön plana çıktığı bu döneme aynı zamanda Yeni Ekonomi adı verildi. Bilgi teknolojilerinin yükselişi yeni kâr üretme yollarını da getirdi. Bilişim şirketleri, pazar ilgilerini bireylerin davranışlarının öğrenen makineler yoluyla tahmin edildiği davranış tahmin modellerine yönlendirdi. Bu bağlamda yeni dönemin sermaye birikiminin bireylerin gözetimine odaklanmasından hareketle Shoshana Zuboff yeni döneme “gözetim kapitalizmi” adını verdi. Pazar ilgilerindeki bu değişme, halihazırda yönetim stratejilerinin sosyolojik olarak düzenlenmiş bir bürokrasiden sürekli gözetime dayalı yeni bir Taylorist bilimsel yönetişime geçtiği tarihsel bağlam içinde anlaşılabilir. Gözetim kapitalizmi, neoliberal yönetimsellik içinde bireylere psikolojik manipülasyon yoluyla boyun eğdirmeyi amaçlayan yeni bir “özne teknolojisi” olarak yorumlanabilir. Bu makale, gözetim kapitalizminin ortaya çıkışı ile yeni bir kapitalist biyo-iktidar biçimi olarak bireyselleştirilmiş yönetim stratejilerinin kullanımı arasındaki tarihsel ilişkiyi ortaya koymayı amaçlamaktadır.
... A thriving corpus of scholarship, articulated under the banner of "critical toponymies," has disentangled the connections between politics (power), linguistics (naming), history (the past), and geography (space), by documenting street name changes in times of political unrest and societal transformations (Vuolteenaho and Berg, 2009;Rose-Redwood, Alderman, and Azaryahu, 2018). Scholars working at the disciplinary crossroads of political sociology and socio-cultural geography (Azaryahu, 1996(Azaryahu, , 1997Alderman, 2002;Rose-Redwood, 2006;Azaryahu, 2009, 2018) have compellingly argued that place/street-naming is an unmistakably political act of exercising nominative power over the landscape. Assigning a nomenclature to a geographical space is certainly more than simply organizing the landscape for merely pragmatic reasons (such as efficient navigation and rational administration). ...
This paper examines the street name changes brought about in Romanian cities and towns during the period of postsocialist transformations. Based on a complete dataset comprising the entire urban street nomenclature existing prior to the regime change of 1989, the paper explores the geography of postsocialist toponymic change, as well as the latter’s temporal dynamic. Statistical analyses reveal major discrepancies in the scope of street name changes between Romania’s historical regions. The paper argues that one important factor that structures these regional variations is the ethnopolitics played out at the level of each locality. The analysis concludes by pointing out the instrumentality of street names as a powerful means of politicising the urban landscape, as well as their vulnerability, especially in the aftermath of significant political changes.
... La gubernamentalidad neoliberal se expresa a través de estos actores que inscriben a profesionales, procedimientos y artefactos en búsqueda de sus objetivos de regulación y control (Rose, 1990). Así, moldean y administran la vida de los individuos (Rose-Redwood, 2006;Rose et al., 2009;Rose & Miller, 2010). De igual forma, como explicaremos en el siguiente capítulo, la gubernamentalidad neoliberal se mezcla a otras formas de gubernamentalidad preexistentes (Brenner & Theodore, 2002). ...
Este capítulo de libro se enfoca en las prácticas cotidianas como parte del conjunto de tácticas de sectores populares para contrarrestar las estructuras de poder vigentes en Lima. Nuestro estudio tiene una orientación cualitativa. A través de la recogida de datos secundarios y de entrevistas semiestructuradas, nos centramos en analizar el proceso de consolidación urbana en el barrio de Nueva Rinconada, al este de Lima, mediante prácticas de trabajo colectivo. Tomamos en cuenta la definición de micro-resistencias de Scott (1989; 2003); quien manifiesta que las clases subalternas se resisten a diferentes situaciones de dominación a través de estrategias y mecanismos creativos, manteniendo una aversión al riesgo y actuando detrás de normas simbólicas. Cómo es que estos mecanismos han sido asumidos por la agenda urbana neoliberal es lo que abordaremos en este trabajo.
... Este tipo de mirada cartográfica, que simplifica la complejidad social y geográfica y centra la atención en unos pocos aspectos concretos del territorio, es efectiva porque permite a los gobiernos conocer y actuar desde la distancia, un elemento clave para cualquier administración organizada por niveles. Estas reflexiones forman parte de un debate más amplio entorno al concepto de "gubernamentalidad" desarrollado por Foucault que relaciona la estadística, la cartografía y otras tecnologías sociales (Hannah 2000;Rose-Redwood 2006). ...
La geografía urbana crítica se encuentra en una posición privilegiada para aprovechar las oportunidades que ofrece la transición digital cartográfica. Para conseguir este objetivo es necesario, sin embargo, desarrollar unas prácticas cartográficas renovadas y creativas. En este artículo destacamos algunas aportaciones, realizadas desde la denominada cartografía crítica, útiles para entender las limitaciones que impone el mapa como herramienta de investigación. También identificamos algunos ejemplos cartográficos que muestran las ventajas de representar el espacio social urbano desde concepciones espaciales diversas. Una aproximación cartográfica más reflexiva e imaginativa puede ser útil también para aquellas personas y colectivos que empiezan a realizar mapas sin mucha experiencia cartográfica previa ni conocimientos formales sobre los efectos que tienen los mapas sobre la realidad que tratan de representar.
... Moreover, Murdoch and Ward (1997) emphasise that knowledge production in both instances prioritised certain kinds of farms and farmers. The policies that were devised thus worked to reshape the material reality for with different levels of benefit and support for different discursive categories of farm (Rose-Redwood, 2006 aplty summarises Murdoch and Ward's argument). ...
In this thesis, I investigate the relational practices and processes involved in collaborative agri-environmental governance. The study is concerned with the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which provides a governance framework for agriculture throughout the European Union (EU). Since the 1990s the CAP has increasingly sought to foster collaboration between different agricultural stakeholders as a means of improving policy efficacy. These trends have extended to the CAP’s agri-environmental schemes, which seek to improve the environmental sustainability of EU agriculture. Existing research indicates that the outcomes of such schemes are highly contingent upon the relationships through which they play out. However, empirical case-studies are scarce. To address this shortcoming, I investigate one such programme – the European Innovation Partnership (EIP) Initiative – currently running as part of Ireland’s national implementation of the CAP. When the EIP Initiative was introduced in 2016, prospective participants were invited to form Operational Groups (OG) and to propose locally targeted agri-environmental projects. 21 proposals were funded nationally based on a competitive assessment process. I trace how one group engaged with the EIP application. The group in question hails from a marginal agricultural area in Ireland’s Western uplands with a relatively high proportion of collectively owned and managed land (known as commonage), customarily used for sheep grazing.
Conceptually, the research draws on Governmentality literature to conceive of the EIP Initiative as an intervention in the evolving socio-material relations of the case-study area. I present an analysis of how the EIP Initiative thereby gathered farmers, research scientists, rural development professionals and other actors together. These actors formed collaborative working relationships, established decision-making structures, and incorporated a range of knowledges to design a locally targeted agri-environmental management plan. The research also draws on concepts from the Assemblage literature to explore how this group developed and worked together in practice. Specifically, I utilise concepts of desire and possibility spaces to illustrate how different actors navigated and anticipated the evolving relationships through which collaboration occurred. The thesis adds to understandings of the processes through which collaborative governance approaches can render (agricultural) space governable. At the same time, the study highlights the potential of such governance approaches to generate spatially specific agri-environmental management plans.Conceptually, the research draws on Governmentality literature to conceive of the EIP Initiative as an intervention in the evolving socio-material relations of the case-study area. I present an analysis of how the EIP Initiative thereby gathered farmers, research scientists, rural development professionals and other actors together. These actors formed collaborative working relationships, established decision-making structures, and incorporated a range of knowledges to design a locally targeted agri-environmental management plan. The research also draws on concepts from the Assemblage literature to explore how this group developed and worked together in practice. Specifically, I utilise concepts of desire and possibility spaces to illustrate how different actors navigated and anticipated the evolving relationships through which collaboration occurred. The thesis adds to understandings of the processes through which collaborative governance approaches can render (agricultural) space governable. At the same time, the study highlights the potential of such governance approaches to generate spatially specific agri-environmental management plans.
... La gubernamentalidad neoliberal se expresa a través de estos actores que inscriben a profesionales, procedimientos y artefactos en búsqueda de sus objetivos de regulación y control (Rose, 1990). Así, moldean y administran la vida de los individuos (Rose-Redwood, 2006;Rose et al., 2009;Rose y Miller, 2010). De igual forma, como explicaremos en el siguiente capítulo, la gubernamentalidad neoliberal se mezcla a otras formas de gubernamentalidad preexistentes (Brenner y Theodore, 2002). ...
... A serious disruption of a single global space and thus the emergence of global governmentalities entails "the idioms of territory and sovereignty [that] remain central to our understanding of dilemmas in international affairs, such as human intervention and mass refugee flows" (Lui 2004: 118). Despite globalization and mobility that lend themselves to images of waning states, many scholars call out for attention to geopolitical tendencies, the resurrection of the sovereign state, restricted and controlled mobilities and a geocoded world in which territory plays a decisive role (Latour 2018;Brown 2017;Guzzini 2012;Rose-Redwood 2006). Since the underlying governmental practices ultimately reside on nonsovereign and alternative ways to govern through subtle methods that are not hierarchical, judicial or sovereign while adhering to the notion of free or autonomous subjects, global governmentality seems to enter into a normative indistinction with the working of liberal government. ...
Poststructural and other critical and nonfoundational approaches to International Relations have embraced governmentality as an analytical perspective to understand emergent problems in the international sphere. The possibility of understanding various forms of power that are more mundane and granular than sovereign power has been valuable to our understanding of how states and societies are governed. In this chapter, we discuss the analytical, and possibly historical, displacement of sovereignty in Foucault’s narrative of the governmentalization of the state. Drawing on different sources and interventions, this chapter discusses the importance of sovereign power for understanding the governmentality approach within the state. In a similar vein, when governmentality is used to analyze globality, or global oneness, we think it is important to account for the presence sovereign states outside individual states if we wish to understand how global governance and globality is imagined, conducted and not least contested. We need in other words to be able to answer how sovereign states (as actors), state sovereignty (as principle) and sovereign powers (as state functions) are entangled in global governance and globality.
... Det er trods meget grundig litteratursøgning ikke lykkedes at finde akademiske studier af moskenavne, hverken inden for den onomastiske, religionssociologiske eller sociolingvistiske forskningslitteratur. Denne artikel skal derfor ses som et første skridt i et forsøg på at undersøge, om moskenavne er et produktivt felt, der kan give os ny viden om muslimske miljøer i Danmark. Det vil jeg gøre ved at se moskeer som en del af den urbane tekst (Light and Young 2015;Rose-Redwood 2006) og i den kontekst analysere navne på fire udvalgte moskeer i Danmark. Min hypotese er, at ligesom navngivning af gader eksempelvis kan bruges til at markere eller genopfinde forestillinger om national identitet og historie (Alderman 2008;Rose-Redwood, Alderman, and Azaryahu 2017), kan navne på danske moskeer ses som et udtryk for forskellige muslimske gruppers placemakingstrategier, der har til formål at positionere dem, såvel indbyrdes som over for majoritetsbefolkningen, i deres (relativt) nye kontekst i Danmark. ...
Moskeer i Danmark har typisk en kompleks navnepraksis, både pga. den flersproglighed, der præger moskeerne, og fordi de organisatorisk er et relativt nyt fænomen i en dansk kontekst. Artiklen undersøger, om moskenavne er et produktivt felt, der kan generere ny viden om muslimske gruppers placemakingstrategier i Danmark, og i hvilket omfang navne bruges til at positionere moskeerne såvel indbyrdes som over for majoritetsbefolkningen. Ved hjælp af Giraut og Houssay-Holzschuchs teoretiske rammemodel for navngivning og navngivningsprocesser (2016) og begrebet spatial scaling undersøges navne på fire danske moskeer: Fredens Moske i Aarhus, Islamisk Trossamfund på Fyn, Odense Selimiye Moske samt Khayr el-Barriya-moskeen i København. Analysen viser, at moskeerne betjener sig af et bredt spektrum af navneteknologier, der afspejler forskellige måder at positionere sig på i det danske moskelandskab, og åbner samtidig op for nye spørgsmål og overvejelser om, hvordan moskeerne (i betydningen bestyrelse, donorer eller andre navngivere) ser deres rolle i diasporaen. Undersøgelsen konkluderer, at der ligger værdifuld information gemt i de navne, moskeerne selv vælger, og at denne information kan bruges til at indfange aspekter af moskeernes selvforståelse, som det kan være vanskeligt at indfange på anden vis.
... Det er trods meget grundig litteratursøgning ikke lykkedes at finde akademiske studier af moskenavne, hverken inden for den onomastiske, religionssociologiske eller sociolingvistiske forskningslitteratur. Denne artikel skal derfor ses som et første skridt i et forsøg på at undersøge, om moskenavne er et produktivt felt, der kan give os ny viden om muslimske miljøer i Danmark. Det vil jeg gøre ved at se moskeer som en del af den urbane tekst (Light and Young 2015;Rose-Redwood 2006) og i den kontekst analysere navne på fire udvalgte moskeer i Danmark. Min hypotese er, at ligesom navngivning af gader eksempelvis kan bruges til at markere eller genopfinde forestillinger om national identitet og historie (Alderman 2008;Rose-Redwood, Alderman, and Azaryahu 2017), kan navne på danske moskeer ses som et udtryk for forskellige muslimske gruppers placemakingstrategier, der har til formål at positionere dem, såvel indbyrdes som over for majoritetsbefolkningen, i deres (relativt) nye kontekst i Danmark. ...
Moskeer i Danmark har typisk en kompleks navnepraksis, både pga. den flersproglighed, der præger moskeerne, og fordi de organisatorisk er et relativt nyt fænomen i en dansk kontekst. Artiklen undersøger, om moskenavne er et produktivt felt, der kan generere ny viden om muslimske gruppers placemaking-strategier i Danmark, og i hvilket omfang navne bruges til at positionere mo-skeerne såvel indbyrdes som over for majoritetsbefolkningen. Ved hjælp af Giraut og Houssay-Holzschuchs teoretiske rammemodel for navngivning og navngiv-ningsprocesser (2016) og begrebet spatial scaling undersøges navne på fire danskemoskeer: Fredens Moske i Aarhus, Islamisk Trossamfund på Fyn, Odense SelimiyeMoske samt Khayr el-Barriya-moskeen i København. Analysen viser, at moskeerne betjener sig af et bredt spektrum af navneteknologier, der afspejler forskellige måder at positionere sig på i det danske moskelandskab, og åbner samtidig op for nye spørgsmål og overvejelser om, hvordan moskeerne (i betydningen besty-relse, donorer eller andre navngivere) ser deres rolle i diasporaen. Undersøgelsen konkluderer, at der ligger værdifuld information gemt i de navne, moskeerne selv vælger, og at denne information kan bruges til at indfange aspekter af moskeernes selvforståelse, som det kan være vanskeligt at indfange på anden vis.
... 8 For example, Rose (1999: 32) describes various "governable spaces" through which "government" is "territorialized", including the factory, neighbourhood, commune, region, and nation. Other work has explored "cartographic calculations of territory" (Crampton, 2011) where statistical knowledge is applied cartographically, from street addressing (Rose-Redwood, 2006), to population trends (Crampton and Elden, 2006), to maps of homelessness (Marquardt, 2016) and crime (Vigneswaran, 2014), to classifications of "failed states" and terrorist threats (Amoore, 2006;Cutter et al., 2014). ...
“Ethnic territories” were a central political technology of colonial rule, which also shaped strategies of anti-colonial resistance in diverse contexts. Today, in former colonies, the making of ethnic territories remains a key site of both governmentality and political struggle. This Special Issue brings together six ethnographic case studies (from Argentina, Bolivia, Cambodia, DR Congo, Paraguay and Peru) to explore how discourses of ethnicity and territory are combined and deployed in various technologies of government and resistance – from colonial native policies, to land titling programs, to struggles for territorial self-rule and recognition. In this Introduction, we set out an analytical approach to understanding the contemporary nexus between ethnicity, territory and governmentality in postcolonial states. Rather than being the result of “top-down” governmental projects, or forms of resistance “from below”, we explore how “ethnic territories” are created by diverse subjects engaged in situated struggles over categories, recognition and boundaries. Our approach draws on Foucault’s concepts of “governmentality” and “counter-conducts” in order to capture how struggles may simultaneously contest and reproduce dominant ethno-territorial regimes of truth, and how subjects may consciously refuse the “conduct of conduct” of governmentality. We extend this analysis by drawing inspiration from postcolonial and decolonial scholarship to highlight how subaltern actors engage with, appropriate, problematise or refuse governmental interventions in pursuit of their own political projects and visions for self-determination, which may exceed the scope of governmental knowledges. At the same time, we seek to problematise accounts that essentialise ethnic territories as bounded sites of ontological difference and indigenous resistance. Building on recent work by indigenous scholars, we propose an approach that takes seriously subaltern agency and the endurance of alternative ways of being and knowing, while keeping the persistent constraining effects of the colonial nexus between ethnicity, territory and governmentality firmly in view.
... "The disenchantment of the world" through rationalization had brought about not only secularization at the level of religious beliefs and practices, but also the ordering of space along with its scientific management. Starting with the 17 th century, in the context of modernization, political authorities had begun articulating "regimes of spatial inscription" and proceeded to the "geo-coding of the world" (Rose-Redwood 2006). The body of scholarship that charted these processes found inspiration in Michel Foucault's seminal thoughts on "governmentality" (Foucault 2007(Foucault ) [1978. ...
Street names are mundane spatial markers that besides providing a sense of orientation inscribe onto the landscape the ideological ethos and political symbols of hegemonic discourses. This review article takes stock of the existing scholarship done on the politics of street naming practices in human (political, cultural, and social) geography and rethinks these insights from sociological perspectives. Drawing on Randall Collins’ taxonomy of sociological theory, the paper interprets urban street nomenclatures along functionalist, conflictualist, constructionist, and utilitarian lines. The analysis is delivered in two installments: Part I addresses urban nomenclatures from functionalist and conflictualist perspectives, while Part II (published in the next issue of this journal) approaches street names as social constructions and examines their utilitarian value. In doing so, the paper advances the argument that urban namescapes in general and street names in particular should make an important object of sociological reflection and empirical analysis. It is one of the key arguments developed in this paper that toponymy encapsulates broader and intersecting issues of power, memory, identity, language, and space which can be rendered visible through sociological analysis.
Following the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, U.S. private insurers abandoned flood coverage after deeming it incalculable, precipitating the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) in 1968. The NFIP continued to underwrite illegible risk in the public interest. For decades, hydraulic models were limited to simplified “one-dimensional” simulations ill-equipped to characterize uncertainty to the standard of market carriers. However, recent advancements in multidimensional characterization have galvanized the flood sector. The NFIP has licensed some of the most expansive 2-D models to date from eager tech firms; it has pledged to modernize its risk portfolio, invest in financing, and attract private carriers in order to “lift all boats” within the flood sector. This article intervenes by examining the “multidimensional turn” as a fix for “crises of calculation.” The article rejects teleological narratives crediting models for “changing how we think” about flood, and illustrates how underwriters enframe illegible floodplains as unruly problems. The incalculability of flood risk is an “insurantial logic” naturalized as a physical truth. Economic geographers have interrogated the materiality of such truths as integral to the production of nature under capitalism. The article examines how invested state and non-state actors operationalize impediments to legible risk to realize their financial interests. It further argues that FEMA’s costly efforts to realize an allusive market are undermined by intractable conflicts between pure-market and affordable coverage. The NFIP will likely continue to do the heavy lifting with respect to underwriting, and selective geographies of private coverage will mirror the drive for surplus value.
In this article, I take a socio-material approach to highlight the changes in the legibility of the built environment due to digital interfacing and the subsequent fragmentation of urban space. Using Uber as an example, I demonstrate how app-reliant mobility practices, reflexive of the changing mobility values in the city of Calcutta, manifest certain “temporal spaces”—quasi-virtual spaces of the online/digital-offline/material continuum—that imbricate the physicality of the city with the digital traces that Uber accrues about a particular location and the data about the rhythms of the individual users within that space. The investigation uses screenshots of Uber pick-up points to conceptualize legibility in the context of temporal spaces and how this changing legibility alters the kinaesthetic quality of Calcutta. Siting the argument in postrepresentationalist thought—one that does not assume an ontological distinction between representations and the referent—this article offers a posthumanist account of spatial performativity that considers the everyday entanglements of human actors, social practices, networked technologies, algorithms, and interfaces that render “legible” the urban space.
This chapter shows that emotional content has become a type of spiritual currency in our contemporary society. It further argues that emotional content has become a powerful tool for people in social life, be it in the field of politics or marketing. The chapter discusses the implications of this shift in how we perceive and interact with our modern environment and how it relates to spiritual direction. The chapter serves as an introduction to the book as such. It, therefore, shows the development of positive affectivism in the practice of spiritual direction. I take the time to consider the impact of the psychologisation of spirituality and consider the work of William James and Rudolf Otto, the rise of the Injunction to Enjoy and the eventual misuse of these psychologised techniques by modern spiritual directors.
This study investigates the use of ethnonyms in the toponymies of Hassahiesa and Rufa’a areas in
Gezira State, Sudan. Using the principles of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Discourse Historical
Approach (DHA), the study analyses place names as arenas of power struggle and explores the additional
functions they play. It studies the distribution of ethnonyms in the names of 1161 villages and the impact
of the historical, socio-political, and economic factors on their choice. The study shows that there are two
types of ethnonyms used in the two areas and that their distribution is more widespread in the toponymies
of Rufa’a than in that of Hassahiesa. It further shows that the unequal distribution of ethnonyms is the
result of herders’ migrations to the Butana plain and the introduction of the agricultural scheme and light
industries in Gezira. The study demonstrates that the inhabitants of Rufa’a used ethnonyms as a passive
resistance strategy to challenge state power. On the other hand, the decreased number of the feature in
Hassahiesa is an indication of its farmers’ population integration in the colonial development projects and
their tendency to form multi-ethnic and cooperative communities. The study findings indicate that
ethnonyms are utilized as identity constructive and perpetuating strategies and as boundary demarcation
markers.
Aceasta este, așadar, o carte despre Sibiu. Despre numele locurilor sale, despre monumentele publice amplasate în perimetrul său și despre oamenii care îl populează. Însă centrarea analizei pe Sibiu nu transformă volumul într-o carte de istorie locală. În primul rând, ea nu este o carte de istorie. Ci mai degrabă de sociologie politică a patrimoniului memorial, în care miza centrală este aceea de a înțelege modul în care prezentul modelează trecutul prin politici de memorializare, și nu cum prezentul este concretizarea firească a trecutului. În al doilea rând, ea nu este o carte de interes local. Ci una cu caracter „glocal”, în care Sibiul este unitatea geografică „locală” de analiză, dar una care a fost și continuă să fie modelată de forțe „globale”: de la dinamica foarte complexă a relațiilor interetnice și confesionale în cadrul imperiului habsburgic, la constrângerile exercitate de ideologia națională în cadrul statalității române, până la presiunile cu adevărat globale ale neoliberalismului actual.
Perono Cacciafoco, Francesco, and Francesco Cavallaro. 2023. Place Names: Approaches and Perspectives in Toponymy and Toponomastics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
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What are place names? From where do they originate? How are they structured? What do they signify? How important are they in our life? This groundbreaking book explores these compelling questions and more by providing a thorough introduction to the assumptions, theories, terminology, and methods in toponymy and toponomasticsthe studies of place names, or toponyms. It is the first comprehensive resource on the topic in a single volume and explores the history and development of toponyms, focusing on the conceptual and methodological issues pertinent to the study of place names around the world. It presents a wide range of examples and case studies illustrating the structure, function, and importance of toponyms from ancient times to the present day. Wide-ranging yet accessible, it is an indispensable source of knowledge for students and scholars in linguistics, toponymy and toponomastics, onomastics, etymology, and historical linguistics.
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108780384
Links:
1) https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/languages-linguistics/historical-linguistics/place-names-approaches-and-perspectives-toponymy-and-toponomastics?format=PB;
2) https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/place-names/B6C6CB54DF0896D31CAE470C710D22D1.
What are place names? From where do they originate? How are they structured? What do they signify? How important are they in our life? This groundbreaking book explores these compelling questions and more by providing a thorough introduction to the assumptions, theories, terminology, and methods in toponymy and toponomastics – the studies of place names, or toponyms. It is the first comprehensive resource on the topic in a single volume, and explores the history and development of toponyms, focusing on the conceptual and methodological issues pertinent to the study of place names around the world. It presents a wide range of examples and case studies illustrating the structure, function, and importance of toponyms from ancient times to the present day. Wide ranging yet accessible, it is an indispensable source of knowledge for students and scholars in linguistics, toponymy and toponomastics, onomastics, etymology, and historical linguistics.
The practice of street addressing – that is, the assigning of house numbers and street names to specific locations – is generally assumed to have its origins in the history of postal communications to facilitate the delivery of mail. This chapter provided an overview of the political genealogy of the street address. It considers the curious lack of scholarship on the spatial histories of street addressing and discusses the small but growing body of literature on the topic. The chapter traces the historical emergence of street addressing practices in different geographical contexts based upon the current state of knowledge. It explains potential avenues of future research on the role of street addressing in the making of a geocoded world. In 1749, a house numbering scheme for Paris was proposed by a French police lieutenant, but the plan was not adopted.
How is the circulation of digital data to be governed? This question is the subject of often conflicting political rationalities. Focusing on internet and data politics in Germany, we identify fundamental problematizations in governing data circulation on the basis of a mixed-methods analysis of the public–political discussion. In doing so, we elaborate the genealogy of a tension between two political rationalities. On the one hand, there are the political rationalities of a global information society since the 1990s. These have propelled the free circulation of data across national borders and Germany’s integration into an international and competitive telecommunications and information technology market. In these rationalities, state intervention in the circulation of data is seen as a dangerous obstacle to economic competitiveness and social prosperity. On the other hand, there are the political rationalities of a digitally sovereign statehood since the early 2010s. These consider state intervention in data circulation as a guarantor of economic prosperity, democracy and the ability to govern. We argue that prominent political technologies of territorial regulation of data circulation currently discussed and experimented within Germany can be interpreted as attempts to harmonize this field of tension.
This chapter traces the unfolding of the toponymic politics in George Town, Malaysia in the context of the country’s postcolonial multiculturalism. It investigates the ways in which place names have been imbricated in the larger project of post-Independence nation-building as Malaysia struggles to forge its multicultural identity throughout three key historical periods. First, under the British colonial rule, the streets in the early town plan were named after colonial authorities, places in the Metropole, and other places in the larger British Empire. After the Independence, the government of Malaysia reinstated its national language policy that saw street renaming across Malaysian cities. However, when George Town was nominated as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2008, local actors crafted a narrative of multiculturalism against the national backdrop of simmering racial antagonism, affirmative action, and Malay dominance. Places and streets in George Town today are re-narrated as embodiment of multicultural ideals, but the renaming, official and colloquial, is not without contestation. By looking at various toponymic sites in this multi-ethic city, the chapter foregrounds the toponymic politics of place names, exposing various levels of conflict: Empire and Colony, dominant and minority races, cartesian cartography and popular perception, official language and everyday parlance.
In this paper, we mobilise a multiple environmentalities framework that captures overlapping rationalities of governing nature to engage and identify the role of maps and mapping practices in Patagonia-Aysén, Chile, a peripheral region where government and institutional actors have embraced (eco)tourism as a conservation strategy in protected areas. Through interviews with key stakeholders situated in conservation and tourism institutions in both the public and private sector, we identify two dominant environmentalities at play in the relationship between protected area management and tourism development in Patagonia-Aysén: a neoliberal environmentality, which seeks to promote conservation through the commodification of nature as a tourism product, and an environmentality of truth predicated on a singular, pristine and beautiful nature as an object of conservation and advantage for tourism. Through an analysis of conservation maps and mapping rationalities specific to the Cerro Castillo protected area in Patagonia-Aysén, we trace how these multiple environmentalities are consolidated, rendered real and actionable through geovisualisations and cartographic practices. We argue that conservation maps and mapping emerge as an ‘encounter point’ wherein multiple environmentality strategies and rationalities converge, producing a form of governing the spaces of conservation – what we term a spatial environmentality – rooted in neoliberal and aesthetic logics. Spatial environmentality, we contend, constitutes a form of governing conservation spaces by inscribing and assigning (in)appropiate uses to nature that operationalises institutional interests in conditioning the active engagement of ‘environment subjects’ to control, administer, and take care of the spaces of conservation while in turn making environmental stewardship profitable.
Lim, S. T. G., & Perono Cacciafoco, F. (2023). Naming public transport and historicising experiences: Critical toponymies and everyday multilingualism in Singapore’s mass rapid transit system. Urban Studies, 60(15), 3045-3060. https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980221109101
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Public transport plays an integral role in urban centres by promoting economic development, mitigating environmental degradation and fostering social cohesion. It also enables users to experience the socio-cultural and linguistic diversity of a locality. Public transport is important to the cosmopolitan city-state of Singapore: its public transport system, which is ranked among the best in the world, is used by over 7.54 million passengers daily. Nevertheless, not much is known about how the linguistic landscapes, soundscapes and place names are tied to public transport use and encounters. This study analyses Singapore's Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) station names, effectively toponyms (place names) in their own right. Specifically, it focuses on the East West and North South Lines, two of Singapore's oldest MRT lines. Besides tracing the (initially) tumultuous history of the MRT system, the paper studies the languages used in the MRT stations of both lines. It argues that place names, taken together with the sights and sounds of the MRT, are part of everyday multilingualism, or the linguistic dynamism when different linguistic groups occupy public spaces. This paper also explores some of the linguistic, socio-political and policy making considerations behind the MRT stations through a critical toponymic perspective. From the viewpoint of the special issue's interests, the paper contributes to understanding the historicisation of Singapore's rail system and its contesting political and economic choices when developing the MRT.
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Keywords: Critical Toponymy, Everyday Multilingualism, Public Transport, Singapore Toponymy
The 2015 Paris Agreement is often depicted as a turning point for global climate governance. Following years of diplomatic gridlock, it laid the foundations for a new global climate regime that invites states to partner with nonstate actors in the transition to the low-carbon society. This article critically examines the political rationalities that inform the pluralization of climate politics after Paris and the turn toward cooperative modes of governing. Drawing on an analysis of initiatives led by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change that were launched to engage nonstate actors in the evolving Paris regime, we identify a global governmentality that mobilizes nonstate actors as active and responsible partners in the quest for rapid and deep decarbonization. In its search for cooperative and efficient forms of problem management, we argue, this form of rule nurtures a global space free from friction and opposition where businesses, investors, and industry are elevated as the real partners of government.
Through detailed explorations of ‘augmented realities’, this chapter provides a broad overview of not only the ways that those augmented realities matter but also the complex and often duplicitous manner that code and content can congeal in experiences of augmented places. Specifically, it demonstrates there are four key ways in which power is manifested in augmented realities: two performed largely by social actors – distributed power and communication power – and two enacted primarily via software – code power and timeless power. All spatial representations are both the products and producers of specific configurations of power relations, and thus a key question is whether the ways power in augmented reality is constructed and exercised is novel. The chapter concludes by calling for redoubled attention to both the layering of content and the duplicity and ephemerality of code in shaping the uneven and power‐laden practices of representations and the experiences of place augmentations in urban places.
As COVID-19 pandemic has afflicted countries the world over, and governments have taken a variety of steps to curb the spread of the virus. India like many other countries had taken very stringent measures early on to contain and curb the spread of the virus. This chapter examines the technological interventions implemented in India at national, state, and local levels in the government’s “war” against COVID-19. In order to contain and curb the spread of the virus, various geospatial, information, communication, and surveillance technologies have been used. These technologies are being used by the government for contact tracing, tracking, monitoring, and managing crowds for strict enforcement of quarantines and lockdowns. A comprehensive examination of the technological interventions raises social and ethical questions about the efficacy of technology use during the pandemic. The measures exacerbate social inequities and deepen digital divide. Moreover, the measures taken in the war against COVID-19 further the government agenda of building a Digital India that has promoted instituting a system that actively seeks to create a “geo-coded” landscape that enables government authorities to surveil, trace, track, delegate, and govern from a distance.KeywordsLocal and urban governanceCOVID-19PandemicIndia
Taking as its starting premise that we have a politics of space because space is political at the level of ontology, this article investigates how the governing of regional development is guided by a set of prominent political rationalities that revolve around the notions of competition and competitiveness. To this end, I mobilise the Foucauldian framework of governmentality to provide empirical illustrations drawn from a 5-year long research project concerning globalisation in Swedish sub-national regions. These illustrations show how regions are governed through rationalities that stress adaptability, attraction, environment and sustainability as well as leadership in order to prevail in their inevitable competition for vital resources. I argue that as these chains of rationale are put into motion in the contemporary politics of space, they not only promote specific and particular ways of developing regions, but also displace certain practices and objects from the realm of the political to the realm of a natural order. I therefore conclude that current expressions of the politics of space have strong tendencies to deny its own political foundations. Instead, competition and competitiveness are inscribed as naturally occurring features in social relations, thereby elevating their importance in the creation of new sub-national spaces.
Despite the increasing literature on LGBTQ families, there continues to be limited research on the children within these families. The social, legal and political context for LGBTQ people has transformed drastically over the twentieth and twenty-first century. However, we know little about how these changes will have shaped the life courses of people raised by LGBTQ parents.
The data within this thesis comes from 20 biographical interviews with adult-children raised by lesbian, bisexual, trans and queer (LBTQ) parents in England and Scotland. This thesis explores how people with LBTQ parents narrate their life stories, particularly addressing the intersections of family, identity, social norms and historical context. I use a combination of life course and queer theory to discuss the complex and messy everyday spatialities and relationalities found in participant life stories. The study examines the interplay between notions of normative families, genders and sexualities, and alternative everyday practices in families with LBTQ parents. This analysis is combined with a geographical and temporal lens, discussing how family practices, emotions and relationships can shift through time and space.
I firstly discuss this in relation to genetic normativity, noting that although people with LBTQ parents often live in families that seem to resist dominant notions of biological relatedness, genetic discourses remain significant to those raised by LBTQ parents. This suggests that children raised in LBTQ households must navigate between the non-traditional aspects of their families and ongoing normative genetic discourses. Secondly, I examine queer origin stories, highlighting the ways that adult-children with LBTQ parents emphasise the importance of knowing their queer family histories, rather than only their genetic relations. This demonstrates the ways that adult-children can re-create, re-shape and re-tell their queer origin stories in adulthood. Third, I look into how participants narrated their experiences within the various spaces they moved between. I focus on the idea of ‘coming out’ or disclosure, to discuss how the power within specific contexts prompt different practices, displays, and feelings from people with LBTQ parents. Finally, I explore how participants related to ideas of normality and normativity more broadly, noting adult-children’s pursuit of intelligibility and legitimacy; how adult-children engage in quiet forms of everyday activism; and complicate traditional notions of the idealised life course.
These findings contribute to the geographies of family and intimacy and sociological understandings of LGBTQ and queer kinship, adding to the limited body of work on children raised by non-heterosexual or gender confirming parents.
The creative economy is a complex assemblage of policy, practice and industrial activity, underpinned by apparently novel configurations of cultural and creative work. In recent years, it has become the focus of a number of schemes which have seen major shifts in how UK research councils fund universities. This paper reflects on the work of Research and Enterprise in Arts and Creative Technology (REACT), a major knowledge exchange programme aimed at stimulating growth in the creative sector through collaborations with universities in South West England and South Wales. In the first section, I unpack some of the underpinning logics of the ‘creative turn’ by which creativity has become a key currency in modern economies. I then consider how this shift has affected universities. I next ask how the various rationalities of an economy driven by creativity have moved into the knowledge exchange sphere. I approach this by formulating creative economy policy as a form of governmentality performed through assemblages that facilitate policy transfer. The paper turns to the empirical example of REACT, considering it as an assemblage through which reconfigurations of discourses, spatialities, temporalities, subjects and calculative practices have unfolded. The analysis shows how the multivalent, ad hoc and sometimes contradictory experience of producing an assemblage such as REACT means that policy transfer is never entirely complete nor stable, and that in this sense it is still possible for knowledge exchange programmes to imagine and generate alternative approaches to creativity that are not wholly reducible to a neoliberal or capitalist logic, although they remain implicated therein.
Precision agriculture (PA) is restructuring farmer livelihoods and identities through a panoply of technologies that generate and process big data to influence agricultural practices. In this paper, we ask the question: How does algorithmic rationality impact farmers' trust in PA? We focus on the modalities of power wielded by agritech firms through PA that socially construct a form of moralistic trust, the politics of knowledge and knowledgeability, and the internalization of new social identities. This research study utilized a mixed methods approach that included focus groups and follow-up surveys with social actors along the PA value chain. We found that agritech firms have successfully positioned their knowledge products as superior to farmers' experiential knowledge, thereby ensuring farmers’ sustained engagement with PA technologies for the purposes of data capture and capital accumulation. Farmers internalize the algorithmic rationality of PA and position themselves along a moral register through governmentalized actions that ostensibly demonstrate moralistic trust in the system. This process has the effect of transforming social identities, interpellating farmers as the architects of their own alienation. Agritech is increasingly adept at digitally abstracting farm knowledge away from farmers. PA is a battleground wherein the politics of agrarian knowledge are contested.
At the heart of ‘Indian nation-state making’ in the post-colonial context is dominant imagery and imaginary of Indian-ness, and there is an uncertain relationship between legitimate and illegitimate violence, and debate on integration and coercion of diverse nationalities in this state-nation. The ethnic nationalities of India’s Northeast have not been well integrated into the Indian imaginary and share a sense of belonging. Insurgency shapes the politics of this borderland and fuels secessionist aspirations and led to a demarcation of disturbed areas and exceptional citizens. Following Foucault and Agamben, I highlight the immense ‘unchecked’ sovereignty and biopolitical control of the Indian government to demarcate zones of democratic exception in Northeast India and enforce laws such as the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) to perpetuate its domination, militarise and radically decide on matters of life. The law is draconian in its implications and I review some of the extant literature that reveals the ‘bare life’ enjoyed by some Indian citizens. Integrating ethnographic voices from Manipur, this paper deepens our critical perspective on the AFSPA to understand its fundamental impact on everyday life and routine violence in Manipur and the consequent emigration of its citizens.
Hydrosocial territories are produced not just through concrete water infrastructure, but through flows of people, water, money, and ideas at multiple scales. As part of China’s South–North Water Transfer Project, water drawn from the distant Danjiangkou Reservoir now supplies the megacities of Beijing and Tianjin with the majority of their drinking water. To provide this new service – supplying drinking water of sufficient quality and quantity – the Reservoir and its upper reaches are in the midst of socio-economic and ecological transformations. In this article, we outline the tools being mobilised to send a river of clean water north, including administrative interventions, displacement, and discursive imaginings. We argue that what is being attempted is a wholesale reorganisation that marginalises local territorialities, reflects China’s particular governing rationalities and practices, and highlights new spatialities of water governance. Our analysis of the remaking of Danjiangkou pushes hydropolitical scholarship to more precisely define the geographies of power in hydrosocial territories.
Critical scholars have addressed land use models and related technologies by pointing to their epistemological underpinnings and the social consequences of visibilities and invisibilities induced by these instruments to different forms of governance. More recently, in addition to reaffirming the old dictum that the map is not the territory, some scholars have analyzed how land use models can shape perceptions, narratives and policy, and in this way “make” the territory and the state. In this study, we adopt the notion of sociotechnical imaginaries to highlight the role of land use models and basin-wide development schemes in the emergence of military developmentalism in the Brazilian Amazon. We show that earlier surveys of the Amazon were created in order to substantiate territorial claims and to guide the exploitation of natural rubber and other extractive resources. Mapping of the rivers as arteries with limited upland assessment implied a view of the Amazon as an immutable and invincible nature where resources were given as elements of natural landscapes. The approach of economic sectorial mapping that had dominated earlier surveys began to shift during and especially after World War II in an effort to imagine Amazonia as a separate and identifiable policy space which transformation would be possible with the application of development frameworks, such as the one derived from Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Likewise, experts from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization played a key role in providing land use models and assessment that “proved” the economic viability of large-scale colonization projects. This article points out that the extensive occupation and ongoing destruction of the Amazon rainforest was also informed by US large-scale planning regimes infused with technoscientific approaches derived mostly from Global North scientific institutions. Those concepts underpinned imaginaries of an integrated region whose “planning surface” would be oriented by the idea of the “Legal Amazon”, subject to a technocratic, centralized and authoritarian style of developmentalism. In this way this paper shows how land use models are not mere representations of the territory but also carriers of sociotechnical imaginaries that coproduce radical changes in social and natural landscapes.
The social, as a plane of thought and action, has been central to political thought and political programmes since the mid-nineteenth century. This paper argues that, while themes of society and concerns with social cohesion and social justice are still significant in political argument, the social is no longer a key zone, traget and objective of strategies of government. The rise of the language of globalization indicates that economic relations are no longer easily understood as organized across a single bounded national economy. Community has become a new spatialization of government: heterogeneous, plural, linking individuals, families and others into contesting cultrual assemblies of identities and allegiances. Divisions among the subjects of government are coded in new ways; neither included nor excluded are governed as social citizens. Non-political strategies are deployed for the management of expert authority. Anti-political motifs such as associationism and communitarianism which do not seek to govern through society, are on the rise in political thought. The paper suggests some ways of diagnosing and analysing these novel territorializations of political thought and action.
Urban studies scholars drawing on Foucault's analysis of governmentality have investigated how urban social orders are increasingly more concerned with the management of space rather than on the discipline of offenders or the punishment of offences (Merry, 2001). This paper examines the 'rationality' and efficacy of spatial governmentality in post-apartheid Cape Town, and shows how the city has increasingly become a 'fortress city' (Davis, 1990), much like cities such as Los Angeles, Sao Paolo and Rio de Janeiro. These 'global cities' are increasingly characterised by privatised security systems in middle class suburbs, shopping malls and gated communities (Caldeira, 1999). These spatial forms of governmentality draw on sophisticated security systems comprising razor wire and electrified walls, burglar alarms and safe rooms, as well as vicious guard dogs, neighbourhood watches, private security companies, and automated surveillance cameras. On the other side of the race and class divide are urban ghettoes characterised by growing poverty and everyday violence. These socio-spatial inequalities continue to be reproduced despite urban planning initiatives aimed at desegregating the apartheid city. Although the media and the middle classes highlight the dangers of crime and violence, they tend to ignore the structures of inequality that fuel the growth of crime syndicates and violent drug economies that are reproducing these urban governance crises. Given the diminished resources of the neo-liberal state, the policing of middle class residential and business districts is increasingly being 'outsourced' to private security companies. In working class neighbourhoods of Cape Town such as Manenberg, the state has attempted to re-establish governance by resorting to new forms of spatial governmentality. The paper draws attention to the limits of these attempts to assert state control through the management of space. Spatial governance in places like Manenberg will continue to be relatively ineffectual given existing levels of social inequality and racial polarization. Such processes are reproduced by massive unemployment and racialised poverty resulting from socio-spatial legacies of apartheid and Cape Town's shift from a manufacturing to a tourist, IT and financial services economy. Although this paper focuses on attempts at re-establishing governance in a crime and gangster-ridden working class neighbourhood of Cape Town, it addresses these issues in relation to city-wide shifts to new forms of spatial governmentality after apartheid.
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This paper examines some of the ways in which state power is extended and consolidated. In particular, Foucault's notion of ‘governmentality’ is employed to investigate some of the rationalities and technologies used by the modern liberal state to ‘govern at a distance’. Governmentality allows us to explain how the state is able to regulate spheres of civil society that are not under its direct control. In order to undertake this task successfully a host of indirect mechanisms must be employed to ensure that civil domains are governable. Statistics are cited as one good example of how government at a distance is achieved, for the collection of numbers about various populations allows those populations to be acted upon as they are made increasingly visible and calculable. The example of British agriculture during the 19th and 20th centuries is explored. It illustrates how the collection of statistics gradually rendered agriculture visible and permitted its characterization as an economic sector. The development of a national policy—for the ‘national farm’— followed, which sought to rationalize agriculture in line with statistical representations. Thus a consolidation of the agricultural territory was achieved during the post-war years. In the process, farms and farmers were disembedded from their immediate socio-spatial contexts as they were integrated into a discrete economic sector.
Governing Europe is the first book to systematically link Michel Foucault's hypotheses on power and 'governmentality' with the study of European integration. Through a series of empirical encounters that spans the fifty-year history of European integration, it explores both the diverse political dreams that have framed means and ends of integration and the political technologies that have made 'Europe' a calculable, administrable domain. The book illustrates how a genealogy of European integration differs from conventional approaches. By suspending the assumption that we already know what/where Europe is, it opens a space for analysis where we can ask: how did Europe come to be governed as this and not that? The themes covered by this book include: * the different constructions of Europe within discourses of modernization, democratization, insecurity and 'governance' * the imprint of modernism, liberalism, ordoliberalism, neoliberalism and crime on the identity of the European Community/European Union * the historical relationship between European government and specific technologies of power, technologies as diverse as planning, price control, transparency and benchmarking. © 2005 William Walters and Jens Henrik Haahr. All rights reserved.
The new urban social order depends on a complex combination of systems of punishment, discipline, and security. Scholars drawing on Foucault's analysis of the art and rationality of governance, or governmentality, have explored how urban social orders are increasingly based on the governance of space rather than on the discipline of offenders or the punishment of offenses. The new urban social order is characterized by privatized security systems and consumer-policed spaces such as malls. Gender violence interventions represent another deployment of spatial forms of governmentality. Over the last two decades, punishment of batterers has been augmented by disciplinary systems that teach batterers new forms of masculinity and by security systems for women based on spatial separation. In the postmodern city, spatial governmentality is integrally connected with punishment and discipline. These new forms of governance circulate globally along with neoliberal ideas of the diminished state.
This book provides an essential insight into the practices and ideas of maps and map-making. It draws on a wide range of social theorists, and theorists of maps and cartography, to show how maps and map-making have shaped the spaces in which we live.
This paper examines some of the ways in which state power is extended and consolidated. In particular, Foucault's notion of ‘governmentality’ is employed to investigate some of the rationalities and technologies used by the modern liberal state to ‘govern at a distance’. Governmentality allows us to explain how the state is able to regulate spheres of civil society that are not under its direct control. In order to undertake this task successfully a host of indirect mechanisms must be employed to ensure that civil domains are governable. Statistics are cited as one good example of how government at a distance is achieved, for the collection of numbers about various populations allows those populations to be acted upon as they are made increasingly visible and calculable. The example of British agriculture during the 19th and 20th centuries is explored. It illustrates how the collection of statistics gradually rendered agriculture visible and permitted its characterization as an economic sector. The development of a national policy—for the ‘national farm’— followed, which sought to rationalize agriculture in line with statistical representations. Thus a consolidation of the agricultural territory was achieved during the post-war years. In the process, farms and farmers were disembedded from their immediate socio-spatial contexts as they were integrated into a discrete economic sector.
One of the founding fathers of Italian "workerism," Antonio Negri was associated with the Marxist extra-parliamentary organization Potere operaio [Workers' Power] during the 1960s and with the Italian autonomist movement during the 1970s. He was imprisoned on political charges from 1979 to 1983 and from 1997 to 2003. Between 1983 and 1997, Negri lived in exile in Paris, where he continues to hold a university lectureship.
In the Anglophone world, Negri is best known for his collaborative work with Michael Hardt, in particular for their theory of capitalist globalization, developed in Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000) and Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (London and New York: Penguin Press, 2004). "Empire" is the term coined by Negri and Hardt to describe the flexible, transnational form of sovereignty that develops contemporarily with the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism. Hardt and Negri re-introduce the concept of the "multitude"—taken from the seventeenth-century political philosophy of Hobbes, Spinoza, and others—in order to designate the collective subject that labors and struggles under Empire's global regime of exploitation.
In exploring the transformations of art and culture in the age of Empire, the essay translated below touches on many of the central themes of Negri's recent work. A prime example of Negri's capacity for theoretical synthesis, the essay surveys the economic, political, and cultural developments of the past decades in order to trace them to the anthropological and ontological transformation that accompanies the transition from the system of Fordist nation-states to Empire. Negri invokes a wide range of conceptual apparatuses—from Spinoza's ontology to the theory of space developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus – in order to reverse Adorno and Horkheimer's vision of capital's all-encompassing dominion and to argue for the autonomy and creativity of the multitude.
Max Henninger (MA, PhD) lives in Berlin and works as a translator. He is the German translator of Italian novelist and poet Nanni Balestrini. His critique of Antonio Negri's theory of post-Fordism is forthcoming in the online journal Ephemera.
This paper relates developments in the science of geology to forms of governmental rationality in Canada during the late nineteenth century. By so doing it opens for discussion a topic rarely broached by political theorists: the role that the earth sciences played in the historical evolution of forms of political rationality. The paper contests theoretical approaches that understand the relation between scientific knowledge and state rationality as only instrumental. Instead, the paper demonstrates how attending to the temporality of science (as evident in the emergence of specifically geological ways of seeing nature during the period) helps us understand the ways in which science is constitutive of political rationality, rather than merely its instrument. This argument is developed through a critique of Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘governmentality’, a concept that historicizes political rationality, yet remains silent on how the physical sciences contributed to its varied forms. The paper concludes with reflections on the implications of such an argument for theories of the social production of nature.
The subjectivity of individuals, the so-called speakers and hearers of political discourse, who actually, or even ideally, populate a state, needs to be understood in terms of enunciative modalities - the statuses, sites, and positions - of their existence as political subjects. Enunciative modalities refer to the ways a discursive practice is attached to bodies in space (Clifford, 2001:56).Governmental thought territorializes itself in different ways… We can analyze the ways in which the idea of a territorially bounded, politically governed nation state under sovereign authority took shape… One can trace anomalous governmental histories of smaller-scale territories… and one can also think of these [as] spaces of enclosure that governmental thought has imagined and penetrated… how [does it] happen that social thought territorializes itself on the problem of [for example] the slum in the nineteenth century (Rose, 1999:34–36)?
This paper outlines Foucault's concept of governmentality and argues for its contemporary significance. It focuses upon the role that liberal modes of government accord to the exercise of authority over individual and collective conduct by expertise. The paper argues that nineteenth-century liberalism as a mode of rule produced a series of problems about the governability of individuals, families and markets and populations. Expertise provided a formula for resolving these problems instantiated in a range of complex and heterogenous ‘machines’ for the government of individual and collective conduct. Over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries one sees the rise of a new formula for the exercise of rule, which one can call ‘the welfare state’ - within which expertise becomes linked to the formal political apparatus in new ways. the strategies of rule generated under this formula of ‘the welfare state’ have changed fundamentally over the last fifty years. A new formula of rule is taking shape, one that we can perhaps best term ‘advanced liberal’. The analytical machinery of most conventional political sociology - and most radical analyses that take their cue from Marxism - have not proved successful in characterizing these forms of rule nor evaluating their consequences. The forms of power that subject us, the systems of rule that administer us, the types of authority that master us, do not find their principle of coherence in a State, nor do they answer to a logic of oppression or domination. Analyses of governmentality can enable us to explore these relations between mentalities of rules, forms of truth telling, and procedures of expertise.
This paper proposes some new ways of analysing the exercise of political power in advanced liberal democratic societies. These are developed from Michel Foucault's conception of ‘governmentality’ and addresses political power in terms of ‘political rationalities’ and ‘technologies of government’. It draws attention to the diversity of regulatory mechanisms which seek to give effect to government, and to the particular importance of indirect mechanisms that link the conduct of individuals and organizations to political objectives through ‘action at a distance’. The paper argues for the importance of an analysis of language in understanding the constitution of the objects of politics, not simply in terms of meaning or rhetoric, but as ‘intellectual technologies’ that render aspects of existence amenable to inscription and calculation. It suggests that governmentality has a characteristically ‘programmatic’ form, and that it is inextricably bound to the invention and evaluation of technologies that seek to give it effect. It draws attention to the complex processes of negotiation and persuasion involved in the assemblage of loose and mobile networks that can bring persons, organizations and objectives into alignment. The argument is exemplified through considering various aspects of the regulation of economic life: attempts at national economic planning in post-war France and England; the role ascribed to changing accounting practices in the UK in the 1960s; techniques of managing the internal world of the workplace that have come to lay special emphasis upon the psychological features of the producing subjects. The paper contends that ‘governmentality’ has come to depend in crucial respects upon the intellectual technologies, practical activities and social authority associated with expertise. It argues that the self-regulating capacities of subjects, shaped and normalized through expertise, are key resources for governing in a liberal-democratic way.
This paper speculates about the origins and effects of global disorder after the end of the Cold War. It challenges the categories used by political realists to interpret governmentality as an ensemble of state sovereignty, territoriality and power in an international anarchic system, suggesting that new subnational and supranational anarchies now permit agents of contragovernmentality, or un-stated sovran potentates, to contest the rules of in-stated sovereign powers. These alternative categories, in turn, provide a new conceptual register to assess how and why new anti-statal, transnational, and extraterritorial social forces begin to proliferate after the Cold War.
Distinguishing four sources of power in human societies - ideological, economic, military and political - The Sources of Social Power traces their interrelations throughout human history. This second volume deals with power relations between the Industrial Revolution and the First World War, focusing on France, Great Britain, Hapsburg Austria, Prussia/Germany and the United States. Based on considerable empirical research, it provides original theories of the rise of nations and nationalism, of class conflict, of the modern state and of modern militarism. While not afraid to generalize, it also stresses social and historical complexity. Michael Mann sees human society as 'a patterned mess' and attempts to provide a sociological theory appropriate to this, his final chapter giving an original explanation of the causes of the First World War. First published in 1993, this new edition of Volume 2 includes a new preface by the author examining the impact and legacy of the work.
This paper examines how and for what reasons rural residents come to care about the environment. Focusing on Kumaon, India, it explores the deep and durable relationship between government and subjectivity and shows how regulatory strategies associated with and resulting from community decision making help transform those who participate in government. Using evidence drawn from the archival record and fieldwork conducted over two time periods, it analyzes the extent to which varying levels of involvement in institutional regimes of environmental regulation facilitate new ways of understanding the environment. On the basis of this analysis, it outlines a framework of understanding that permits the joint consideration of the technologies of power and self that are responsible for the emergence of new political subjects.
Preface and Acknowledgements. 1. Strategies. 2. Capitalism and Anti-essentialism: An Encounter in Contradiction. 3. Class and the Politics of "Identity". 4. How Do We Get Out of This Capitalist Place? 5. The Economy, Stupid! Industrial Policy Discourse and the Body Economic. 6. Querying Globalization. 7. Post-Fordism as Politics. 8. Toward a New Class Politics of Distribution. 9. "Hewers of Cake and Drawers of Tea". 10. Haunting Capitalism: Ghosts on a Blackboard. 11. Waiting for the Revolution. . . Bibliography. Index.
Based on Michel Foucault's 1978 and 1979 lectures at the College de France on governmental rationalities and his 1977 interview regarding his work on imprisonment, this volume is the long-awaited sequel to Power/Knowledge. In these lectures, Foucault examines the art or activity of government both in its present form and within a historical perspective as well as the different ways governmentality has been made thinkable and practicable. Foucault's thoughts on political discourse and governmentality are supplemented by the essays of internationally renowned scholars. United by the common influence of Foucault's approach, they explore the many modern manifestations of government: the reason of state, police, liberalism, security, social economy, insurance, solidarity, welfare, risk management, and more. The central theme is that the object and the activity of government are not instinctive and natural things, but things that have been invented and learned. The Foucault Effect analyzes the thought behind practices of government and argues that criticism represents a true force for change in attitudes and actions, and that extending the limits of some practices allows the invention of others. This unique and extraordinarily useful collection of articles and primary materials will open the way for a whole new set of discussions of the work of Michel Foucault as well as the status of liberalism, social policy, and insurance.--Publisher description.
Discussions within geography of the history of the concepts of “space” and “place” are often Whiggish rehearsals of perceived mistakes and misapprehensions; there is little sense that earlier understandings of the concepts have anything important to offer the contemporary geographer. Conversely, one finds little that suggests that reflections on contemporary life might shed light on those now seemingly antiquated concepts. Both views are unfortunate. In fact, viewed from the perspective of current practice, the classical division of topos/choros/geos makes sense not, as is commonly thought, as an ontologically oriented oversimple conceptualization of scalar differences but, rather, as an outgrowth of epistemological differences. The discourses that emerged around those concepts—topography, chorography, and geography—each relied upon a different way of knowing, storing, and communicating knowledge. Indeed, in the absence of the appropriate affording technologies—the map and the data storage device—we had a world without space, which (along with its conceptual relatives, including the “geographic”) emerged as a relatively recent invention. At the same time, against the background of this rereading of the concepts of space and place, much that occurs today turns out to be a matter of place, not space. In fact, the concept of space typically operates either metaphorically or reflectively, and the current practice of using the terms almost interchangeably (as with the practice of using the term “spatiality” to refer to matters concerning both space and place) merely obscures.
There have been few studies of spatialized discourse within contemporary healthcare policy-making. This paper addresses this omission, focusing on the governmental presentation of the little-studied measures that consolidated the post-1989 reforms of the NHS in England and Wales, and culminated in the Health Authorities Act 1995. A short section places these measures in context and outlines their main components. An analysis of key documents and parliamentary exchanges is then used to show how spatialized language was central to the presentation of policy and its debate in parliament. In particular, the paper demonstrates how nuanced conceptions of space- and territorially-led service management provide a flexible basis for presenting notions of power and control. This ‘spatio-linguistic strategy’ is located theoretically within the concept of governmentality.
In this exploratory article, we ask how states come to be understood as entities with particular spatial characteristics, and how changing relations between practices of government and national territories may be challenging long-established modes of state spatiality. In the first part of this article, we seek to identify two principles that are key to state spatialization: verticality (the state is "above" society) and encompassment (the state "encompasses" its localities). We use ethnographic evidence from a maternal health project in India to illustrate our argument that perceptions of verticality and encompassment are produced through routine bureaucratic practices. In the second part, we develop a concept of transnational governmentality as a way of grasping how new practices of government and new forms of "grassroots" politics may call into question the principles of verticality and encompassment that have long helped to legitimate and naturalize states' authority over "the local."