In 1970, the English sociologist Ray Pahl published a collection of essays under a simple yet disarming title, Whose City? The question was more original than it sounded, even if its answer was fairly obvious; and Pahl knew it: “One doesn’t have to be very astute now”, he said in an introduction to the second edition of the text, “in order to answer the question ‘Whose City?’: quite evidently the capitalists own British cities and up to 1973 they grew fat on their rents and the revaluations of their portfolios”. What interested Pahl and other critical urban scholars of that era – many of whom like Pahl and Manuel Castells went on to found the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (in 1977) – was how come it was their city? What were the mechanisms whereby capitalists – increasingly finance capitalists – commandeered the city in the way they did? Through what means did they make it their city? How did planning authorities, land-use allocations, and various state agencies perpetuate or undermine this ‘system’? The bold originality of the thinking then was that it did indeed identify a ‘system’, an ‘urban system’, a class system through which fat cats grew rich. There was, still is, a logic at play, with structures and institutions that enabled, still enable, this logic to function, to reproduce itself systemically. “The city”, wrote Pahl, with typical blunt insight, “is what society lets it be”. The dialectic between the city and society would never be the same again.

The approach Ray Pahl pioneered quickly became known as ‘urban managerialism’. This for a number of reasons, both analytical and political. First off is that, analytically, ‘the system’ has its human embodiment, which is to say, has active players who make decisions even while they constrain themselves by the decisions they make. Pahl suggested that there were a host of ‘urban managers’ who affect the life chances of ordinary people in decisive and uneven ways; they affect life chances because these managers have a certain authority and relative autonomy in the allocation of ‘scarce’ urban resources, the most precious of which is housing. By urban managers, Pahl meant housing officers, planners, social workers and decision-making bureaucrats, those employed by state authorities, housing associations and local municipalities, those who acted, both wittingly or unwittingly, as ‘social gatekeepers’. To analyze how these urban managers acted, to identify empirically their common ideology (if they had one), the actual allocative decisions and manipulations they made, and why, was, said Pahl, a legitimate object of enquiry for socially committed sociologists. The allocative mechanism, in other words, “how much of the cake and for whom?”, how this created “territorial inequalities”, how it affected the sort of schools children went to, as well as access to other public resources like hospitals and mass transit, became, for Pahl, a focus of intense political concern.

While Pahl, like many progressive urbanists of that generation, was influenced by Marxism, by a critical analysis of capitalist urban political-economy, the politics of Whose City? might be best described as Left Weberian. Unlike Castells and David Harvey, as a social democrat believing in redistributive justice and a benevolent, welfare capitalist state, Pahl balked at throwing in his lot with Marxism tout court. He was always more interested in collective consumption rather than productive consumption; and his emphasis on Max Weber’s trinity of ‘wealth, status and power’ meant a class analysis that scrutinized urban space and resource allocation rather than work relations as such[1]. His fundamental concern was what does class mean in an urbanizing context, and here he only dabbled with Weberian thinking, never going the whole hog like Peter Saunders and Peter Williams et al., for whom “consumption classes” won out over production classes.

At the time, Harvey seemed to be countering Pahl when he claimed that urban struggles represented “displaced” class struggles, struggles condensed from workplace struggles; although, more recently (see Rebel Cities from 2012), Harvey says struggles in the urban arena are no longer displaced, given restructuring of capitalist work relations and the denigration of unionization. Urban struggles, on the contrary, represent the most intense and amplified of class struggles: the arena of the social factory has now enlarged onto the whole productive plane of city itself. But Harvey explained to me recently in an e-mail exchange (11 June 2013) that “Pahl found his own answer in his Sheppey study, which I am now happy to accept [see Rebel Cities, ch. 5, p. 132]”. “I used the idea of displaced class struggle”, Harvey said, “not as an antidote to Ray’s anti-Marxism; it is more to deal with what I now refer to as the distinction between the production and realization of surplus value in urban settings, because all along I could see that as much value was being extracted by the property owners and rentiers (with the aid of urban managerialists) as by direct producers at the point of production. I always felt close to Ray in terms of his identification of the urban question even as I pulled in different directions for answers (he made very little of urban rent, for example, which I emphasized and would still emphasize)”.

In subsequent renderings of his managerialist thesis, Pahl responded positively to comradely Marxist criticism like this. “By focusing on urban resources and facilities”, he admitted, “and by alerting urban populations to their relative deprivations in the field of consumption, attention is shifted from the main source of inequality, namely, the field of production … If workers are made to think that their main interests are in the field of consumption, and if sociologists adopt a form of urban managerialism to explain the allocation of resources within an urban system, then clearly basic inequalities arising from the productive process may remain hidden”.

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When I first read Ray Pahl’s Whose City? in the 1980s I was a twenty-something undergraduate. I’d been introduced to this and other works of critical urban theory – especially to Castells’ The Urban Question and Harvey’s Social Justice and the City – by Trevor Jones, a gifted, maverick Social Studies teacher at what was then Liverpool Polytechnic. I didn’t quite know it at the time but Jones’ lectures would change the course of my life, such that I can still talk about them almost thirty years on. Under Jones’ tutelage, I’d already decided that I was a Marxist and Pahl a liberal; so Whose City? was a vital text only insofar as it took me beyond Chicago School urban ecology, propelling me onwards to the hard-core critical material I yearned for. Jones put urban managerialism pithily in context: Imagine the city is a large cake; imagine you cut the cake into a series of slices, with each slice representing some scarce resource; a thick, creamy slice here, a slither over there. Managerialism tells us how that cake gets divided up and who gets such and such a slice and why; but it doesn’t tell us who bakes the cake, nor does it say why those urban resources are ‘scarce’ in the first place. ‘Who decides?’ is one thing; but ‘Who decides who decides?’ is another question again. And there Marxism comes into its own.

In those days, I remember carrying Pahl’s Whose City? around with me in my black denim jacket pocket; a small-cut Penguin paperback, it fitted perfectly. In retrospect, I think the books that made a lasting impression on me all somehow fitted into one of my pockets; they were transportable, moving theory, particularly as I navigated around the new cities I’d soon find myself in. These books were theoretical street guides to the hidden structures of the city, atlases to vital parts of the city that weren’t always visible to any naked eye. This would be an invaluable lesson university curricula would only partly help convey. (Castells’ bulky The Urban Question, of course, didn’t fit into any coat pocket; I suspect I was happy to transport it under my arm, hoping people might actually believe I understood its contents!)

Quite recently, I took that Pahl book, that same tatty edition, to a conference in Hong Kong commemorating Pahl’s life and death, justly entitled Whose City?[2]. In my contribution I reflected upon what Pahl’s book was and might still be today, might still offer concerned urbanists who know better than ever to whom cities like Hong Kong really belong. One thing I noticed this time, which I hadn’t noticed back then, was that my copy of Whose City? had been withdrawn from Bradford College Library in 1984, during the fear and loathing of Thatcher’s first term. When I mentioned this in my talk the audience began to laugh. We all began to laugh because we all knew – or most of us knew – that the Thatcherite project was at that moment in full flight actively dismantling Pahl’s theoretical object and political subject. His passionate embrace of welfare statism was under fire from all quarters; multiple levels of local and national government would feel Thatcher’s ‘free market’ heat, abolished, abused, and recalibrated to suit the whims of an ascendant private sector. Thatcher’s full frontal attack against welfare provision, her blatant class warfare against organized labor and organized opposition (like the Miners and Militant in Liverpool), created a generation of lazy entrepreneurs in Britain, capitalists who had no need to innovate because business was handed to them on a Tory silver plater. And those remaining urban managers no longer concerned themselves with allocative redistributive justice; most wouldn’t even know what the phrase meant. Instead, their working day began to be passed applying cost-benefit analysis to calculate efficiency models, devising new business paradigms for delivering social services at minimum cost; services got contracted-out to low-ball bidders, and whole government departments were dissolved or replaced by new units of non-accountable ‘post-political’ middle-managers, whose machinations are about as publicly transparent as mud.

A dramatic transformation of urban governance was wrought, a shift from managerialism to entrepreneurialism, from social investment in the urban realm to the speculative binge of the urban itself; use-values had uses only because they were exchange-values; cities’ ‘scarce’ resources quickly became speculative stock, new futures and options for expanded capital accumulation by dispossession. Yet while we know that this shift from managerialism to entrepreneurialism involved disjuncture and rupture, that it reveled in forcible implementation, we also know with hindsight how it involved a certain morphing and role switching of protagonists, with revolving doors between public managers and private entrepreneurs, between managerial entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial managers. (In lots of ways this toing and froing across ideological boundaries made its debut in the 1980s in France, during Mitterrand’s presidency, when radical ex-’68ers became diehard neoliberal politicians and media pundits. For good reason Guy Debord always said that the society of “integrated spectacle” was pioneered in France.)

And if, in Britain, the initial thrust had been Thatcher’s, then John Major and notably Tony Blair expertly finished the job. In that sense, corporate, financial and state power are now stitched together with barely any trace of a seam. Politicians and civil servants, bankers and CEOs, job-share and job-swap; public faces and private concerns are shamelessly interchangeable and mutually beneficial for both careers and bank accounts. As Seumas Milne has pointed out in the pages of The Guardian (see here), the doors between the public and the private “are no longer just revolving but spinning, and people charged with protecting public interest are bought and sold with barely a fig leaf of regulation”. “Take David Harnett”, says Milne, “head of tax at HM Revenue & Customs until last year and the man whose ‘sweetheart deals’ allowed Starbucks and Vodafone to avoid paying billions in tax. He now works for the giant City accountancy firm Deloitte, which works for Vodafone”. “The cabinet secretary, Jeremy Heywood, is the living embodiment of the revolving door, having moved effortlessly from the Treasury to Blair’s office to the investment bank Morgan Stanley and back to work for David Cameron”.

Along the way, the public coffers have been raided, plundered by hybrid public-private bodies like PFIs (Private Finance Initiatives), the brainchild of John Major, which have helped themselves to urban infrastructure – ports, roads, schools, railways, electricity grids, and God knows what else – not only in Britain but throughout the world. When the going is good, PFIs – government-sponsored private companies with zero public accountability – amass considerable booty; when things go belly-up, the government steps in to bail them out because the continuation of the particular utility serves a vital public necessity and can’t go under. It’s an all-win situation for everybody, apart from the ordinary tax payer and consumer. As such, the neoliberal stakes have profoundly ratcheted up since Thatcher’s day: what we’ve witnessed isn’t so much a privatization as a financialization of public infrastructure and services, speculative quackery enabling windfall gains (when equity is cashed in) for a tiny minority of bosses and shareholders, some of whom are supposedly public servants.

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So, returning to the question ‘Whose City?’, the answer, perhaps, is pretty clear: it’s the parasites’ city; their progeny is a species we can now label the parasitic city. A parasite, remember, is an organism that feeds off a larger ‘host’ organism, an uninvited diner at the lodge who doesn’t pay for their grub. Parasites chomp away at the common-wealth the world over, eating away inside the social body, stripping people’s assets, foreclosing homes, dispossessing value rather than contributing anything towards its creation. In parasitic cities, social wealth is consumed through conspicuously wasteful enterprises, administered by parasitic elites, our very own aristocracy (the 1%) who squander generative capacity by thriving exclusively from unproductive activities: they roll dice on the stock market, profit from unequal exchanges, guzzle at the public trough; they filch rents and treat land as a pure financial and speculative asset, as a form of fictitious capital[3].

The only thing parasites need to do is sit on property, mobilize monopoly power, and charge somebody else a premium for using or entering it. “One part of society”, Marx says in volume three of Capital (ch. 46), “thus exacts tribute from another for the permission to inhabit the earth, as landed property in general assigns the landlord the privilege of exploiting the terrestrial body, the bowels of the earth, the air, and thereby the maintenance and development of life”. “It is the ground-rent”, Marx was wont to emphasize, “and not the house which forms the actual object of building speculation in rapidly growing cities, especially where construction is carried on as an industry”. Artificially created scarcity jacks up land values; financial and property interests promote redevelopment on the land towards ‘higher’ and ‘better’ capitalistic uses, towards future increased exchange-values pocketed as class-monopoly rents. Parasites hatch land and infrastructural grabs and get their friends in government to issue ‘eminent domain’ edicts, legalizing their parasitic predilections. Parasites thrive in both the private and public sectors and especially flourish where those sectors merge as one. Parasites do everything they can to leech blood money, flattening themselves off the backs of social labor. And these days they brandish any pretext to do so under the ruse of a politics of austerity.

In the 1950s, the development economist Bert Hoselitz first coined the notion of “parasitic” cities. In Sociological Aspects of Economic Growth (1960), Hoselitz wondered whether cities in the developing world, with their “backward” economies, would turn out to be parasitical or generative. (‘World Cities’ theorist John Friedmann would later pick up on this for thinking about Latin American urbanization.) Generative cities, said Hoselitz, have a favorable impact on economic growth; parasitic cities produce the opposite, negative effect, siphoning off economic resources for the enrichment of privileged urban classes who render no real productive services in return. Generative cities reallocate the bulk of its surplus and accumulated wealth, giving it back in the form of investment that benefits production and people, public infrastructure and human capital. Parasitic cities, conversely, have their wealth squandered by a non-working yet all-consuming elite; a parasitic form of urbanization, reflective of the parasitic nature of this urbanized elite, thereby ensues.

It’s ironic to think that under Hoselitz’s (and Friedmann’s) thesis, parasitic usually meant ‘developing’ cities; generative cities were our cities, in the ‘developed’ world, whose industrial heartlands like Pittsburgh and Detroit, to say nothing of New York and London, once made things, provided real jobs and generated wealth. Now, though, in these latter places, cappuccino-sipping elites idly sit around in chic bars and cafés, checking stocks and shares on their Blackberries or iPhones, while the designer clothes they sport are manufactured in brutal garment factories in ‘generative cities’ like Dhaka and Jakarta. Still, the reality of the situation is that parasitic urban elites consume the social wealth everywhere, in the developing as well as developed world. In fact, the binary between developed and developing worlds no longer seems analytically or politically tenable, given parasitic urbanism nestles everywhere and marks the pathological condition of our neoliberal urban age. The parasitic city, in short, is a cancerous cell in the molecular structure of our global urban fabric.

In the urban studies literature we hear a lot of hype about “global cities” as engines of economic growth, as “growth machines”. Yet one really has to wonder if this is true, if global cities nowadays are about the “wealth of nations” (as Jane Jacobs put it in the 1980s). One doesn’t have to look too hard or too deeply to see how most of the world’s biggest metropolises have economies foremost predicated on activities justifiably categorized as parasitic. World cities are giant arenas where the most rabid activity is the activity of rabidly extorting land rent, of making land pay anyway it can; of dispatching all non-parasitic activities to some other part of town (as Engels recognized long ago), so as to help this rental maximization. Generative activities frequently mean dirt and grime, and usually involve dirty and grimy people, which is very bad for parasitic business. (Parasites flourish amid cleanliness, where immunity has been broken down.)

Richard Florida has made a lucrative career promoting urban boho-chic; yet spearheading the parasitic nature of cities, legitimizing it as a cultural force, are assorted “creative classes”. In many (if not most) cases, ‘creation’ here seems more akin to inventing new niches for further rounds of dispossession and contagious parasitic proliferation: creative accountancy and creative ways to avoid paying tax; creative devices to gouge fees from ordinary citizens (especially in utility bills); creative finagling of stock markets; creative new patents and apps that tap hitherto untapped markets; creative destruction of competition to garner inflated monopoly rents and profits; creative excuses to cadge money from the state. The list goes on, creatively. And when they parachute into cities, these creative and cognitive classes have little use of public infrastructure anyway; their lives are so utterly privatized, geared only towards individual, market-oriented goods, that they bid up land values and property prices and hasten the abandonment of the public realm in the creative bargain.

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The question, ‘Whose City?’, accordingly, might not be the most interesting one to ask today. The more pressing concern is what can we do about parasites? How can ‘we’ develop a vaccine to eradicate the parasites within our social body? How to reclaim the parasitic city for people, for the ‘host’ community? Are there any prophylactics to prevent the further proliferation of parasites? How to develop civic immunity? One initial, reformist measure is to stop the billions of pounds and dollars draining from the public finances because of corporate tax avoidance. Governments insist on belt-tightening austerity policies, running down collective consumption provision and screwing the ordinary tax payer at the same time as they turn a blind eye on tax dodging companies, carving themselves up and re-registering their head offices in tax havens like the Cayman Islands, Monaco or Luxembourg; or else entrusting ownership on phony overseas partners or close relatives who’ve never ever set foot on the said companies’ premises. Already, in this regard, a groundswell of opposition has developed. Grassroots organizations like UK Uncut have now adopted rambunctious and brilliantly innovative direct action ‘occupations’, creating scandals around tax-avoiding parasites like the swanky London department store Fortnum & Mason and Vodafone (who had a handy 0% income tax rate for 2012). UK Uncut have likewise launched concerted campaigns against USBC, RBS and Barclay’s and other Dodge City banks and financial institutions. (For a spirited account of tax crimes and misdemeanors, see Richard Brooks’s 2013 The Great Tax Robbery: How Britain Became a Tax Haven For Fat Cats and Big Business.)

Maybe the greatest reform and strongest prophylactic against parasitic invasion is democracy, a strengthening of participatory democracy in the face of too much representative democracy, especially when representation is made by public servants intent on defending private gain. Government as we currently know it must be terminated. We need to root out the virus, all those blood suckers who leech life from the generative social body. The notion that ‘we’ represent the ‘99%’ is a fruitful beginning at identifying the minority parasite that contaminates the majority culture. Some planned shrinkage of the financial sector seems in order, waging war on monetary blood sucking in the same vein as the ruling class waged war on public services in the 1970s and 1980s. And here, too, that preeminent parasitic organism, the leech of landed property – “the monstrous power wielded by landed property”, Marx called it, “expelling people from the earth as a dwelling-place” – needs to be expunged, democratized by some Community Land Trust that can reinvigorate a fresh notion of the public realm, one not owned and managed by any centralized state but owned and run by a collectivization of people, federated, communal and truly responsive to citizens’ needs.

In an odd sort of way, Ray Pahl’s urban managerialist thesis still instructs, still says something meaningful about twenty-first century parasitic urbanism. Indeed, the whole question of ‘managers’, of those middle-management ‘social gatekeepers’ Pahl impugned so many years ago, remains analytically vital for pinpointing administrative culpability; or, if you will, is still politically vital for breaking the ‘weakest link’ in a concatenation of parasitic cells. To that degree, struggling for democracy means loosening the grip that these anonymous, behind-closed-doors middle-managers have on our culture. Breaking the weakest link implies waging war not only against the massively complex and alienating divisions of labor we have today, but also against the even more massively alienating bureaucratic compartmentalizations that rule over us, those precisely orchestrated by Pahlian entrepreneurial managers who mediate between us and the 1%, and who stabilize and calibrate the imbalance.

The problematic is as much Kafkaseque as Marxist or Weberian, as struggling against the parasite within. To do so we need to redouble mass civil disobedience, continually affirm our democratic desires. That way a different meme might get created and collectively exchanged, counteracting parasitic invasion. A meme is a cultural transmitter, a messenger particle carrying an idea, a symbol or a buzz concept that catches on, that’s communicable between people, that solidifies group identity. (‘Meme’ is shorthand for the Greek mimeme, meaning something imitative.) “When you plant a fertile meme in my mind”, says biologist Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976), “you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of the host cell”. In this light we might say that neoliberalism is a meme that has parasitized our brains as well as our society over the past twenty years or more, and has entered our culture in a way that looks like a highly sped-up genetic revolution, but has really nothing to do with a genetic revolution. There’s nothing ‘natural’ going on here: parasitic agents and commissars, institutions and lobbyists have cajoled and bullied and seduced us into accepting this meme as a given, ensuring that the idea has evolved memically, imitatively, to the selfish advantage of the 1%.

An appeal for a permanent ‘meme war’, for revolters to battle under the banner of a new meme, is, then, to propagate a different political-economic paradigm, one antagonistic to the existing order, transforming and even erasing the institutions that spread this old meme.4 The task remains: How to incubate such an alternative meme, how to dose up on it to strengthen our immunity system? How might it circulate as a prophylactic within the generative cells of our urban politic, permanently ridding us of parasites. To frame it that way is to paraphrase Ray Pahl: it is to say that middle-managers remain bearers of the parasitic meme; they remain, therefore, as central as ever to the urban problematic.

Endnotes

[1] In later work, like his study of informality on Kent’s Isle of Sheppey (Divisions of Labour from 1984), Pahl rethought the nature of work. He began to see it as something much more than simply what happened at the workplace. Work incorporated home and community, too, said Pahl; production and reproduction are but different facets of mutually constituted phenomena.

[2] The conference, organized by Ray Forrest and Bart Wissink, took place at the Department of Public Policy, City University of Hong Kong on 24-25 May 2013. Pahl himself died of cancer in June 2011, aged 75. In The Guardian’s obituary (see here), Claire Wallace highlights Pahl’s “restless intelligence, his sharp mind and equally sharp tongue. Ray never courted easy popularity. He chose what he saw as the right way, which was often the hard way. You may not have liked what he said, but he never hid his views”.

[3] Commenting on David Harvey’s “magisterial review and re-theorization” of Marx in The Limits to Capital, Fredric Jameson says “Harvey suggests that for Marx the value of land is something like a structurally necessary fiction … This is possible only because fictitious capital is oriented towards the expectation of future value: and thus with one stroke the value of land is revealed to be intimately related to the credit system, the stock market and finance capital generally” (see ‘The brick and the balloon’, New Left Review, 228, p.42-43).

Andy Merrifield’s most recent book is The Politics of the Encounter: Urban Theory and Protest Under Planetary Urbanization (University of Georgia Press, 2013).

The recording of Christian Parenti’s 2013 Antipode AAG lecture, ‘The Environmental State: Territoriality, Violence, and Value’, is now available online as a part of the Antipode Lecture Series.

Unfortunately we don’t have a recording of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s 2012 Antipode AAG lecture, ‘A Conversation With Gayatri Spivak’, but Prof. Spivak will be publishing a paper in the journal – ‘Scattered Speculations on Geography’ – later this year. Watch this space…

Seth Schindler (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) on Ahmed et al.’s India’s New Economic Policy: A Critical Analysis;

Gerald Aiken (Durham University) on David Featherstone’s Solidarity: Hidden Histories and Geographies of Internationalism;

Malene Jacobsen (University of Kentucky) on Gregory Feldman’s The Migration Apparatus: Security, Labor, and Policymaking in the European Union;

Patrick Weir (University of Exeter) on Brad Evans’ Liberal Terror;

Soma Chatterjee (University of Toronto) on Harald Bauder’s Immigration Dialectic and Immigration and Settlement;

Kate Parizeau (University of Guelph) on Alex Loftus’ Everyday Environmentalism: Creating an Urban Political Ecology; and

John Agnew (UCLA) on Farhana Sultana and Alex Loftus’ The Right to Water: Politics, Governance, and Social Struggles.

If you’ve an idea for our more capacious ‘Book reviews, etc.’ section – it now features, in addition to reviews of both English and non-English titles, reviews of film and music, grey literature, and political pamphlets (in fact, any texts that have something to say to the radical geographic imagination) – please get in touch with Vinay Gidwani and Andy Kent.

Antipode Foundation Scholar-Activist Project Awards are grants of up to £10,000 to support collaborations between academics, non-academics and activists (from NGOs, think tanks, social movements, or community grassroots organisations, among other places) which further radical analyses of geographical issues and engender the development of a new and better society. They are aimed at promoting programmes of action-research, participation and engagement, cooperation and co-enquiry, and more publicly-focused forms of geographical investigation. The Foundation seeks to fund work that’s mutually beneficial and leads to the exchange of ideas across and beyond the borders of the academy, and builds meaningful relationships and productive partnerships.

International Workshop Awards (known as Regional Workshop Awards last year; ‘in what sense a regional workshop?’ we asked ourselves…) are grants of up to £10,000 to support radical geographers holding events such as conferences, workshops, seminar series, summer schools, and action research meetings. We encourage collaboration – whether with fellow scholars, research groups, university departments, NGOs, think tanks, or social movements – the building of capacity, and development of community. The Foundation encourages initiatives that are adventurous, that explore the boundaries of established academic practice, and that trespass and disrupt disciplinary (and other) borders.

We’d like to see work that is innovative and original, but more than that we want to fund work that is significant: we’d like to support activities that have implications for praxis, to better understand contemporary political concerns and to develop alternatives. Note also that the Foundation especially welcomes applications from historically under-represented groups, regions, countries and institutions.

You can read all about last year’s awardees here, and application forms, further details, etc. are available here and here. Do get in touch (Andy Kent – antipode@live.co.uk) with questions, and please share this information with colleagues and comrades within and beyond the academy.

The past two weeks have witnessed an extraordinary public and political outcry about levels of remuneration in the UK’s teaching sector. While there have been rumblings of discontent for several years, things have been brought to a head by this year’s unprecedented bonus season, which saw thousands of teachers being awarded six-figure sums and “several hundred” – according to informed industry sources – receiving seven-figure packages.

“It’s extremely hard to see any logical justification for such largesse”, said a spokesperson for the opposition Labour party. “These sums are entirely out of synch with the economic value actually generated in the educational sector”. Other critics pointed to research suggesting that a lack of competitiveness is responsible for the historically high levels of profitability in the industry, which in the postwar era has operated entirely within the private sector. “They’re just extracting rents, pure and simple”, one said, asking for his identity not to be revealed, but referring to peer-reviewed research in a respected academic sociology journal.

A key concern among such critics appears to be with a perceived misalignment of teaching objectives. “Look, the reality is that if you tie bonuses to short-term metrics like student grades, you encourage teachers to focus entirely on examination outcomes, which are surely just one part of the educational ambit”, observed the chairman of Britain’s leading public-sector trade union. “What about the longer-term development of young people as responsible, socially-minded citizens? Do we not care about such things? Can we not try to regulate the sector – and its remuneration practices – in such a way that a broader set of objectives can be encouraged?”.

Challenged to identify a better way of structuring educational provision, the union leader was unashamedly radical. “Why not make education a public utility funded through taxation? It’s not that outlandish an idea. Why do we simply assume that teaching belongs in the private sector?”.

To underline their case about the perceived “overvaluation” of teachers, the same critics frequently highlight what they regard as a particularly poignant counterexample: that of bankers, and what they see as the latter’s grotesque undervaluation. “At the same time as we have teachers walking home with obscene pay packets, we have bankers slaving away in incredibly challenging working conditions, and for fractions of the amount of money”, remarked Labour’s spokesperson. “These men and women provide a vital public service, and I’m afraid that it’s gotten to the point that we simply take it for granted. The national banking service is one of Britain’s great postwar achievements, and those working in it should be respected and valued accordingly”.

The head of the National Union of Bankers takes up the same argument. “It’s not our fault that society has decided that our service is a public good, is it? I can assure you that we – our workers, our institutions – would and could make huge profits, too, if we were privatized. But the point is, we don’t want that. We believe in the public service we provide, it’s our ‘mission’, if you like, and we don’t think the ordinary man on the street should have to pay for it; but should our workers be punished for this in the form of derisory levels of pay?”.

When we put it to her that the current state of affairs risked alienating a future generation of potential bankers, the union’s chief executive concurred. “Oh, absolutely, yes. The government needs to be very careful here. If banking continues to be undervalued, people just won’t want to do it any more, however personally ‘rewarding’ they might think the work is. Remember that we’re talking about a world in which young people find it harder and harder to buy their own home. Graduates are inevitably going to gravitate towards where they think the easy money is, areas like teaching, where every Tom, Dick, and Harry currently seems to be taking home astronomical sums”.

Certainly recent revelations from those who have worked in both worlds seem to support this case. We spoke to Jason, who worked in the school sector for ten years, retired early having made his millions, and then followed his principles and returned to work as a banker after three years of extra training. Jason’s story was recently serialized in another newspaper, and it makes for provocative reading. “What type of society do we live in…”, his forthcoming book asks, “…when I now work twice as hard as I ever did as a teacher, and arguably perform an equally if not more important public service, but where I get paid less than a tenth as much?”.

The Conservative government, meanwhile, rebuts these criticisms with its own forthright logic. “Now, when the public finances have been left in disarray by the previous administration, is really not the time for bankers to be complaining about their lot”, said the Prime Minister. “We all have to pull together – politicians as much as bankers, let me add – and put the public finances back in order. This means tightening our belts and not simply expecting the taxpayer to generously fund us come what may. These are tough times. All of us in the public sector need to learn to be leaner, more efficient, and that must include bankers I’m afraid. We need to strip out needless middle-management and stifling bureaucracy”.

The Chancellor added his influential voice to the Prime Minister’s: “Let me be clear about this. We see the banking service as a public good and bankers as public servants. It would therefore be entirely inappropriate to introduce markets to the banking sector and to let the profit motive, so to speak, reign”. Does this mean that all private-sector methods will and should be resisted? “No, not at all. We are clearly not averse to introducing relevant private-sector efficiencies to public banking. Banking will remain public, to be sure, but it has much to learn from the private sector. Of course it does. In fact I personally would point here to the much – and in my view, entirely unfairly – maligned teaching sector. Just look at the incredible efficiencies in evidence there”.

Unsurprisingly the British Teachers’ Association – the principal trade association and lobbying body for the schooling industry – comes at these issues from a similar standpoint as the government. “It’s incredibly frustrating and unhelpful that the public and the political opposition do not seem to recognize the contributions our members make to the British economy”, says the BTA’s chairman. “Who do Labour think pays the taxes that keep the country afloat? Let me tell you: our members do. The taxes our members paid on their profits (in the case of the schools) and salaries (in the case of the teachers) last year could have paid for the equivalent of 15 new hospitals or 60 new bank branches. With all due respect to the banks, should they not be learning from our members’ entrepreneurial spirit rather than complaining about the remuneration that flows from this entrepreneurship? Our member schools employ 3,500,000 British people; they contribute 12 percent of national gross value-added; and last year they provided 20 percent of the Revenue’s tax income”.

The chief executive of Britain’s top-ranked school was equally stout in his defense of the sector. “It’s all very easy and populist to criticize my staff’s compensation levels, but it’s also facile. Our profit reflects our productivity levels. Workers at this school are among the most productive workers in the world. We don’t decide how much we earn; the market does. We earn a lot of money because the market recognizes the utility our services afford. It’s not rocket science. If anything there are lessons for the public sector here. I just don’t think critics recognize the inherent difficulty and complexity of what we do. It’s tough work; real talent is required. At the end of the day, if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys”.

With neither side giving an inch to the other, this debate seems set to run and run.

http://www.brettchristophers.org/

“Now that we have overcome the hardship of the mountains

we need to subdue the adversities of the valleys…”

Bertolt Brecht

Among the various sad stories related to the ongoing crisis in Greece and its tremendous effects for the majority of the local population, there is one commonly neglected but still crucial: it is the story of the nearly 750 scholars – all PhD holders, with significant academic teaching and research credentials (as required) – that since 2009 have been evaluated and elected, in accordance with Greek law, to serve as faculty members in universities across the country. The election and appointment process, which is more or less similar to the tenure system in the US, depends on the decision of an electorate board usually consisting of 15 faculty members acting as peer reviewers for the post’s candidates. These highly qualified young people have been piled up on a ‘waiting list’ for the last three/four years with the reasoning that they ‘…cannot be appointed due to cuts in public spending and restrictions in public employees recruitment policies’. Backed up by the EU-IMF-European Central Bank troika, the government emphatically insists on this practice, despite the fact that at the same period a significant number of the Greek universities’ academic staff retired (to take advantage of pension provisions before they worsen), leaving academic posts uncovered.

The ‘waiting list’ scholars comprise close to 10% of all faculty members in the country. In the expectation of their recruitment, they have actually become ‘hostages of the academic system’. Many of them have been employed as adjunct lecturers, but the budget for such posts was also reduced to one-quarter since the crisis surfaced. Many of them, as well as other scholars, have gradually turned towards precarious or short term under-employment outside of academic institutions, or they have already left the country seeking academic (or other) posts in Northern Europe, the US, Australia, and the ‘booming’ economies of the ‘developing’ world.

Government officials and the Greek Minister of Education, though officially worried about the evolving brain-drain phenomenon, have in fact encouraged this outward mobility of both Greek scholars and other highly qualified and skilled population groups. They do so by accepting and implementing a socially-violent political agenda and the associated devaluation practices that once again transform the economies of the European South to migrant-sending labour markets. Ghosts of the past are awakened as postmodernity echoes the harsh realities of the post-war era of migrating labour from Greece, Spain, Italy, and Portugal.

These seemingly irrational choices of the Southern political elites can be better understood when contextualized within the current socio-economic framework: ‘precarity’, ‘risk’, and ‘insecurity’ are in fact integral factors of post-1990 capitalist societies. The increasing spatial fluidity of capital has all the more ‘freed’ employers from the constraints of typical employment. The flexibilization and informalization of work has been a common practice of all advanced societies these past few decades. Yet, the 2008 crisis dramatically reinforced these trends, putting forth an imaginary geographical dividing line between the Northern, supposedly ‘wise’, industrious, and relatively ‘prepared’ economies, and the so-called PIIGS of the South and the EU periphery (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain). Academic and research institutions could not have remained untouched by such changes – how could they?

A few figures on the current recession in Greece illuminate this argument; such has been the depth of the crisis that the rate according to which forces of knowledge and production have been destroyed is only comparable to societies at war or going through major political transformation. For instance, between 2008 and 2012 Greek nominal GDP witnessed a cumulative reduction of nearly 20% and it is expected to continue to fall in 2013 and 2014. Moreover, the successive waves of ‘structural reforms’ and cutbacks in public spending – that have stemmed from the three memoranda agreed upon by the government and the troika in order to ‘deal with the spectre of default’ – have unsurprisingly led to swelling public deficit and public debt, which is expected to return to pre-crisis levels (i.e. below 120% of the GDP) only after 2020!!!

A collapse in the labour market has been the unavoidable outcome of such austerity measures and ‘restructured’ public budgets. Greece has already overtaken Spain as the EU’s leading country in unemployment. In early 2013, the officially registered unemployment rate was 27.8% (i.e. 2.7 times higher than 2009) and reflected in more than 1.35 million unemployed. Notably, unemployment amongst the young hit 56.6%, while fewer than 30% of them are receiving any unemployment compensation. Indicative of the depth of the crisis is the fact that in 2012 ten individuals were added to the unemployment rolls every 15 minutes. These profound changes have their negative imprint upon higher education and related public expenditure.

Although Greek researchers are highly ranked among the international academic division of labour (for example, in 2012 the share of the research produced by Greek universities that contributed to the top 1% of most-cited articles was 13th in the world, above many advanced countries such as Canada and France), the public expenditure on higher education and research is one of the lowest across EU member states and has been reduced by 9.7% according to recent available data (2009-2010). Salaries of faculty members have been reduced by about 30%; the typical lecturer currently receives around 1,000 Euros per month. In addition, basic provisions such as research and teaching facilities, and conference and research-related traveling expenses are now insufficient due to slashed university budgets. For instance, subscriptions to research and journal databases have been suspended since early April 2013; libraries are simply unable to pay. At least a mild Greek winter prevented students from freezing in class during this last semester.

The agency of the non-appointed faculty members against this hard reality has been important. A group called the ‘Initiative of Non-appointed Faculty Members’ – ‘the non-lecturers’ (see http://lecture.jimdo.com/) – was formed as soon as the crisis emerged. The initiative organized and/or participated in several events, some of them jointly organised and supported by adjunct and tenured faculty members in the two metropolitan areas of Athens and Thessaloniki. It has managed to maintain a network of information exchange and action coordination that puts continuous pressure upon the government and the Ministry of Education demanding what seems to be obvious: one’s right to be appointed in a post that he/she has been elected for. Such a claim is part and parcel of a wider demand to overthrow the pro-monopolist and profit-oriented policies that dismantle Public higher education in Greece and the Southern EU.

Stelios Gialis is an economic geographer, currently working as a post-doctoral scholar with the Hellenic Open University (Greece) and the University of Georgia (USA). He’s been elected, but yet not appointed, since December 2011 to the Department of Geography, University of the Aegean, Greece.

All of the essays in this forum redirect attention from singular events to political-economic contexts, where each explosion is a punctuated moment that creates openings, closures, and possibilities across space and scales. In this way the entire collection is a collective act of what Jamey Essex calls ‘committing geography’ in his contribution. By committing geography we attempt to sort through the relationships, discourses, and practices that connect these explosions and the innumerable people and places, from Main St to Wall St, from Dagestan to Yemen, where the causes and effects of these explosions will continue to reverberate.

In these interventions, the authors are not engaged in the neoliberal academy’s ‘paranoid scholarship’ of exposing tenuous connections and trying to out-clever their colleagues-cum-competitors, but in political observations of the nature of catastrophe. These observations feel all the more urgent, as the frequency of spectacular violence, structural and otherwise, shows no sign of slowing. This forum prompts radical (in the literal sense) thinking about the relationships that are productive of crisis, how they are represented, and how we might forge solidarities across traumatic events. It does this at a time of crisis when the need for radical solidarity is pressing – just when the events in Boston and West, the collapse of a giant garment factory in Bangladesh, the massacre at a parade in New Orleans, and bombings in Baghdad have taken place. (And that is to say nothing of the everyday, non-spectacular violence on offer in its infinite dimensions across the world.)

The value in this type of forum, dealing with current events from a radical geographical perspective, at least in part, lies in having a more tightly tailored set of ideas through which to work. While the essays overlap there are differing inflection points and varying emphases, as some authors foreground political economy, some the state and its relationship to structural (and structured) violence, and some on the types of political responses these observations demand. Hopefully readers will expand on these observations in the comments, bringing us closer to a holistic understanding of crises, be they terrorist acts, industrial catastrophes, socio-ecological calamities, or the everyday violences of capital and neo-imperalism.

Patrick Bigger

Department of Geography, University of Kentucky

patrick.bigger@uky.edu

The essays

Manufacturing Banality by Patrick Bigger, University of Kentucky

The Social Location of Industrial Disasters: West, Texas in a Wider Perspective by Raju J. Das, York University

Committing Geography by Jamey Essex, University of Windsor

West, TX Through the Damage Mirror: The Enabling Contradictions of Preparedness by Leigh Johnson, University of Zurich

A Political Economy of Distraction: The Boston Marathon Bombings and their Relation to the Fertilizer Facility Explosion in West, Texas by Harold A. Perkins, Ohio University

Connecting the Dots in a Political Economy of Violence by Stephanie Simon, University of Amsterdam

Rules Bloody Rules: Safety, Security, Stockholm Syndrome, and the State by Simon Springer, University of Victoria

Introduction

The idea of nationhood rests on the claim of a specific territorial area. The cartographic demarcating of territory automatically exposes, however, the contingent nature of borders. Modern borders are the product of a world system composed of nation states which are not organic unities but socially constructed entities in need of constant affirmation. Nationalism, the modus operandi for that affirmation, often takes a cartographic form. Cartographic nationalism is of all ages but seems in East Asia to have become especially important in post-Mao China.

This short article wishes to offer some insight into the ways in which maps are increasingly being used to arouse nationalist sentiments in East Asia. I do not aspire to explain the reasons for the trend of a rise in nationalism, but instead wish to engage with the manner in which this has become apparent by looking at the ways in which maps have recently been used to settle territorial disputes.

The Cartography of Rocks

The US has recently issued serious concerns over the growing animosity between China and Japan over the uninhabited rock formation in the East China Sea. A former US ambassador to China warned that the territorial dispute could escalate into an “unintended confrontation”. The dispute has a history which dates back to Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in the late 1970s. The Senkaku islands (or Diaoyu in Chinese) were, after the defeat of Japan in the Second World War, colonised by the US before being returned to Japan in 1972. Japanese territorial claims of ownership are based on the annexation of the islands in 1895 (at the time considered to be terra nullius or unclaimed) in the Treaty of Shimonoseki. The ambiguity of the ownership over the islands stems largely from historical accounts which are grounded in the not-so-unreasonable idea that China was at the time of the treaty forced to cede the islands. Chinese sources rest their claim on historical records which go as far back as the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). Zhong Yan in the Beijing Review argues for the “discovery” of the islands in 1403 and draws his authority from antique texts to argue for the “indisputable” claim that the Chinese state has over the islands. The use of old texts is often accompanied by equally ancient maps which feature especially strongly on Chinese internet forums.

Disputes over the islands are not merely limited to academic discussions. The dispute has increasingly been a hot theme in the popular Chinese imagination. Blogs by so-called ‘Netizens’ feature a countless number of maps, both historical and more contemporary, which underline the legitimacy of China’s claim. Apple iPhones were recently threatened by boycotts as a result of a mapping application which allegedly marked the islands as Japanese territory. Many Chinese cities witnessed of angry protestors marching on the street last year. Boycotts of Japanese products were so widespread that Party leaders feared for a drawback in the strongly intertwined economic relationship between the two countries.

The case poses several interesting and challenging questions to which there are no definitive answers. Perhaps the most fertile one is that of the historical transferability of sovereignty. How does a temporally distant ‘discovery’ translate into modern legal claims over territorial ownership? The unequal distribution of power at the time of the Treaty of Shimonoseki forms another obstacle. The Chinese claim dates back to a time before the formation of the modern Japanese and Chinese states. The Japanese claim goes back to a time in which both states were in the process of taking their present, modern form. The main problem seems, therefore, to be one of two different ideas of what territory entails. The first, Chinese, conception of territory rests on a pre-modern authority and is embedded in the idea of ownership by right of imperial legacy. The second, Japanese, interpretation rests on the idea of international law which functions on the basis of a world system founded and constituted by sovereign nation states. This difference in understanding territory is further complicated by the fact that the islands are uninhabited which means that, unlike in other cases (e.g. the Falklands), we cannot arguably legitimise ownership on the basis of a right to self-determination. The dispute is, therefore, likely to remain unresolved for some time to come.

The territorial dispute seems instead for both sides to perform as a nationalist catalyst from which state legitimacy is attained, and has been fuelled by nationalists on both sides of the East China Sea. Nationalism functions, therefore, as the proverbial “double edged sword”. On the one hand, it unifies people and, on the other, forms a threat to the economic stability of the two countries.

Cartographies of the Sea

Nationalism has in East Asia taken an increasingly cartographic stance. The recent issuing of Chinese passports, which depicted China’s sovereignty over a large part of the South China Sea, Taiwan, Arunachal Pradesh and Aksai Chin (the latter two areas are disputed borderlands between Indian and Chinese territory) fuelled public anger across the region. Vietnam’s and the Philippines’ border authorities were reported to be refusing to stamp the new passports (see here and here), while Indian authorities responded by issuing Chinese visas with a map showing Arunachal Pradesh and Aksai Chin as integral territorial parts of India.

Figure 1: Close-up of the map in the new Chinese passport

A divergence in the understanding of what territory entails, looms also large in the ‘South China Sea’ (or ‘West Philippine Sea’) dispute. The Philippines recently turned to Spain for help in its dispute with China over the area. Spain handed over 70 historical maps to underline the claim that the disputed islands in the South China Sea were already part of the Philippines when it was under Spanish colonial rule. Comments on Filipino internet forums and Facebook pages hailed the act of the once coloniser and welcomed the gesture as an attempt to reconcile with the violent past. Other members of the ASEAN community have similarly expressed their concerns over the dispute which potentially could threaten the economic relationship between ASEAN and China. The US stated, in turn, that it is not willing to endorse the new passport.

The official Chinese cartographic institution, Sinomaps Press, responded earlier this year with its own territorial representation. The depiction of the South China Sea in the new map is similar to the one earlier used in the new Chinese passports. The map is, in fact, the first official cartographic attempt to show the entirety of the claimed territory on the same scale as mainland China.

There exists, however, ambiguity over the political coherence of China’s territorial claims. The map in the Chinese passport has in the aftermath of international condemnation been downplayed by Chinese authorities as the result of a mere “technical problem”. The territorial boundaries of China in the new Sinomaps map are, in contrast, intentionally deployed by the Chinese state to arouse a national sentiment. The Chief Editor of the Sinomaps institute argues in the China Daily that “[t]he [Sinomaps] maps will be very significant in enhancing Chinese people’s awareness of national territory, safeguarding China’s marine rights and interests, and manifesting China’s political diplomatic stance”.

While the function of a passport is the technical means to overcome territorial borders, then, the official map is primarily used domestically to expand those borders in an attempt to arouse a sense of nationalism. There exists, therefore, a contradiction between the two cartographic realities. The passport performs primarily a diplomatic function and is for that reason by the Chinese state pragmatically considered to be a mere ‘technical’ issue. The map in the new atlas is, in contrast, said to follow a domestic and educational purpose. The overlapping in the meaning of the map underpins the logic of the ‘double-edged sword’ of nationalism which, on the one hand, is meant to unify the nation and, on the hand, threatens to endanger China’s economic and diplomatic interests.

Cartographies of Resistance

Cartographic representations of territorial disputes are not only limited to the domain of intra-state relations, but also feature prominently within states. The geographic imaginations of stateless nations receive relatively little attention in conventional academic accounts. Nevertheless they play an important role in the popular geographic imaginations of separatists. The case of the Uyghur, a sizeable ethnic community in the western part of China, is officially represented by the World Uyghur Congress (WUC) in Washington D.C. The mission of the WUC is to “promote democracy, human rights, and freedom for the Uyghur people and use peaceful, nonviolent, and democratic means to determine their political future…[The] WUC endeavors to set out a course for the peaceful settlement of the East Turkestan Question through dialogue and negotiation”. The ‘East Turkestan Question’ concerns the Chinese province of Xinjiang (officially the ‘Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region’).

The WUC website provides a clear indication of where the organisation thinks the borders of East Turkestan should be drawn. The demarcated borders are exactly the same as those of the present Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region which were originally established in 1955. The geographical contours of East Turkestan have over the course of history changed quite substantially. The official and unofficial dissemination of maps among the Uyghur population has, however, helped to formulate an increasingly uniform cartographic representation of East Turkestan. The following map was posted on the website of the London Uyghur Ensemble – a London-based organisation which promotes Uyghur culture – and shows how the Uyghur manoeuvre between demands for greater autonomy and calls for the establishment of a sovereign nation state.

Figure 2: Map of the Uyghur Region also often described as East Turkestan

The map replaced the official Chinese Xinjiang name (which literally translates as ‘new borders’) with that of the somewhat ambiguous label of ‘Uyghur Region’. The language on the map is written in Uyghur script. The ‘region’ has not only linguistically but also geographically become detached from the rest of China. The region is ‘desinicized’ (if you like) and has become appropriated by and filled with a distinctive Uyghur identity. China is instead portrayed as being external to the region and is presented as a sovereign territorial equal in the same fashion as other states on the map are. Uyghur maps are a form of resistance and are, in a similar manner as the previously discussed examples, deployed, produced, and disseminated in both online and offline discussions. The publication and increasing dissemination of such maps occurs at a time of surge in violence between Uyghur separatists and the Chinese security forces in the region.

Conclusion

The Polish philosopher Alfred Korzybski famously argued that the map does not represent the territory which it depicts; the map conveys instead a representation of how we mentally perceive and politically organise and make sense of the world. Maps inform us about the way territory is perceived. They are important political instruments to maintain the popular belief that the nation state is a natural phenomenon. They help legitimise governance and embody the idea of ownership of the earth.

Maps in Asia seem increasingly to perform as the platform of territorial contestation among sovereign states and between stateless nations and territorialised nation states. The authority of maps is in such cases often directly linked to history. Looking at a map is, as we have seen, a lot like looking at history. Narratives are constructed and are appropriated by states to legitimise their existence. Cartographic representations result in competing narratives from which opposing claims to land among nation states and between states and stateless nations arise. This form of cartographic competition seems to be fuelled by a rising tide of nationalism in East Asia.

Marijn is a PhD student at the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick.

Families Apart picks up where Working Feminism finishes by examining the horrific economic, social and political effects and affects of the LCP on families attached to and invested in this migration. However, following the analysis in the book itself, Families Apart might be best thought about not as a sequel, but rather as a breaking apart of the frame of analysis established in Working Feminism, and its reconstitution at a great spatial extent, to incorporate what after Butler (Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, Columbia University Press, 2012) we might term the geographies of ‘wretched’ transnationalism. As Pratt notes (2012: 44), “[i]t seems possible to say that mothers entering the Canadian nation to care for Canadian children while their own children remain in the Philippines are sacrificed for the benefit of Canadian families, and that a sense of Canadian benevolence and liberal universalism depends on concealing with fact”. However, it is not only mothers, but also their children that suffer: “It is not only that women coming through the LCP are deskilled through the process; in eerie and rapid repetition, their children relive many of their mother’s experiences” (Pratt 2012: 7).

Families Apart documents the experiences of second-generation migrants, and the multiple connections between Canada and the Philippines forged through their lives, in ways that resist the seductions of feeling good about feeling bad (Pratt 2012: 80). Instead, the book experiments with multiple forms of telling stories about wretched transnationalism, and thinks critically about processes of storytelling, as a means of creating ethical and political geographies that entangle and impact Canadian, Filipino and other concerned publics, often in literal, which is to say material, embodied ways.

*         *         *

The responses to Pratt’s book that constitute this symposium were given in preliminary form at a seminar at Durham University on 5th March 2013. As the organiser of this seminar, I asked five members of Department of Geography at Durham to address specific themes in the book that both intersect their own research and give some sense of the scope of the monograph. These responses were recorded, and are included here (see below). Lynn Staeheli talks about citizenship and publics, Rachel Pain examines intimacy and violence, Paul Harrison reflects on witnessing and testimony, Lizzie Richardson discusses performance, and Lucy Smout Szablewska thinks through transnational labour migration. As well as Gerry’s response, we have included some of the discussion that followed the presentations. My thanks to Michele Allan for her help in recording the seminar and preparing the files for Antipode.

Rachel, Paul, Lizzie, and Lucy have subsequently written up their contributions, which Gerry has kindly responded to. All are available below. As Gerry notes in her response, her interlocutors enact “a kind of conceptual-ethical-aesthetic politics” that connects worlds and starts conversations. However, despite the breadth of these contributions there are still many aspects of Families Apart that aren’t covered, and can perhaps only be appreciated when it is read cover to cover. We hope you will take the opportunity to do so.

Christopher Harker, Durham University, christopher.harker@durham.ac.uk

1st May 2013

The reviews

‘Sowing Seeds‘ by Lucy Smout Szablewska

‘Performance Unsettled‘ by Elizabeth Richardson

‘Oscillations‘ by Paul Harrison

‘Intimacy and Violence‘ by Rachel Pain

‘With Gratitude‘ by Geraldine Pratt

Seminar, Durham University, 5th March 2013

Lynn Staeheli

Rachel Pain

Paul Harrison

Lizzie Richardson

Lucy Smout Szablewska

Gerry Pratt

Gerry Pratt, ‘Families Apart’ symposium, Durham University, 5th March 2013 from Andrew Kent on Vimeo.

Discussion/questions

Discussion/questions, ‘Families Apart’ symposium, Durham University, 5th March 2013 from Andrew Kent on Vimeo.

“…contemporary performances of border enforcement and security cannot be understood as distinct from the process of neoliberalization.”

So argues University of Oulu geographer Eeva-Kaisa Prokkola in her forthcoming Antipode paper ‘Neoliberalizing Border Management in Finland and Schengen‘. Eeva-Kaisa offers a critical examination of the development of border management in Finland and the Schengen Area, focusing on the Finnish Border Guard service. Border management in Finland provides an interesting case, she contends, not only because Finland is responsible for controlling the Schengen/EU-Russian border but also because, since Finnish state reforms in the early 1990s, neoliberal rationales have increasingly provided the guidelines for how to calculate and optimize border security. Her paper emphasizes that the rationales of border management should be made transparent and opened for public debate, analysing some key tenets of neoliberalized border governance – internationalization, competitiveness, risk prevention, and the functioning of society.