Jason Cons
Biographic Data
| ID | 127250 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jason Cons |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jason |
| FAMILY NAME | Cons |
| SIGNATURE | CONS J |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Texas at Austin |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1869-527X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 356 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Unconscious entrainments
A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security on the Bangladesh-India Border
Settler Colonial Beasts: Feral Pigs and Frontier Assemblages in Texas
This essay explores the role of feral pigs in assembling the Texas frontier. Quick to reproduce, highly adaptive, and destroyers of agricultural fields, feral pigs have emerged over the past decade as one of the principal challenges facing agriculture and land management systems in Texas. Yet, more than simply a pest, feral pigs have and continue to be active agents in forging new landscapes, ecologies, and settler‐colonial relations. We trace th…
Delta Temporalities: Choked and Tangled Futures in the Sundarbans
This paper offers an ethnographic engagement with the present and futures of Bangladesh's southwest delta. The southwest - which houses the Sundarbans, the world's largest remaining mangrove forest - is at once profoundly vulnerable to climate change and a site critical to Bangladesh's economic development. It figures thus both as a space of optimistic industrial growth and planetary threat. I explore what I call delta temporalities - the dissona…
Chokepoints: Anthropologies of the Constricted Contemporary
This article develops an anthropology of chokepoints: sites that constrict or 'choke' the flows of resources, information, and bodies upon which contemporary life depends. We argue that an ethnographic and analytical focus on chokepoints - ports, canals, tunnels, pipelines, transit corridors, and more - recasts longstanding anthropological concerns with the character and consequences of global circulation or 'flow'. Chokepoints, we argue, are zon…
Ecologies of capture in Bangladesh's Sundarbans: Predations on a climate frontier
What is the relationship between climate change and criminal predation? Bangladesh's Sundarbans, the world's largest mangrove forest, has, over the past decade, emerged as a climate frontier. It is a space viewed not only as a climate hot spot but also as a zone where control and opportunity emerge out of friction between long-standing political economies, new conservation interventions, and the materialities of the mangrove forest. Concomitantly…
Frontier Assemblages: The Emergent Politics of Resource Frontiers in Asia
Frontier Assemblages: The Emergent Politics of Resource Frontiers in Asia
Staging Climate Security: Resilience and Heterodystopia in the Bangladesh Borderlands
This essay interrogates an emergent genre of development projects that seek to instill resilience in populations likely to be severely impacted by climate change. These new projects venture a dark vision of life in a warming world-one where portable technologies become necessary for managing a future of climate chaos. I propose, following Michel Foucault, understanding these projects as heterodystopias: spaces managed as and in anticipation of a …
Global Flooding
Conclusion: The placial imagination
Impasse and Opportunity: Reframing Postcolonial Territory at the India-Bangladesh Border
This essay makes a case for reconceptualizing South Asia by refiguring postcolonial territory. It does this by bringing together the broad political history of a series of enclaves along the India-Bangladesh border with an ethnographic discussion of the contemporary political economy of Dahagram, the largest of these enclaves. The essay argues for a need to bring nationalist framings of space and more textured explorations of everyday forms of te…
Coming to terms: Reinserting research assistants into ethnography's past and present
Research assistants have long been central to ethnographic practice, yet the conventions of academic labor have left their roles under-stated and obscure. The implications, we opine, are both theoretical and practical. Writing research assistants back in to our collective considerations of the method does more than simply fill a lacuna in the 'reflexive turn'. It opens windows onto a radically transformed field of ethnographic practice. Today, th…
Field dependencies: Mediation, addiction and anxious fieldwork at the India-Bangladesh border
This paper explores the politics of dependency in researcher-assistant relationships. By doing so, it reflects on how these dynamics are always already predicated on broad personal histories and a range of emergent dependencies. Taking the politics of dependency in fieldwork seriously charts a path towards more fully understanding the quixotic production of ethnographic knowledge. Specifically, this paper reflects on the author's relationship wit…
Life in a shrimp zone: Aqua- and other cultures of Bangladesh's coastal landscape
This essay questions the possibilities of food sovereignty for producing a radical egalitarian politics. Specifically, it explores the class-differentiated implications of food sovereignty in a zone of ecological crisis - Bangladesh's coastal Khulna district. Much land in this deltaic zone that had previously been employed for various forms of peasant production has been transformed by the introduction of brackish-water shrimp aquaculture. This h…
Narrating boundaries: Framing and contesting suffering, community, and belonging in enclaves along the India–Bangladesh border
Aleatory Sovereignty and the Rule of Sensitive Spaces: Aleatory Sovereignty
Addressing life in borders and refugee camps requires understanding the way these spaces are ruled, the kinds of problems rule poses for the people who live there, and the abilities of inhabitants to remake their own lives. Recent literature on such spaces has been influenced by Agamben's notion of sovereignty, which reduces these spaces and their residents to abstractions. We propose an alternate framework focused on what we call aleatory sovere…
Geographies at the margins: Borders in South Asia-an introduction
Histories of Belonging(s): Narrating Territory, Possession, and Dispossession at the India-Bangladesh Border
This paper offers a history of belonging in Dahagram, a sovereign Bangladeshi enclave situated within India but close to the India-Bangladesh border. I recount Dahagram's post-Partition history, focusing particularly on the long and localized struggles between 1974 and 1992 to open the Tin Bigha Corridor, a land bridge through Indian territory that links Dahagram to the Bangladeshi mainland. Drawing on the memories and experiences of residents, I…
Contested Credit Landscapes: Microcredit, self-help and self-determination in rural Bangladesh
This paper makes a methodological and political intervention in debates over microcredit. It explores outcomes of microcredit interventions in the lives of residents of Arampur, a village in rural northern Bangladesh. Using a community-based research and engagement strategy, we explore recipients' own critiques and experiences of microcredit. These experiences suggest that the cultural and economic template that many microfinance institutions (mf…
Aleatory Sovereignty and the Rule of Sensitive Spaces: Aleatory Sovereignty
Addressing life in borders and refugee camps requires understanding the way these spaces are ruled, the kinds of problems rule poses for the people who live there, and the abilities of inhabitants to remake their own lives. Recent literature on such spaces has been influenced by Agamben's notion of sovereignty, which reduces these spaces and their residents to abstractions. We propose an alternate framework focused on what we call aleatory sovere…
Chokepoints: Anthropologies of the Constricted Contemporary
This article develops an anthropology of chokepoints: sites that constrict or 'choke' the flows of resources, information, and bodies upon which contemporary life depends. We argue that an ethnographic and analytical focus on chokepoints - ports, canals, tunnels, pipelines, transit corridors, and more - recasts longstanding anthropological concerns with the character and consequences of global circulation or 'flow'. Chokepoints, we argue, are zon…
Coming to terms: Reinserting research assistants into ethnography's past and present
Research assistants have long been central to ethnographic practice, yet the conventions of academic labor have left their roles under-stated and obscure. The implications, we opine, are both theoretical and practical. Writing research assistants back in to our collective considerations of the method does more than simply fill a lacuna in the 'reflexive turn'. It opens windows onto a radically transformed field of ethnographic practice. Today, th…
Staging Climate Security: Resilience and Heterodystopia in the Bangladesh Borderlands
This essay interrogates an emergent genre of development projects that seek to instill resilience in populations likely to be severely impacted by climate change. These new projects venture a dark vision of life in a warming world-one where portable technologies become necessary for managing a future of climate chaos. I propose, following Michel Foucault, understanding these projects as heterodystopias: spaces managed as and in anticipation of a …
Life in a shrimp zone: Aqua- and other cultures of Bangladesh's coastal landscape
This essay questions the possibilities of food sovereignty for producing a radical egalitarian politics. Specifically, it explores the class-differentiated implications of food sovereignty in a zone of ecological crisis - Bangladesh's coastal Khulna district. Much land in this deltaic zone that had previously been employed for various forms of peasant production has been transformed by the introduction of brackish-water shrimp aquaculture. This h…
Geographies at the margins: Borders in South Asia-an introduction
Histories of Belonging(s): Narrating Territory, Possession, and Dispossession at the India-Bangladesh Border
This paper offers a history of belonging in Dahagram, a sovereign Bangladeshi enclave situated within India but close to the India-Bangladesh border. I recount Dahagram's post-Partition history, focusing particularly on the long and localized struggles between 1974 and 1992 to open the Tin Bigha Corridor, a land bridge through Indian territory that links Dahagram to the Bangladeshi mainland. Drawing on the memories and experiences of residents, I…
Narrating boundaries: Framing and contesting suffering, community, and belonging in enclaves along the India–Bangladesh border
Contested Credit Landscapes: Microcredit, self-help and self-determination in rural Bangladesh
This paper makes a methodological and political intervention in debates over microcredit. It explores outcomes of microcredit interventions in the lives of residents of Arampur, a village in rural northern Bangladesh. Using a community-based research and engagement strategy, we explore recipients' own critiques and experiences of microcredit. These experiences suggest that the cultural and economic template that many microfinance institutions (mf…
Delta Temporalities: Choked and Tangled Futures in the Sundarbans
This paper offers an ethnographic engagement with the present and futures of Bangladesh's southwest delta. The southwest - which houses the Sundarbans, the world's largest remaining mangrove forest - is at once profoundly vulnerable to climate change and a site critical to Bangladesh's economic development. It figures thus both as a space of optimistic industrial growth and planetary threat. I explore what I call delta temporalities - the dissona…
Ecologies of capture in Bangladesh's Sundarbans: Predations on a climate frontier
What is the relationship between climate change and criminal predation? Bangladesh's Sundarbans, the world's largest mangrove forest, has, over the past decade, emerged as a climate frontier. It is a space viewed not only as a climate hot spot but also as a zone where control and opportunity emerge out of friction between long-standing political economies, new conservation interventions, and the materialities of the mangrove forest. Concomitantly…
Field dependencies: Mediation, addiction and anxious fieldwork at the India-Bangladesh border
This paper explores the politics of dependency in researcher-assistant relationships. By doing so, it reflects on how these dynamics are always already predicated on broad personal histories and a range of emergent dependencies. Taking the politics of dependency in fieldwork seriously charts a path towards more fully understanding the quixotic production of ethnographic knowledge. Specifically, this paper reflects on the author's relationship wit…
Settler Colonial Beasts: Feral Pigs and Frontier Assemblages in Texas
This essay explores the role of feral pigs in assembling the Texas frontier. Quick to reproduce, highly adaptive, and destroyers of agricultural fields, feral pigs have emerged over the past decade as one of the principal challenges facing agriculture and land management systems in Texas. Yet, more than simply a pest, feral pigs have and continue to be active agents in forging new landscapes, ecologies, and settler‐colonial relations. We trace th…
Impasse and Opportunity: Reframing Postcolonial Territory at the India-Bangladesh Border
This essay makes a case for reconceptualizing South Asia by refiguring postcolonial territory. It does this by bringing together the broad political history of a series of enclaves along the India-Bangladesh border with an ethnographic discussion of the contemporary political economy of Dahagram, the largest of these enclaves. The essay argues for a need to bring nationalist framings of space and more textured explorations of everyday forms of te…
Global Flooding
Conclusion: The placial imagination
Contested Credit Landscapes: Microcredit, self-help and self-determination in rural Bangladesh
This paper makes a methodological and political intervention in debates over microcredit. It explores outcomes of microcredit interventions in the lives of residents of Arampur, a village in rural northern Bangladesh. Using a community-based research and engagement strategy, we explore recipients' own critiques and experiences of microcredit. These experiences suggest that the cultural and economic template that many microfinance institutions (mf…
Histories of Belonging(s): Narrating Territory, Possession, and Dispossession at the India-Bangladesh Border
This paper offers a history of belonging in Dahagram, a sovereign Bangladeshi enclave situated within India but close to the India-Bangladesh border. I recount Dahagram's post-Partition history, focusing particularly on the long and localized struggles between 1974 and 1992 to open the Tin Bigha Corridor, a land bridge through Indian territory that links Dahagram to the Bangladeshi mainland. Drawing on the memories and experiences of residents, I…
Narrating boundaries: Framing and contesting suffering, community, and belonging in enclaves along the India–Bangladesh border
Aleatory Sovereignty and the Rule of Sensitive Spaces: Aleatory Sovereignty
Addressing life in borders and refugee camps requires understanding the way these spaces are ruled, the kinds of problems rule poses for the people who live there, and the abilities of inhabitants to remake their own lives. Recent literature on such spaces has been influenced by Agamben's notion of sovereignty, which reduces these spaces and their residents to abstractions. We propose an alternate framework focused on what we call aleatory sovere…
Geographies at the margins: Borders in South Asia-an introduction
Impasse and Opportunity: Reframing Postcolonial Territory at the India-Bangladesh Border
This essay makes a case for reconceptualizing South Asia by refiguring postcolonial territory. It does this by bringing together the broad political history of a series of enclaves along the India-Bangladesh border with an ethnographic discussion of the contemporary political economy of Dahagram, the largest of these enclaves. The essay argues for a need to bring nationalist framings of space and more textured explorations of everyday forms of te…
Coming to terms: Reinserting research assistants into ethnography's past and present
Research assistants have long been central to ethnographic practice, yet the conventions of academic labor have left their roles under-stated and obscure. The implications, we opine, are both theoretical and practical. Writing research assistants back in to our collective considerations of the method does more than simply fill a lacuna in the 'reflexive turn'. It opens windows onto a radically transformed field of ethnographic practice. Today, th…
Field dependencies: Mediation, addiction and anxious fieldwork at the India-Bangladesh border
This paper explores the politics of dependency in researcher-assistant relationships. By doing so, it reflects on how these dynamics are always already predicated on broad personal histories and a range of emergent dependencies. Taking the politics of dependency in fieldwork seriously charts a path towards more fully understanding the quixotic production of ethnographic knowledge. Specifically, this paper reflects on the author's relationship wit…
Life in a shrimp zone: Aqua- and other cultures of Bangladesh's coastal landscape
This essay questions the possibilities of food sovereignty for producing a radical egalitarian politics. Specifically, it explores the class-differentiated implications of food sovereignty in a zone of ecological crisis - Bangladesh's coastal Khulna district. Much land in this deltaic zone that had previously been employed for various forms of peasant production has been transformed by the introduction of brackish-water shrimp aquaculture. This h…
Conclusion: The placial imagination
Global Flooding
Staging Climate Security: Resilience and Heterodystopia in the Bangladesh Borderlands
This essay interrogates an emergent genre of development projects that seek to instill resilience in populations likely to be severely impacted by climate change. These new projects venture a dark vision of life in a warming world-one where portable technologies become necessary for managing a future of climate chaos. I propose, following Michel Foucault, understanding these projects as heterodystopias: spaces managed as and in anticipation of a …
Frontier Assemblages: The Emergent Politics of Resource Frontiers in Asia
Frontier Assemblages: The Emergent Politics of Resource Frontiers in Asia
Ecologies of capture in Bangladesh's Sundarbans: Predations on a climate frontier
What is the relationship between climate change and criminal predation? Bangladesh's Sundarbans, the world's largest mangrove forest, has, over the past decade, emerged as a climate frontier. It is a space viewed not only as a climate hot spot but also as a zone where control and opportunity emerge out of friction between long-standing political economies, new conservation interventions, and the materialities of the mangrove forest. Concomitantly…
Delta Temporalities: Choked and Tangled Futures in the Sundarbans
This paper offers an ethnographic engagement with the present and futures of Bangladesh's southwest delta. The southwest - which houses the Sundarbans, the world's largest remaining mangrove forest - is at once profoundly vulnerable to climate change and a site critical to Bangladesh's economic development. It figures thus both as a space of optimistic industrial growth and planetary threat. I explore what I call delta temporalities - the dissona…
Chokepoints: Anthropologies of the Constricted Contemporary
This article develops an anthropology of chokepoints: sites that constrict or 'choke' the flows of resources, information, and bodies upon which contemporary life depends. We argue that an ethnographic and analytical focus on chokepoints - ports, canals, tunnels, pipelines, transit corridors, and more - recasts longstanding anthropological concerns with the character and consequences of global circulation or 'flow'. Chokepoints, we argue, are zon…
Settler Colonial Beasts: Feral Pigs and Frontier Assemblages in Texas
This essay explores the role of feral pigs in assembling the Texas frontier. Quick to reproduce, highly adaptive, and destroyers of agricultural fields, feral pigs have emerged over the past decade as one of the principal challenges facing agriculture and land management systems in Texas. Yet, more than simply a pest, feral pigs have and continue to be active agents in forging new landscapes, ecologies, and settler‐colonial relations. We trace th…
Unconscious entrainments
A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security on the Bangladesh-India Border
Political science (11 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Geography (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Politics (9 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (6 works) · Water Governance and Infrastructure (6 works) · Economics (5 works) · Law (5 works) · Anthropology (4 works)