Elsa Noterman
Biographic Data
| ID | 1340893 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Elsa Noterman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Elsa |
| FAMILY NAME | Noterman |
| SIGNATURE | NOTERMAN E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cambridge |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2702-0944 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 99 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 12 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Introduction: Inhuman Reparations — Translating Relations of Repair
Efforts to reckon with the afterlives of colonialism and slavery have multiplied in recent years with an extensive focus on reparations as a demonstrative and structural form of legal redress. In this special issue the authors consider the task of dismantling extensive and networked structures of harm by thinking across reparative frameworks grounded in multiple theoretical, spatial, legal, and material contexts. Centering the spatial and relatio…
Repair Beyond Property: Restoring Complexity to Land
Land reparations have often been dismissed as too complex, politically unworkable, and legally questionable. Questions of who qualifies are thorny. Land restoration might require a second act of dispossession. Too much time has passed. Claims to and uses of land overlap and are often conflictual. What happens, though, if we approach such complexity as not a reason for the infeasibility of land reparations but rather a reflection of the irreparabi…
Children's Legal Geographies, and the “Make-Believe” of Property
What is a wall to a child? It may be an obstacle course, a balance beam, a “car,” a seat, a home for spiders and ladybugs, a place to play hide and seek, a support to lean on when learning to walk, a perch for cats, a musical instrument to be played with sticks and hands. Rather than just a barrier, the wall can also become an incitement to explore that which lies beyond it. So how does a wall become just a territorial marker—a designation of pri…
Fugitive Dust: The Indeterminate Trajectories of Urban Development's Present Past
As Philadelphia's postindustrial River Wards landscape undergoes a development boom, dust from construction projects settles on surrounding parks, gardens, and homes, and in the lungs of residents. Concerned about the reemergence of the area's toxic history-especially the material legacies of lead refineries-and its impacts on their children's health, local parents are organizing to understand and address the risks associated with the circulation…
Housing justice, mobilization, and financialization: A conversation from the Antipode Institute for Geographies of Justice
In June 2022, a group of activists, students, and scholars gathered in Barcelona for the 8th annual International Geographies of Justice Summer Institute (IGJ), Housing Justice in Unequal Cities, co-sponsored by Antipode and the UCLA Institute on Inequality and Democracy. IGJ attendees included people from within movement and activist spaces, academics, and non-profit organizations who share the common vision of working toward housing justice. Th…
Redefining the role of urban studies Early Career Academics in the post-Covid-19 university
We are an international collective of Early Career Academics (ECAs) who met throughout 2020 to explore the implications of COVID-19 on precarious academics. With this intervention, our aims are to voice commonly shared experiences and concerns and to reflect on the extent to which the pandemic offers opportunities to redefine Higher Education and research institutions, in a context of ongoing precarity and funding cuts. Specifically, we explore a…
Adverse commoning: Tracing contested legal geographies of the urban commons
Under threat of enclosure in rapidly gentrifying cities, some urban commoners are turning to legal tactics to ward off dispossession. In this article, I explore the contested legal geographies of urban commoning, considering some of the challenges, stakes, and opportunities that emerge in the effort to gain legal recognition. Specifically, I examine the use of the doctrine of adverse possession by Philadelphia gardeners to claim title to the comm…
A Design Challenge for Transforming Justice
Transforming Justice is a collaborative project that aims to challenge the dominant narratives of policing and segregation in Milwaukee through community workshops, visual arts and storytelling, and experimental mapping. This Practices and Curations contribution describes one of the project’s collaborations, a design challenge, that aimed to create and imagine new ways of visualizing (in)justice and place in Milwaukee. Engaging feminist principle…
Speculating on vacancy
Property speculation has long served a role in the settler colonial appropriation of land and the racialised uneven development of contemporary cities. This future‐oriented approach to property acquisition and management is underpinned by notions of vacancy that erase past and present forms of possession and associate racialised spaces with lack and risk. Efforts to define, represent, and manage the speculative value of “vacant” properties throug…
Organizing for collective feminist killjoy geographies in a US university
Amid broader discussions of the continuities of racism and sexism on campuses in the United States, we bring together Sara Ahmed’s notion of the ‘feminist killjoy’ with intersectional feminist geographers’ focus on the politics of knowledge production to suggest that the academic department is a key site for anti-racist feminist intervention. Specifically, we survey our organizing experiences as members of Women in Geography (WIG) at UW-Madison, …
Taking back vacant property
“Taking back” has long been a rallying call of urban social movements asserting land rights. This call often involves seeking to ward off dispossession by taking possession. Scholars rethinking property beyond the normative “ownership model” have explored the seeming paradoxicality of resisting dispossession through legal forms of possession that reproduce deprivation. In this paper, I consider the possibilities for taking back the concept of pos…
Beyond Tragedy: Differential Commoning in a Manufactured Housing Cooperative
Caught between the dual crises of declining economic opportunity and diminishing public assistance, people on the economic margins resist threats to their livelihoods by opting to share resources. The processes involved in managing these “commons” are often messy and paradoxical amid differing livelihood concerns and subject positions. Unevenness tends to emerge along new and existing lines of power. Rather than reducing such tendencies to a “tra…
Beyond Tragedy: Differential Commoning in a Manufactured Housing Cooperative
Caught between the dual crises of declining economic opportunity and diminishing public assistance, people on the economic margins resist threats to their livelihoods by opting to share resources. The processes involved in managing these “commons” are often messy and paradoxical amid differing livelihood concerns and subject positions. Unevenness tends to emerge along new and existing lines of power. Rather than reducing such tendencies to a “tra…
Speculating on vacancy
Property speculation has long served a role in the settler colonial appropriation of land and the racialised uneven development of contemporary cities. This future‐oriented approach to property acquisition and management is underpinned by notions of vacancy that erase past and present forms of possession and associate racialised spaces with lack and risk. Efforts to define, represent, and manage the speculative value of “vacant” properties throug…
Adverse commoning: Tracing contested legal geographies of the urban commons
Under threat of enclosure in rapidly gentrifying cities, some urban commoners are turning to legal tactics to ward off dispossession. In this article, I explore the contested legal geographies of urban commoning, considering some of the challenges, stakes, and opportunities that emerge in the effort to gain legal recognition. Specifically, I examine the use of the doctrine of adverse possession by Philadelphia gardeners to claim title to the comm…
Taking back vacant property
“Taking back” has long been a rallying call of urban social movements asserting land rights. This call often involves seeking to ward off dispossession by taking possession. Scholars rethinking property beyond the normative “ownership model” have explored the seeming paradoxicality of resisting dispossession through legal forms of possession that reproduce deprivation. In this paper, I consider the possibilities for taking back the concept of pos…
Fugitive Dust: The Indeterminate Trajectories of Urban Development's Present Past
As Philadelphia's postindustrial River Wards landscape undergoes a development boom, dust from construction projects settles on surrounding parks, gardens, and homes, and in the lungs of residents. Concerned about the reemergence of the area's toxic history-especially the material legacies of lead refineries-and its impacts on their children's health, local parents are organizing to understand and address the risks associated with the circulation…
Redefining the role of urban studies Early Career Academics in the post-Covid-19 university
We are an international collective of Early Career Academics (ECAs) who met throughout 2020 to explore the implications of COVID-19 on precarious academics. With this intervention, our aims are to voice commonly shared experiences and concerns and to reflect on the extent to which the pandemic offers opportunities to redefine Higher Education and research institutions, in a context of ongoing precarity and funding cuts. Specifically, we explore a…
Organizing for collective feminist killjoy geographies in a US university
Amid broader discussions of the continuities of racism and sexism on campuses in the United States, we bring together Sara Ahmed’s notion of the ‘feminist killjoy’ with intersectional feminist geographers’ focus on the politics of knowledge production to suggest that the academic department is a key site for anti-racist feminist intervention. Specifically, we survey our organizing experiences as members of Women in Geography (WIG) at UW-Madison, …
A Design Challenge for Transforming Justice
Transforming Justice is a collaborative project that aims to challenge the dominant narratives of policing and segregation in Milwaukee through community workshops, visual arts and storytelling, and experimental mapping. This Practices and Curations contribution describes one of the project’s collaborations, a design challenge, that aimed to create and imagine new ways of visualizing (in)justice and place in Milwaukee. Engaging feminist principle…
Beyond Tragedy: Differential Commoning in a Manufactured Housing Cooperative
Caught between the dual crises of declining economic opportunity and diminishing public assistance, people on the economic margins resist threats to their livelihoods by opting to share resources. The processes involved in managing these “commons” are often messy and paradoxical amid differing livelihood concerns and subject positions. Unevenness tends to emerge along new and existing lines of power. Rather than reducing such tendencies to a “tra…
Organizing for collective feminist killjoy geographies in a US university
Amid broader discussions of the continuities of racism and sexism on campuses in the United States, we bring together Sara Ahmed’s notion of the ‘feminist killjoy’ with intersectional feminist geographers’ focus on the politics of knowledge production to suggest that the academic department is a key site for anti-racist feminist intervention. Specifically, we survey our organizing experiences as members of Women in Geography (WIG) at UW-Madison, …
Taking back vacant property
“Taking back” has long been a rallying call of urban social movements asserting land rights. This call often involves seeking to ward off dispossession by taking possession. Scholars rethinking property beyond the normative “ownership model” have explored the seeming paradoxicality of resisting dispossession through legal forms of possession that reproduce deprivation. In this paper, I consider the possibilities for taking back the concept of pos…
A Design Challenge for Transforming Justice
Transforming Justice is a collaborative project that aims to challenge the dominant narratives of policing and segregation in Milwaukee through community workshops, visual arts and storytelling, and experimental mapping. This Practices and Curations contribution describes one of the project’s collaborations, a design challenge, that aimed to create and imagine new ways of visualizing (in)justice and place in Milwaukee. Engaging feminist principle…
Speculating on vacancy
Property speculation has long served a role in the settler colonial appropriation of land and the racialised uneven development of contemporary cities. This future‐oriented approach to property acquisition and management is underpinned by notions of vacancy that erase past and present forms of possession and associate racialised spaces with lack and risk. Efforts to define, represent, and manage the speculative value of “vacant” properties throug…
Housing justice, mobilization, and financialization: A conversation from the Antipode Institute for Geographies of Justice
In June 2022, a group of activists, students, and scholars gathered in Barcelona for the 8th annual International Geographies of Justice Summer Institute (IGJ), Housing Justice in Unequal Cities, co-sponsored by Antipode and the UCLA Institute on Inequality and Democracy. IGJ attendees included people from within movement and activist spaces, academics, and non-profit organizations who share the common vision of working toward housing justice. Th…
Redefining the role of urban studies Early Career Academics in the post-Covid-19 university
We are an international collective of Early Career Academics (ECAs) who met throughout 2020 to explore the implications of COVID-19 on precarious academics. With this intervention, our aims are to voice commonly shared experiences and concerns and to reflect on the extent to which the pandemic offers opportunities to redefine Higher Education and research institutions, in a context of ongoing precarity and funding cuts. Specifically, we explore a…
Adverse commoning: Tracing contested legal geographies of the urban commons
Under threat of enclosure in rapidly gentrifying cities, some urban commoners are turning to legal tactics to ward off dispossession. In this article, I explore the contested legal geographies of urban commoning, considering some of the challenges, stakes, and opportunities that emerge in the effort to gain legal recognition. Specifically, I examine the use of the doctrine of adverse possession by Philadelphia gardeners to claim title to the comm…
Children's Legal Geographies, and the “Make-Believe” of Property
What is a wall to a child? It may be an obstacle course, a balance beam, a “car,” a seat, a home for spiders and ladybugs, a place to play hide and seek, a support to lean on when learning to walk, a perch for cats, a musical instrument to be played with sticks and hands. Rather than just a barrier, the wall can also become an incitement to explore that which lies beyond it. So how does a wall become just a territorial marker—a designation of pri…
Fugitive Dust: The Indeterminate Trajectories of Urban Development's Present Past
As Philadelphia's postindustrial River Wards landscape undergoes a development boom, dust from construction projects settles on surrounding parks, gardens, and homes, and in the lungs of residents. Concerned about the reemergence of the area's toxic history-especially the material legacies of lead refineries-and its impacts on their children's health, local parents are organizing to understand and address the risks associated with the circulation…
Introduction: Inhuman Reparations — Translating Relations of Repair
Efforts to reckon with the afterlives of colonialism and slavery have multiplied in recent years with an extensive focus on reparations as a demonstrative and structural form of legal redress. In this special issue the authors consider the task of dismantling extensive and networked structures of harm by thinking across reparative frameworks grounded in multiple theoretical, spatial, legal, and material contexts. Centering the spatial and relatio…
Repair Beyond Property: Restoring Complexity to Land
Land reparations have often been dismissed as too complex, politically unworkable, and legally questionable. Questions of who qualifies are thorny. Land restoration might require a second act of dispossession. Too much time has passed. Claims to and uses of land overlap and are often conflictual. What happens, though, if we approach such complexity as not a reason for the infeasibility of land reparations but rather a reflection of the irreparabi…
Political science (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Law (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · Geography (4 works) · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism (4 works) · Law and economics (4 works) · Political economy (4 works) · Property (philosophy (4 works)