C Minca
Biographic Data
| ID | 21547 |
|---|---|
| NAME | C Minca |
| GIVEN NAMES | C |
| FAMILY NAME | Minca |
| SIGNATURE | MINCA C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Wageningen University & Research |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6619-6614 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 82 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1126 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 82 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 17 |
The Politics of Infrastructural Ruination. (Re)bordering Practices in Time of ‘Emergency’ In Trieste, Italy
In recent years, an increasing number of studies on migration and borders have adopted an infrastructural approach to conceptualising bordering processes. These studies suggest that considering borders as infrastructures emphasises the ever-changing interplay between the various actors, institutions, technologies and scales affecting migration management and control. However, the influence of place-specific social environments on the formation of…
Biopolitics, sovereign power and mobility at the intersections between tourism and informal migration along the Balkan Route
Each year, hundreds of thousands of migrants take the informal Balkan Route from Turkey to Greece and on to western Europe. Along this route, the paths of migrants and tourists frequently cross. Some sections of the route are populated by volunteer tourists, and hostels, railway stations and bus stations are often used by both tourists and migrants. Some hotels accept migrants, while others do not. Similarly, some buses and taxis do not allow mig…
A day in the camp
The Auschwitz Memorial is one of the most well-known and significant heritage sites in the world. As visitor numbers have grown, the behaviour of visitors has generated public concerns about the meaning and purpose of the Memorial as a means of preserving the memory of the violence perpetrated at that site. In this article, we provide an autoethnographic account of the guided tour that Memorial authorities have developed to structure visits to th…
Geographies of migrant mobile containment along the Balkan Route
This article examines the spatial and temporal dynamics of migrant 'entrapment' in the Una-Sana Canton, a border region between Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia. A substantial body of scholarship has shown that journeys along migratory routes do not only consist of straightforward movement, but also involve stopping and waiting, as well as episodes of frantic hypermobility. This article focuses on a particular 'passage' along the Balkan Route, wher…
On tourism, geography and the biopolitical
The Belgrade 'Campscape
This article examines the institutional and makeshift refugee geographies of Belgrade, using Diana Martin’s concept of ‘campscape’. It argues for the importance of this concept as a lens through which the complex relationship between the presence of refugees, camps and the city may be analysed. Accordingly, it takes into consideration key refugee spaces related to the role played by Belgrade as a migration hub along the so-called Balkan Route: in…
Coercive geographies
This symposium examines the relations between biopower, destination governance and tourism. Biopower, a Foucauldian concept, refers to political strategies based on humanity’s biological features. In the simplest of terms, it is applied via biopolitical mandates that govern life of a given population. Contemporary tourism exemplifies the exertion of biopower over the mobility of travellers, as was evidenced during the COVID-19 pandemic, and to a …
Makeshift camp geographies and informal migration corridors
Makeshift camps have increasingly become a permanent presence along border areas and in cities around Europe and elsewhere, constituting a ‘hidden geography’ that is crucial to overland mobilities of thousands of migrants each year and essential to understanding contemporary informal migration. While there is rich and burgeoning scholarship on makeshift camps, substantial gaps remain in the understanding of these informal geographies which have n…
Micro‐Politics of a Makeshift Refugee Camp
With the EU's increasingly militarised and violent external borders, makeshift refugee camps have developed into crucial nodes along the “Balkan Route” where refugees reside between their clandestine border‐crossing attempts. Though a rich body of scholarship has recently emerged on the makeshift camp, there remains limited engagement on the complex and dynamic social and political lives produced within these spaces. Building upon ethnographic fi…
Of Werewolves, Jungles, and Refugees
Drawing from Giorgio Agamben’s conceptualisation of the werewolf as a more-than-human figure, this article investigates how this figure may help in analysing the ‘animalisation’ of the refugees banned to the forest along the so-called Balkan Route. After briefly discussing how the werewolf has historically been a recurrent motif in European folkloric accounts and popular narratives depicting the stranger and the abnormal, the article examines how…
The camp as a custodian institution
Care and control are concepts frequently invoked within Camp Studies, often as a means of characterizing the varied logics of institutional camps. This article builds on recent geographical literature by going beyond care and control and proposing a renewed focus on the idea of custodianship within a range of historical and contemporary camp contexts, from colonial and totalitarian concentration camps to present-day refugee camps. The notion of t…
Makeshift camp methodologies along the Balkan Route
This paper reflects on some of the methodological challenges I was faced with during my recent fieldwork in refugee camps along the Balkan Route. In particular, I will discuss the difficulties related to the application of conventional research methods in a context largely determined by “irregular” mobilities and by changing relationships between formal and informal camps. In‐depth interviews, go‐along interviews, participant observation, and oth…
Rethinking the biopolitical
This Symposium reflects on the growing relevance of biopolitical perspectives in camps studies, border studies, refugee studies, and in particular in research at the intersection between mobility studies and political geography. The five interventions accordingly engage with questions regarding the use of biopolitics as an analytical framework, but also as a pervasive strategy and governmental tool in Western societies. Through an analysis of sev…
Closing camps
Refugee camp geographies vary greatly; however, the most fleeting informal camps and decades-old institutional settlements have in common that they are meant to be temporary. While research on camps has been attentive to their spatialities, relatively little work has focused on closures. However, we consider the permanent possibility of closure as a constitutive element of life-in-the-camp. Closures, then, must be situated within the exclusionary…
Becoming Airbnbeings
Provocatively drawing inspiration from an episode of the Netflix series Black Mirror and China’s Social Credit System this article critically examines the politics and practices of datafication, quantification and qualification associated to the Airbnb platform. It first explores some of the ideas and ontological claims that endorse Airbnb’s digital infrastructure. Secondly, it looks at how the company’s use of data management and metrics has bec…
The Game
Affective dark tourism encounters
This article discusses the case of Rikuzentakata, a town almost completely destroyed by the 2011 tsunami provoked by the Great East Japan Disaster. It shows how the town has directed some of its recovery efforts toward the development of a specific form of post-disaster tourism. Two main strategies implemented by the local authorities are analyzed in detail: first, the celebration of Ipponmatsu, or the Miracle Pine, a symbol of resilience in the …
The Jungle
A book like this one on the Calais ‘Jungle’, the most extraordinary form of informal refugee encampment ever realised in the core of Western Europe, was much needed. Michel Agier adopts an original
Affective life, “vulnerable” youths, and international volunteering in a residential care programme in Cusco, Peru
This paper critically engages with the implications of the “affect turn” in the geographies of development and volunteering. By way of considering “affective life” at a residential youth care centre in Peru through an ethnographic study, we aim to contribute to current discussions of “(self‐)transformation” taking place through affectivity in the experience of volunteering. Conceptually, our approach to investigating “affective life” and voluntee…
Interventions on European nationalist populism and bordering in time of emergencies
The camp and the question of community
Inside Checkpoint 300
As a part of the architecture of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories, the Israeli government introduced in 2005 a series of so‐called terminal checkpoints as “neutral border crossings”, to minimise the impact of these barriers on Palestinian lives through a different design and the use of several machines, such as turnstiles and metal detectors. In this article, we analyse terminal Checkpoint 300 in Bethlehem, framing it as a sp…
The Meanings of Landscape
Rethinking the camp
In light of the recent proliferation and co-presence of institutional and makeshift camps and encampments in Europe, this article explores the current multifaceted geographies of the camp and their formal and informal spatialities. By engaging with key work in 'camp studies' we analyse contemporary institutional and makeshift refugee camps in their complex relationship. While the review of the existing literature is a fundamental starting point f…
Walls, walling and the immunitarian imperative 1
Wall announcing and wall building has become a popular practice amongst many politicians in Western liberal democracies. In this chapter, we discuss the return of old-fashioned material borders in Europe, but also their intended and unintended porosity. We do this by reflecting on the ‘immunitarian’ role played by these walls in a context of increasing populist calls to (visibly) stop the ‘invasions of irregular migrants’ and respond to terrorist…
Geographies of the camp
Rethinking the camp
In light of the recent proliferation and co-presence of institutional and makeshift camps and encampments in Europe, this article explores the current multifaceted geographies of the camp and their formal and informal spatialities. By engaging with key work in 'camp studies' we analyse contemporary institutional and makeshift refugee camps in their complex relationship. While the review of the existing literature is a fundamental starting point f…
The return of the Camp
Article with no abstract
Venetian Geographical Praxis
Giorgio agamben and the new biopolitical nomos
In this paper I reflect on the progressive normalization of a series of geographies of exception within Western democracies and, in particular, the relation of these to the new biopolitical power that is progressively affirming itself in our everyday lives — and that appears to be imposing itself as the new, secret, ontology of the political.I do so by engaging with the work of Giorgio Agamben and, specifically, interrogating the spatial architec…
Agamben's geographies of modernity
Topographies/topologies of the camp
Re-scaling ‘EU’rope
This article engages with the most recent spatial fantasy for the making of ‘EU’ropean space: the idea of trans-European macro-regions, currently in vogue in the policy literature. In particular, we focus on the imaginings of a Mediterranean macro-region as the latest incarnation of the macro-regional fad, but also as a useful prism for reflecting on some of the underlying conceptual as well as political and geopolitical challenges of the on-goin…
The Island
This paper reflects on the biopolitical implications for tourists and workers of enclavic tourist resorts. I contend that the concept of ‘the Island’ captures very well the metaphorical, but also the functional proximity between many tourist ‘islands’ and other past and contemporary forms of encampment and seclusion. I will thus explore the relationship between the idea of ‘the Island’ in tourism and the production and reproduction of what are su…
Nazi Spatial Theory
The concern with space and, more fundamentally, the formulation of a larger, guiding spatial theory, was central to achieving Nazi objectives during the Third Reich. We disclose critical elements of that theory, focusing on two contributions: the first by the jurist and international legal and political theorist Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) and the second by the geographer Walter Christaller (1893–1969). Applying the perverted biopolitical logic of N…
The Mediterranean alternative
This paper is a critical review of Italian and French Mediterranean studies from a postcolonial and geographical perspective. It claims that the relationship between contemporary Mediterranean geographies and mainstream European modernities has been overlooked by the Mediterraneanist literature, a literature from which geography has been surprisingly absent. We hope to begin addressing this gap, rethinking the Mediterranean as a postcolonial sea.…
The Superhost. Biopolitics, home and community in the Airbnb dream-world of global hospitality
The power of space
The tourist landscape paradox
This paper is about tourist practices of landscape. Landscape has long been a key reference Point in the construction of tourist imaginaries and, to this day, plays an important role in tourists' experience of travelling and their encounters with Otherness. Yet the ambivalent ways in which tourists conceptualize landscape is inherently paradoxical; indeed, it is by travelling that tourists try to overcome the tension produced by such a paradox. P…
The Bali Syndrome
The 'Bali Syndrome' is an attempt to codify the re-territorialization of 'mature exotic' tourist spaces, focusing upon the progressively more pronounced tendency towards extreme forms of spatial segregation evident within such destinations. Adopting the case of Bali as an illustrative example, the paper examines select aspects of the spatial (re)organization of tourist landscapes in the developing world and, in particular, the increasing emergenc…
Rethinking the biopolitical
This Symposium reflects on the growing relevance of biopolitical perspectives in camps studies, border studies, refugee studies, and in particular in research at the intersection between mobility studies and political geography. The five interventions accordingly engage with questions regarding the use of biopolitics as an analytical framework, but also as a pervasive strategy and governmental tool in Western societies. Through an analysis of sev…
The Game
Interventions on European nationalist populism and bordering in time of emergencies
Checkpoint 300
The surface and the abyss/Rethinking topology
Through a critical deployment of the surface/depth metaphor, this article explores the catalytic potential of topological thinking to establish points of articulation between apparently opposed notions and canons of thought. Starting from a genealogy of mathematical developments and philosophical mediations toward the end point of geography, we address the interplay between the formal (axiomatic) and conceptual (problematic) dimensions of topolog…
Touring responsibility
Old Europe, new Europe
This paper looks to the role of geographical metaphors in the ‘battle of words’ to describe Europe and its presumed identity. The facile adoption of banal cartographies such as those of a ‘New’ and ‘Old’ Europe highlights two concerns: first, that despite the imperial and isolationistic temptations of the current American administration, its geopolitical imagination remains firmly wedded to – indeed, cannot but define itself by – its relationship…
The question of space in Carl Schmitt
In this paper we present an analysis of the German legal and political theorist Carl Schmitt as a spatial thinker whose work contains many elements relevant to the concerns of political geography. In examining his fundamental concern with how to ground modern political order without theological foundation, we identify a conceptual matrix between space, political order and conflict that underpins his thought. Charting the development of his spatia…
Closing camps
Refugee camp geographies vary greatly; however, the most fleeting informal camps and decades-old institutional settlements have in common that they are meant to be temporary. While research on camps has been attentive to their spatialities, relatively little work has focused on closures. However, we consider the permanent possibility of closure as a constitutive element of life-in-the-camp. Closures, then, must be situated within the exclusionary…
The historic hotel as ‘quasi-freedom machine’
Existing research on historic hotels has identified their role as key projections of community ideals and place identities, as ‘hip’/creative business ventures and as dark tourism sites of ‘darkness', difficulties and dissonances. However, there has been less discussion on what happens when these intentions and operations come together in a single historic hotel. Specifically, we argue that the historical Lloyd Hotel in Amsterdam was recently ada…
Geography of tourism
Planning, environment and policy making management, environment et politique planung, umwelt und politik
Survey respondents are compared on strategic tourism planning issues in Banff, Alberta, and Niagara Falls (Ontario and New York). Findings reveal areas of consensus and disagreement in perceptions of issues and preferences for strategies. Three specific issues are considered: the destination life cycle concept, capacity, and destination image. Conclusions are drawn on how public and private‐sector cooperation on destination planning can be foster…
Territory and Tourism
This article introduces a model of human territoriality as it pertains to tourism, describes its operation, and illustrates its application to the specific case of Banff National Park. Brief descriptions of the basic concepts of human territoriality, processes of territorialization and the role of image as an index of the evolution of territoriality are provided. Current and historical processes of territory and tourism in Banff National Park are…
Image and destination
As intricate mental constructions, destination images reflect cultural, intellectual and existential backgrounds of individuals, communities and social groups, as well as marketing strategies. In the case of Banff National Park, for example, marketing strategies have promoted a potential need for wilderness and natural environment related experiences that is expressed in western post‐industrialized societies. However, touristic development often …
Geographical Practice and Postmodern Destination Image
The Bali Syndrome
The 'Bali Syndrome' is an attempt to codify the re-territorialization of 'mature exotic' tourist spaces, focusing upon the progressively more pronounced tendency towards extreme forms of spatial segregation evident within such destinations. Adopting the case of Bali as an illustrative example, the paper examines select aspects of the spatial (re)organization of tourist landscapes in the developing world and, in particular, the increasing emergenc…
Venetian Geographical Praxis
Kritikai nézőpontok a perifériáról
A dolgozat felhívja a figyelmet a kritikai geográfiai tudás létrehozásának – definiálása, nyelvezete megalkotásának – földrajzi különbségeire. Különös fontosságot tulajdonít a társadalmi közegnek, amelyben élünk, dolgozunk, s amely meghatározza a kereteit „kritikai” cselekvéseink lehetőségeinek. Ennek sokfélesége miatt a szerző a kritikai geográfiának egy befogadóbb, ezáltal „internacionálisabb” koncepciója mellett érvel. Meg kell ismerni a tudom…
The return of the Camp
Article with no abstract
Old Europe, new Europe
This paper looks to the role of geographical metaphors in the ‘battle of words’ to describe Europe and its presumed identity. The facile adoption of banal cartographies such as those of a ‘New’ and ‘Old’ Europe highlights two concerns: first, that despite the imperial and isolationistic temptations of the current American administration, its geopolitical imagination remains firmly wedded to – indeed, cannot but define itself by – its relationship…
Italian cultural geography, or the history of a prolific absence
Perhaps there is no such thing as an ‘Italian cultural geography’. Although it would be more correct to say that within Italian academic geography, there is no clearly identifiable sub-discipline that could possibly correspond to this label. There is nothing in the Italian geographical tradition that matches, for instance, the body of reflection that emerged in British geography in the 1980s and 1990s, following the pioneering work of scholars su…
Giorgio agamben and the new biopolitical nomos
In this paper I reflect on the progressive normalization of a series of geographies of exception within Western democracies and, in particular, the relation of these to the new biopolitical power that is progressively affirming itself in our everyday lives — and that appears to be imposing itself as the new, secret, ontology of the political.I do so by engaging with the work of Giorgio Agamben and, specifically, interrogating the spatial architec…
Humboldt's compromise, or the forgotten geographies of landscape
This paper is about the strategic forgetting of the Humboldtian ‘compromise’. The analysis looks to the ways in which the concept of landscape entered geography as a device uniquely able to match the Romantic imaginary of the emergent European bourgeoisie and this latter's need for a scientific (and a-political) theory of knowledge. Humboldt's geographical idea of landscape was precisely the ‘compromise’ that would provide the bourgeoisie with a …
Agamben's geographies of modernity
The tourist landscape paradox
This paper is about tourist practices of landscape. Landscape has long been a key reference Point in the construction of tourist imaginaries and, to this day, plays an important role in tourists' experience of travelling and their encounters with Otherness. Yet the ambivalent ways in which tourists conceptualize landscape is inherently paradoxical; indeed, it is by travelling that tourists try to overcome the tension produced by such a paradox. P…
The Island
This paper reflects on the biopolitical implications for tourists and workers of enclavic tourist resorts. I contend that the concept of ‘the Island’ captures very well the metaphorical, but also the functional proximity between many tourist ‘islands’ and other past and contemporary forms of encampment and seclusion. I will thus explore the relationship between the idea of ‘the Island’ in tourism and the production and reproduction of what are su…
Trieste Nazione' and its geographies of absence
The aim of this introductory essay is to offer a broad overview of the histories and geographies of Trieste stressing, in particular, the ways in which interpretations of Trieste's past have been structured by a distinct set of tropes; a distinct set of geographical imaginations. I will argue that it is only by engaging with these recurrent tropes, with these recurrent geographical imaginations, that we can begin to understand the ways in which t…
The Reign and the Glory
The Mediterranean alternative
This paper is a critical review of Italian and French Mediterranean studies from a postcolonial and geographical perspective. It claims that the relationship between contemporary Mediterranean geographies and mainstream European modernities has been overlooked by the Mediterraneanist literature, a literature from which geography has been surprisingly absent. We hope to begin addressing this gap, rethinking the Mediterranean as a postcolonial sea.…
The 'Border Within
In this paper we look to the Italian border city of Trieste-at various points in its past, a cosmopolitan port, Austria's urbs europeissima, but also a battleground for competing understandings of territoriality, identity, and belonging and a paragon of the violent application of an ethnoterritorial logic to a plurinational, plurilingual urban context; a paragon of the violence of modern borders. At the same time-and precisely by virtue of its bo…
Nazi biopolitics and the dark geographies of the selva
This article examines the spatialities of Nazi genocidial practices. It does so by engaging with the concepts of selva and città, as inspired by Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben and drawing upon a broader tradition in human geography. Although the historical events that we recall have been extensively discussed elsewhere, we revisit them here through the lens of two geographical metaphors, the selva and the città, in order to gain new insight …
Topographies/topologies of the camp
Chapter 4 Negotiating Marrakech
Marrakech is today the most important tourist destination in Morocco. Marrakech, however, is not only a key reference point for mass international tourism, but also the preferred choice for those hunting for an “authentic” experience in this North African country. The “Red City” is indeed often presented in literature and advertising alike as a place out of modern time where the real “soul” of Morocco can be found and unveiled (Minca, 2006). This…
Not a geography of what doesn’t exist, but a counter-geography of what does
The shaping of geography as a discipline has been the result of a combination of productive and successful communication and missed opportunities, of presence and absence, of fluid travels of ideas and projects, but also of closures, impediments, good lessons that got lost. This paper suggests that using a counterfactual approach to draw attention to specific geographies that remained unfulfilled and poorly known helps to think beyond linear gene…
Carlo Galli, Carl Schmitt, and contemporary Italian political thought
Political science (61 works) · Sociology (59 works) · Law (47 works) · Politics (38 works) · Geography (32 works) · Law (28 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (25 works) · Philosophy (24 works) · Social science (23 works) · Archaeology (22 works)