Mary Lawhon
Biographic Data
| ID | 257334 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mary Lawhon |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mary |
| FAMILY NAME | Lawhon |
| SIGNATURE | LAWHON M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Edinburgh |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4850-1560 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 52 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 971 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 52 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
To complete modernity or to embrace heterogeneity? From historical inequality towards an uncertain future for water infrastructure in Mexico City
Urban geographers continue to debate how services might be provided justly and sustainably to everyone. They have identified two key pathways: completing modern infrastructure systems and pursuing heterogeneous configurations. Why these pathways have different prevalence and support in particular places and times continues to be explored, including how experiences with and histories of modernity and development shape contemporary infrastructure a…
We Woke Up With a Sign: Exclusion, Conflict and the Politics of Marine Conservation in South Africa
Conservation often continues to be undertaken in ways that exclude nearby communities, despite extensive critique of such practices. Political ecologists have emphasised the unequal power relations that shape conservation management and its unequal burdens and benefits, showing how this undermines the success of particular initiatives. They challenge the exclusion of marginalised local knowledge systems and perceptions that communities do not sup…
Areas of opportunity
Short Abstract This editorial introduces Area 's new editorial team and offers a collective sense of why Area continues to be an important outlet for geographical scholarship
Infrastructure in formation: The Politics and Practices of Making Progress With Infrastructure
Infrastructure has long been understood as central to enabling “progress”, a visible sign of modernity and development. Urban scholars have pushed back against modernist notions of the networked city as the teleological end of infrastructure, yet there remains uncertainty and debate over how to make sense of infrastructure’s temporality. We emphasize that – analytically – infrastructure is always “in formation”. To understand infrastructure’s pol…
"That's how we live sustainably"! Conflicting environmentalisms in Franconian Switzerland
What is sustainable - and who gets to decide what sustainability is - remains a central question for political ecologists. Scholars have explained and critiqued specific iterations, as well as proposed versions of what they believe sustainability ought to be. In practice, environmentalism is made up of a panoply of emerging, concurrent and conflicting views that continue to change over time and are emplaced and enacted differently. This article c…
Degrowth
Geographers have recently begun to engage with degrowth scholarship and activism, albeit somewhat tentatively. The history of degrowth is reviewed and how geographers have contributed, could contribute to, and been shaped by debates over the relationship between growth and the environment are examined. Consideration is given to both a narrow version (focused on a critique of economic growth and articulating/advocating for economic models not prem…
Infrastructure Imaginaries, Past, Present, and Future: Living with the Urban Flood in Guwahati, India
Understandings of what urban flood infrastructure is and how it ought to operate have changed over time and differed within cities. This article considers changing narratives and practices of flood mitigation in Guwahati, India, showing the limits of modern infrastructure. Instead, we find heterogeneous technologies, actors, and relations working to guide unpredictable waters through the "proper" drains through patching, adjusting, and shifting m…
African cities in conversation: Who are we listening and talking to
The "where" of urban geography as a discipline, and Urban Geography as a journal, has changed significantly over the last 40 years.Here, we take a quantitative and qualitative look at this history.We find, unsurprisingly, some articles about African cities in the journal before 2010, and a notable and ongoing uptick since.Drawing on debates over how southern cities ought to be studied, we identify different framings and lines of argumentation.Som…
Sanitation configurations in Lilongwe: Everyday experiences on and off the grid
Scholars have called for increased attention to the practices through which residents of southern cities create and use infrastructure. The failures and disruptions of many particular artefacts have meant that people often develop multiple ways to access water, electricity, or transportation, even if all of them have limitations. For sanitation, thinking through heterogeneous infrastructure configurations can help us to see connections between to…
The Troubles of Sharing Grammars in a World of Cities
A Biotoilet for the Future
Through their study of a biotoilet in Nairobi, Mwangi Mwaura and Mary Lawhorn examine the feasibility and challenges of green sanitation infrastructures in light of contrasting aspirations and support structures
Towards a modest imaginary? Sanitation in Kampala beyond the modern infrastructure ideal
The idea of the modern city continues to inform urban policies and practices, shaping ideas of what infrastructure is and how it ought to work. While there has long been conflict over its meaning and relevance, particularly in southern cities, alternatives remain difficult to identify. In this paper, we ‘read for difference’ in the policies and practices of sanitation in Kampala, purposefully looking for evidence of an alternative imaginary. We f…
Making heterogeneous infrastructure futures in and beyond the global south
Infrastructure has never been a single thing, understood in a universal way. Yet, there has long been a broad overarching orthodox approach in which ‘experts’ create replicable, stable, large, networked systems to control nature and ensure regular, predictable flows of people, materials and information. Within this orthodoxy, infrastructure is narrated as good, contributing to economic and social development. In this paper, we identify environmen…
Living with fragile infrastructure: The gendered labour of preventing, responding to and being impacted by sanitation failures
While infrastructure is often understood to operate ‘in the background’, scholars have increasingly attended to the labour that enables urban material flows. Drawing on empirical material collected through fieldwork and document analysis in Lilongwe, this paper explores how different residents of the city experience and respond to the regular failures of infrastructure. We examine sanitation in one middle- and two low-income areas, considering th…
Navigating heterogeneous sanitation configurations: How off‐grid technologies work and are reworked by urban residents
A range of innovative off‐grid sanitation technologies have been developed and deployed to improve sanitation in cities where networked sanitation by publicly managed sewers is insufficient. Studies of such technologies tend to consider toilets as static, where technologies are chosen once, at the project onset and in isolation from each other. In this study we explore off‐grid sanitation as heterogeneous infrastructure configurations of people a…
Making UBI radical: On the potential for a universal basic income to underwrite transformative and anti-kyriarchal change
Cash transfers as a response to poverty and unemployment have moved to mainstream political practice. From global south developmental policy to pandemic payments, there is growing concern with relying on employment for income. Many on the left have been sceptical of, and at times opposed to, such transfers, instead urging direct state provisioning, improved employment, or economic transformation beyond the state. Here, we develop an alternative p…
What counts as infrastructural labour? Community action as waste work in South Africa
Studies of waste work have largely focused on labourers who collect and process materials in exchange for money, including informal waste reclaimers and those now working precariously due to neoliberalization. Researchers have also drawn attention to who sorts waste in and beyond the household. Here we examine voluntary clean-ups as well as waste education in South Africa. State discourse encourages people to engage with the wastescape without fr…
Permission to appropriate: Waste pickers’ ‘guidelines’ for contesting and consolidating claims to waste on the streets of Tshwane, South Africa
Power, politics and a poo pump: Contestation over legitimacy, access and benefits of sanitation technology in Kampala
Most literature on sanitation largely follows a developmentalist approach, searching for the right combination of public education, appropriate technology, and partnerships across local and international institutions. Such works are useful, but also can be read as demonstrating the limitations of focusing on the modern infrastructural ideal of uniform, networked services. Studies of household experiences and practices of infrastructure in global …
Neither more nor less, but enough: Towards a modest political ecology of the future
Claiming value in a heterogeneous solid waste configuration in Kampala
Kampala has a complex set of regulations describing actors, rules and procedures for collection and transportation of waste, and requires waste to be disposed of at the landfill. Yet little of the city’s waste moves through this “formal system”. Building on wider scholarship on urban infrastructure and calls to theorize from southern cities, we examine recycling in Kampala as a heterogeneous infrastructure configuration. Kampala’s lively recyclin…
Beyond southern urbanism? Imagining an urban geography of a world of cities
Urban geography has increasingly considered southern cities as important locations from which to develop urban theory. We build this wider movement and recent scholarship to continue opening urban geography to southern cities, scholars and ideas generated from the south. Here, we draw on the experiences of mentoring and being students from the global south. We think through the strategic importance of the south as a term and a political alliance,…
Beyond Jobs vs Environment: On the Potential of Universal Basic Income to Reconfigure Environmental Politics
The tension between creating jobs and protecting the environment remains central to contemporary environmental politics. Critical scholars have reworked the “jobs vs the environment” problematique, but how people will secure livelihoods in various imagined futures remains unclear. We demonstrate how a Universal Basic Income (UBI) that enacts a revitalised politics of redistribution, in conjunction with an active state, has the potential to ruptur…
Disambiguating the southern urban critique: Propositions, pathways and possibilities for a more global urban studies
Scholarship engaging with (northern) urban theory from the south has troubled the core of urban studies. At this critical juncture, we argue that it is important to clarify core propositions and call attention to points of convergence and dissonance amongst advocates of ‘the southern urban critique’. We briefly review foundational arguments for this scholarly community, then outline three distinct iterations of the source of this critique: the so…
Southern urbanism or a world of cities? Modes of enacting a more global urban geography in textbooks, teaching and research
Despite growing attentiveness to cities in the global south, questions remain as to how to enact a more global urban studies. We analyze five contemporary textbooks as a lens into how southern cities ought to be incorporated in teaching as well as the field of urban geography. We find both separate chapters for southern cities (southern urbanism), and southern cities integrated into existing thematic chapters (a world of cities). We further show …
Provincializing Urban Political Ecology: Towards a Situated UPE Through African Urbanism
Urban political ecology (UPE) has provided critical insights into the sociomaterial construction of urban environments, their unequal distribution of resources, and contestation over power and resources. Most of this work is rooted in Marxist urban geographical theory, which provides a useful but limited analysis. Such works typically begin with a historical-materialist theory of power, then examine particular artifacts and infrastructure to prov…
Socio-technical regimes and sustainability transitions: Insights from political ecology
Sustainability is increasingly becoming a core focus of geography, linking subfields such as urban, economic, and political ecology, yet strategies for achieving this goal remain illusive. Socio-technical transition theorists have made important contributions to our knowledge of the challenges and possibilities for achieving more sustainable societies, but this body of work generally lacks consideration of the influences of geography and power re…
Thinking through heterogeneous infrastructure configurations
Studies of infrastructure have demonstrated broad differences between Northern and Southern cities, and deconstructed urban theory derived from experiences of the networked urban regions of the Global North. This includes critiques of the universalisation of the historically–culturally produced normative ideal of universal, uniform infrastructure. In this commentary, we first introduce the notion of ‘heterogeneous infrastructure configurations’ (…
Walking as Method: Toward Methodological Forthrightness and Comparability in Urban Geographical Research
Qualitative urban geographical research should explicitly acknowledge insights gained from walking (the iterative exploration and observation of cities on foot), which enhances local literacy and enables researchers to compare methods more explicitly. Some urban geographers might use walking as a method, but it is rarely reported in published scholarship. This article argues for the explicit inclusion of walking in methodological reporting for ur…
Disambiguating the southern urban critique: Propositions, pathways and possibilities for a more global urban studies
Scholarship engaging with (northern) urban theory from the south has troubled the core of urban studies. At this critical juncture, we argue that it is important to clarify core propositions and call attention to points of convergence and dissonance amongst advocates of ‘the southern urban critique’. We briefly review foundational arguments for this scholarly community, then outline three distinct iterations of the source of this critique: the so…
Geographies of waste: Conceptual vectors from the Global South
Geographies of waste, which include examination of its flows and politics, have demonstrated empirical differences and contrasting approaches to researching waste in the Global North and South. Southern waste geographies have largely focused on case studies of informality and (neoliberal) governance. We draw on Southern theory to argue that this focus can be productively extended through greater consideration of the production of value and the ro…
Unlearning (Un)Located Ideas in the Provincialization of Urban Theory
Lawhon M., Silver J., Ernstson H. and Pierce J. Unlearning (un)located ideas in the provincialization of urban theory, Regional Studies. Postcolonial scholars have argued for the provincialization of urban knowledge, but doing so remains an opaque process. This paper argues that explicit attention to ‘learning to unlearn’ unstated theoretical assumptions and normativities can aid in provincialization, and demonstrate ways in which theorizing enta…
Placing race: On the resonance of place with black geographies
A range of conceptual terms and diverse theoretical traditions have been used to study geographies of race. Black geographical scholarship has persuasively articulated the need to better understand black agency and experiences. We suggest that the conceptual lens of place, and specifically relational place-making, is particularly congruent with the black geographical interest in agency, experience, and non-material spatial practices. It is also a…
Conceptual Vectors of African Urbanism: ‘Engaged Theory-Making’ and ‘Platforms of Engagement’
Ernstson H., Lawhon M. and Duminy J. Conceptual vectors of African urbanism: ‘engaged theory-making’ and ‘platforms of engagement’, Regional Studies. With increasing urbanization in the global South, and Africa in particular, scholars have called attention to the limited explanatory capacity of existing theory. Ananya Roy suggests developing conceptual vectors based on regional histories and contexts. Two such vectors with relevance beyond Africa…
Towards a modest imaginary? Sanitation in Kampala beyond the modern infrastructure ideal
The idea of the modern city continues to inform urban policies and practices, shaping ideas of what infrastructure is and how it ought to work. While there has long been conflict over its meaning and relevance, particularly in southern cities, alternatives remain difficult to identify. In this paper, we ‘read for difference’ in the policies and practices of sanitation in Kampala, purposefully looking for evidence of an alternative imaginary. We f…
Making heterogeneous infrastructure futures in and beyond the global south
Infrastructure has never been a single thing, understood in a universal way. Yet, there has long been a broad overarching orthodox approach in which ‘experts’ create replicable, stable, large, networked systems to control nature and ensure regular, predictable flows of people, materials and information. Within this orthodoxy, infrastructure is narrated as good, contributing to economic and social development. In this paper, we identify environmen…
Southern urbanism or a world of cities? Modes of enacting a more global urban geography in textbooks, teaching and research
Despite growing attentiveness to cities in the global south, questions remain as to how to enact a more global urban studies. We analyze five contemporary textbooks as a lens into how southern cities ought to be incorporated in teaching as well as the field of urban geography. We find both separate chapters for southern cities (southern urbanism), and southern cities integrated into existing thematic chapters (a world of cities). We further show …
Claiming value in a heterogeneous solid waste configuration in Kampala
Kampala has a complex set of regulations describing actors, rules and procedures for collection and transportation of waste, and requires waste to be disposed of at the landfill. Yet little of the city’s waste moves through this “formal system”. Building on wider scholarship on urban infrastructure and calls to theorize from southern cities, we examine recycling in Kampala as a heterogeneous infrastructure configuration. Kampala’s lively recyclin…
From precarious work to obsolete labour? Implications of technological disemployment for geographical scholarship
The displacement of jobs via mechanization and automation has long been understood as uncomfortable for labourers but also an intrinsic part of a process of ‘creative destruction’ leading to further growth in capitalist economies. This article argues that a seismic shift is currently underway in the dynamics of the labour market with regard to automation. Technologies of automation are capable of a rapidly rising proportion of all of the tasks th…
Living with fragile infrastructure: The gendered labour of preventing, responding to and being impacted by sanitation failures
While infrastructure is often understood to operate ‘in the background’, scholars have increasingly attended to the labour that enables urban material flows. Drawing on empirical material collected through fieldwork and document analysis in Lilongwe, this paper explores how different residents of the city experience and respond to the regular failures of infrastructure. We examine sanitation in one middle- and two low-income areas, considering th…
Contesting power, trust and legitimacy in the South African e-waste transition
Beyond southern urbanism? Imagining an urban geography of a world of cities
Urban geography has increasingly considered southern cities as important locations from which to develop urban theory. We build this wider movement and recent scholarship to continue opening urban geography to southern cities, scholars and ideas generated from the south. Here, we draw on the experiences of mentoring and being students from the global south. We think through the strategic importance of the south as a term and a political alliance,…
Flows, Friction and the Sociomaterial Metabolization of Alcohol
Political ecologists have considered the sociomateriality of diverse hybrids and the metabolism and circulation of urban flows such as water, food and waste. Adding alcohol to this list enhances our understanding of the geography of alcohol as well as the theory of sociomateriality. Viewing alcohol as a sociomaterial hybrid draws attention to the power‐laden, dynamic processes which shape its flow, rather than considering it as already in place. …
Beyond Jobs vs Environment: On the Potential of Universal Basic Income to Reconfigure Environmental Politics
The tension between creating jobs and protecting the environment remains central to contemporary environmental politics. Critical scholars have reworked the “jobs vs the environment” problematique, but how people will secure livelihoods in various imagined futures remains unclear. We demonstrate how a Universal Basic Income (UBI) that enacts a revitalised politics of redistribution, in conjunction with an active state, has the potential to ruptur…
Place‐making at a national scale: Framing tar sands extraction as “Canadian” in The Globe and Mail
Although the concept of place has most often been used to examine micro‐scale locales, recent explications of place‐making and place‐framing can usefully inform debates on nations, nationalism, and the nation‐state. Viewing the nation as a contested, unstable, and relational place enables a pluralist and dynamic understanding of how nation‐places are constructed and contested, by whom, and towards what ends. In this paper, we examine public debat…
Transdisciplinarity in urban South Africa
Making UBI radical: On the potential for a universal basic income to underwrite transformative and anti-kyriarchal change
Cash transfers as a response to poverty and unemployment have moved to mainstream political practice. From global south developmental policy to pandemic payments, there is growing concern with relying on employment for income. Many on the left have been sceptical of, and at times opposed to, such transfers, instead urging direct state provisioning, improved employment, or economic transformation beyond the state. Here, we develop an alternative p…
A Labour Question for the 21st Century: Perpetuating the Work Ethic in the Absence of Jobs in South Africa's Waste Sector
For centuries, economic relations in southern Africa were profoundly shaped by interventions that sought to attract and coerce workers to participate in colonial and apartheid economies. These interventions included efforts to change the meaning of labour. Colonial powers sought to instil in colonial subjects a belief that work has worth beyond its productive value, and that work itself is virtuous. In recent decades, the classic labour question …
Relational Power in the Governance of a South African E-Waste Transition
Transition studies attempts to explain sociotechnical change over time and to develop policy prescriptions to help guide transitions towards more sustainable outcomes. While this literature has made significant contributions to our understanding of transitions and achieving greater sustainability, most transition theory and practice overlooks the central role of power in shaping the direction and outcomes of transitions. In this paper I apply the…
Permission to appropriate: Waste pickers’ ‘guidelines’ for contesting and consolidating claims to waste on the streets of Tshwane, South Africa
Solving/understanding/evaluating the e-waste challenge through transdisciplinarity
Transdisciplinarity in urban South Africa
Market intermediaries and rural people in Bolivia's forest products sector: Are trusting partnerships possible
Decentralization in access to and control of Bolivia's forest resources, coupled with a rising global demand for tropical hardwoods, raises important questions about whether increased trade and community forest management (CFM) initiatives can enable forms of market integration that have more favourable outcomes for rural communities. This paper assesses the prospects for such a transition through an examination of the relationships linking wood …
Socio-technical regimes and sustainability transitions: Insights from political ecology
Sustainability is increasingly becoming a core focus of geography, linking subfields such as urban, economic, and political ecology, yet strategies for achieving this goal remain illusive. Socio-technical transition theorists have made important contributions to our knowledge of the challenges and possibilities for achieving more sustainable societies, but this body of work generally lacks consideration of the influences of geography and power re…
Contesting power, trust and legitimacy in the South African e-waste transition
The meaning of global engagements with Africa (for us)
Rooted Cosmopolitanism: Spaces of Multiplicity in Cusco, Peru
Cosmopolitanism has recently been revived as a concept through which to explore increasing global interactions. While many theoretical advances have been made, these conversations focus on urban centers in the global North and remain caught up in binary concepts such as the global/local. In our article, we start with an empirical set of social processes and spatial practices in Cusco, a global South city with extensive international connections. …
Relational Power in the Governance of a South African E-Waste Transition
Transition studies attempts to explain sociotechnical change over time and to develop policy prescriptions to help guide transitions towards more sustainable outcomes. While this literature has made significant contributions to our understanding of transitions and achieving greater sustainability, most transition theory and practice overlooks the central role of power in shaping the direction and outcomes of transitions. In this paper I apply the…
DianaMitlin and DavidSatterthwaite2013: Urban Poverty in the Global South: Scale and Nature. London and New York: Routledge
Why I want to be a South African geographer: A response to Hammett’s (2012) “W(h)ither South African human geography?”
Flows, Friction and the Sociomaterial Metabolization of Alcohol
Political ecologists have considered the sociomateriality of diverse hybrids and the metabolism and circulation of urban flows such as water, food and waste. Adding alcohol to this list enhances our understanding of the geography of alcohol as well as the theory of sociomateriality. Viewing alcohol as a sociomaterial hybrid draws attention to the power‐laden, dynamic processes which shape its flow, rather than considering it as already in place. …
Economies of Recycling: The Global Transformation of Materials, Values and Social Relations Edited by CatherineAlexander and JoshuaReno. London: Zed Books, 2012
Provincializing Urban Political Ecology: Towards a Situated UPE Through African Urbanism
Urban political ecology (UPE) has provided critical insights into the sociomaterial construction of urban environments, their unequal distribution of resources, and contestation over power and resources. Most of this work is rooted in Marxist urban geographical theory, which provides a useful but limited analysis. Such works typically begin with a historical-materialist theory of power, then examine particular artifacts and infrastructure to prov…
Situated, Networked Environmentalisms: A Case for Environmental Theory from the South
There has long been a notable difference between the environmentalism of the global North and South. Despite this and recent calls for the development of theory from the global South, research on environmentalism in the global South continues to largely employ Northern theory. While much of this seeks to inform and revise theory, and a case has been made for the articulation of an environmentalism of the poor, work in the South remains dominated …
Conceptual Vectors of African Urbanism: ‘Engaged Theory-Making’ and ‘Platforms of Engagement’
Ernstson H., Lawhon M. and Duminy J. Conceptual vectors of African urbanism: ‘engaged theory-making’ and ‘platforms of engagement’, Regional Studies. With increasing urbanization in the global South, and Africa in particular, scholars have called attention to the limited explanatory capacity of existing theory. Ananya Roy suggests developing conceptual vectors based on regional histories and contexts. Two such vectors with relevance beyond Africa…
Walking as Method: Toward Methodological Forthrightness and Comparability in Urban Geographical Research
Qualitative urban geographical research should explicitly acknowledge insights gained from walking (the iterative exploration and observation of cities on foot), which enhances local literacy and enables researchers to compare methods more explicitly. Some urban geographers might use walking as a method, but it is rarely reported in published scholarship. This article argues for the explicit inclusion of walking in methodological reporting for ur…
Unlearning (Un)Located Ideas in the Provincialization of Urban Theory
Lawhon M., Silver J., Ernstson H. and Pierce J. Unlearning (un)located ideas in the provincialization of urban theory, Regional Studies. Postcolonial scholars have argued for the provincialization of urban knowledge, but doing so remains an opaque process. This paper argues that explicit attention to ‘learning to unlearn’ unstated theoretical assumptions and normativities can aid in provincialization, and demonstrate ways in which theorizing enta…
Power and Development
Development is a power‐laden process involving the reconfiguration of power relations between individuals and institutions as well as across spaces and scales. Geographers have participated (and continue to participate) in the exertion of power by providing data and theoretical justification for development, while also providing critical analysis of these processes. Scholars have argued that development is enabled and constrained by power entangl…
The right to move: Informal use rights and urban practices of mobility
Everyday urban practices are enabled by both formal and informal rights regimes. Researchers often focus on the effects of formal rights; informal rights to use urban spaces have been less widely examined, particularly in North America. This article examines practices of intra-urban mobility in a gentrifying area of Portland, Oregon. We find that rights regimes regarding movement in urban space importantly shape who uses particular transit strate…
Place‐making at a national scale: Framing tar sands extraction as “Canadian” in The Globe and Mail
Although the concept of place has most often been used to examine micro‐scale locales, recent explications of place‐making and place‐framing can usefully inform debates on nations, nationalism, and the nation‐state. Viewing the nation as a contested, unstable, and relational place enables a pluralist and dynamic understanding of how nation‐places are constructed and contested, by whom, and towards what ends. In this paper, we examine public debat…
Provincializing urban appropriation: Agonistic transgression as a mode of actually existing appropriation in South African cities
Urban appropriation is a key dimension of both Lefebvre's widely hailed ‘Right to the City’ and Bayat's concept of ‘quiet encroachment’. For Lefebvre, appropriation is a (generally unrealized) claim by those who do not ‘have’ the city of a right to ‘take’ it. Bayat, in contrast, characterizes actually existing appropriation as motivated by everyday needs, not aimed at wider social change. While both theorizations may be useful, we argue that a th…
From precarious work to obsolete labour? Implications of technological disemployment for geographical scholarship
The displacement of jobs via mechanization and automation has long been understood as uncomfortable for labourers but also an intrinsic part of a process of ‘creative destruction’ leading to further growth in capitalist economies. This article argues that a seismic shift is currently underway in the dynamics of the labour market with regard to automation. Technologies of automation are capable of a rapidly rising proportion of all of the tasks th…
Placing race: On the resonance of place with black geographies
A range of conceptual terms and diverse theoretical traditions have been used to study geographies of race. Black geographical scholarship has persuasively articulated the need to better understand black agency and experiences. We suggest that the conceptual lens of place, and specifically relational place-making, is particularly congruent with the black geographical interest in agency, experience, and non-material spatial practices. It is also a…
Thinking through heterogeneous infrastructure configurations
Studies of infrastructure have demonstrated broad differences between Northern and Southern cities, and deconstructed urban theory derived from experiences of the networked urban regions of the Global North. This includes critiques of the universalisation of the historically–culturally produced normative ideal of universal, uniform infrastructure. In this commentary, we first introduce the notion of ‘heterogeneous infrastructure configurations’ (…
Geographies of waste: Conceptual vectors from the Global South
Geographies of waste, which include examination of its flows and politics, have demonstrated empirical differences and contrasting approaches to researching waste in the Global North and South. Southern waste geographies have largely focused on case studies of informality and (neoliberal) governance. We draw on Southern theory to argue that this focus can be productively extended through greater consideration of the production of value and the ro…
Sociology (39 works) · Political science (35 works) · Geography (22 works) · Politics (21 works) · Law (20 works) · Economics (18 works) · Water Governance and Infrastructure (18 works) · Engineering (16 works) · Epistemology (15 works) · Law (15 works)