Frank I Müller
Biographic Data
| ID | 300072 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Frank I Müller |
| GIVEN NAMES | Frank I |
| FAMILY NAME | Müller |
| SIGNATURE | MÜLLER F I |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Amsterdam |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4829-7184 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 63 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1969 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Between Extrapolation and Speculation
In this commentary, we explore how the work of Octavia E. Butler, a prominent Black feminist speculative fiction author, can enrich teaching practices aimed at fostering collective and emancipatory forms of future‐making in Political and Urban Geography. Focusing on Butler's Parables duology, a significant example of climate fiction, we demonstrate how fictional narratives of home‐making can shape our understanding of the present and encourage re…
More-than-Forests
This paper contributes to the emerging field of forest pedagogies by foregrounding mangroves as critical sites for learning with more-than-human entanglements in polluted worlds. Engaging with planetary strategies of corresponding, evidencing and circulating, we approach mangroves as complex, contested and vital ecotones. We explore how mangroves invite pedagogical attention to the lived realities of toxicity, urbanisation and forms of contaminat…
Deconstructing sovereignty
This special issue explores the territorial logics of competing sovereignties and their impacts on social and material infrastructure, deployment of violence and the politico-ecological transformation of bare life, livelihoods and terrain. Although sovereign regimes may aspire to monopolise violence and cultivate legitimacy, such projects are often incomplete or highly contested. Territorial sovereignty, however, continues to be a strong fiction …
Durable governance assemblages at the margins
Durable instabilities of home
This paper explores the interplay between rain, landslides, and local governance, highlighting their roles in shaping the precariousness of homes of lower-income residents in Medellín. Building on literature that positions “natural” disasters as human-made or exacerbated phenomena, and on semi-structured interviews as well as media analysis, the paper examines how rain and its associated risks serve as socio-spatial markers in the narratives of t…
Captains of the Sands”
Urban Political Ecology (UPE) has explored human–soil relations, emphasising the political dimensions of environmental degradation in and through urbanisation. However, UPE lacks critical reflection on governance collusions with illicit actors. Bridging this gap, my paper combines UPE with literature on criminal urban governance, focusing on how urban sand shapes illicit urbanisation. To address UPE's oversight of criminal governance, I explore R…
Take root among the stars? Emancipatory homemaking as critical worldbuilding in Octavia Butler's Parables
This paper draws on geographical literature on home to explore two strategies of emancipatory homemaking in the Science Fiction novels of Octavia Butler. It examines, homemaking as a strategy, first, of persistence and, second, of adaptability. Analyzing these two strategies in the way they combine, we argue, allows us to define the home as a critical place that links various geographical scales, from the most intimate to the planetary. We build …
The technopolitics of security
This introduction to the special issue on ‘the technopolitics of security’ outlines key concepts and engages debates pertaining to the relationship between techno-materiality, security governance and struggles over sovereignty. ‘Technopolitics’ refers to the strategic practice of designing and using technologies to enact political goals, producing hybrid forms of power that combine cultural, institutional and technological dimensions. These techn…
Weaponizing Urban Development
Access to land and to adequate housing—a constitutionally granted right in Brazil—is currently under attack by non-state armed actors, the so-called militias, in Rio de Janeiro. In their attempts to widen territorial control, “militias” weaponize urban development. To understand such form of militarization, I argue that we need to add a geographical perspective to literatures on criminal governance: Terrain and its political materiality is the ba…
Illicit City-Making and Its Materialities. Introduction to the Special Issue
Provoked by Charles Tilly’s analogy of state-making as organized crime (1985), this issue aims at better understanding the material conditions of illicit city-making – that is, of urbanization and criminal governance, as well as the criminalizing discourses and strategies that underpin them. In opposition to the liberalist paradigm of states vs. illegitimate enemies, Tilly proposed to see the dynamics of state-making (and the negotiation of prote…
Housing Security
Latin America’s ‘housing crisis’ affects 28 million lower-income households. In many Latin American countries, governments have developed housing policies to provide access to basic standard dwelling and to offer a route towards legal tenure at an affordable cost. Yet, they have failed to address violence and crime that beneficiaries are often exposed to. I argue that housing policies must take stronger efforts in accounting for urban security. T…
Der Konformismus der französischen Intellektuellen. Walter Benjamin im Frankreich der 1930er Jahre
Home Matters
How do residents mobilize their dwellings to engage in the politics of urban security? How do these mobilizations connect to their perceptions of insecurity and residents' concrete engagements in protecting their lives and possessions? And what can we learn from these engagements-by looking through the lens of dwelling-about urban security? The main objective of this intervention forum is to explore the cross-fertilization between studies on the …
Securing the Home
In urban Latin America social housing developments have become a strategy to (re)centre territorial sovereignty with the state, by relocating low-income populations from informal settlements controlled by organized criminal groups. Yet criminal groups wield significant influence in new social housing developments, and states’ monopoly on violence continues to be contested. While studies of urban housing in the region have largely disregarded matt…
Brazil-Israel Relations and the Marketing of Urban Security Expertise
The transnational (re)making of contemporary urban pacification practices, discourses, and technologies between Brazil and Israel is underpinned by coercive entanglements. The Israeli experience with the occupation of the Palestinian territories has brought the Israel Defense Forces and the country's private security industry international recognition for their urban warfare skills and related security technologies; Brazil has recently gained int…
Criminalising encounters
This article assesses the nexus of militarised humanitarian work, governance and violence in the context of the ‘Mission des Nations Unies pour la stabilisation en Haïti’ (MINUSTAH). It draws on empirical fieldwork in Port-au-Prince and Rio de Janeiro. Brazil’s leading role in this UN mission reinforces the country’s ambitions as an emergent economic and political power on a global stage. Brazilian military and civilian actors base their claim of…
The Uses of Informality
Urban informality" is a signifier that is disputed by real estate developers, politicians, and residents in undertaking strategies of social distinction and gaining particular political and economic benefits. Research in the western periphery of Mexico City distinguishes three cases of such use of informality. First, real estate developers employ informality as a threat to valorize and justify an enclosed "First World" lifestyle in gated communit…
Urban informality as a signifier
Urban informality is typically ascribed to the urban poor in cities of the Global South. Drawing on Judith Butler's concept of performativity and taking the case of Rio de Janeiro in the context of the 2016 Olympic Games, this article conceptualizes informality as a signifier and a procedural, relational category. Specifically, it shows how different class actors have employed the signifier informality (1) to legitimize the confinement of margina…
Poétique des objets chez Sophocle. Fonctions dramatiques et valeurs symboliques / Sophocles’ Poetic of Objects. Dramatic Functions and Symbolic Values
Müller Frank. Poétique des objets chez Sophocle. Fonctions dramatiques et valeurs symboliques / Sophocles’ Poetic of Objects. Dramatic Functions and Symbolic Values. In: ASDIWAL. Revue genevoise d'anthropologie et d'histoire des religions, n°10, 2015. pp. 191-192
A Performative Approach to Urban Informality
In light of perpetuated exclusions in and through urban development, governance and planning along the dichotomy of formality and informality, I argue that informality should be conceived of as a socially embedded and embodied signifier. Building upon recent approaches to overcome the dichotomy, I hence develop a performative approach toward urban informality. I discuss informality as a methodological orientation to rethink power relations inhere…
The technopolitics of security
This introduction to the special issue on ‘the technopolitics of security’ outlines key concepts and engages debates pertaining to the relationship between techno-materiality, security governance and struggles over sovereignty. ‘Technopolitics’ refers to the strategic practice of designing and using technologies to enact political goals, producing hybrid forms of power that combine cultural, institutional and technological dimensions. These techn…
The Uses of Informality
Urban informality" is a signifier that is disputed by real estate developers, politicians, and residents in undertaking strategies of social distinction and gaining particular political and economic benefits. Research in the western periphery of Mexico City distinguishes three cases of such use of informality. First, real estate developers employ informality as a threat to valorize and justify an enclosed "First World" lifestyle in gated communit…
Urban informality as a signifier
Urban informality is typically ascribed to the urban poor in cities of the Global South. Drawing on Judith Butler's concept of performativity and taking the case of Rio de Janeiro in the context of the 2016 Olympic Games, this article conceptualizes informality as a signifier and a procedural, relational category. Specifically, it shows how different class actors have employed the signifier informality (1) to legitimize the confinement of margina…
Criminalising encounters
This article assesses the nexus of militarised humanitarian work, governance and violence in the context of the ‘Mission des Nations Unies pour la stabilisation en Haïti’ (MINUSTAH). It draws on empirical fieldwork in Port-au-Prince and Rio de Janeiro. Brazil’s leading role in this UN mission reinforces the country’s ambitions as an emergent economic and political power on a global stage. Brazilian military and civilian actors base their claim of…
Securing the Home
In urban Latin America social housing developments have become a strategy to (re)centre territorial sovereignty with the state, by relocating low-income populations from informal settlements controlled by organized criminal groups. Yet criminal groups wield significant influence in new social housing developments, and states’ monopoly on violence continues to be contested. While studies of urban housing in the region have largely disregarded matt…
Brazil-Israel Relations and the Marketing of Urban Security Expertise
The transnational (re)making of contemporary urban pacification practices, discourses, and technologies between Brazil and Israel is underpinned by coercive entanglements. The Israeli experience with the occupation of the Palestinian territories has brought the Israel Defense Forces and the country's private security industry international recognition for their urban warfare skills and related security technologies; Brazil has recently gained int…
A Performative Approach to Urban Informality
In light of perpetuated exclusions in and through urban development, governance and planning along the dichotomy of formality and informality, I argue that informality should be conceived of as a socially embedded and embodied signifier. Building upon recent approaches to overcome the dichotomy, I hence develop a performative approach toward urban informality. I discuss informality as a methodological orientation to rethink power relations inhere…
Captains of the Sands”
Urban Political Ecology (UPE) has explored human–soil relations, emphasising the political dimensions of environmental degradation in and through urbanisation. However, UPE lacks critical reflection on governance collusions with illicit actors. Bridging this gap, my paper combines UPE with literature on criminal urban governance, focusing on how urban sand shapes illicit urbanisation. To address UPE's oversight of criminal governance, I explore R…
Illicit City-Making and Its Materialities. Introduction to the Special Issue
Provoked by Charles Tilly’s analogy of state-making as organized crime (1985), this issue aims at better understanding the material conditions of illicit city-making – that is, of urbanization and criminal governance, as well as the criminalizing discourses and strategies that underpin them. In opposition to the liberalist paradigm of states vs. illegitimate enemies, Tilly proposed to see the dynamics of state-making (and the negotiation of prote…
Home Matters
How do residents mobilize their dwellings to engage in the politics of urban security? How do these mobilizations connect to their perceptions of insecurity and residents' concrete engagements in protecting their lives and possessions? And what can we learn from these engagements-by looking through the lens of dwelling-about urban security? The main objective of this intervention forum is to explore the cross-fertilization between studies on the …
Deconstructing sovereignty
This special issue explores the territorial logics of competing sovereignties and their impacts on social and material infrastructure, deployment of violence and the politico-ecological transformation of bare life, livelihoods and terrain. Although sovereign regimes may aspire to monopolise violence and cultivate legitimacy, such projects are often incomplete or highly contested. Territorial sovereignty, however, continues to be a strong fiction …
Weaponizing Urban Development
Access to land and to adequate housing—a constitutionally granted right in Brazil—is currently under attack by non-state armed actors, the so-called militias, in Rio de Janeiro. In their attempts to widen territorial control, “militias” weaponize urban development. To understand such form of militarization, I argue that we need to add a geographical perspective to literatures on criminal governance: Terrain and its political materiality is the ba…
Housing Security
Latin America’s ‘housing crisis’ affects 28 million lower-income households. In many Latin American countries, governments have developed housing policies to provide access to basic standard dwelling and to offer a route towards legal tenure at an affordable cost. Yet, they have failed to address violence and crime that beneficiaries are often exposed to. I argue that housing policies must take stronger efforts in accounting for urban security. T…
A Performative Approach to Urban Informality
In light of perpetuated exclusions in and through urban development, governance and planning along the dichotomy of formality and informality, I argue that informality should be conceived of as a socially embedded and embodied signifier. Building upon recent approaches to overcome the dichotomy, I hence develop a performative approach toward urban informality. I discuss informality as a methodological orientation to rethink power relations inhere…
Poétique des objets chez Sophocle. Fonctions dramatiques et valeurs symboliques / Sophocles’ Poetic of Objects. Dramatic Functions and Symbolic Values
Müller Frank. Poétique des objets chez Sophocle. Fonctions dramatiques et valeurs symboliques / Sophocles’ Poetic of Objects. Dramatic Functions and Symbolic Values. In: ASDIWAL. Revue genevoise d'anthropologie et d'histoire des religions, n°10, 2015. pp. 191-192
The Uses of Informality
Urban informality" is a signifier that is disputed by real estate developers, politicians, and residents in undertaking strategies of social distinction and gaining particular political and economic benefits. Research in the western periphery of Mexico City distinguishes three cases of such use of informality. First, real estate developers employ informality as a threat to valorize and justify an enclosed "First World" lifestyle in gated communit…
Urban informality as a signifier
Urban informality is typically ascribed to the urban poor in cities of the Global South. Drawing on Judith Butler's concept of performativity and taking the case of Rio de Janeiro in the context of the 2016 Olympic Games, this article conceptualizes informality as a signifier and a procedural, relational category. Specifically, it shows how different class actors have employed the signifier informality (1) to legitimize the confinement of margina…
Criminalising encounters
This article assesses the nexus of militarised humanitarian work, governance and violence in the context of the ‘Mission des Nations Unies pour la stabilisation en Haïti’ (MINUSTAH). It draws on empirical fieldwork in Port-au-Prince and Rio de Janeiro. Brazil’s leading role in this UN mission reinforces the country’s ambitions as an emergent economic and political power on a global stage. Brazilian military and civilian actors base their claim of…
Securing the Home
In urban Latin America social housing developments have become a strategy to (re)centre territorial sovereignty with the state, by relocating low-income populations from informal settlements controlled by organized criminal groups. Yet criminal groups wield significant influence in new social housing developments, and states’ monopoly on violence continues to be contested. While studies of urban housing in the region have largely disregarded matt…
Brazil-Israel Relations and the Marketing of Urban Security Expertise
The transnational (re)making of contemporary urban pacification practices, discourses, and technologies between Brazil and Israel is underpinned by coercive entanglements. The Israeli experience with the occupation of the Palestinian territories has brought the Israel Defense Forces and the country's private security industry international recognition for their urban warfare skills and related security technologies; Brazil has recently gained int…
Der Konformismus der französischen Intellektuellen. Walter Benjamin im Frankreich der 1930er Jahre
Home Matters
How do residents mobilize their dwellings to engage in the politics of urban security? How do these mobilizations connect to their perceptions of insecurity and residents' concrete engagements in protecting their lives and possessions? And what can we learn from these engagements-by looking through the lens of dwelling-about urban security? The main objective of this intervention forum is to explore the cross-fertilization between studies on the …
Illicit City-Making and Its Materialities. Introduction to the Special Issue
Provoked by Charles Tilly’s analogy of state-making as organized crime (1985), this issue aims at better understanding the material conditions of illicit city-making – that is, of urbanization and criminal governance, as well as the criminalizing discourses and strategies that underpin them. In opposition to the liberalist paradigm of states vs. illegitimate enemies, Tilly proposed to see the dynamics of state-making (and the negotiation of prote…
Housing Security
Latin America’s ‘housing crisis’ affects 28 million lower-income households. In many Latin American countries, governments have developed housing policies to provide access to basic standard dwelling and to offer a route towards legal tenure at an affordable cost. Yet, they have failed to address violence and crime that beneficiaries are often exposed to. I argue that housing policies must take stronger efforts in accounting for urban security. T…
The technopolitics of security
This introduction to the special issue on ‘the technopolitics of security’ outlines key concepts and engages debates pertaining to the relationship between techno-materiality, security governance and struggles over sovereignty. ‘Technopolitics’ refers to the strategic practice of designing and using technologies to enact political goals, producing hybrid forms of power that combine cultural, institutional and technological dimensions. These techn…
Weaponizing Urban Development
Access to land and to adequate housing—a constitutionally granted right in Brazil—is currently under attack by non-state armed actors, the so-called militias, in Rio de Janeiro. In their attempts to widen territorial control, “militias” weaponize urban development. To understand such form of militarization, I argue that we need to add a geographical perspective to literatures on criminal governance: Terrain and its political materiality is the ba…
Captains of the Sands”
Urban Political Ecology (UPE) has explored human–soil relations, emphasising the political dimensions of environmental degradation in and through urbanisation. However, UPE lacks critical reflection on governance collusions with illicit actors. Bridging this gap, my paper combines UPE with literature on criminal urban governance, focusing on how urban sand shapes illicit urbanisation. To address UPE's oversight of criminal governance, I explore R…
Take root among the stars? Emancipatory homemaking as critical worldbuilding in Octavia Butler's Parables
This paper draws on geographical literature on home to explore two strategies of emancipatory homemaking in the Science Fiction novels of Octavia Butler. It examines, homemaking as a strategy, first, of persistence and, second, of adaptability. Analyzing these two strategies in the way they combine, we argue, allows us to define the home as a critical place that links various geographical scales, from the most intimate to the planetary. We build …
Deconstructing sovereignty
This special issue explores the territorial logics of competing sovereignties and their impacts on social and material infrastructure, deployment of violence and the politico-ecological transformation of bare life, livelihoods and terrain. Although sovereign regimes may aspire to monopolise violence and cultivate legitimacy, such projects are often incomplete or highly contested. Territorial sovereignty, however, continues to be a strong fiction …
Durable governance assemblages at the margins
Durable instabilities of home
This paper explores the interplay between rain, landslides, and local governance, highlighting their roles in shaping the precariousness of homes of lower-income residents in Medellín. Building on literature that positions “natural” disasters as human-made or exacerbated phenomena, and on semi-structured interviews as well as media analysis, the paper examines how rain and its associated risks serve as socio-spatial markers in the narratives of t…
Between Extrapolation and Speculation
In this commentary, we explore how the work of Octavia E. Butler, a prominent Black feminist speculative fiction author, can enrich teaching practices aimed at fostering collective and emancipatory forms of future‐making in Political and Urban Geography. Focusing on Butler's Parables duology, a significant example of climate fiction, we demonstrate how fictional narratives of home‐making can shape our understanding of the present and encourage re…
More-than-Forests
This paper contributes to the emerging field of forest pedagogies by foregrounding mangroves as critical sites for learning with more-than-human entanglements in polluted worlds. Engaging with planetary strategies of corresponding, evidencing and circulating, we approach mangroves as complex, contested and vital ecotones. We explore how mangroves invite pedagogical attention to the lived realities of toxicity, urbanisation and forms of contaminat…
Law (13 works) · Political science (13 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Politics (11 works) · Art (8 works) · Corporate governance (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Business (5 works) · Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance (4 works) · Economics (4 works)