The question of how space matters to the mobilisation, practices and trajectories of contentious politics has frequently been represented as a politics of scale. Others have focused on place and networks as key spatialities of contentious politics. Yet there are multiple spatialities – scale, place, networks, positionality and mobility – that are implicated in and shape contentious politics. No one of these should be privileged: in practice, participants in contentious politics frequently draw on several at once. It is thus important to consider all of them and the complex ways in which they are co‐implicated with one another, with unexpected consequences for contentious politics. This co‐implication in practice, and its impact on social movements, is illustrated with the Immigrant Workers’ Freedom Ride in the United States.

No abstract

This paper investigates infectious disease mismanagement as a way of understanding the mixture of neoliberal and illiberal governance in public health. While acknowledging the significant role of neoliberalization in public health, we call for tracing geographies of illiberalism in relation to various actors, and through various scales and processes of governance, such as private power and state absence. Through a case study of the spread of Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) throughout South Korea in 2015, this research demonstrates how neoliberal transformations in public health and illiberal practices of disease management allowed a severe outbreak of MERS, while being of benefit to a few private actors. In the MERS response, state absence via non-response such as cover-ups and censorship exacerbated state violence such as drastic quarantine and othering. Further, the South Korean government-chaebol nexus has profoundly privatized both disease management and public health, as well as intensified the responsibilization of individuals. By explaining how illiberal and neoliberal processes and particular actors came to matter in politics of infectious diseases in Korea, this paper contributes to the sociopolitical understanding of infectious diseases and public health in a mixture of authoritarianism and neoliberalism.

No abstract

Religion‐labour alliances, like other faith‐based and religious organisations, raise questions about the invocation of religion to establish moral authority and political legitimacy in Western democracies. This paper argues that legitimacy should be understood as produced through spatio‐temporally contingent practices. The question of legitimacy is explored through a case study of the activities of a religion‐labour alliance in an urban hospital workers’ contract campaign. The paper traces the work of religion‐labour organising through the multiple space‐times of the campaign. As religion‐labour organising negotiates various habituses, attempting to legitimate itself as well as the union's struggle, it draws on not only religious discourses, but discourses of human rights, democratic deliberation, and social scientific evidence. The analysis is based on participant observation throughout the campaign, interviews with coalition members and other union staff, and internal documents and public reports from the campaign.

No abstract

This paper contributes to Foucauldian population geographies by examining an infant mortality reduction campaign in Milwaukee. The infant mortality rate for Milwaukee’s Black community is about three times that for whites and higher than rates for other racialized groups. This paper asks how Milwaukee’s public health interventions came to focus on sleep deaths, when population data show that preterm birth and congenital abnormalities are the leading causes of all infant deaths in the city, and the greatest contributor to the racial gap. The City of Milwaukee Health Department and partners drew on contradictory biopolitical logics and practices: On one hand, they located the problem of the “gap” in particular segregated neighborhoods-in-crisis, and on the other hand, they used an ostensibly “race-blind” strategy of promoting safe sleep environments. These spatializations together shifted blame for the crisis onto “failing” parents, especially Black parents. Tracing instances of resistance through the development and implementation of the campaign suggests possibilities for an anti-racist biopolitics.

This paper reports on an introductory world regional geography course with a roleplaying exercise. The goal was to situate students in a form of popular geopolitics that engaged them viscerally with positionality and othering. Students were assigned different positionalities in a liminal active learning environment within a context of fear of zombies; some actually engaged in othering or were othered; many vocally critiqued their own or others' positionalities and arguments. Later in the semester, students were more engaged and likely to apply the concepts of positionality and othering in critically thinking about the real-world case of Turkey's European Union application.