Geographies of authority

Abstract

We propose a geography that pluralizes the sites, practices and politics of authority. We defend an approach that tracks less perceptible forms of authority emerging through everyday micropolitics and experimental practices. In contrast to dominant definitions of authority as institutionalized legitimate power, we define authority as a relation of guidance emerging from recognition of inequalities in access to truth, experience or objectivity. Analysing four intersecting areas of authority (algorithmic, experiential, expert and participatory authority), we propose analyses grounded in political aesthetics that trace authority’s affective force, and its role in disclosing and contesting the common.

The power of lament: Reckoning with loss in an urban forest

“…Activist activities such as protests and memorial performances (e.g., funeral processions) point to the need to create spaces and practices through which to mourn pets or species extinction (Dillon, 2019; Pike, 2017). And, as Brigstocke et al (2020) note, subversive acts like these can nurture new relations of authority. Responses to FG's situation suggest that losses beyond those of animal individuals or species require more attention.…”

Geographies of science and technology II: In the critical zone

“…Addressing the drone as an assemblage of human and nonhuman agencies and capacities, Millner explores the democratisation of vertical knowledge production in a setting where conservation science and practice has all too often been pressed into the service of state violence and the oppression of indigenous peoples. Drone technologies, which have rapidly colonised conservation practice, are used here to generate new forms of authoritative and yet conflictual knowledges (Brigstocke et al, 2021), such as ‘cartographic testimony’ to the ecological benefits of existing community forest management practices, which will play a crucial role in the making of new territorial claims. Millner also reflects on how these new practices of technologically mediated knowledge-making foster new forms of human–nonhuman attunement amid a wider ethos of care, expressed for example in the experiences of those seeing their forests from above for the first time: ‘the care emerging from such technological entanglements seems to offer rich possibilities for thinking beyond the militarised, securitised and neoliberalised visions of conservation acquiring traction globally’ (Millner, 2020: 12).…”