Giorgio Hadi Curti

Institutional borders, revolutionary imaginings and the becoming-adult of the child

Questions surrounding childrens capacities and abilities to exert responsible agency have increasingly become a topic of interest in studies of children. Using an empirical example from a Family Treatment Drug Court (FTDC) case in the San Diego area, we discuss how a child entangled in familial circumstances of drug addiction actively exerts care and responsibility in and for the continual remaking of different familial and institutional boundaries and spatialities. In the process, we argue, can be found the becoming-adult of the child: a movement of becoming understood not through developmental stages or forms, but through what children do and are able to do.

The Ghost in the City and a Landscape of Life: A Reading of Difference in Shirow and Oshii's Ghost in the Shell

In this paper I demonstrate how an ontological perspective variously informed by Spinozan and Deleuzian philosophy and the (Shinto-influenced) work of Japanese artists Masamune Shirow and Mamoru Oshii offers an approach to landscape which decenters human position(s) and allows an exploration of landscape on its own terms. Through an empirical exploration of this approach, I analyze the animated Japanese science fiction film Ghost in the Shell (1998 [1995]), and discuss how its imagery, ideas, and philosophies can elucidate and aid in an understanding of landscape, not as a separate or passive entity but as a relational living and endeavoring thing.

Recovery spaces and therapeutic jurisprudence: a case study of the family treatment drug courts

In recent years families entangled with drug addiction and drug use have become subjected to a myriad of judicial and medical interventionist strategies designed to remake the family into a more socially productive and self-regulated ‘healthy’ body. Working through feminist and post-structural understandings of law and different body–space relations of family treatment and recovery, in this paper we empirically investigate the nature and workings of therapeutic jurisprudence in drug treatment and child welfare management programs based in San Diego, California, and involved in the family treatment drug court (FTDC) system. What is at the forefront in this paper are different critical geographical conceptualizations of the double articulating productive and inhibiting forces inherent to the workings of FTDCs. Through the presentation of two family narratives of different familial, corporeal, spatial, and institutional encounters, movements, and transformations, we argue for alternative, attentive, and empowering understandings of family recovery.

A doubly articulated cartography of children and media as affective networks-at-play

With increasing concerns surrounding childrens agency and questions of the impacts of globalizing media, it is imperative to critically explore how interactions with media objects become part of childrens social lives. Working through Deleuzian-Guattarian ideas of what bodies are and do, we approach child–media interactions as horizontal components of becoming. Through this, we argue that media objects can be important social elements of the emergent nature of ‘affective networks-at-play’ and illustrate this by creatively working through two narratives of media object relations: one, drawn from the actions of Tomohiro Kato on 8 June 2008 in Tokyo, Japan; the other, of a child named Juana and her interactions with the Latin American version of the Disney educational show Manny a la Obra (Handy Manny). In engaging child–media relationships as mutual and affirmative elements in becoming, we challenge strict dichotomous understandings of children and adults while addressing debates surrounding childrens agency.