Lauren Martin

Towards a post-mathematical topology

This paper aims to bring clarity to the term topology as it has been deployed in human geography. We summarize the insights that geographers have garnered from thinking topologically about space and power. We find that many deployments of topology both overstretch topology’s conceptual merit and limit its insights for spatial thinking. We show how topology, with its structuralist and modernist baggage, requires some theoretical reworking to be put to work by poststructuralist geographers. Our purpose is not to consolidate a specific topological approach for geographers, but to call for an ongoing consideration of what topology offers poststructuralist spatial theories.

A Formula for Disaster: The Department of Homeland Security's Virtual Ontology

This paper focuses on the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in order to theorise the spatialities of post-9/11 security knowledge and practice in the US. It analyses the organisational discourses that animate homeland security work, such as preparedness, vulnerability, the new threat environment, risk analysis and capabilities-based planning, and considers the implications of these practices for contemporary geographies of security. It is argued that DHS operates through a virtual ontology of threat, whereby potential, future threats are addressed as present possibilities that emerge in the spaces of everyday life. The sources of American freedoms and insecurities, the everyday, emerging circulations of goods and people, present DHS with a terrain of shifting threats from which both emergencies and preparedness may materialise. Disaster looming, the potential suspension of everyday life forms the basis for security practice as the emergency becomes a fact of life itself. The spatialities of this environment of imminent threat are considered and it is argued that the everyday emergency operates topologically as a continuous process of spatialisation.

Governing through the Family: Struggles over US Noncitizen Family Detention Policy

This paper offers a conceptual framework in which ‘the family’ is situated as an object of governmental intervention, on the one hand, and a site of discursive proliferation, on the other hand. Reading across the works of Michel Foucault and Jacques Donzelot, I argue that the family served an important, but often overlooked, role in Foucauldian conceptualizations of sovereign, disciplinary, and biopolitical modalities of power. In particular, the elaboration of disciplinary institutions and biopolitical governance converged in the family household; as a central point in these governmental strategies, the familys relationship to sexuality, child-rearing, and kinship provoked anxieties over race, nation building, sexuality, and gender. After reviewing how these concerns overlapped in US immigration policies, I analyze the debates concerning noncitizen family detention policy in the United States. I show how a series of proposals for family detention and release congealed around competing discourses of childhood innocence and criminality, prison and home, and parental authority and security. On the basis of this analysis, I argue that state and nonstate actors produce multiple normative family subjects through strategic spatializations of state and familial power.

A Review of “Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times”

authors of memoirs in North American Explorations— Clark, Golledge, King, Monk, and Murton. Golledge’s career reflections also appear in Gould and Pitts (2002). Additional examples of the autobiographic genre include the international dialogue project, initiated by Anne Buttimer and Torsten Hägerstrand, featuring more than 100 filmed interviews with academics in geography and related fields (Buttimer 1987), and Monk’s use of interviews and film to capture voices of women in American geography as well as of women in general (Monk 2006). Collections of these types offer opportunities to probe stories for broader patterns of social context and change. Thus, aside from the internationalization of scholarship, this collection reflects the dominant male orientation of higher education (especially at the graduate level) prior to the 1980s and the implications of this for the present day. Other persistent themes include the role of dedicated mentors in nurturing intellectual curiosity at an early age and the importance of cross-generational social and collegial networks in opening doors to opportunity. For instance, what was the impact of the copresence of Golledge, Logan, and Smith at the University of New England in the late 1950s or of Clark, Golledge, Holland, King, and Murton early in their careers at the University of Canterbury in the early 1960s? Multiple bonds to one’s homeland and chosen career destinations tug at personal decisions and shape career paths. Of those who completed PhDs in Australia and New Zealand, all but one (McGee) returned to cap their careers in their homelands. One might speculate that early academic acculturation beckons a return to cultural and geographical roots (a theme touched on by some of the authors). All of those who completed PhDs in the United States have remained in North America, while retaining strong professional and social links to their homelands. All of the authors have made lasting contributions to the institutional development of geography and academia in Australia and New Zealand as well as in Canada and the United States. Yet, it is in the nature of scholarship to transcend boundaries and thrive in a world of ideas and applications of knowledge. The authors have contributed to changing the landscapes of academic geography nationally and internationally and to nourishing geography’s applications in the service of humankind. Readers and reviewers will bring contrasting backgrounds to draw insight from this collection. North American Explorations warrants this attention for ferreting out multiple interpretations of what these gifted scholars and leaders say in their memoirs. Logan sums up an enduring thread for anyone who has attempted to recollect the past: “Memory is like a long broken night: fragments remain fragments and the complete story often escapes forever” (p. 72). We can thank the authors of this collection for their retrospective efforts and for recording their lessons learned to share with emerging generations of geographers.

Rightlessness in an Age of Rights: Hannah Arendt and the Contemporary Struggles of Migrants. By Ayten Gündoğu. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. xii, 298 pages. £20.49.

Ayten G€ undo gu’s Rightlessness in an Age of Rights takes up Hannah Arendt’s critiques of human rights and statelessness, rethinking some of her key arguments to address contemporary migrant rightlessness. The book achieves the rare distinction of providing a close and novel reading of an important political theorist and a cogent and timely critique of human rights. For Arendt and for G€ undo gu, human rights have been reduced to the administration of mere existence. For rights to form the basis of deliberative democracy, however, humans must have a right to have rights, a basic sense of personhood from which to politicize the matters that open up and foreclose their ability to participate in political life. Thus, G€undo gu challenges us to “read Arendt against Arendt” because her critiques of human rights highlight critical failures of contemporary human rights. G€ undo gu carefully builds a sophisticated response to the problems of legal personhood, humanity, and recognition that mobile people encounter when crossing borders, and the book’s novel rethinking of Arendt’s theories of the political, personhood, work, labor, and action will be of great interest to readers of critical and political theory. Chapter 1 offers a careful and nuanced recovery of Arendt’s “aporetic method.” Drawing inspiration from Socrates, Arendt questioned the foundations of rights, politics, and humanity not to discard them, but to pinpoint which aspects needed to be rethought. Here, G€undo gu offers a refreshing reading of Arendt. For G€ undo gu, Arendt’s critique of statelessness does not render rights a void. Instead, statelessness results from a “contingent yet structured constellation”: human rights regimes’ paradoxical assumptions of the pre-political nature of human rights; intrinsic tensions within the institutions that guarantee rights; and the historical reliance on the nation-state for enforcement. Inspired by Arendt’s method, G€undo gu seeks to understand how new forms of rightlessness have emerged and how they might be contested. To do this, chapter 2 rethinks and revises Arendt’s argument regarding social and political spheres of human life by reading across Arendt’s books, lectures, and public appearances. Arguing that Arendt was troubled by the antipolitical trajectories of rights, G€undo gu focuses on two elements of her critique that prove fruitful for examining the contemporary production of rightlessness. First, some manifestations of human rights move basic needs to the center of politics and address them through depoliticized, technocratic administration. Second, these efforts to alleviate human suffering tend to rest on compassion and pity, which instate unequal relations between the state and the assisted and elide the multiple, equivocal, and contingent politics of democracy. G€ undo gu argues that human rights regimes are likewise antipolitical when they appeal to basic needs of asylum seekers in ways that prevent them from representing themselves as political subjects. In these cases, instrumental, administrative rationality reduces politics to the management of social reproduction, and a fundamentally antipolitical rationality occupies the political field. G€ undo gu goes on to analyse contemporary forms of statelessness, particularly those produced in and through the very human rights norms formulated to address statelessness. Chapter 3 explores how legal personhood, which is supposed to endow all humans with rights regardless of citizenship status, remains tenuous in

Constructing the Border Wall – The Social and Environmental Impacts of Border: Mexico-U.S. Border Policy

As of December 2008 the U.S. government has built just over 370 mi (595 km) of fencing along its southern boundary, half of the quantity mandated by Congress in the 2006 Secure Fence Act. Expanding from 73 mi (118 km) of fencing in 2001, the construction of border fencing has unfolded in tandem with massive investments in surveillance and Border Patrol staffing. Enabled by waivers suspending 37 laws and regulations governing federal construction projects, the Department of Homeland Security has planned and constructed the border wall with unprecedented speed and with an unprecedented lack of oversight. As early reports of fence-induced flooding, environmental destruction, and human rights violations prefigure the wall’s future impacts, I argue that the border wall is situated in a complex of security technologies imagined to secure the nation as a whole. Thus, the negative impacts of fence construction are felt locally, while the benefits of physical barriers remain undetermined. Billed as necessary to the very survival of the United States, this scalar disjuncture works to localize and further marginalize the negative consequences of border construction, with significant and lasting consequences for the cultural, political, economic, and physical geographies of the Mexico-U.S. borderlands.