Nicholas Jon Crane

A Movement Returning Home? Occupy Wall Street After the Evictions

This article investigates the possible geographies generated in Occupy Wall Street’s emergence and subsequent evictions from multiple sites of occupation. As Occupy Wall Street (OWS) moves into other spaces, most notably the home, we counter the application of a priori analytics of traditional social movement studies, through which OWS would be seen as unified (with leaders, corresponding constituencies, and clearly crafted demands). Instead, we argue for a relational conception of spaces of politics, and emphasize the indeterminate multiplicity that we believe is crucial for ensuring continued critique and agitation. The argument is advanced, first, by considering the theoretical disjuncture between OWS and social movements, and second, by turning to OWS’s geographies of movement and settlement. We conclude by suggesting that, when OWS goes home, it does not retreat from politics. From a relational perspective, the home is itself a space of politics and not a secure, enclosed site to which one returns when the political is left behind.

Embracing dissensus: reflections on contemporary research strategies in cultural geography

This introductory essay situates this edited collection on “contemporary research strategies in cultural geography” in relation to relevant scholarly debates, e.g., around positionality in feminist geography, reflexivity in critical human geography, and world-making in cultural geography. We claim that, taken together, the essays in this collection represent an “embrace” of dissensus, which is to say they stage encounters between often-irreconcilable senses of the world. We suggest that this dissensus in the subdiscipline is a source of dynamism and vitality, which promises to generate new ways of doing cultural geography and therefore new ways of making and knowing the world.

The Punitive City: Privatized Policing and Protection in Neoliberal Mexico by Markus-Michael Müller (review)

latinoamericana. Por último, su análisis permite vislumbrar el vínculo entre academia y política, que tanto preocupaba, como una forma de generar conocimiento y que requiere de desarrollar posturas semejantes desde el sur y para el sur, sin que sea necesario copiar las posturas que desde el norte se desarrollan. Éstas inspiran, marcan tendencias y orientan reflexiones como lo hace todo el trabajo de Neil Smith y, por supuesto, el libro que García Herrera y Sabaté Bel recopilaron de su obra. Sin embargo, esto tiene que servir no para copiar y colonizar nuevamente nuestros países, sino para marcar nuevas líneas de reflexión y de generación de nuestro conocimiento geográfico que contribuya a marcar las tendencias de transformación del mundo en el futuro, tal y como Smith tanto anhelaba.

Young People, Place and Identity

dominant notions of race influenced property and class among the Creeks themselves. As Creek land in Indian Territory was eroded by an expanding Anglo-America, so too were Creek concepts of land ownership and tribal identity. This book is a must read for anyone interested in the cultural geographies of race in early America, Native American history, or the power of period and place in the era of U.S. expansionism.