Editorial

Abstract

The papers in this special issue of Somatechnics, guest edited by Mahdis Azarmandi, Elaine Laforteza and Maud Ceuterick, were originally developed as part of the 8 Annual Somatechnics Conference, on the theme of Space, Race, Bodies: Geocorpographies of City, Nation and Empire, held at the University of Otago in New Zealand on 8–10 December, 2014. The conference, and the papers in this special issue, examined the connections between somatechnics and Joseph Pugliese’s concept of “geocorporealities.” Pugliese coined this term to examine the way the body ‘is always geopolitically situated and graphically inscribed by signs, discourses, [and] regimes of visuality’ (2007: 12). The contributions in this special issue focus on a broad range of case studies—including literary works, post-colonial critiques, governmental agendas, commemoration sites, Indigenous sovereignty and drone technologies—to critically engage with the cultural processes by which spaces are produced in localised contexts. The Editors would also like to thank our departing book reviews editor, Nicole Matthews, Senior lecturer in the School of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, and co-editor of Nature Strikes Back! Genres of Revenge in the Anthropocene, for her valuable years of service to the journal. This has been much appreciated by the whole Somatechnics community.