Alternative Imaginaries Research Articles

Re reading the Borderland Imaginary from 2021

This essay re-reads Margaret E. Dorsey and Miguel Diaz-Barriga’s “Beyond surveillance and moonscapes: An alternative imaginary of the U.S.–Mexico border wall” (2010) from the position of a design educator engaged with horizontal co-design methods for social and disciplinary change. The essay brings Dorsey and Diaz-Barriga’s ideas into conversation with a selection of relevant visual communication design outcomes and scholarship produced around the same time. It then rereads the value of that transdisciplinary conversation from within the present moment—one complicated, morally charged, and visually saturated by domestic immigration policy.

Listening “Care-Fully”: Acoustemologies of Hope in the Face of Human-Made Environmental Degradation

The article explores a means through which eco-acoustic engagements with the environment can inspire hope in the face of human-made environmental degradation. Based on a discussion of entangled ethnographic experiences in Germany and Australia, the author shows how listening “care-fully” to people and places can foster new forms of collaboration that allow for alternative imaginings of the “buen vivir” and contest the modernist rationale and related dwellings of allegedly objective matters of fact – in this case, the exploration of natural resources through the controversial technology of fracking on sacred Aboriginal land.

Autonomy of Migration and the Radical Imagination: Exploring Alternative Imaginaries within a Biometric Border

ABSTRACT This paper discusses biometric borders in Europe, focusing on the Eurodac database and practises of fingerprinting people on the move in Greece as a politicised attempt to control and limit secondary movement as set out in the Dublin Regulation. The paper presents empirical research to explore one way in which migrants in Athens negotiate Eurodac; where alternative imaginaries informed ideas of ‘big’ and ‘small’ fingerprints, shaping interactions with the asylum service as well as secondary movement. I use Autonomy of Migration (AoM) theories to depict borders as places of ongoing conflict, subjectivity and transformation and introduce the work of Castoriadis’ social imaginaries and the radical imagination to explore migrants’ alternative imaginaries. I argue that these occur at points of friction, within the constraints of, and alongside, a dominant socio-technical imaginary driving the proliferation of biometric border controls. I believe this enables a deeper understanding of the autonomy with AoM theories. Here, autonomy is presented as instances of self-creation, spurred on through the radical imagination and shaping moments of uncontrollability, where the subjective dimension of migration informs both meanings of autonomy as well as alternative imaginaries. Ultimately, I argue that these practices seek to disrupt and challenge the dominance of biometrics as a signifier of control, identity and truth.

“Quite ironic that even I became a natural scientist”: Students' imagined identity trajectories in the Figured World of Higher Education Biology

AbstractStudying biology entails negotiating knowledges, identities, and what paths, more or less well‐trodden, to follow. Knowledges, identities, and paths within the very practices of science are fundamentally gendered and it is, therefore, critical to recognize when exploring students' learning and participation in natural sciences. Even though students' numbers in undergraduate Higher Education Biology are female‐biased, it does not mean that gendered processes are absent. In this study, we focus on early undergraduate biology students' identity work at a Swedish university, analyzing 55 study motivation texts discursively. Embedded in a Figured Worlds framework, we explore how students imagined and authored themselves in(to) the Figured World of Higher Education Biology along two imagined identity trajectories, the Straight Biology Path and the Backpacking Biology Path. While the first and numerically dominant imagined trajectory entails typical stories of a scientific child striving toward a research career, the latter recognizes broad interests and biology competences to be collected in a backpack for transdisciplinary use. Students imagining the Backpacking Biology Path authored themselves in relation to and explicitly not as having a linear trajectory, which positions the Straight Biology Path as dominant and culturally recognized. Our findings reveal gendered myths about science practices present in Higher Education Biology, yet also contested through alternative imaginaries. We, thereby, show that it is crucial for Higher Biology and Science Education to be aware of how students imagine their trajectories and how they negotiate masculine norms of science to create spaces for diverse and alternative identity trajectories.

Hidden in the limelight: A feminist engagement with innovation studies

Innovation is filled with aspirations for solutions to problems, and for laying the groundwork for new technological and social breakthroughs. When a concept is so positively charged, the hopes expressed may create blindness to potential shortcomings and deadlocks. To disclose innovation blind spots, we approach innovation from a feminist viewpoint. We see innovation as a context that changes historically, and as revolution, offering alternative imaginaries of the relationship between race, gender and innovation. Our theoretical framework combines bell hooks (capitalist patriarchy and intersectionality), Mazzucato (the entrepreneurial state and the changing context of innovation) and Fraser (redistributive justice) and contributes with an understanding of innovation from the margin by unveiling its political dimensions. Hidden Figures, the 2016 biographical drama that follows three Black women working at NASA during the space race, provides the empirical setting of the paper. Our analysis contributes to emerging intersectionality research in management and organisation studies (MOS) by revealing the subject positions and dynamics of inclusion/exclusion in innovation discourses, and by proposing a radical – and more inclusive – rethinking of innovation. With this article, we aim to push the margins to the centre and invite others to discover the terrain of the margin(alised). We suggest that our feminist framework is appropriate to study other organisational phenomena, over time and across contexts, to bring forward the plurality of women’s experiences at work and in organisations.

Jamaica, Covid-19 and Black freedom

This essay is concerned with the conditions of Black life in the 21st century and the continued need to imagine Black freedom as projects of self-sovereignty, in the current moment of global protests centered on the socio-economic inequities that people especially those of color face, deepened by the devastating effects of Covid-19. The essay’s focus is on the Caribbean island of Jamaica. I highlight the articulation of race and class that springs from a world history of anti-blackness, historicized through plantation slavery. The essay addresses the enduring violence manifest in physical assaults and political projects of Development, that lead to widespread deprivation for lower-income Jamaicans. Yet the essay suggests that it is these very sordid conditions that generate alternative imaginaries for a sustainable re-ordering of life.

Elliptical life in (post)crisis cinema from Spain

ABSTRACT This essay tracks the long-term effects of the global financial crash of 2008 in two films produced during the so-called postcrisis period in Spain (2014–). Borrowing Lauren Berlant’s term elliptical life, I examine Adán Aliaga and David Valero’s El arca de Noé (2014) and Polo Menárguez’s El plan (2019), which center on the disorientations facing recently fired security guards who draw up blueprints or make plans for alternative imaginaries in the context of ongoing crisis. Elliptical life, as a liminal space for nonsovereign subjects and an aesthetic form that deploys a loose filmic language, captures what Berlant calls “flailing” as characters express their desire for a surrogate reality free from the constraints of biopower. Through form and content alike, elliptical life embraces negativity as a strategy for chipping away at entrenched hegemonies, welcoming encounters with estrangement and/or incoherence. It sets its sights on transformational structures, privileging states of incompletion over endgame scenarios and revolutionary triumph. In the end, as both films work through the vicissitudes of elliptical life in contemporary Spain, they contemplate failure as a mode for interrogating aspirational notions of self-legitimation and control in a reality structured by the logic of late capitalism.

The queer promise of pageantry: queering feminized migration and the labor of care in Sunday Beauty Queen (2016)

ABSTRACT This article examines Baby Ruth Villarama’s Sunday Beauty Queen to explore representations that unsettle heteronormative ideas around Filipina domestic workers’ bodies and labor. First, I analyze the aesthetics of pageantry in Villarama’s camerawork to argue that the film, in visually queering straight cisgender Filipina bodies, challenges scripts of heteropatriarchal portrayal of care labor. By using cinematic “queer time,” the documentary troubles the “straight time” of care work as linear flow from left-behind families at homeland to host families at destination countries and back. This dovetails to a discussion of how the labor of care is queered within the homosocial community of migrant Filipina women abroad through the conception of community of care. By queering the labor of care, I unveil forms of queer intimacies and practices that reveal how pageantry and community building produce spaces for non-normative and nonbiological affinities for alternative modalities of care exchange. By looking at the intersections of queer and migration studies, I explore how Villarama’s documentary represents spaces and social practices that offer alternative imaginaries of care that exceeds naturalized and normalized understanding of feminized labor diaspora.

Campus closures and the devaluing of emplaced Higher Education: widening participation in neoliberal times

Widening participation (WP) in Higher Education (HE) is often positioned as key to resolving social inequality; it underpins arguments that increasing levels of education lead to reduced levels of poverty. Located within the tension of duty and need, WP is positioned as both the responsibility of the University and a financial imperative. This paper considers the student experience of this tension, specifically the contradictions between discourses of equality and diversity and neoliberal conceptualisations of HE as market. Drawing upon qualitative research conducted during the closure of a WP satellite campus, the paper explores the consequences of the withdrawal of HE provision for ‘local’ students. Utilising focus group methodologies to develop an approach for ‘thinking with’ seven WP students, the paper explores the material, social and affective contexts within which students experience university in their ‘hometown’. Foregrounding participants’ critical understanding of their ‘place’ within a marketised HE sector, we consider the formation of student identity as a site of struggles for value. We argue, the closure of satellite campuses must be understood within the context of deepening social-spatial inequalities. Developing a critique of individualised constructions of ‘social mobility’, we outline an alternative imaginary of HE as an intergenerational community resource.

"B급 장르와 대체역사적 상상력 - 쿠엔틴 타란티노의 <바스터즈: 거친녀석들>에 나타난 ‘반(反)나치-서사’를 중심으로"

쿠엔틴 타란티노 Quentin Tarantino(1963～ )는 장르 영화들의 인습적 관행과 B급 감성을 반복, 변형, 쇄신하면서 그만의 독특한 작품세계를 펼쳐나간다. 본고가 주목하고자 하는 작품 < 바스터즈: 거친녀석들 Inglourious Basterds >(2009)은 ‘스파게티 서부극’, 갱스터 영화, 60년대 전쟁 영화 등을 노골적으로 연상시키며, 나치에 대한 대체역사적 복수를 꿈꾼다. 타란티노는 이 영화 속에서 대중에게 이미 익숙한 장르적 문법뿐만 아니라 전형적인 B급 감성을 활용하면서, 자신만의 독창적인 내러티브를 펼쳐나간다. 이러한 맥락에서 본고는 기꺼이 B급 영화임을 자처하는 듯한 인상을 주며 영화사 속 명장면을 의도적으로 끌어들이는 장르적 문법이, 나치들을 잔인하게 처단하고자 하는 대체역사적 서사를 어떻게 담아내는지에 대하여 논하려 한다. 이 과정에서 영화라는 장르 자체는 B급의 속성을 드러내기도 하지만, 실제 역사는 해내지 못한 나치에 대한 복수를 이루어내는 ‘전지전능하고 성스러운’ 영역임이 드러날 것이다.

Singapore's Extreme Neoliberalism and the COVID Outbreak: Culturally Centering Voices of Low-Wage Migrant Workers.

I draw on the key tenets of the culture-centered approach to co-construct the everyday negotiations of COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) among low-wage male Bangladeshi migrant workers in Singapore. The culture-centered approach foregrounds voices infrastructures at the margins as the basis for theorizing health. Based on 87 hours of participant observations of digital spaces and 47 in-depth interviews, I attend to the exploitative conditions of migrant work that constitute the COVID-19 outbreak in the dormitories housing low-wage migrant workers. These exploitative conditions are intertwined with authoritarian techniques of repression deployed by the state that criminalize worker collectivization and erase worker voices. The principle of academic–worker–activist solidarity offers a register for alternative imaginaries of health that intervene directly in Singapore’s extreme neoliberalism.

“Queering” the Nation?

AbstractThis article explores how gendered Chineseness is represented, circulated, and received in Huangmei musical films for audiences in martial-law Taiwan. Focusing on Love Eterne (1963), the analysis examines how theatrical impersonations in the film provided a “queer” social commentary on aspects of Chinese nationalism that conflicted with the Kuomintang's military masculinities. Love Eterne features dual layers of male impersonations: diegetically, the female character Zhu Yingtai masquerades as a man to attend school with other men; nondiegetically, the actress Ling Po performs the male character Liang Shanbo, Zhu's lover. In addition to the “queer” imagination generated by Ling's cross-dressing performance, the author considers how the feminine tone of Love Eterne allowed the Taiwanese audience to escape from masculine war preparations. Although the Kuomintang promoted Ling as a model patriotic actress, it was her background, similar to many Taiwanese adopted daughters, that attracted the most attention from female audiences. This female empathy and the queer subjectivity arguably disturbed the Kuomintang's political propaganda. Hence, this study adds to the breadth of queerness in studies on the cinematic performance of same-sex subjectivities and invites new understandings of queer performance in Love Eterne as a vehicle that can inspire alternative imaginings of gendered selfhoods and nations.

Appeals to shared Africanness: Negotiating precarious childhoods and intra-African migration in two coming-of-age narratives in contemporary South Africa

Child and youth migration has not only been marginalized within scholarship on literary engagements with global migratory processes, but has also, for the most part, been studied in the narrow context of movements from the Global South to the Global North. This essay examines the complex dynamics of child and youth migration manifest in narratives of migration to South Africa from elsewhere on the African continent. Focusing on the coming-of-age of young migrants and refugees in Meg Vandermerwe’s novel Zebra Crossing (2013) and Aher Arop Bol’s refugee memoir The Lost Boy (2009), I argue that the texts critique common readings of African childhoods as either utopian or dystopian and move beyond dichotomous framings of young migrants through the lens of victimhood or criminality. The texts highlight young migrants’ precarious experiences relating to intersecting hierarchies of race, gender, ability and immigration status, while at the same time foregrounding their situated, relational agency that is often negotiated through appeals to shared Africanness. Drawing on scholarship on the postcolonial Bildungsroman, I suggest that both texts deploy the form to reclaim access to – and subject to criticism – the current human rights order. By focusing on intra-African migration, this essay extends literary migration scholarship to address how the selected texts exact new vocabularies and alternative imaginaries for the study of contemporary migration narratives.

Beyond the narco frontier; rethinking an imaginary of the margins

The ‘narco-frontier’ is frequently invoked in policy and popular narratives about drugs and armed conflict. The frontier is represented as an unruly, marginal and ‘ungoverned’ space, a magnate for drug traffickers, rebels and migrants. These ‘non state’ or ‘anti state’ spaces are believed to have a comparative advantage in illegality, with borderlands and frontiers becoming centres for the production, consumption and trafficking of illicit drugs. Linked to this representation is a policy narrative and set of assumptions that statebuilding, peacebuilding, development and counter narcotics policies are mutually reinforcing, and involve the extension of a state presence into these frontier zones, along with effective drug eradication, substitution and development activities. In spite of the evident inaccuracy of this portrayal of the ‘narco-frontier’ the imaginary is extremely resilient and continues to be reflected and reinforced in policy texts and narratives. This paper asks why has this been the case. What ideological work does the imaginary perform and for whom? And what are the implications of an alternative imaginary of the margins?

Behind the Neoclassical Façade: A Haunted National Monument in Chilean Film

This article analyses filmic representations of the Chilean presidential palace (La Moneda), an emblematic site at which narratives of past violence, national exceptionalism and emancipatory anticipation intersect. I build on a growing corpus of work that uses film analysis to explore the spatiality of dictatorship memories and legacies in the Southern Cone. Unlike more conventional “sites of memory”, La Moneda is simultaneously a functioning government building, a site of violence, and an object of heritage. This complex temporal fabric makes it a powerful space for political interventions, a setting that can sharpen the continuities and symmetries between different historical events and periods. Drawing on theories of inheritance and haunting, I first examine the hegemonic temporalities of progress and heritage that frame the building, moving on to reflect on the alternative temporal imaginaries offered by film. In these texts the palace is haunted by images of its own destruction in 1973, as well as by the figure of Salvador Allende, whose prophesy of future emancipation sits uncomfortably with triumphalist accounts of the Chilean democratic transition. Through my analysis, I explore how site-specific struggles for historical justice are imbricated in resistance to ongoing state repression, and the formulation of alternatives to neoliberal capitalism.

Editor's Note

Editor's Note Mari Yoshihara The essays in this issue all address, in different ways, how borders, places, cities, and life are managed, controlled, and represented by the possessive logics of the state, empire, and capitalism as well as how they are radically imagined and lived otherwise by those who refuse those logics. Alana de Hinojosa's "El Río Grande as Pedagogy" examines the Chamizal Dispute that purportedly ended when the 1964 treaty returned el Chamizal to Mexico and displaced 5,600 Mexican American residents of South El Paso. Through the pedagogical lens of the unruly river, de Hinojosa illustrates the terrain's refusal of white possessive logics as well as the residents' complex response to the treaty. Jennifer Ponce de León takes a different approach to the border in "After the Border Is Closed," which analyzes Ricardo A. Bracho's dystopian science fiction play Puto set in a near future in which the US has closed its border with Mexico. Ponce de León shows the play's depiction of the racialized social hierarchies, state and parastate violence, militarism, and authoritarian modalities of social control that are systematically produced by US capitalism and imperialism. Introducing the neologism of "transmilitainment," Waleed Mahdi examines Morocco's role in the production of Hollywood's "war on terror" films. Through a rich empirical study, Mahdi discusses not only the monetary relationship between Hollywood producers and Moroccan partners but also the multifaceted infrastructure for such support, arguing that transmilitainment's commodification of Morocco for pleasurable global consumption of US state violence is itself an act of neocolonial violence. Turning our attention to the other end of the spectrum in the imagination of places, Chandra Russo's "Cities of Fruit" examines how art activism can promote popular education and mobilize radical collectivity in the face of eco-social alienation. Russo focuses on the Guerrilla Grafters, an activist artist collective whose members surreptitiously graft fruit onto sterile city trees in the San Francisco Bay Area, as an example of how creative arts can contest dominant social-spatial arrangements and forge alternative imaginaries of the city. Danielle Haque also discusses an alternative imagining of city space and life in "Collective Care and Human Rights Cinema." Through an analysis of Musa Syeed's 2016 film A Stray, Haque examines the film's portrayal of the improvised and communal spaces and sustaining networks created by Muslims in Minneapolis. Finally, in his essay that turned out to be an excellent tribute to the late Lauren Berlant, Chad Shomura presents a reading of Jennifer Egan's short story "Found Objects," to show that [End Page v] Berlant's notion of "impasse" points to the life otherwise by opening modes of being that are irredeemable to the good life founded on "animacy hierarchy." Aria S. Halliday reviews three books that examine how Latina and Black girls make sense of themselves in a society built on their objectification, consumption, and familial connection as well as the appropriation of their creativity for neoliberal consumerism. Hōkūlani Aikau discusses three important works that center Hawai'i as the site of settler colonialism and cultures of US imperialism and use indigeneity as a critical analytic. In a digital project review, Dylan Rodríguez engages Edmund T. Gordon's online exhibit Racial Geography Tour that guides the visitor through the University of Texas at Austin campus and the university's institutional foundations in racial, colonial history. [End Page vi] Copyright © 2021 The American Studies Association

Europe and/or the UK: Post-Brexit urban and regional development futures – A special issue

It was over 25 years ago that European Urban and Regional Studies was launched at a time of epochal change in the composition of the political, economic and social map of Europe. Brexit has been described as an epochal moment – and at such a moment, European Urban and Regional Studies felt it should offer the space for short commentaries on Brexit and its impact on the relationships of place, space and scale across the cultural, economic, social and political maps of the ‘new Europes’. Seeking contributions drawing on the theories, processes and patterns of urban and regional development, the following provides 10 contributions on Europe, the UK and/or their relational geographies in a post-Brexit world. What the drawn-out and highly contested process of Brexit has done for the populace, residents and ex-pats of the UK is to reveal the inordinate ways in which our mental, everyday and legal maps of the regions, nations and places of the UK in Europe are powerful, territorially and rationally inconsistent, downright quirky at times but also intensely unequal. First, as the UK exits the Single Market, the nature of the political imagination needed to create alternatives to the construction of new borders and new divisions, even within a discourse of creating a ‘global Britain’, remains uncertain. European Urban and Regional Studies has always been a journal dedicated to the importance of pan-European scholarly integration and solidarity and we hope that it will continue to intervene in debates over what alternative imaginings to a more closed and introverted future might look like. Second, as the impacts of COVID-19 continue to change in profound ways how we think, work and travel across European space, we will need to find new forms of integration and new forms of engagament in intellectual life and policy development. European Urban and Regional Studies remains commited to forging such forms.

Rupturing violent land imaginaries: finding hope through a land titling campaign in Cambodia

In areas of land conflict, fear and the threat of violence work to reproduce imaginaries of land as a resource that powerful people can grab. An urgent question for agrarian scholars and activists is how people can overcome fear so that alternative imaginaries might flourish. In this article, we argue for attention to the affective dimension of imaginaries; ideas of what land is and should be are co-constituted through the material and social, imbued with powerful emotions that enable imaginaries to be reproduced, to be challenged, and even to be transformed. We draw from long-term research projects in Cambodia—a country known for plantation-fuelled dispossession—where the Prime Minister’s surprise announcement of a land titling campaign in 2012 ruptured the wave of land grabbing, creating openings to imagine different outcomes that are rooted in the potential for legal recognition of smallholder claims. Although the campaign was an uncertain rupture in land imaginaries, these moments matter. Land claimants sought to create affective ties with volunteer land surveyors that embedded hopeful land imaginaries in rural areas and into the national cadastral system. The land title in this context is the material bearer of a land imaginary that centres on rural people’s connection to the land, and also reinforces rural people’s connection to the Cambodian state and the potential to gain the state’s protection. We contribute to an emerging literature that locates the formative effects of hope as an orientation and as a method by exploring the possibilities inherent in rupture.

Bioeconomy imaginaries: A review of forest-related social science literature

This review article examines how social science literature co-produces various imaginaries of forest-based bioeconomy transformations and pathways for reaching desired ends. Based on an analysis of 59 research articles, we find that despite a growing number of social sciences studies on the forest-based bioeconomy, much of the research tends to replicate a bioeconomy imaginary articulated in EU and national bioeconomy policies and strategies. Accordingly, the research primarily reproduces a weak approach to sustainability, which prioritize economic growth and competitiveness. Expectations are largely directed at national and regional corporate interests and forest industrial renewal, while the state has a supportive rather than restricting role. We discuss the findings against the role of social sciences, and conclude that social science scholars may adopt various strategies if interested in opening up forest-based policy debates and offer alternative imaginaries of sustainable bioeconomy transformations.

Legal Imaginaries and the Anthropocene: \u2018Of\u2019 and \u2018For\u2019

This reflection contrasts the dominant imaginary underlying ‘law of the Anthropocene’ with an imaginary reaching towards ‘law/s for the Anthropocene’. It does so primarily by contrasting two imaginaries of human embodiment—law’s existing imaginary of quasi-disembodiment and an alternative imaginary of embodiment as co-woven with the lively incipiencies and tendencies of matter. It draws on ‘transcorporeality’ and ‘sympoiesis’ as inspiration for ‘sympoietic normativities’ as ways of co-living and co-organizing in the face of the catastrophic implications of the Anthropocene emergency.