Assemblage Thinking Research Articles

Tracing new ground, from language to languaging, and from languaging to assemblages: rethinking languaging through the multilingual and ontological turns

ABSTRACTThis paper traces recent theorisation stemming from the multilingual turn and brings this into dialogue with assemblage thinking, discussing the critical potential of bringing these perspectives together to explore what language is and how it is understood. The argument maps salient features of the multilingual turn which have extended the fields of applied and socio-linguistics beyond a preoccupation with separable languages embedded within a code-based depiction of linguistic behaviour. Within this body of research, we highlight the influential theoretical frames of (trans)languaging and metrolingualism, which position language as a dynamic process – and practice – rather than a product. We then begin to think through language/languaging as assemblage, a process which heralds an ontological shift. In so doing, we consider the ontological turn within and beyond linguistics to extend the potential of critical language studies, breaking with hegemonic language ideology via a radical reconsideration of the temporality, complexity and materiality of language.

Making room for the extraeconomic

This paper revisits the 2011 debate in City over the relationship between assemblage urbanism and critical urban theory. Rather than emphasizing the somewhat exaggerated cleavage between the two sides of the debate, it seeks to address some of the incisive critiques that Brenner, Madden, and Wachsmuth ([2011]. “Assemblage Urbanism and the Challenges of Critical Urban Theory.” City 15 (2): 225–240) level against McFarlane's ([2011a]. “Assemblage and Critical Urbanism.” City 15 (2): 204–224) thought experiment regarding what assemblage thinking might bring to critical urban theory by returning to Deleuze and Guattari's political philosophy. It both explores the lineage of the two central concepts defining Deleuze and Guattari's political philosophy—the ‘state apparatus’ and the ‘war machine’—and uses aspects of the redevelopment of Seattle's South Lake Union neighborhood as case study to argue that their political theory is especially well-suited for understanding the interaction of economic and extraeconomic forces (specifically ethics and aesthetics) in contemporary urban development.

From Chinese dam building in Africa to the Belt and Road Initiative: Assembling infrastructure projects and their linkages

This paper aims to build a political economic geography of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). We draw on assemblage thinking and the notion of the Chinese Water Machine to examine Chinese practices and business-related outcomes of building a dam in Africa, stressing the complicated interactions between different actors. Based on fieldwork in China and Ghana, as well as documentary data, this paper argues that Chinese engagement with Africa is a global enterprise, in which players come from China, the recipient, and other countries; and that project-level organisation and implementation under BRI umbrella will also likely be a joint production by all such players, elaborated in a path dependent way but subject to the spatial embeddedness of specific projects. Yet whether BRI-related projects can advance the specific geopolitical and economic interests of China is uncertain: not only have Chinese players been co-constructing such infrastructure projects with non-Chinese players, but also Beijing's role in forging the expansion of Chinese corporations' business abroad is not clear.

Process-ing with mechanism: The renaissance of critical realism in human geography?

This paper fleshes out the advantages of critical realism in social explanation. It does so first through criticizing the obsession with process-ing in the field of geography, which uses time to explain space, for obscuring inherited social relations and key mechanism in social research. Second, the paper argues that under such a circumstance, Yeung’s ((2019) Rethinking mechanism and process in the geographical analysis of uneven development. Dialogue in Human Geography 9(3): 226–255) accusation that the conflation of process and mechanism leads to chaotic concepts makes great sense. While he distinguishes the process as a contingent change from the mechanism as a necessary relation, he combines them to explain specific and concrete outcomes. Finally, the paper argues that this insight suggests the need to return to Doreen Massey’s distinction and interaction between time- and space-dimension explanations by comparing Harvey’s views on the Marxist political economy with Ong’s assemblage thinking used when scrutinizing ‘neoliberalization’ in China. As such, the purpose of this paper is to underscore the merit of causal analysis as advocated by critical realism.

The political economy of molecules: vital epistemics, desiring machines and assemblage thinking

Could the most miniscule of objects, imperceptible to the human eye, enact whole new political economies? The suggestion may seem odd, but this article shows that tiny molecules are already engendering new regimes of value across the fields of global health and biodefense. Delving genealogically into the onto-epistemology of the life sciences, the article thus traces the protracted molecular reconfigurations of state-market relations underpinning the global bioeconomy and civilian biodefense today. Using methodological precepts developed through assemblage thinking, this evolving patchwork of new constellations is conceptualized as a global molecular assemblage. Attending to the lively play of molecules in the world advances the post-Foucauldian, molecular study of biopolitics by exploring how scientific shifts in our ‘vital epistemics’ contour state-market relations. It further contributes to the development of a post-human international political economy that is more sensitive to the ways in which artefacts (like molecules) too exhibit particular kinds of ‘agency’ and ‘force’ in the world. Finally, it also enhances the field’s ability to make unconventional, hitherto overlooked and multi-scalar connections in the study of political economy through the creative use of assemblage thinking. In the case of molecules, such assemblage thinking can – quite literally – reveal the value of ‘life’.

Discussing and Analyzing “Maritime Cohesion” in MSP, to Achieve Sustainability in the Marine Realm

Whilst the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 14 promotes the conservation and sustainable use of the seas, oceans and marine resources for sustainable development, decisions in ecosystem-based Maritime Spatial Planning (MSP) follow annoying and costly trade-offs and this may negatively impact its acceptance. To address conflicts and cumulative impacts and favor, as much as possible, interfering of marine activities, positive coordination and win-win options, it is necessary to develop integrated and cohesive planning approaches and new management tools. In this article, a conceptual framework of “maritime cohesion” is being developed mostly applicable to peopled and crowded seas and a set of relevant indicators to assess it, is proposed. It is based on the triple-model of interdependent components such as “maritime spatial efficiency”, “maritime spatial quality” and “maritime spatial identity”, taking into account the “territorial cohesion” equivalent, promoted by the Cohesion Policy. Then, in order to broadly analyze the “spatial efficiency” component, the “multi-use” concept and management tools, recently given particular emphasis by EU Blue Growth Strategy, are examined thoroughly, using the relevant literature. This article highlights constructive use of “maritime cohesion” with the multi-use MSP paradigm as key part of “maritime cohesion” narrative and posits that its huge and extensive potential can stimulate dynamic, collaborative, cohesive and assemblage thinking in the MSP process and be the “spearhead” to balance economic, social, environmental and cultural aspirations in maritime planning to achieve sustainability in the marine realm.

“Hostages to both sides”: Favela pacification as dual security assemblage

Research on security and governance in marginalised urban spaces in Latin America has pointed to complex cycles of conflict and negotiation between state and non-state actors. However, many questions remain about the dynamics of such arrangements and how they may be affected by top-down policing reforms. Presenting fieldwork conducted in Tuiuti, a ‘pacified’ favela in Rio de Janeiro, this article proposes that ‘assemblage thinking’ can shed light on these issues. Despite rhetoric of reclaiming territory for the state, I argue that Tuiuti’s UPP (Police Pacification Unit) did not produce a new state-led security regime, but rather overlaid and fused with previous security practices enacted by traffickers. This gave rise to a ‘dual security assemblage’ characterised by the co-production of security through an emergent division of policing functions. The consequences for Tuiuti’s residents were thus not enhanced social control at the hands of police, but rather greater uncertainty about the rules they were expected to observe and whom was responsible for enforcing them. By identifying the broader power inequalities surrounding this local security assemblage and the ways in which they constrained its (trans)formation, I reject the claim that assemblage thinking offers a depoliticised or merely descriptive view of the social world.

Subscribing to Specimens, Cataloging Subscribed Specimens, and Assembling the First Phytogeographical Survey in the United States.

Throughout the late 1840s and the early 1850s, Harvard botanist Asa Gray (1810-1888) and his close friend George Engelmann (1809-1884) of St. Louis engaged themselves with recruiting men who sought to make a living by natural history collecting, sending these men into the field, searching for institutions and individuals who would subscribe to incoming collections, compiling catalogs, and collecting subscription fees. Although several botanists have noted Gray and Engelmann's bold experiment as having introduced America to a mode by which European naturalists had devised to organize scientific expeditions, historians of science have not taken the "subscription mode" seriously. I argue that it was specifically by undertaking the labor of cataloging species and charging subscription fees for the cataloged species that Gray established himself as a metropolitan botanist. One crucial consequence of Gray's rising profile was that he acquired sufficient "cataloging power" to secure his status as an authoritative cataloger of species, and as a kind of "mint" or "storehouse" (McOuat in Br J Hist Sci 34(1):1-28, 2001a) who produced well-pruned lists of American species to enable transactions between American and European botanists. But this essay is not focused on the Europeanization of American taxonomy. Drawing on work by scholars who place emphasis on how new forms of knowledge get produced when knowledge travels, my focus here is the evolution of the subscription mode when Gray and Engelmann adapted it to American natural history. My conclusion examines what historian of science Vanessa Heggie (Isis 105(2):318-334, 2014) identifies as the "danger of category dominance" in today's historiography of science and shows how a kind of "assemblage thinking" may help historians cope with this danger.

Out from the shadows? Voluntary organisations and the assembled state

As literature on the ‘shadow state’ shows, the voluntary sector has long served as a necessary conduit through which states orchestrate the governance of various populations. However, relatively little is known about the active role that voluntary organisations play in shaping and mobilising the capacities of the state to advance their own projects and interests. We draw out aspects of post-structural theories of the state, and particularly assemblage thinking, that provide the conceptual and analytical tools with which to explore how voluntary organisations may exceed their common positioning as co-opted by, and subservient to, the state. Through empirical research on homelessness policy development in Australia, we show how locally embedded voluntary organisations in Australia and the United States acted strategically and engaged transnationally – through material practices and multi-sited labours – to create opportunities to shape formal state agenda at national and sub-national levels. The activities and influence of these voluntary organisations are illustrative of the assembled nature of state capacity.

Assembling the capacity to care: Caring‐with precarious housing

In a period when care is being cast as an individual responsibility there is a need to invigorate analyses of caring capacity, of the factors and relations that make care possible. This paper develops caring‐with as an analytic to guide analyses of caring capacity. Caring‐with brings feminist care ethics together with assemblage thinking. It innovates from Tronto's identification of “caring with” as the fifth phase of care to figure care as a generative sociomaterial relation that is productive of and emergent through assemblages of actors who are not always supportive of care. Caring‐with advances three frames for conceptualising caring capacity. First, caring‐with situates care in a sociomaterial and performative frame. Second, it places care in a temporal frame, speaking to the historical and generative depth of relations that are the foundation and future of care. Third, it theorises the production and translation of care across space. These concepts are empirically examined through the caring experiences of single older women living in precarious housing in Sydney, Australia. Interviews with these women show how housing assemblages shape the emergent potential for care, co‐constituting the capacity for individuals to take part in caring practices (for self and others) and to achieve basic care needs (including needs for food, energy, and appropriate housing). Caring‐with provides a framework for conceptualising caring capacity in unequal worlds and illuminates the adaptive and creative agencies that generate and hold care together. It also points to new ways of conceptualising caring responsibility as a distributed achievement. Finally, caring‐with suggests an approach to conceptualising housing within care research.

Between territory and space: assembling the Murmansk region from a security perspective

ABSTRACTThis article explores connections between the Russian state and territory from a security perspective. At first, concepts of state, territory and space are critically interrogated with the use of Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage thinking. The article introduces striated and smooth space as analytical concepts revealing connections between the state and territory. Analysis exposes the state’s attempt to capture the Arctic space in terms of state security and border protection. Based on the example of local security practices in the Murmansk region, the article demonstrates that an understanding of security cannot be reduced the borders of nation-state.

The assemblage and making of suburbs in post-reform China: the case of Guangzhou

ABSTRACT This study examines the modality of recent suburbanization in post-reform China. Most of the existing literature focuses on individual cases or quantitative measurements; there is ashortage of panoramic views to identify the actors and processes related to suburbanization in post-reform China. We fill this gap by applying assemblage thinking to decipher the modality of suburbanization in Guangzhou, one of China’s largest cities. We identify the making of three types of suburban spaces– new enclaves, new towns, and suburban villages based on the fieldwork over the last decade. With assemblage thinking, we focus on the process of spatial production and articulate the interactions of various actors such as market, state and society. Differing from the classic Anglo-American model of homogeneous middle-class suburbia, suburbanization in post-reform China is marked by the production of variegated social spaces as well as the ongoing interactions of state, market and societal forces. Abbreviation: Pearl River Delta, (PRD)

Walking with technology: understanding mobility-technology assemblages

ABSTRACTIt is difficult to deny that technology – be it listening to music through headphones, engaging with smartphone apps or conversing through hands-free headsets – has become a ubiquitous part of everyday walking practices, influencing daily activities and shaping how these are operationalised. While digital technologies cannot replace conventional interactions with landscapes (e.g. the weather, clothing, street furniture, etc.), the intersections of people, places and technologies can converge in exciting and surprising ways to produce new forms of interrelating with(in) spaces. In this paper, I focus on the digital walking tour as a novel instrument through which to examine how mobility-technology assemblage assists with understanding how engagements with environments might produce various, contrasting assemblages of mobilities, bodies, affects, emotions and placemaking. I argue that participating within hybridised physical/digital spaces affects and is affected by different mobility practices. Through this paper, I propose that mobility-technology assemblage thinking provides new interventions into the ways in which people interact with technology, with each other and with(in) everyday spaces. Hence, while the person–technology interface may be considered a largely individual experience, I posit that the amalgamation of people, places and technologies can, in fact, greatly influence how pedestrian experiences are assembled, transmitted, received and interpreted.

Can assemblage think difference? A feminist critique of assemblage geographies

Assemblage thinking has been increasingly engaged by geographers to theoretically and empirically challenge philosophical categories and spatial imaginaries that have long been dominant in the field. Assemblage thinking presents exciting theoretical and methodological opportunities for geographers, yet its shortcomings are becoming increasingly clear. This article examines one such shortcoming: assemblage geographies’ lack of engagement with feminist thought. I approach assemblage’s uses in geography – assemblage as descriptor, concept, and ethos – as an entry point for a feminist critique, examining the potential of assemblage thinking to critically address issues of social difference, power, and the maintenance of inequality.

Performance, Emotions, and Diplomacy in the United Nations Assemblage in New York

Emotions are crucial to geographies of performance, yet our understanding of their role in diplomacy is not well developed despite many calls, especially from feminist geographers, for greater attention to the study of emotional geopolitics. This article addresses that deficit. We do so by focusing on diplomatic performance as a key component in the anthropology of the state. We argue that performances link statehood with statecraft to create geopolitical power in what we term spaces of possibility. Although state claim making materializes through diplomatic performances, we show that its enactment has been lamentably neglected in terms of its emotional dimensions—even though performance and emotions are constitutive of world making. Representing the state is an active “lived experience” for diplomats that exposes the challenges and vulnerabilities of personal performance through everyday political geographies. Consequently, here we set out a new research agenda for an emotional geopolitics that directly addresses the pivotal role of performance in state claim making through diplomacy. Our focus for this is the topography of action of the United Nations (UN) in New York. Deploying assemblage thinking and using rich empirical data, we illustrate the centrality of material, visceral, and sensual embodiments as they emerge out of and through diplomatic claim making in a range of spaces of possibility. In doing so, we demonstrate how emotions are inseparable facets of everyday UN diplomatic life. Key Words: assemblage, diplomacy, emotions, performance, United Nations.

From Nowhere: Provincializing Gay Life

Using contemporary and historical sources about one medium-sized provincial city in England, this short paper examines the distinctive features of gay life outside major metropolitan cities. This provocation engages with the question of violence and discrimination against LGBT people in small and medium sized European cities. However, it focuses more on thinking about everyday life in such cities. Conceptually, the paper attempts to provincialize certain key theoretical assumptions about contemporary sexual politics. Empirically, this short paper draws on literary and archival sources about gay life in Leicester (and the broader English East Midlands region) in the late 20th century, along with ethnographic observations conducted in the city over the last decade. In thinking about these issues through a diverse range of empirical material, this paper engages with Catherine J. Nash and Andrew Gorman-Murray’s call for geographers to utilize assemblage thinking to help theorize how contemporary sexual lives and sexual politics are shaped by the coming together of recent socio-legal changes and various new socio-technical arrangements.

What is walkability? The urban DMA

The concept of urban ‘walkability’ has come to occupy a key role at the nexus of a series of multidisciplinary fields connecting urban design and planning to broader issues of public health, climate change, economic productivity and social equity. Yet the concept of walkability itself remains elusive – difficult to define or operationalise. Density, functional mix and access networks are well-recognised as key factors: density concentrates more people and places within walkable distances; functional mix produces a greater range of walkable destinations; and access networks mediate flows of traffic between them. This complex synergy of density, mix and access – herein called the urban DMA – largely stems from the work of Jacobs. With an approach based in assemblage thinking we show that each of these factors is multiple and problematic to define or measure. Any reduction to a singular index of morphological properties can involve a misrecognition of how cities work. We argue that walkability is a complex and somewhat nebulous set of capacities embodied in any urban morphology, and that it should not be conflated with nor derived from actual levels of walking.

Assembling halal meat and poultry production in Brazil: Agents, practices, power and sites

Over the last few decades, an emerging, thoroughly globalized market for halal products has been generating increasingly sophisticated, diverse, contested halal regulations. Today, the Brazilian halal meat and poultry industry is among the world’s largest exporters of halal meat and poultry. Against this backdrop, this paper examines how halal meat and poultry production has been assembled in Brazil. Drawing on assemblage thinking and ethnographic fieldwork, this paper traces assembling practices of halal meat and poultry production and sheds light on how halal standards have been taken on board. Current research has conceptualized halal and other food standards predominantly as mobile, globalized knowledge objects through which centres assemble and govern food production at a distance. However, I argue that halal meat and poultry production is assembled through sites and their interconnections – including sites of production and others – rather than globally. The assemblage is constituted and shaped as power is transmitted through assembling practices (e.g. the mobilization of Muslim labour from abroad), and sites (e.g. meat processing plants, agribusiness cities, sites of Muslim workforce recruitment and migration networks). The findings suggest that future research on the “bigger picture” of halal should take the role of sites, practices and transmission of power into closer consideration, and address the nexus between halal standards, skilled Muslim labour and migration. Like Brazil, most of the world’s large halal producers are countries where Muslims are a minority population.

What is policy assemblage?

ABSTRACT Assemblage thinking has exploded in policy research, especially among scholars working in the policy mobilities field who are seeking to harness the potential of an assemblage approach to understand how policies move, mutate and manifest in increasingly transnational contexts. The ubiquity of assemblage, however, does not always render it clear, with the concept being variously defined and sometimes lacking conceptual strength and explanatory power. This paper seeks to conceptualize and defend an assemblage approach to policy analysis. By synthesizing core threads from existing literature, it identifies three theoretical and conceptual foundations central to a ‘policy assemblage’ approach: (1) relations of exteriority and emergence; (2) heterogeneity, relationality and flux; and (3) attention to power, politics and agency. Together, these foundations signal a coherency to assemblage thinking and suggest an assemblage approach has powerful potential, allowing researchers to see and explain things in ways that many established traditions in policy research do not. By identifying foundations and offering examples of how each might be mobilized, the paper provides the beginnings of a framework for policy assemblage research not previously articulated in a systematic form, thus inviting further discussion about what it means to undertake policy assemblage research.

Governance as multiplicity: the Assemblage Thinking perspective

Governance, the process of steering for collective action, is being theorized and empirically explored on a variety of subjects, private and collective issues and spatial levels. Depending on epistemological and theoretical preferences, studies adopt a hierarchical/centralized or a relational/decentralized conception of governance although they increasingly recognize that ‘hybrid governance,’ a mix of multiple models and modes, prevails in practice. Theoretical and empirical studies alike discuss sparingly, if at all, ontological issues, i.e., the nature of the ‘what’ is governed, despite their prominence for meaningful empirical analysis. A ‘system’ ontology is mostly presumed that usually produces static, context-insensitive accounts of dynamic governance phenomena and one-size-fits-all and ‘best practices’ recommendations. Since the 2000s, Assemblage Thinking (AT), a current of poststructuralist thinking, is being utilized on the grounds that the assemblage ontology better supports, conceptually and methodologically, the situated study of governance. This paper offers an overview of the application of AT in governance studies and an introductory exploration into the capacity of AT to frame a compleat approach for the applied study of governance conceived not as unitary process but as multiplicity. After summarizing the discourse on governance, the paper highlights the main features of AT and critically reviews selected assemblage-based governance studies. Then, it discusses the conceptual affinities between governance and assemblage, reconceptualizes governance, outlines the contours of an assemblage-based methodology and proposes an AT-based approach to governance. A discussion of the value of AT for applied governance studies and future research challenges conclude the paper.