Discursive Assemblage Research Articles

The Techno-politics of Rental Housing Financialization: Real Estate Service Companies and Technocratic Expertise in Australia’s Build to Rent Market

This article argues private expertise is a driving force behind the global expansion of rental housing financialization and, particularly, the making of build to rent (BTR) assets and markets. It develops this argument by investigating Australia’s underexamined BTR market and global real estate service companies (RESCs) as ubiquitous yet unscrutinized intermediaries in this new financialization frontier. Its analysis heeds calls to attend to assetization, as the process of turning things into assets, deploying science and technology studies-inspired marketization approaches, which understand markets as sociotechnical assemblages, and their prior integration with critical political economy of financialization. This approach is enhanced by engaging with the techno-politics of market-making scholarship, which sensitizes assetization approaches to the politics of expertise. This conceptual move respecifies market devices (i.e., material and discursive assemblages of market making) as knowledge contingent (i.e., that require and assert expert knowledge) and provides conceptual terrain to explore the rule of private experts in assetization. Analysis of interviews, media, and industry reporting reveals how RESCs’ epistemic, discursive, and technical efforts format the emergent market, making BTR assets thinkable, visible, calculable, and transactable. This article repositions rental housing financialization as a techno-political project led in nontrivial ways by private experts who act as financializing champions and as intermediaries connecting global finance and local sites, through advisory, valuation, brokerage, and lobbying. This contributes to understandings of the expanding global geographies of rental housing financialization and project ecologies behind urban production. Underscoring the power of private expertise to reconfigure housing markets recasts concerns surrounding market reliance as urban housing crisis salves.

Conservation policies, scientific research and the production of Lake Pátzcuaro's naturecultures in Postrevolutionary México (1920–1940)

The Lake Pátzcuaro region has recently been a focus of attention of various scholars working in the field of cultural studies. These works have highlighted the role of Lake Pátzcuaro in creating a national culture and identity during the postrevolutionary period in México (1920–1940). However, the cultural production of nature has not been subject to the same attention. Taking a cultural and historical geography approach, the paper considers the production of Lake Pátzcuaro's ‘naturecultures’ during the postrevolutionary period in México. This is how discourses about culture and identity shaped nature and vice versa. The emphasis is on what I call scientific cultures of nature, referring to ideas and practices around nature that made use of scientific claims. The goal is to understand the role of these practices in shaping Lake Pátzcuaro as a meaningful discursive assemblage, and the relationship between this process and nation-state building. I do this by examining the discourses surrounding the establishment of environmental protection schemes in Lake Pátzcuaro, comprising the creation of a ‘forest hydrological reserve’ and fishing regulations, and the introduction of species to protect native fish and improve fisheries. I argue that these actions took part in broader efforts to create México and the Mexican, contributing to the naturalization of narratives about the nation.

Unpacking the discursive assemblages of anthropocentrism and ecocentrism: Articulations of space, place and time in the documentary film Gállok

This article analyses, through a case study approach, the environmental documentary film Gállok, which narrates the struggles over the proposal to operate an iron ore mine in Gállok (Sámi) or Kallak (Swedish), in Northern Sweden. The analysis is transdisciplinary, anchored in the environmental studies work on anthropocentrism and ecocentrism, combined with discourse theory, geography and the scholarly work on space, place and time. These different disciplines and fields are activated to examine how space, place and time become articulated in the discursive assemblages of anthropocentrism and ecocentrism that feed the discursive – material struggles around the operation of the Gállok mine. As the analysis shows, the anthropocentric view favours an instrumentalist and geo-reductionist approach to space and the use of land that promotes presentism, space–place and space–time dualism. Ecocentrism, on the other hand, articulates holism and geo-pluralism, supporting ideas of deep time, space–place and space–time.

Teacher subjectivities and multiplicities of enactment: Agential realism and the case of science teacher learning and practice with multilingual Latinx students

ABSTRACT The case of two middle school science teachers engaged in a long-term professional learning project is used to complicate the story of teacher change and agency and the presumed relationships between teacher knowledge and practice. Becky and Kelly were highly participatory in all aspects of a multi-year professional learning project, yet, when observed in their classrooms, they did not seem to enact project practices in robust ways during their instruction. Framed through the dominant professional development literature, our project would seem to be a ‘failure’ at promoting teacher change. However, using a post-qualitative framing of our ethnographic fieldwork, an alternative storyline emerges, involving the intricate negotiations of power dynamics, competing discourses, assemblages of multiple entities and relations that Becky and Kelly navigated. These complex assemblages shaped the teachers’ understandings of their multilingual Latinx students as science learners in ways that often ran contrary to what they learned during the project professional development. In this retelling, drawing on the notion of agential realism, we show how teachers’ knowledge and subjectivities were dynamically reconfigured in relation to local sociopolitical, material, and discursive assemblages shaping their practices in what we have framed elsewhere as multiplicities of enactment.

An Ethnography of Vulnerability: A New Materialist Approach to the Apparatus of Measurement, the Algorithm

During an ethnographic study of two Chilean schools over a period of three years, we observed the discursive assemblage of “what is vulnerable” emerging from an algorithm used to allocate public resources. In this article, we unravel the ways in which the algorithm intra‐acts with other elements in the process of producing what is vulnerable and how this affects our approach to ethnography. We conclude by considering two methodological dilemmas that arose from our work.

Valuing energy solutions in the housing markets: the role of market devices and real estate agents

New energy technologies present opportunities for low-carbon housing but also significant upfront costs for house owners. Due to the long service life of such technologies, market valuation impacts on the feasibility of such investments. Yet, existing evidence on the market valuation of energy investments in private housing is inconclusive. Furthermore, despite significant policy efforts, energy performance certificates remain ineffective. This paper addresses these gaps with a study of real estate agents and the use of market devices, such as tools, databases, classification schemes, inspection protocols and market practices. Our analytical framework builds on the sociology of markets, actor network theory and pragmatist theories of valuation in order to highlight the material and discursive assemblages and arrangements that intervene in the construction of markets. Drawing on empirical evidence from Finland, the results point to asymmetries in market devices and valuation practices that disfavour energy investments compared to the other key quality attributes of housing.

Where You Labor Is Where You Sing: The New Folksong Movement of 1958 and the Fissured Mediascape of Maoist China

This article examines the New Folksong Movement (NFM) of 1958–1959, which was launched by the Chinese Communist Party in conjunction with the Great Leap Forward (GLF) campaign. It employs an analytical strategy called fissured reading, whereby a discursive assemblage that seems ideologically uniform can be made to reveal the myriad tensions that its own positive facade works to conceal. While the NFM seems suffused with songs of praise for the GLF, closer inspection reveals a project riven with tensions regarding the creative agency of the people, the persistence of “old” songs in popular culture, and dialects. Such methodological concerns were in fact foundational to modern folk study in China as it developed from the 1920s onward. Understanding such historical connections can help us rethink the cultural revolutions in modern China as fissured projects, with tense cracks just beneath their surface that indicate unresolved contradictions passed on from one generation of reformers and revolutionaries to the next.

Geopolitics, (Re)territorialisation, and China’s Patriotic Tourism in the South China Sea

ABSTRACT This study interrogates the geopolitical nature of China’s Xisha tourism, and unravels the territorial politics played out in tourism, while examining the complex interplay between tourism and territorialisation. It demonstrates that Xisha tourism is inherently geopolitical and integral to China’s comprehensive territorialisation strategy in the South China Sea (SCS). It reveals that Xisha tourism is politically oriented, highly regimented, and performatively constituted. Tourism and territorialisation are found to be mutually constituted and interdependent. The main argument of this study is that tourism should be conceptualised as a constitutive dimension of geopolitical restructuring processes in the SCS, and an essential part of the performative and discursive assemblage that sustains the state’s will to claim territorial possession of the SCS.

After the M in STEM: Towards Multispecies’ Flourishing

In this paper, I introduce the ideas of Sylvia Wynter, in particular, her concepts of Man and After Man. I argue that the M in STEM is implicated in this discursive assemblage, which traces a lineage back to the political economy of mathematics that emerged during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and which is related to plantation economics and logics of underdevelopment. I provide a description of this logic and attempt to unsettle the privileged position of human beings in thinking of an ethics for Mathematics Education. I propose that the M in STEM be oriented towards a goal of multispecies’ flourishing and an ethics of kinship, which involves structural coupling and partnering with other species. I illustrate some first steps with student curations of their experience of learning to teach mathematics and with my own photographs and experiments in honouring the challenge of this work.

‘Inevitable distinctions’

AbstractProfessionals working in residential care for children everyday perform the institutional relevant activity of constructing their cases. This article analyzes the ways in which they construct the case of ‘unaccompanied minors’ (UAM) and how, in doing so, they talk into being their everyday practices of work. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with Italian residential care professionals, this study adopts a Discourse Analysis approach. Findings illustrate how the discursive assemblage of UAM relies on participants’ multiple distinctions and on a contrastive rhetoric that is widely used in social work. Differences in the case-construction of UAM mirror participants’ institutional settings and overall socio-cultural debate, paving the way for future investigation.

Assemblages, routines, and social justice research in community archaeology

ABSTRACTArchaeologists often perceive community archaeology as an inclusive space where the presence of multiple voices drawn into this space through a shared interest in recovering and understanding the past broadens the discourse of archaeology and related heritage. While this work provides access for diverse stakeholders, certain routines seem embedded that limit the potential for community archaeology to produce something new. I suggest that rethinking the point of engagement, by shifting it from stakeholders to the discursive assemblages that cohere as stakeholders come together, allows for a deeper ethnographic reading of the engaging communities and the possibility that they will learn about others as well as themselves. The approach I describe draws from Gilles Deleuze's concept of transcendental empiricism, such that what we do in becoming engaged, even in the most routine way, requires consistently analysing how those we engage with come into view and why they become open to collaboration.

The professional mathematics teacher: fabricating and governing the becoming of the teacher

This paper aims at unpacking the becoming of the mathematics teacher as a professional immerse in the Chilean society, by mapping the changes that have taken within his/her fabrication and governing. A Foucault–inspired history of the present is deployed, as analytical strategy, to problematize how the discursive assemblage of social development and school mathematics produces a particular mathematics teacher—an autonomous professional that has to engage in continuous training and has to be a good decision-maker, framed within political and economic agenda. Ways of conceiving and understand the mathematics teacher are (re)producing a discursive network that operates as a technology of government for the fabrication of the desired mathematics teacher.

Networked Assemblages and Geopolitical Media: Governance, Infrastructure and Sites in BBC Radio

ABSTRACT The development of radio as a communication and broadcasting technology has been vital to popular, formal and practical geopolitics. This paper contributes to the nascent literature on assemblage thought in geopolitics by considering radio as a historical iteration of “the media”. Through this dialogue, it is suggested that British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) radio is both a material and discursive assemblage, operating at multiple scales, sites and intensities of governance. The paper argues that radio cannot be seen simply as a vehicle for producing popular geopolitical imaginaries, nor as a neutral military or cultural diplomatic tool. Contributing to the use of assemblage and actor–network thought in historical-popular geopolitics, the paper begins by articulating the benefits of certain elements of these theoretical registers to the sub-field in general, before moving onto a series of empirical fragments from the archive to illustrate these abstractions in a more concrete manner. First, it does so by considering the early governance and regulation of radio in the 1920s, then the forces producing the BBC’s Middle Eastern Relay network during the late 1960s. The paper concludes with a further call to take materiality seriously, particularly in future popular geopolitical research dealing with media networks.

An affective politics of sexual harassment at school in the 21st century: Schooling and Sexualities twenty years later

Building on work on sexual harassment in schools, this article continues one of the threads from the first Schooling and Sexualities conference held, in 1995. In so doing, it offers a contemporary account of a teacher’s sexual harassment by one of her students, through a sexually violent comment posted about her on the Rate My Teacher website. Throughout, I explore the affective politics of sexual harassment. In developing an understanding of affective politics as it plays out through an online review, a teacher, a classroom and students, I draw on the concepts of affects and assemblages, and the capacity of a sexual harassment assemblage to constitute (and de-constitute) identities. I consider how power is both increased and also diminished between student and teacher in an assemblage of gendered, sexual and neoliberal identities; and how she and her student are re-situated through the sexual harassment. Attending to the affective politics of a teacher’s sexual harassment by her student offers a way to understand violence and identities as social, material and discursive assemblages, and contributes to understanding sexual harassment in schools, particularly where teachers are targeted.

Affect, race, and white discomfort in schooling: decolonial strategies for ‘pedagogies of discomfort’

The present paper theorises white discomfort as not an individual psychologised emotion, but rather as a social and political affect that is part of the production and maintenance of white colonial structures and practices. Therefore, it is suggested that white discomfort cannot be critically addressed merely in pedagogic terms and conditions within schools and universities. By foregrounding white discomfort in broader terms, the aim of the paper is to provide a more holistic and dynamic account which opens up a realm that situates the pedagogisation of white discomfort within the broader decolonising project of disrupting white colonial structures and practices. The paper calls for both a decolonising and a critical affective approach to pedagogies of discomfort that would focus on examining and addressing strategically how white discomfort comes to be experienced and dismantled within broader affective, material and discursive assemblages of race, racism and whiteness.

‘Is it a mosque?’ The Islamization of space explored through residents’ everyday ‘discursive assemblages’

ABSTRACTThis article examines the Islamization of suburban space in southeast England. Its microgeographies of racialization challenge binary either/or logic, favoured by ‘mosque conflict’ approaches and instead demonstrate how residents’ negotiations are channelled through everyday both/and logic rooted in multiplicity and indeterminacy. A key element in negotiations is the ‘sometimes quality’ of the ‘Islamic Centre’ that allows it to be both a ‘mosque’ and ‘not-a-mosque’. Moreover, each of the differently positioned residents shows uneven discursive capacities for identity, belonging and community in relation to the Islamization of suburban space, and each is afforded differential empowerment and capabilities under social discourses of ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘tolerance’. In examining these microgeographies of racialization, this paper also extends representational accounts of lived experiences surrounding the Islamization of space by attending to affect, emotion and materiality. To do so, the notion of ‘discursive assemblage’ is developed.

Cinch for instacurves: The discursive assemblage of waist trainers in new media

ABSTRACTScholars have found that engaging in practices of self-discipline and restraint has severe consequences for women, some of which involves distracting them from more important endeavors. The author explores one such instance of female restraint by analyzing the product reviews of waist trainers, modern-day corsets, sold through new media. This recent analysis examines 1,600 product reviews on Amazon.com for the most popular waist trainer, the “Black 3 Hook Latex Waist Cincher by Ann Chery.” Drawing from literature on fat studies and feminism, the author posits that the product reviewers understand their embodied experience through disciplinary processes, including surveillance, normalization, and self-examination. By highlighting how reviewers deploy these discourses, the author considers the subsequent consequences and possible forms of resistance against bodily discipline.

(Re)assembling Natures, Cultures, and (Nano)technologies in Public Engagement

Practices of ordering are powerful means of giving structure to people's lives and providing a sense of control. The analysis of three episodes from discussion groups on nanotechnology in Austria shows that citizens evaluate new technologies with regard to how they intersect with, support, or disturb existing orders. The concept of discursive assemblages serves as a lens for recognising the non-fixed character of the discursive process, while still allowing the analyst to identify how specific elements, such as conceptions of nature, culture, and technology, are (re)assembled at particular moments. Each of the three episodes represents a specific way of creating and negotiating assemblages: the first case demonstrates how discussants collectively discuss a nature–technology hybrid (nano-bamboo socks) against the backdrop of a highly valued ideal of keeping ‘the natural’ and ‘the technological’ separate; the second episode exemplifies a clash of two assemblages as participants argued for or against the application of nanotechnology in food products; and the third example illustrates the process of collective experimentation with different assemblages to make sense of a highly futuristic nanochip for brain enhancement. Together the episodes demonstrate that participants in public engagement settings do not address nanotechnology as a simple question of choice between acceptance and rejection but rather engage in processes of care regarding how a society might develop when technological innovations such as nanotechnology threaten to blur existing boundaries and orders, such as the distinction between nature and culture.

Devices and trajectories of responsible innovation: problematising synthetic biology

This paper focuses on the ‘devices’ of responsible innovation, that is, the material and discursive assemblages that serve to enact the ideal of responsible innovation (such as policy frameworks and public debates). It proposes an analytical approach and research questions to study the trajectories of these devices via their concretisation, institutionalisation, do-ability and the criticisms they raise.

Singer-Machines: Describing Italian Singers, 1800-1850

Puppets, automata, electric creatures: in numerous descriptions from the first half of the nineteenth century, Italian singers were presented as singing and acting machines. Whether mechanical or electrical, such models do not merely reflect the technologies of the time and their circulation across a wider discursive field; nor do they simply illustrate a special case of cultural appropriation of science and technology in the emergent discipline of music criticism, in search of specialized tools and terms with which to describe operatic performance. Although mechanical models were usually used satirically to condemn specific singing or acting practices, and electrical models to applaud others, they were not limited to mere pejorative or laudatory criticism. Italian opera singers, whether compared to mechanical machines or considered as truly electric instruments, were discursively transformed into technical objects and thus acquired stronger aesthetic, cultural and social meanings. In her introduction to the recent issue of Opera Quarterly devoted to opera and machines,1 guest editor Bonnie Gordon proposed “decenter[ing] opera, [moving] away from thinking of it as dependent mostly on the subjective experiences of composers, performers, and audiences … moving from a subject- to an object-oriented approach.”2 Problematizing the relationship between musical performance and machines implies, however, a full analysis and historicization of discursive fields and their various intricacies. “Machines are social before being technical,” wrote Gilles Deleuze.3 The singer-machine is thus “simultaneously and inseparably a machinic assemblage and an assemblage of enunciation.”4 The present article will concentrate on precisely this discursive assemblage. Rather than reconstituting “mechanical” or “electric” acting and singing practices, or linking them to real technological uses in or outside theaters, I intend to focus here on the singer-machine by analyzing specific discursive models of description and observation in use among early nineteenth-century operatic critics.5