Geographies Of Justice Research Articles

A tourist, not a god: Mike Davis, radical geographer

Mike Davis (1946–2022) was a leftist intellectual and activist, in addition to a prolific author on myriad subjects. His major writings focused on topics that included power relations and inequality in US cities, particularly in Southern California: the history of the car bomb; the ties between climate change, empire, and famine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; the explosive growth of shantytowns in the global South; and the political ecology of global pandemics. Trained as a historian, Davis, in many of his works, heavily engaged geographical scholarship, both human and biophysical. While he is perhaps best known for his outsized contributions to urban geography, he also had a major impact on radical geography. Herein, I explore Davis's contributions to three areas of concern to radical geographers: cultural geography, political ecology, and borders and territoriality. In doing so, I focus primarily on four of his books: City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear, Late Victorian Holocausts, and The Monster Enters. In the end, I consider Davis's ethics and implicit critique of modernity, as well as his geographies of justice and hope.

Life After Death Redux: Anticipating the Posthumous Geographies of Dr. Bobby M. Wilson

Life After Death Redux: Anticipating the Posthumous Geographies of Dr. Bobby M. Wilson Nik Heynen (bio) I met Dr. Bobby M. Wilson at an Antipode reception at the Las Vegas AAG meeting in 2009. I had seen him at previous Antipode receptions and other AAG events but I was always too nervous to approach him. Before I met him, I had the great pleasure of having some mentoring from Dr. Harold Rose at my first job, at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. Dr. Rose talked to me as much as I would come around; I pestered Dr. Rose plenty. He’d often tell me stories about coming up in the discipline and he often invoked an important relationship with Dr. Wilson that I found inspiring. Dr. Wilson and I got to know each other better over a small-group week-long workshop in Vancouver in 2012. That meeting ultimately led to an edited book Trevor Barnes and Eric Shepherd published titled Spatial Histories of Radical Geography. Since Dr. Wilson and I were both traveling back to the South from Vancouver, we spent five or six hours getting to know each other in a bar at the Vancouver airport. Ultimately, he was not able to write his chapter for that book because of events going on in his life (his first wife passed away in 2012 and as I later found out, he was starting to grapple with his own health issues). He had planned to write about being at Clark when Antipode was founded as a graduate student. I never tired of seeing him reenact making copies of the first issues on the risograph machine they used in the basement of the geography building at Clark; he’d wind up his arm and turn it round and round. During that airport session, Dr. Wilson mentioned he was writing a new book. Having helped start UGA’s Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation Series, I pitched the idea of him considering UGA Press for his book. He liked what I was saying. That conversation led to an ongoing relationship that, in part, revolved around that book which is titled Consumer Political Economy and African-America: Slavery to Postmodernity. In that same airport chat, I told him that I had paid well over 100 dollars for my copy of America's Johannesburg, which was hard to come by when I bought it, and I suggested we do a reissue of it at UGA. He liked that idea a whole lot. Signaling his humble spirit though, I remember him asking me if I thought anybody would buy it. It was a very strange experience to be in such awe of somebody, while trying to assure them that their work was timeless and required greater circulation. While getting the reissue of America's Johannesburg accomplished took a lot of effort because while they did not intend to reissue it, Rowman & Littlefield, who held the copyright, was unwilling to let it go to UGA Press. At various times I felt like it was not going to happen, which made us work harder to make it happen. I suggested he ask Dr. Ruth [End Page 210] Wilson Gilmore to write a new forward to help situate the book for new (and previous) readers given her importance and stature in the field. He liked that idea a lot also. Dr. Wilson was really happy when it came out. When it was all said and done, this was one of the moments in my time at the UGA Press series that makes me the happiest upon reflection given the joy and gratitude he expressed. When I met Dr. Wilson at that 2009 AAG Antipode reception, I also, for the first time, met Dr. Clyde Woods, as they were standing together talking. Did I mention I felt nervous and intimated? S-h-e-e-e-e-t. That meeting takes on a new and complicated significance when I think about things that have occurred since Dr. Wilson’s passing. Dr. Wilson submitted Consumer Political Economy and African-America: Slavery to Postmodernity to UGA Press not too long after we talked in 2012. It made me feel like I truly...

Notes from the Middle Level Section: Geographies of Justice in Middle Grades Literacy

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The geographies of justice in Portugal: redefining the judiciary's territories

AbstractIn this paper, I examine the current geographical location of Portuguese courts and the effects this territorial redefinition has had on the relationships between the justice system and the territories/populations in a context in which external and internal political factors, rather than a mere need to improve the justice system, have played a major role. Such an analysis entails three key elements: the geographic impacts on access to justice, in view of the emblematic presence of the state in the territories, both contrasted with the conflict between specialisation and the proximity of jurisdiction.

Shadows of a Sunbelt City: The Environment, Racism, and the Knowledge Economy in Austin by Eliot M. Tretter

Reviewed by: Shadows of a Sunbelt City: The Environment, Racism, and the Knowledge Economy in Austin by Eliot M. Tretter Michan Connor Shadows of a Sunbelt City: The Environment, Racism, and the Knowledge Economy in Austin. By Eliot M. Tretter. Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation. ( Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016. Pp. x, 179. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-4489-8; cloth, $74.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-4488-1.) Contemporary development theory and practice presume, following Richard Florida, that thriving cities attract a diverse, creative, and educated workforce through cultural eclecticism and environmental sustainability. Austin, Texas, celebrated as "weird," tops many lists of such cities. Eliot M. Tretter contends that Austin's culture was less important to its development than were decisions made beginning in the 1950s by a coalition of local, state, and federal entities, particularly University of Texas (UT) officials, to remake the city's institutions [End Page 751] and physical spaces to attract investment in the electronics industry. This coalition and its successors razed working-class and minority neighborhoods and prioritized the needs of research professionals and investors, showing that the creative-class city is a "system of asymmetrical power relations that has engendered both uneven development among neighborhoods and inequalities among peoples" (p. 142). Tretter divides his book into two parts. The first, stretching from the 1950s to the 1990s, describes the rise of UT's growth coalition, while the second critically evaluates the selective incorporation of environmentalism into growth politics after 1990. Readers familiar with recent studies of urban renewal will recognize in the first part a description of local leaders empowered by the Housing Act of 1949 to declare land blighted, seize it, and redevelop it. Tretter enhances this history by arguing that UT, spurred by a 1957 commission to generate more lucrative intellectual property, adroitly linked its need for research facilities to the property value goals of the Austin Urban Renewal Agency. Later, UT leveraged the university's bond power to subsidize the costs of private production facilities through university-industry partnerships. The second part addresses contemporary development politics. Municipal officials, drawn evenly from developer and conservationist constituencies, beganin theearly1990stoembracea "sustainability fix" for a political impasse that allowed Austin's suburbs to capture development (p. 7). Intensifying land use in central Austin accommodated state support for suburban sprawl, mollified influential water quality activists, and attracted professionals to redeveloped neighborhoods, enhancing land value, while pushing burdens of pollution and displacement onto politically marginalized communities of color. Tretter effectively critiques both "creative class" and "smart growth" analyses by highlighting the elite politics that created them and the skewed distribution of their costs and benefits (pp. 146, 147). A knowledge economy did not spring spontaneously from brainpower gathered at UT; it was nurtured by public commitment to physical and institutional infrastructure that ignored working-class and minority constituencies and by UT's turn toward entrepreneurial pursuits. And "smart growth" policies reconciled the concerns of affluent and liberal environmentalists with growth by supporting redevelopment and gentrification in central and eastside Austin neighborhoods. As a disciplinary matter, some historians may find Shadows of a Sunbelt City: The Environment, Racism, and the Knowledge Economy in Austin less a history of UT's and Austin's intertwined development than a set of essays that use history to (again, effectively) debunk influential development pieties. The organization of the book does not always present recurrent themes to best advantage; for example, a discussion of enduring at-large council elections (which diluted the power of students, minorities, and the poor) would have lent a useful structure to following chapters had it been presented in the introduction of the book rather than in chapter 6. While Tretter's writing is concise, the book is slim, offering a chronology of plans, ideas, and decisions without extensive engagement with the voices of either the elites driving policy changes or the disadvantaged affected by them. That said, historians writing studies of the knowledge-economy cities Austin exemplifies should find in this [End Page 752] book a number of provocative ideas to evaluate through future archival research. Michan Connor Dallas, Texas Copyright © 2017 The Southern Historical Association

The Geography of Justice: Assessing Local Justice in Colombia’s Post-Conflict Phase

This article combines descriptive empirical research with theoretical reflections to offer policy guidelines on what the role of local justice institutions in Colombia’s post-conflict phase should be. The article is divided into two parts. In the first, we present empirical evidence to illustrate the ways in which justice operates differently across the territory. In addition to illustrating these disparities, we also demonstrate the connection between these disparities and some phenomena relevant to understanding the Colombian conflict. Based on these findings, the second part of this article defines the state-building challenge confronted by the Colombian State during the post-conflict phase. Following this part, we propose a solution to this state-building challenge: the State must adopt a combination of efficacy and justice, and we provide guidelines on how a post-conflict justice system can operate to achieve that combination.

Properties of Violence: Law and Land Grant Struggle in Northern New Mexico. Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation Series . By David Correia . ( Athens : University of Georgia Press , 2013 . xiv + 222 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $69.95 , cloth; $24.95 , paper; $24.95 , e-book.)

<b><i>Properties of Violence: Law and Land Grant Struggle in Northern New Mexico</i></b>. Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation Series . By David Correia . ( Athens : University of Georgia Press , 2013 . xiv + 222 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $69.95 , cloth; $24.95 , paper; $24.95 , e-book.)

They Saved the Crops: Labor, Landscape, and the Struggle over Industrial Farming in Bracero-Era California. Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation Series . By Don Mitchell . ( Athens : University of Georgia Press , 2012 . xvi + 529 pp. Illustrations, maps, charts, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $79.95, cloth; $26.95, paper; $26.95, e-book .)

They Saved the Crops: Labor, Landscape, and the Struggle over Industrial Farming in Bracero-Era California Get access They Saved the Crops: Labor, Landscape, and the Struggle over Industrial Farming in Bracero-Era California. Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation Series. By Mitchell Don. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012. xvi + 529 pp. Illustrations, maps, charts, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $79.95, cloth; $26.95, paper; $26.95, e-book.) David Igler David Igler University of California, Irvine Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Western Historical Quarterly, Volume 44, Issue 1, Spring 2013, Pages 83–84, https://doi.org/10.2307/westhistquar.44.1.0083 Published: 01 February 2013

Justice and Injustice in the City

AbstractFollowing a recent growth of interest in questions of justice and the city, this paper considers how the work of contemporary critical urbanists compares with earlier accounts of urban justice and injustice. Our purpose in making this comparison is to consider how scholars concerned with justice and injustice in the city might better articulate the conceptual relationship between justice‐thinking and (in)justice‐documenting in their writings about the contemporary planned city. Using a selection of influential texts as evidence, our comparative commentary on past and present approaches focuses on three issues we think are crucial to this relationship. First, with the rise of analyses of the politics of difference, concepts of justice stressing procedure, process, and the hearing of multiple voices have come to the fore recently, especially in urban planning. Second, contemporary writers about geographies of justice have queried the value of using pre‐formulated, philosophical justice norms to judge outcomes and processes in particular contexts, seeing justice, rather, as intuited in the enactment of social conflicts and practices in those actual situations. Third, questions about the spatiality of justice and injustice have been aired recently asking whether justice and injustice have primarily a social rather than a spatial ontology. The conclusion of our evaluative review is that similar issues are being named and investigated now as were four decades ago, in investigations of justice and injustice in cities, but that concerted debates about theory and epistemology have elaborated the conceptual focus of discussion. We call for grounded investigations of enactments of justice as well as of injustice.

Guest Editorial

Geographies of migration, geographies of justice? Feminism, intersectionality, and rights Migration and social (in)justice are intrinsically linked. Migration is often spurred by social injustices due to lack of opportunities or multiple insecurities, exacerbated by racism and ethnoreligious or gender-based discrimination. By moving to new locations, migrants are often treated as `different' on the basis of their ethnic back- ground, religion, or country of origin and subjected to inferior treatment on the basis of being noncitizens. Gender-based discrimination adds a further, and for women often the most crucial, layer to these complex processes as migrant women leave and enter gendered societies and gender-segregated labour markets and are subjected to gendered migration policies (Piper, 2008a). In this sense, social justice is essentially a transnational (and, thus, spatial) phenomenon affecting migrants at all stages of their migration experience (Weiss, 2005).

Workers' strategies to secure jobs, their uses of scale, and competing economic moralities: Rethinking the ‘geography of justice’

This paper considers workers' strategies to secure jobs, the justice of these strategies, and the spatial scales which they involve. It is argued that the justice of such strategies is strongly bound up with the scales at which they are enacted: the morality of social relations is intrinsically geographical. The paper discusses strategies within which workers compete individually or collectively for a given geographically-structured supply of jobs, including the use of social oppressions and territorial chauvinism in such competition. It contrasts these strategies with actions which challenge social oppression within employment, and which seek to know, contest and control flows of capital at large spatial scales. These latter strategies present a radical alternative to mutual competition, and embody different notions of economic justice. All of these strategies are analysed for the relations among workers and between workers and capital which they construct, the scales at which these relations are played out, the political ideologies they involve, and the moral notions generated and deployed. It is argued that to understand these different moralities, justice needs to be conceptualised not as rights understood as quasi-property of individuals but rather as a moral aspect of social relations. Accordingly, the ‘geography of justice’ is conceived as the geography of these social relations rather than geographical patterns of (dis)advantage. It is argued that the ‘interests’ of individuals and of collectives are not given objectively by social structure but are constructed through and between different feasible strategies of action; this has implications for the problem which selfishness poses to socialist economic strategies.

Guatemala's Genocide Determination and the Spatial Politics of Justice

This paper focuses on the Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification's (CEH) determination that state violence in Guatemala between 1981 and 1983 constituted acts of genocide. The construction of the CEH's argument is analysed, together with its implications for political dynamics within post-war Guatemala. The potential new ‘geographies of justice’ that flow from the CEH's genocide argument are explored in terms of new venues and avenues for prosecution of Guatemalan genocide cases. It is shown how the CEH made nuanced connections between territory, political practice, ethnic identity and violence, and it is argued that these connections were key to its genocide argument. Finally, the relationship is interrogated between the CEH's genocide determination and the figure of the ‘neutral Maya’ as the post-war representation of an indigenous subject inhabiting a space untainted by the stain of a (failed) revolutionary past.

Antipode's 2ndSummer Institute for the Geographies of Justice in conjunction with the International Critical Geography Group

<i>Antipode</i>'s 2^ndSummer Institute for the Geographies of Justice in conjunction with the International Critical Geography Group

What's Just? Afterthoughts on the Summer Institute in the Geographies of Justice 2007

What's Just? Afterthoughts on the Summer Institute in the Geographies of Justice 2007

Work, struggle, death, and geographies of justice: The transformation of landscape in and beyond California's imperial valley

This paper examines the relation between labor, social struggle, and circulation (of capital and bodies) in the production of landscapes. Focusing on California's Imperial Valley and the stark relation there between living labor and dead laborers, and thus between the transformation of nature (the subject of labor) and systems of social reproduction, the paper examines the ways in which the real material conditions for justice—and injustice—are actively built into the ground.

Geography in an Age of Extremes: A Blueprint for a Geography of Justice

The AAG was baptized into and came of age during a century of extreme violence. Total war marked the organization's tenth and fortieth birthdays, genocide its fortieth and ninetieth. On the AAG's t...

The Geography of Justice: Beitz's Critique of Skepticism and StatismPolitical Theory and International Relations. Charles R. Beitz

Political Theory and International Relations is a fine piece of philosophical criticism and reconstruction that few established philosophers could have written because, to put it bluntly, they would not have known enough about politics, especially international politics. Even many political philosophers who genuinely would like to see implications for public affairs drawn from their reflections seem to believe that their own job as philosophers is finished when they have formulated and passed around some abstract principle of equality, justice, liberty, property, or such. Any fool, the working assumption seems to be, can then apply the principle to whatever concrete case bothers him: add the relevant facts, stir to a sticky consistency, and bake in a preheated oven. Yet merely selecting the relevant facts is a difficult and eminently philosophical task. It is, in any case, not a matter of pawing through piles of discrete facts and finding those marked relevant, but a matter of examining entire alternative conceptions of, in this case, international relations and judging how to structure the whole business. Charles Beitz provides in Political Theory and International Relations the theoretical foundations for normative standards applicable to transnational transactions, including not only foreign policies but also domestic policies that affect other societies. It would be difficult to think of a practically more important or an intellectually more unmanageable challenge. Beitz has emphasized the complexities without lapsing into endless complications and, while demolishing the two orthodox oversimplifications, left us with something coherent in their place. This is a first-rate book on an issue as fundamental as it is neglected: how shall we conceive of international relations, and what standards of assessment make sense against an empirically adequate conception?