The ‘Gay Olympics’? : the Eurovision Song Contest and the politics of LGBT/European belonging

The politics of gay and transgender visibility and representation at the Eurovision Song Contest, an annual televised popular music festival presented to viewers as a contest between European nations, show that processes of interest to Queer International Relations do not just involve states or even international institutions; national and transnational popular geopolitics over ‘LGBT rights’ and ‘Europeanness’ equally constitute the understandings of ‘the international’ with which Queer IR is concerned. Building on Cynthia Weber’s reading the persona of the 2014 Eurovision winner Conchita Wurst with ‘queer intellectual curiosity’, this paper demonstrates that Eurovision shifted from, in the late 1990s, an emerging site of gay and trans visibility to, by 2008–14, part of a larger discursive circuit taking in international mega-events like the Olympics, international human-rights advocacy, Europe/Russia relations, and the politics of state homophobia and transphobia. Contest organisers thus had to take positions – ranging from detachment to celebration – about ‘LGBT’ politics in host states and the Eurovision region. The construction of spatio-temporal hierarchies around attitudes to LGBT rights, however, revealed exclusions that corroborate other critical arguments on the reconfiguration of national and European identities around ‘LGBT equality’

Geospatial data analysis in Russia’s geoweb

The chapter examines the role of geospatial data in Russia’s online ecosystem. Facilitated by the rise of geographic information systems and user-generated content, the distribution of geospatial data has blurred the line between physical spaces and their virtual representations. The chapter discusses different sources of these data available for Digital Russian Studies (e.g., social data and crowdsourced databases) together with the novel techniques for extracting geolocation from various data formats (e.g., textual documents and images). It also scrutinizes different ways of using these data, varying from mapping the spatial distribution of social and political phenomena to investigating the use of geotag data for cultural practices’ digitization to exploring the use of geoweb for narrating individual and collective identities online

One Map to Rule Them All: Google Maps and Quasi-Sovereign Power in International Legal Disputes

With 80% market share, Google Maps has become the most powerful digital mapping platform in the world to such an extent that users often believe Google Maps represents an objectively accurate and universally truthful depiction of the world. The desire to create a single, objective map for the whole world dates to the turn of the 20th Century, even though objectivity and cartography are inherently at odds—a notion that has long complicated the status of maps as evidence in domestic and international law. However, growing acceptance of GIS maps as evidence in both domestic and international courts highlights the importance of understanding the relationships between maps and law, particularly as GIS mapping is dominated by a single company. Google’s internal process for resolving border and toponym disputes (some of which date back centuries) by representing “ground truth” is poorly articulated, lacks transparency, and is often at odds with the consensus of the international legal community, which is concerning given the outsourcing to a private company of a function so intimately intertwined with sovereignty as cartography. However, because of the ubiquity Google Maps has accrued thanks to its competitive advantage in collecting and displaying cartographic data, users—including some sovereign actors themselves—have conferred on Google Maps a certain authority in the field that the private company does not actually possess. This ubiquity has given Google a place of prominence on the international plane akin to a quasi-sovereign, where the company serves as both an instigator and mediator of first instance in border and toponym disputes, from legitimizing disputed borders and toponyms via localized maps, to weaponizing border claims, to defining new borders in post-conflict power vacuums. In the wake of a reassertion of hard national borders during the COVID crisis and Brexit, as well as threats to the stability and predictability of the international legal order and sacrosanctity of borders increasingly coming from major sovereign powers like Russia in Ukraine and China in Taiwan, scholars, international lawyers, and policymakers should be aware of potential situations where Google Maps’ quasi-sovereign authority over states’ juridical functions has the potential to impact decades- or centuries-old territorial disputes affected by recent demographic, environmental, and technological disruption. Further, this paper places the issues posed by Google Maps into a broader conversation about technology platforms’ monopoly power and the growing sovereign-like function of supranational technology companies in both the domestic and international legal realm, where the realities of a technological world have outpaced formal legal responses to those challenges

Landscape, Memory, and the Shifting Regional Geographies of Northwest Bosnia-Herzegovina

Writing and arguing with older discourses that have informed the subdiscipline of regional geography and setting them against new ways of conceiving of the region, this article considers the northwest of Bosnia-Herzegovina as a site that calls for a newly animated form of regional study. Of particular concern here is the role that memory and commemorative practices play in such a spatial schema. The monumental landscapes of the Tito regime and its collective commemoration of World War II sit alongside and are troubled by the more recent traumas and spaces of unmarked death associated with the ethnic war in Bosnia during the early 1990s. Read together, northwest Bosnia-Herzegovina functions as a vivid exemplar for understanding traumatic historical mourning as a phenomenological process that is inseparable from the wider geopolitical landscape

Humour at the Model United Nations: The role of laughter in constituting geopolitical assemblages

Model United Nations (MUN) is a simulation in which students take on the roles of ambassadors to the United Nations, engaging in debate on 'real' issues from the perspective of their assumed national identities. This paper, based on a year of ethnography and interviews of a college-level MUN team, examines the role of humour in producing particular geopolitical imaginations among those participating and also in producing the MUN assemblage itself. Key here is the circulation of affects among participants' bodies, producing an orientation among them that facilitates debate and consensus-building. This finding is seen as a corrective to past work on geopolitics and humour, which has tended to emphasise irony and satire, as well as mass-mediated humor. © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

A critical geopolitics of RAF recruitment

PhD ThesisThis PhD thesis investigates the geopolitics of Royal Air Force (RAF) recruitment practices. Set at the interface between military and civilian life, RAF recruitment represents an important site from which particular imaginations of the military are consumed, enacted and performed. Drawing primarily on critical geopolitical theory and military geography, along with more-than-representational approaches to popular culture, the thesis uncovers how RAF recruitment necessitates an understanding of, and participation within, certain military-political narratives and imaginaries. It shows that these imaginaries – variously associated with the role, utility and legitimacy of state-sanctioned military violence – are powerful in their ability to affect popular understandings of the military, and to affect certain bodily and material engagements within the immediate spaces of recruitment. Furthermore, with a specific focus on the RAF, it demonstrates how certain ideas around the role and utility of military airpower are represented, enacted and performed. The thesis approaches the geopolitics of RAF recruitment in three ways. Firstly, focussing on the representative tenets of recruitment, the thesis examines both the historical and contemporary design of recruiting texts, images and documents. Using a socio-historical analysis of recruiting images, and drawing upon interviews with the military and corporate producers of recruitment, it demonstrates how recruitment emerges from particular structures, knowledges and experiences. Secondly, focussing on the visualities of military public-relations, the thesis demonstrates how large-scale public and private events, such as military airshows, provide spaces in which military-political narratives and imaginaries are enacted in and through regimes of seeing and sighting. Based on ethnographic research at military airshows, the thesis works to uncover the ways in which techniques of vision at spectacular events tie the potential recruit into particular imaginations of military legitimacy, efficacy, heritage and power. Thirdly, the thesis examines how the more mundane, quotidian sites of RAF recruitment are powerful in their ability to affect bodily predispositions and material engagements. Focussing on RAF recruiting games, military fitness regimes and the material, ephemeral nature of the airshow in particular, the thesis provides an insight into why the material and bodily cultures of militarism matter, and how they work persuasively to entrain particular imaginations of military life and culture. x The thesis raises important questions about the presence of military narratives and imaginaries in the public, civilian sphere, and in popular culture in particular. Set at the interface between military and civilian life, RAF recruitment demonstrates how popular geopolitical discourses of the military sometimes work not only to script imaginations of military violence, but to affect, mark and alter civilian lives and futures.ESR

Playful Encounters: Games for Geopolitical Change

Bringing together literatures on play, (video) games, and alter- (native) geopolitics this paper explores how digital games offer playful encounters that challenge popular understandings of geopolitics. While geographical scholarship has exposed the ways video games promote geopolitical and militaristic cultures, this paper concentrates on the disruptive qualities of play. More specifically, the paper focuses on This War of Mine (2014), a game which fosters playful encounters that encourage the player to reflect on the everyday consequences of conflict in urban spaces and their civilian populations. Drawing on an analysis of player reviews of the game, this paper demonstrates how play shapes imaginaries of the geopolitical context(s) of urban conflict and stimulates players to reflect on their attitudes towards violence. In doing so, the paper critically demonstrates how digital games offer important cultural outlets in encountering alternative understandings of geopolitics

Hospitality relations and overlapping displacements in refugee camps (capes) in Lebanon

The ambiguous position of the Lebanese authorities towards the recognition of refugees and their formulation of the Syrian diaspora in de-politicised terms has produced a heterogeneous geography of dwelling and emplacement, where many displaced by the current Syrian conflict – including Palestinian, Iraqi and Kurdish refugees – have resorted to different informal strategies to cope with re-territorialisation in Lebanon. This dispersed refugee geography speaks to a pre-existing cartography of Palestinian refugee camps, whose complex social ecology and materiality are encapsulated by the spatial model of analysis of the campscape (Martin, 2015) and informed by Deleuzian assemblage theory. Through ethnographic research in the Palestinian refugee camp of Shatila (Beirut) and the collective creation of critical mapping accounts with residents of the camp, this thesis investigates Shatila’s residents’ understandings of the campscape as a collective space animated by a multiplicity of actors. By opening a fissure through the residents’ discourses on the micro- and macro-politics of the camp, it was possible to cast a light on local responses, refugee-led initiatives of hospitality, and sites of friction emerging from the overlapping of displaced groups. Thus, the dynamics of refugee host and refugee guest relations were illuminated as they are performed and reproduced, from the everyday encounters of the street to the institutional confrontations over refugee benefits’ eligibility. These sites of encounter and friction simultaneously highlight how refugees are not only victims of their exile but also resourceful agents producing alternative infrastructures in contexts of state withdrawal. Considering the complexity of agencies, meanings, and materials that inflect the relations moulding the irregular shapes of Shatila’s campscape enhances our understanding of refugee spaces and refugee relationships. It also forces us to question how economic and social relations of marginal urban places reformulate the sense of cityness through an interplay of subordination, resistance and alternativity that collective mapping experiences can harness, catalyse, and empower.posição ambígua das autoridades libanesas para o reconhecimento dos refugiados e sua formulação da diáspora síria em termos despolitizados produziu uma geografia heterogénea de habitação e "emplacement", onde muitos deslocados pelo atual conflito sírio - incluídos sírios, palestinos, iraquianos, e refugiados curdos - recorreram a diferentes estratégias informais para lidar com a reterritorialização no Líbano. Estas dispersas geografias de refugiados mantêm-se em diálogo com uma cartografia preexistente de campos de refugiados palestinos, cuja complexa ecologia social e materialidade são encapsuladas pelo modelo de análise espacial dos acampamentos (Martin, 2015) e elucidadas pela teoria deleuziana de "assemblage". Por meio da pesquisa etnográfica no campo de refugiados palestinos de Shatila (Beirute) e da criação coletiva de relatos críticos de mapeamento com os residentes do campo, esta tese investiga a compreensão dos residentes de Shatila sobre o acampamento como um espaço coletivo animado por uma multiplicidade de atores. Abrindo uma fissura nos discursos dos residentes sobre a micro e macropolítica do campo, foi possível emitir uma luz sobre as respostas locais, as iniciativas de hospitalidade lideradas por refugiados e os sítios de atrito emergentes da sobreposição dos grupos deslocados. Portanto, a dinâmica das relações entre o hospedeiro dos refugiados e o refugiado hóspede foram iluminadas à medida que foram realizadas e reproduzidas, desde os encontros diários na rua aos confrontos institucionais sobre a elegibilidade para os benefícios dos refugiados. Esses locais de encontro e atrito destacam simultaneamente como os refugiados não são apenas vítimas de seu exílio, mas também agentes hábeis em recursos que produzem infraestruturas alternativas em contextos de ausência do Estado. A estrutura do trabalho é desenvolvida da seguinte forma. A introdução delineia o objetivo da pesquisa de investigar a micropolítica da hospitalidade no campo de refugiados de Shatila, onde a sobreposição de deslocamentos construiu uma mistura heterogénea de populações e como as relações entre as diferentes comunidades do campo de refugiados se expressam territorialmente. Posteriormente, apresento uma revisão exaustiva da literatura que começa com a exposição dos debates acadêmicos sobre a noção de "agentful refugee", onde é contestada a formulação dos refugiados como indivíduos sem raízes, estranhos às nações hospedeiras e debilmente vulneráveis às suas políticas de migração.A teoria deleuziana sobre a “Assemblage” expande a compreensão da experiência de deslocamento como um complexo e estratificação de elementos tangíveis e de experiências vividas. Segue uma discussão sobre o espaço conceitual e físico do campo de refugiados, mais do que dos dispositivos espaciais de contenção e em espera pela solução da condição de exilado refugiado. Sugere-se que os acampamentos são espaços cujas fronteiras são porosas e cuja temporalidade suspensa é tensa pelo prolongamento da situação dos refugiados, o que permite aos residentes apropriar-se e a transformar o acampamento num espaço familiar e doméstico. Isso, por sua vez, gera um espaço de tipo cidade em contínua transformação, cuja expansão é muitas vezes facilitada pelo recuo do papel do Estado na provisão de recursos para lugares marginais, e onde a descontinuidade com o seu entorno urbano é principalmente a sua forma legal. A revisão da literatura finaliza com a revisão do conceito de hospitalidade no contexto de recursos escassos, onde a ativação de redes informais de apoio, cuidado e dinamismo econômico são trazidas pelas noções de infraestrutura migrante e de economia de transação. O terceiro capítulo sobre a abordagem do trabalho de pesquisa fornece uma contextualização histórica do deslocamento de sírios ao Líbano, um estado socialmente fragmentado por uma configuração política baseada no sectarismo religioso que esteve estado na raíz das guerras civis libanesas entre o período de 1975 e 1990. O trauma do conflito afeta a política do país e permite perceber as políticas de migração libanesa sobre a diáspora síria, e gerou para eles as condições de entrada em campos de refugiados palestinos como Shatila. Segue uma breve história do campo de Shatila, desde seu estabelecimento, durante os anos de militância palestina e liderança da Organização de Libertação da Palestina, o trágico massacre durante os anos da guerra e os anos de reconstrução quando a população se diversificou devido à chegada principalmente da migração econômica regional. O capítulo também apresenta considerações sobre a abordagem metodológica - uma corroboração de "counter cartographies" e métodos etnográficos - a observação participante e as entrevistas ganham maior profundidade por meio dos relatos cartográficos de Shatila produzidos por alguns dos participantes. O capítulo sobre a discussão dos resultados é dividido em três seções. A primeira seção aborda o perfil intersetorial dos residentes do campo, as posições políticas multifacetadas e suas ambições migratórias. Uma distinção surge entre as pessoas deslocadas da Síria que desejam voltar para seu país de origem assim que a situação permitir; moradores de campos de diferentes identidades nacionais que não têm os recursos para estar em nenhum outro lugar; residentes do campo que se engajaram em se estabelecer em Shatila porque significava a realização de aspirações pessoais; e residentes do campo cuja elegibilidade para o lugar foi procurar o reassentamento em mais outro terceiro país (embora raramente realizado) está na raiz de sentimentos discriminatórios e contrastes políticos no campo. A compreensão da pluralidade de propriedades que constituem o perfil dos moradores de Shatila esclarece a apropriação do ato de esperar por se tornar num esforço para administrar suas vidas. A segunda seção preocupa-se com a noção de hospitalidade e desemaranha as redes de infraestruturas informais de cuidado que, por sua forma irregular, pela espontaneidade de sua formação e alcance microscópico de ação, compõem um mosaico de infraestruturas migrantes não explicadas por medidas de atividade humanitária oficial. A análise da seção articula-se em torno de seis temas que emergiram das entrevistas como pontos focais para a mobilização e alocação de recursos materiais e sociais. A terceira seção envolve a forma física do espaço, desvelando no processo de formação e configuração não apenas vestígios do desenvolvimento arquitetónico de estruturas de tipo cidade e de espaços feitos de materiais duradouros como o cimento que contradizem a temporariedade da condição de refugiado. Mas também a afirmação de significados simbólicos, políticos e biográficos entrincheirados com as formas geométricas do espaço para marcar territórios, para fundamentar a extensão dos agenciamentos pessoais, para negociar presença e visibilidade. A seção examina três tipos de espaço - as fronteiras do acampamento, as ruas e a casa - para mapear a ecologia do acampamento e sua disseminação territorial. A tese conclui considerando que apesar da privação de infraestruturas oficiais e da marginalização manufaturada de suas populações, Shatila é uma paisagem de acampamento feita de uma arquitetura aparentemente inconsistente que uma vez analisada aponta para a capacidade "agentful" de seus residentes para transformá-la numa infraestrutura polivalente, polimorfa e compartilhada. A economia interna desenvolvida foi e continua sendo atraente para pessoas com meios limitados de alcançar seus meios de subsistência, ela simbolicamente reforça a resiliência das populações de refugiados para suportar condições difíceis enquanto esperam para "voltar para casa", e se vale da capacidade da sua "assemblage" para ajustar-se com flexibilidade à presença transitória, influência e meios das pessoas marginalizadas que o animam. Finalmente, considerar a complexidade das agências, significados e materiais que modificam as relações que moldam as formas irregulares do acampamento de Shatila expande a compreensão dos espaços e das relações dos refugiados. Também nos força a questionar como as relações económicas e sociais de lugares urbanos marginais reformulam o sentido de cidade por meio de uma interação de subordinação, resistência e alternatividade que as experiências coletivas de mapeamento podem aproveitar, catalisar e dar capacidades que os empoderam

(Re)Placing America: Cold War Mapping and the Mediation of International Space

The United States emerged from World War II as an undeniably global power, and as the Cold War unfolded, America faced decisions about where to place and display its power on the globe. The Cold War was a battle between two ideologies and competing world systems, both of which were vying for space and had the tools and technologies to control those spaces. Maps became a central vehicle for the testing of these new boundaries. Mapping projects and programs emerged from a variety of popular cartographers, foreign policy strategists, defense leaders, Congressional representatives, scientists, oppositional movements, labor unions, educational publishers, even everyday citizens. As each of these sources confirms, the scope of American commitments had expanded considerably; to account for this expansion, a cartographic impulse underwrote the continually evolving Cold War, and the tensions of art and science, realism and idealism, and space and place inherent in this impulse helped form the fault lines of the conflict. (Re)Placing America looks largely at the ways that cartography adapted to such changes and tensions in the second half of the twentieth century, and how the United States marshaled the practice of mapping in a variety of ways to account for the shift to internationalism. This dissertation explores how cartography mediated visions of space, and particularly, how it defined America's place within those spaces. Treating cartography as a complex rhetorical process of production, display, and circulation, the five chapters cover major geopolitical thematics, and the responding evolution of maps, from World War II until the Cold War's end in the early 1990s. Some of these driving themes include the "air-age" expansion of visual perspectives and strategic potential in journalistic maps; the appropriation of cartography as a medium for intelligence and national security objectives; the marshaling of maps as evidential weapons against the Soviet Union in diplomatic exchanges, Congressional reports, and government-sponsored propaganda; the shifts from East/West antagonisms to North/South ones as cartography was drafted into the modernization efforts of the U.S. in mapping the Third World; and the Defense Department's use of maps to argue for nuclear deterrence, while protest groups made radical cartographic challenges to these practices of state power. (Re)Placing America reads closely the maps of the forty-years-plus conflict and considers the complexity of their internal codes (in colors, shapes, icons, etc.), while also reaching out externally to the intersecting interests and visions of the cartographic producers and the Cold War contexts in which they emerged. The project seeks out and explores particular nodal points and thematics where maps consolidated and shaped changing shifts in perception, where cartographic fragments cohered around the defining moments, but also sometimes in the everyday politics of the Cold War. Ultimately, this project offers four conclusions about and conduct and operation of American mapping during the complex, ideologically charged time of the Cold War. First, the function of the map to both "fix" and "unfix" particular perceptions of the world is relevant to assessing how America sought to stabilize its place in a rapidly changing world. Second, the internationalism of the Cold War was bound up in the capacities for cartography to document and adapt to it. Third, the humanistic notion of a geographical imagination is central to understanding why particular Cold War agents and institutions continually drew on cartography to represent their interests. Finally, combining an ideological approach to reading maps as articulators of contextual tensions and historical ideas with an instrumental approach to maps as material, strategic documents can best help to situate cartography as an ongoing process of production, circulation, and display

Cyberspace As/And Space

The appropriate role of place- and space-based metaphors for the Internet and its constituent nodes and networks is hotly contested. This essay seeks to provoke critical reflection on the implications of place- and space-based theories of cyberspace for the ongoing production of networked space more generally. It argues, first, that adherents of the cyberspace metaphor have been insufficiently sensitive to the ways in which theories of cyberspace as space themselves function as acts of social construction. Specifically, the leading theories all have deployed the metaphoric construct of cyberspace to situate cyberspace, explicitly or implicitly, as separate space. This denies all of the ways in which cyberspace operates as both extension and evolution of everyday spatial practice. Next, it argues that critics of the cyberspace metaphor have confused two senses of space and two senses of metaphor. The cyberspace metaphor does not refer to abstract, Cartesian space, but instead expresses an experienced spatiality mediated by embodied human cognition. Cyberspace in this sense is relative, mutable, and constituted via the interactions among practice, conceptualization, and representation. The insights drawn from this exercise suggest a very different way of understanding both the spatiality of cyberspace and its architectural and regulatory challenges. In particular, they suggest closer attention to three ongoing shifts: the emergence of a new sense of social space, which the author calls networked space; the interpenetration of embodied, formerly bounded space by networked space; and the ways in which these developments alter, instantiate, and disrupt geographies of power