The arterial border: negotiating economies of risk and violence in Mexico's security regime

This article examines the material and ideological dimensions of what I conceptualise as Mexico's 'arterial border'. Since the late 1980s, transit routes in Mexico's interior have increasingly become sites of a diffused migration enforcement strategy. Based on long-term ethnographic research along Central American transit routes, I examine how the arterial border has developed historically and is experienced by migrants in local contexts. I pay particular attention to the disjuncture between violent encounters with the state and discourses of security, human rights and humanitarianism that serve to legitimise bordering practices. Such an analysis moves beyond understandings of borders as spatially fixed entities to reimagine them as constantly shifting and dynamic sites of state violence, individual agency and contestation

Examining Eschatologies of Glory and the Eschatology of the Cross in A Theology of Hope and A Fire in My Belly

This paper utilizes the theological framework developed in Jūrgen Moltmann\u27s A Theology of Hope to examine David Wojnarowicz\u27s film, A Fire in My Belly. Moltmann\u27s work criticizes eschatologies of glory that can be seen when the church emphasizes heavenly salvation at the expense of earthly life. Instead, Moltmann poses the eschatology of the cross that leads the believer to hope for God\u27s transformation of the earth on which the cross stands and sends the believer back to struggle in the world. Using these theological categories, this paper examines Wojnarowicz\u27s film. The footage from A Fire in My Belly contains themes of colonization, poverty, HIV/AIDS, church, and sexuality. The film juxtaposes images of poverty, suffering, and silence with images that symbolize wealth, power, and indifference. Through this juxtaposition, Wojnarowicz vividly depicts Moltmann\u27s eschatology of glory. When Moltmann\u27s theology is applied to Wojnarowicz\u27s film, it strengthens the film\u27s critique of society\u27s and the church\u27s silence, exclusion, stigmatization, and maintenance of hierarchical structures. This paper concludes that because Wojnarowicz\u27s film speaks to numerous concrete situations of oppression – of persons living with HIV/AIDS, the poor, queer persons, persons from the two-thirds world, and differently-abled persons – it makes a stronger and more precise critique of the ways in which Moltmann\u27s theological categories operate than Moltmann makes himself and demonstrates how Moltmann\u27s theology, in its failure to speak to earthly suffering, fails to be the eschatology of the cross that Moltmann poses

Beyond the Boom: Ensuring Adequate Payment for Mineral Wealth Extraction

Examines Ohio's severance tax rate and receipts on gas and oil extraction compared with other states, oil and gas production's costs to the state, and potential impact of a higher tax. Recommends raising the tax and creating a severance tax trust fund