The Routledge Companion to Urban Imaginaries

One of the most pressing challenges in the world today is access to clean water. This chapter explores the crises of contaminated water in Flint, water shutoffs in Detroit, and larger questions about the control of water by private corporations and the changing nature of urbanization. As neoliberal policies seek to privatize infrastructure and essential resources, the resulting crises illustrate the disastrous results of decisions driven by profit rather than the public good and demonstrate the need for a rethinking of the urban imaginary to produce a radically democratic, anticapitalist form of global urbanization

The Migrant Image: The Fear of "Replacement" and the Resurgence of White Nationalism

Barack Obama oversaw an increase in the apprehension and deportation of almost three million undocumented immigrants, more than any other president so far. In 2016, Donald Trump was elected president after repeatedly calling migrants “drug dealers,” “rapists,” and “criminals,” even though evidence shows that immigration correlates with lower crime rates. One of Trump’s first acts in office was the attempt to ban immigrants from seven majority-Muslim countries. He further opposed immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador, and certain countries in Africa he called “shithole countries” while promoting immigration from places like Norway, an undisguised appeal to white supremacism and “racial purity.” Indeed, Trump has called migrants “animals” who are “invading” the country or suggested they will “infest” the US, using language reminiscent of the Nazi designation of “vermin” for the Jews. The advance notice gave immigrant advocates time to counsel families about their rights, which included not opening the door or answering questions, and on social media

On Looking: Lynching Photographs and Legacies of Lynching after 9/11

On looking at lynching photograph

Just Joking? Chimps, Obama and Racial Stereotype

Public racist stereotypes after the election of Barack Obam

"Heroes" and "Whores": The Politics of Gender in Weimar Antiwar Imagery

Weimar antimilitarist imagery shows that ideals of manliness and maternity, concepts central to the German patriotic view of World War I, were not limited to use by the political right but were redefined and deployed by antiwar artists Otto Dix and Käthe Kollwitz, and in photographs published by the pacifist propagandist Ernst Friedrich, who exhibited images by all three in his International Antiwar Museum in Berlin in 1924. These gendered representations of war, while throwing into question the straightforward "progressiveness" of antiwar visual imagery, reveal the relationship between gendered identity, militarism, and patriarchal capitalism

Cultural Battlegrounds: Weimar Photographic Narratives of War

On pacifist and patriotic visual imagery and the tenth anniversary of the First World War in Weimar Germa

Torture Culture: Lynching Photographs and the Images of Abu Ghraib

On the photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the visual politics of powe

The Auschwitz Memorial Museum and the Case of the Gypsy Portraits

A unique dispute over ownership rights to artwork in the case of the Auschwitz Memorial Museum vs. former camp prisoner Dinah Gottliebova Babbitt illuminates underlying moral questions about the Holocaust and post-Holocaust culture

Diego Rivera and the Left: The Destruction and Recreation of the Rockefeller Center Mural

The politics of Rivera's RCA mural in New York City

Technologies of War, Media, and Dissent in the Post 9/11 Work of Krzysztof Wodiczko

On the work of Krzysztof Wodiczk