20 recommended LGBTQ+ books for Pride Month 2021

For Pride Month 2021, this list brings together a tremendous breadth of LGBTQ+ readings in terms of topical, disciplinary and geographical scope. Most works included here are recent contributions from the social sciences and cultural critique that range from in-depth research-based monographs treating a particular question in great empirical detail (e.g. Carla A. Pfeffer, 2017) to compendia of shorter interventions offering plural insights onto LGBTQ+ lives, struggles and joys (e.g. Michael J. Bosnia et al, 2020)

On not being Dubai: infrastructures of urban cultural policy in Istanbul & Beirut

This paper compares how Istanbul and Beirut both attempt to underline their cultural and developmental uniqueness today in contrast to a metonymic menace — Dubai, standing in for spectacular yet supposedly culture-less Gulf cities. Even amid their own speculative construction frenzies that threaten local heritage, Turkish and Lebanese city-shapers assert theirs are “real” cities because they have “civilization” and “history.” By addressing their own efforts to build, defend, or oppose physical infrastructures related to local urban culture, Istanbullus and Beirutis rely on and reassert strategic, phatic discourses that frequently reference Gulf cities as counterpoint. Analysis focuses on how each city crafts a distinctive urban profile via civilizational appeals to historic senses of culture, inflecting infrastructural developments related to bridging (Istanbul) and bordering (Beirut). Historical truisms are deployed with marked flexibility to showcase these cities as “not Dubai.” This study offers lessons on the particular worlding of Middle Eastern cities and the role of discourses in the material-symbolic infrastructure of implicit urban cultural policy

Clashing power-geometries: geographic thought and the transformation of centrality in Caracas

Contributing to inquiries into the geographies of theory, this article examines the vicissitudes of creating a “new power-geometry” in the urban environment through physical and social interventions in the center of Caracas, Venezuela, where the state elevated Doreen Massey’s axiomatic geographical concept into its revolutionary (“Bolivarian”) program in the late 2000s. Although not formulated for direct practical application, Massey’s notion was embraced by Hugo Chávez to enact measures and promote popular initiatives that would replace inherited structures of deep inequality in Venezuelan society. Focusing on the urban scale, the paper draws on fieldwork in the capital that surveyed Bolivarian projects of placemaking to show how power-geometry was invoked as part of a new urban agenda intended to be both radical and popular (“of the people,” in Spanish). This is not, however, a straightforward utopian project; it is tied up with competing interests and clashes with the Caraqueño landscape constructed under earlier regimes with priorities and economic scenarios that were vastly different. There are also clashes with emergent, competing visions (alternative – sometimes reactionary – power-geometries) at odds with Bolivarian policy and practice. By focusing on new social housing in central Caracas as part of the Great Venezuela Housing Mission [Gran Misión Vivienda Venezuela], the article highlights the intractable ways bricksand-mortar interventions are caught up in clashing power-geometries, creating environments that transform centrality but illuminate the quandaries of applying critical geographical thought in policy, and the limits of revolutionizing the city – a project that has been prominent in numerous, politically dissimilar Latin American cases

A very Nordic set of concerns? Visionary circumspection & theoretical conversations with the rest of the world

This article identifies visionary circumspection as a conceptual vector running through Nordic urban research – a diverse enterprise with robust empirical outputs, but relatively little premium placed on the generation of urban theory. To foster new cross-regional conversations that can bolster the theoretical fecundity of Nordic urban studies, the author overviews key themes in the region’s urban research portfolio – well-being, diversification and socio-spatial transformations, governance and development models, and sustainable futures – and then delineates sites in other world regions that are grappling with related topics but sometimes with different approaches or conceptualizations. By situating Nordic urban research vis-à-vis these disparate sites and theoretical repertoires, the article aims to leverage Nordic self-regard and open up discussions that could enable more ambitious theoretical engagements between the region’s cities and the rest of the world

Peril, privilege, and queer comforts: the nocturnal performative geographies of expatriate gay men in Dubai

This article investigates the intersection of expatriate experiences, queer men's lives, and nocturnal geographies within the transnational Middle Eastern setting of Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE). Although narrowly focused on cisgender men who self-identify as “Western” and “gay,” the study addresses a lack of research about LGBT+ presence among expatriates globally, and poor coverage of queer residents in Gulf cities generally. Using ethnography and in-depth interviews among this segment of men who have come to Dubai to work in relatively privileged professional roles for at least two years, we illuminate the shifting, performative geographies of queer belonging in which these men engage to distinguish spaces that can be embodied in different moments with degrees of comfort and caution. Despite their imperiled position in an officially homophobic territory, these men use their various privileges (economic, social, cultural, and sometimes phenotypic) to counter peril in performing transnational identities that reaffirm their own senses of self (as gay), forge new collectivities (as Western), and distinguish themselves from others deemed suspect (potentially anyone “non-Western”). Findings point to the uneasy dynamics of inclusion/exclusion in this kind of unfixed gay nightlife geography, and the need to study queer expatriates in other world settings, as well as queer lives in Gulf cities more broadly, from a further intersectional perspective: beyond nocturnal geographies, and encompassing the range of queer denizens, not just this relatively privileged subset

Diagnostic accuracy of a three-gene Mycobacterium tuberculosis host response cartridge using fingerstick blood for childhood tuberculosis: a multicentre prospective study in low-income and middle-income countries

BACKGROUND: Childhood tuberculosis remains a major cause of morbidity and mortality in part due to missed diagnosis. Diagnostic methods with enhanced sensitivity using easy-to-obtain specimens are needed. We aimed to assess the diagnostic accuracy of the Cepheid Mycobacterium tuberculosis Host Response prototype cartridge (MTB-HR), a candidate test measuring a three-gene transcriptomic signature from fingerstick blood, in children with presumptive tuberculosis disease. METHODS: RaPaed-TB was a prospective diagnostic accuracy study conducted at four sites in African countries (Malawi, Mozambique, South Africa, and Tanzania) and one site in India. Children younger than 15 years with presumptive pulmonary or extrapulmonary tuberculosis were enrolled between Jan 21, 2019, and June 30, 2021. MTB-HR was performed at baseline and at 1 month in all children and was repeated at 3 months and 6 months in children on tuberculosis treatment. Accuracy was compared with tuberculosis status based on standardised microbiological, radiological, and clinical data. FINDINGS: 5313 potentially eligible children were screened, of whom 975 were eligible. 784 children had MTB-HR test results, of whom 639 had a diagnostic classification and were included in the analysis. MTB-HR differentiated children with culture-confirmed tuberculosis from those with unlikely tuberculosis with a sensitivity of 59·8% (95% CI 50·8–68·4). Using any microbiological confirmation (culture, Xpert MTB/RIF Ultra, or both), sensitivity was 41·6% (34·7–48·7), and using a composite clinical reference standard, sensitivity was 29·6% (25·4–34·2). Specificity for all three reference standards was 90·3% (95% CI 85·5–94·0). Performance was similar in different age groups and by malnutrition status. Among children living with HIV, accuracy against the strict reference standard tended to be lower (sensitivity 50·0%, 15·7–84·3) compared with those without HIV (61·0%, 51·6–69·9), although the difference did not reach statistical significance. Combining baseline MTB-HR result with one Ultra result identified 71·2% of children with microbiologically confirmed tuberculosis. INTERPRETATION: MTB-HR showed promising diagnostic accuracy for culture-confirmed tuberculosis in this large, geographically diverse, paediatric cohort and hard-to-diagnose subgroups. FUNDING: European and Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership, UK Medical Research Council, Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung; German Center for Infection Research (DZIF)

Techniques of absence in participatory budgeting: space, difference and governmentality across Buenos Aires

Techniques of absence describe some of the potentially anti-deliberative practices that haunt recently widespread participation-based governance schemes. Techniques of absence remove certain kinds of people – on a spatialised basis – from crucial ‘democratic’ conversations. To illustrate these, I use ethnographic accounts from the implementation of a citywide participatory budgeting programme in three neighbourhoods across Buenos Aires, Argentina, modelled after the vaunted budgeting process pioneered in Porto Alegre, Brazil since 1989. I position absencing as part of an emergent urban governmentality related to participation. This allows for an analysis of the Buenos Aires participatory budget across very different areas of the city: Puerto Madero, Abasto, and La Boca. Discussion centres on dynamics of participation and non-participation observed during extensive fieldwork in 2004 and 2005. The research aimed to establish intense co-presence through participant-observation, yet instead yielded an ethnography of absences, entailing analysis of how, why and with what consequences there was lacking participation in this participatory experiment. The phenomenon of absencing points to an emergent governmentality that enables ironically pernicious, territorialised regulation of difference, which must be countered to fulfil the promise of such widespread experiments

Distinguishing the right kind of city: contentious urban middle classes in Argentina, Brazil, and Turkey

Despite the fact that virtually all urban growth is occurring, and will continue to occur, in the cities of the Global South, the conceptual tools used to study cities are distilled disproportionately from research on the highly developed cities of the Global North. With urban inequality widely recognized as central to many of the most pressing challenges facing the world, there is a need for a deeper understanding of cities of the South on their own terms..

Imaginative, extroverted Havana

Exploring an ever-dynamic, often-struggling city

Spatializing distinction in cities of the global south: volatile terrains of morality and citizenship

Davis's tentative postulation about the subjecthood of the new middle class is appropriate, as there is a wide variety of definitions given to this group across different national and local contexts. She underlines the importance of rejecting “essentialist arguments about so-called middle class culture and its role in economic development, seeking instead to identify differences among the middle classes (emphasis in original),” further asserting that there is not “some essential cultural or political disposition about class politics or class discourses associated with middle ‘classness.’” But beyond attempting to enumerate exactly who counts as middle class in each setting, and determining whether they are best described as “old” or “new” in their character as political subjects, we must recognize that there are indeed social and cultural attributes ascribed to the middle class that are also a matter of contention, and that there is no single proprietor of these features. In other words, middleclassness is a contested ensemble of characteristics, endowed with variable political valences, that different groups seek to own, manipulate, and deploy to a range of ends