Leading Change: Reproductive Rights, Empowerment and Feminist Solidarity in the Dublin Bay North Repeal the 8th Campaign

This article examines how the Dublin Bay North (DBN) Repeal the 8th activist group, an independent women-led, grassroots movement in the largest constituency in Ireland, practiced a collectivist approach to forms of ‘power-with’ and ‘power-to’ (Allen, 2018) that enabled the group to create an activist community based upon a feminist ethics of ‘caring-with’ (Tronto, 1993). In 2018 in Dublin, what had been a narrow majority in 1983 against abortion rights became a decisive 3:1 margin in favour. While this remarkable change can be attributed to the efforts of numerous feminist and reproductive rights activists working for many years, including those tied to the national Together for Yes campaign, less attention has been paid to new activist leaders participating at the grassroots level. This article focuses on the leadership roles adopted by first-time grassroots activists who became ‘team leaders’ and ran decentralised campaigns in their neighbourhoods. Using qualitative analyses of a survey of 125 members (June 2018), 16 semi-structured interviews with DBN team leaders and other key people within the campaign (October 2018 and March 2019), and the authors’ own experiences, we consider how new activists recruited and empowered others to tell their stories, canvass, and lead their own actions

Critical geopolitics/critical geopolitics 25 years on

Gerard Toal’s/Gearoid ´ O ´ Tuathail’s Critical Geopolitics was published in 1996 in the University of Minnesota’s book series on borderlines, a series described as one concerned with the task of revisioning global politics. It was entirely appropriate that he was the first geographer to contribute to this series given his role in what was then the nascent field of critical geopolitics. In its pages he launched a trenchant critique of the representational practices of international politics that mapped global space. The book subjected the taken-for-granted geographical specifications of power and territory to critical review from a wide range of theoretical perspectives all designed to render strange the geographical constructions of the world map

A Queer New York: Geographies of Lesbians, Dykes, and Queers; The City We Became

People inhabit many temporalities. There is a “somatic time” (Danon 2018) framed by bodily develop�ment and by elective surgical and pharmaceutical technologies; we live, we are changed, we die. There are also the social times of shared contexts, often flattened when understood as a singular history. Beyond these, some understand their own biography as containing such a weighty caesura that with hindsight there is the time before, and the different time beyond. Coming out, for example, is a fulcrum of many gay, lesbian, and queer narratives, and people date a new life and identity back to that moment (Gorman-Murray 2008; Lewis 2012; Saxey 2008

Topple the racists 2: decolonising the space and the institutional memory of geography

In this, the second of two linked articles, I move from efforts to address the colonial legacy of our public spaces to consider the colonial marking of the spaces and institutional memory of the discipline of geography. I use the work and legacy of Halford Mackinder as exemplary of some of these colonial affiliations. By the standards of his time, Mackinder was an enthusiastic imperialist and a resolute racist. He believed that humanity comprised superior and inferior peoples and that the best of the former should use force to defend its global hegemony. When Mackinder’s intellectual legacy is invoked it is all too often in order to promote a similarly bellicose colonialism as with the geopolitical imagination of Robert Kaplan. In his own practice of geographical adventuring, Mackinder himself set Black lives far below his own pursuit of geographical glory and those who vaunt his reputation in the spaces of the academy, burnish a glory that was most cruelly won