The Geo-biographies of Spatial Knowledge: Regional Planning from Israel to Sierra Leone and Back

This article examines the flow of spatial knowledge in different locations and territorial scales, focusing on the geographies of regional planning and its transplantation in the work of two Israeli planners, Arie and Ursula Oelsner. We argue that too often, researchers focus on the movement of spatial knowledge from Western countries to developing countries. We shed light on alternative ways in which this traffic follows different models, that are related to specific political and national constellations. Based on historical study and a thick description of two projects in Israel and Africa planned by these two Israeli planners, we show that spatial knowledge is not only the generator of discourse and of the professional community partaking in it, but also traverses space, crossing national borders and geographies. This dynamic, we suggest, has a politics of its own, as part of its movement and development within the global space, particularly in the movement between first and third worlds

Technopolitics, Development and the Colonial-Postcolonial Nexus: Revisiting Settlements Development Aid from Israel to Africa

This article focuses on the interrelationship between colonial development in Israel and the export of knowledge and practices to Africa. We argue that at the core of the Israeli aid project to Africa is the Cold War and the global technopolitics of this era, that is, the use of technological methods and practices to achieve political ends. The main question to be discussed throughout this article is whether the Zionist settlement enterprise and its ‘export’ to Africa is not only a unique historical event but rather is part of the global imperial debate. We point to the way in which the technopolitics of development in Israel is directly related to the concepts prevalent in the country during the period under discussion in several interrelated ways. First, it was embedded in an Orientalist discourse in which the ‘backward native’ becomes a consumer of modern technologies migrating from a territory where knowledge is produced to the territories that consume its products. Second, the view of Africa was part of a wider epistemological system in which orientalism was also ‘inward’ both toward the Jewish Mizrahi population and to the Palestinian population

Gender and sexuality I: Genderqueer geographies?

This review considers gender diversity across a range of spaces and places. I note that while the notion of gender has been troubled, there exists opportunities to trouble it further. I highlight the scholarship that has sought to deconstruct genders, and the binary framing of man/woman and male/female roles and relationships. The queering of sexuality has meant that geographers are now tracing the ways in which lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer (LGBTIQ) bodies experience and live their gender beyond normative binaries. Research concerned with relational gendered subjectivities within LGBTIQ communities is discussed, and I flag the trend that this research may conflate gendered experiences while privileging sexual subjectivities. Finally, I turn to the recent interest by geographers who - drawing on queer and trans* theories - argue for new and innovative understandings of gender diversity