Infrastructured bodies: Between violence and fugitivity

This article traces the trajectory of critical geographical scholarship on the body’s intertwinement with infrastructure systems. In doing so, it argues that although the body is not ontologically infrastructure, it can nevertheless enable infrastructure’s functioning – whether by being made into infrastructure of surplus value production or by suturing widening gaps in sub-optimal infrastructure systems. Analysing these dynamics, the article theorises the body as infrastructured – given over to the violence of capital and its infrastructures that subject specifically gendered, racialised, and classed bodies to surplus value extraction and/or abandonment; but also as simultaneously fleeting in its irreversible exposure to this violence

Austerity: An environmentally dangerous idea

The article examines austerity as a policy and practice that is dangerous not only for human societies and economies, but also for more-than-human ecologies and lives. Often presented as an economic tool that can 'fix' an economic crisis, austerity nevertheless carries serious environmental consequences which are not systematically documented or theorized. Here, we sketch a political ecology agenda for understanding austerity as environmental politics, focusing on three facets. First, austerity as justification for intensifying environmental destruction in the name of economic recovery. Second, austerity as a catalyst for increasing socio-environmental inequality, exacerbating colonial extractivism, and complexifying North/South binaries. Third, austerity as a socio-environmental condition that can kindle innovative environmental protection movements; but can also exacerbate climate denialism and new forms of 'othering.' The framework we offer here is pertinent at the aftermath of consecutive economic, pandemic, and inflation-induced austerity periods, when aggressive pro-growth agendas fast become normalized as prime recovery strategies. <br/