Locais desativados: ruínas, resistência e cuidado no final da primeira era nuclear

This is the final version. Available on open access from the Núcleo de Antropologia Urbana da Universidade de São Paulo via the DOI in this recordEste artigo advoga por uma geografia dos lugares desindustrializados como espaços de habitação e de persistência, ao invés de uma que se baseia em narrativas de progresso, declínio e ruína. Há muito as ruínas constituem uma questão para os geógrafos, embora as reminiscências materiais dos grandes esquemas da modernidade acabem facilmente endossando formas de perceber e de compreender lugares desindustrializados ao ponto de apagarem as práticas através das quais vidas e mundos são construídos no presente. A partir de trabalho de campo realizado na cidade de Visaginas, ex-atomgrad soviética na Lituânia, o artigo tanto reconhece quanto resiste aos apelos da ruína. Afastando-se das temporalidades da ruína que implicam progresso e declínio, oferece uma análise das práticas e modos de habitação em cursos em lugares definidos pelo arruinamento. Uma compreensão reflexiva de nosso papel contaminado no processo de fazer sentido de tais lugares nos permite, ao mesmo tempo, tanto nos encantar pelas grandes narrativas de hubris e de declínio quanto ver outras histórias – histórias de perseverança, de persistência, de viver em lugares enquadrados como sem futuro por regimes políticos e econômicos. Nesse sentido, o artigo oferece uma geografia alternativa dos lugares que são descomissionados a partir de cima, atentando para o cuidado, compromissos, práticas criativas e projetos estéticos por meio das quais seus habitantes seguem vivendo. Engajando essa abordagem através de uma série de pequenas histórias baseadas em trabalho de campo etnográfico e colaborativo com dois fotógrafos em Visaginas, postulo que as reminiscências materiais e subjetivas dos sonhos da primeira era nuclear engendram formas emergentes de vida que excedem as narrativas de progresso e declínio. As ruínas da modernidade nuclear soviética operam aqui como recipientes para práticas de persistência e de perseverança em meio às mudanças de relações de poder e capital, ao invés de serem objetos de perda melancólica; e também como matérias-primas por meio das quais forjam-se novas formas de viver em espaços tidos como desnecessários

Dramatising deindustrialisation: experiential authority, temporality and embodiment in a play about nuclear decommissioning

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Routledge via the DOI in this recordThe play Green Meadow is a participatory theatre production exploring how the residents of the Lithuanian nuclear town of Visaginas experience the nearby Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant’s decommissioning. In this chapter I discuss how the theatre production, and my own ethnographic research in the town, challenge dominant ways of knowing and representing postindustrial spaces that are rooted in tropes of melancholic loss and spectacular decay, focusing instead on community transition and endurance, and on how lives are made liveable in the present. By dramatising and personalising the politics of energy transition, the play foregrounds the experiential and community effects of wider economic and political processes. Playing with scale and temporality, it moves between singular events and longue durée histories, meshing the affective present with geological time. Drawing on script excerpts and fieldwork in Visaginas, the chapter demonstrates how participatory theatre can generate experiential authority, giving voice to those whose everyday lives, memories, and hopes for the future and are shaped by their relation to the decommissioning plant and contributing to wider debates on affect, community and deindustrialisation

The multiple temporalities of infrastructure: Atomic cities and the memory of lost futures

This is the final version. Available on open access from SAGE via the DOI in this recordNuclear power plants, with their promise of boundless cheap energy, are archetypal figures of progress modernity. As we acknowledge the limits of industrial progress and growth-based capital, places for where the dream is now over, and whose inhabitants are finding ways of living through its transition, offer emergent practical ontologies based on maintenance, bricolage and necessity. Through the case study of the atomic city of Visaginas, Lithuania, this paper addresses the question of how to account for forms of life that emerge in the aftermath of high modernity. Here, infrastructures operate as residual cultural and material resources for practical ontologies and world building after progress. Building on emerging scholarship on the political aesthetics of infrastructure, I suggest that their ontological transition involves what Fisher describes as the ‘memory of lost futures’, a future anterior that, through the remains of material connections, technocultures and cultural memory, provide limits and conditions for emergent ways of living ‘after progress.’Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC

The intimate spaces of debt: Love, freedom and entanglement in indebted lives

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Elsevier via the DOI in this recordIn the context of a perfect storm of measures – welfare reform, precarious work, stagnating wages – increasing numbers of households find themselves in complex webs of debt. This paper addresses the lived experience of debt in the UK, tracing some affective contours of indebtedness that are often overlooked in debt research. Focusing on domestic settings and emotional routines, the paper explores how the everyday experience of indebted life seeps into relationships, frames life projects, and mediates hopes for one's children. The paper argues that the affective architecture of debt operates just as much through moments of intensity – the letter of default, the pressure cooker of an advice session – as through a background hum in which individuals are engaged in ongoing practices of self-assessment, despair, desire and satisfaction. Drawing on in-depth interviews with indebted subjects, this paper investigates contemporary financial subjectivities through such forms of affective modulation that “run in the background”. In addition to those moments of intensity, it argues that indebted lives are composed through low-level affective states that include hypervigilance, dissociation and anxiety. It examines the deep entanglements of people, technologies and objects that produce these affective states, highlighting relations of obligation and codependency, and the forms of vigilance and anxiety these relations create. In doing so, the paper troubles understandings of debt as a binary relationship between creditor and debtor and argues for a perspective that considers the complex affective entanglements of indebted lives and the imbrication of indebtedness, financial subjectivity, love and care in the making of life projects.University of BrightonLeverhulme Trus

Geographies of authority

This is the final version. Available on open access from SAGE Publications via the DOI in this recordWe propose a geography that pluralises the sites, practices, and politics of authority. We defend an approach that tracks less perceptible forms of authority emerging through everyday micropolitics and experimental practices. In contrast to dominant definitions of authority as institutionalized legitimate power, we propose a definition of authority as a relation of guidance emerging from recognition of inequalities in access to truth, experience, or objectivity. Analysing four intersecting areas of authority (algorithmic, experiential, expert, and participatory authority), we propose analyses that trace authority’s affective force, and which address the tension between, but also mutual constitution of, authority and equality

A moral economy of whiteness: behaviours, belonging and Britishness

This article outlines the complex stories through which national belonging is made, and some ways in which class mediates the racialisation process. It is based on fieldwork on the ways in which white UK people in provincial cities construct identities based on positioning vis-à-vis other groups, communities and the nation. I argue that this relational identity work revolves around fixing a moral-ethical location against which the behaviour and culture of Others is measured, and that this has a temporal and spatial specificity. First, attitudinal trends by social class emerge in our work as being to do with emphasis and life experience rather than constituting absolute distinctions in attitudes. Second, in an era supposedly marked by the hegemony of ‘new’ or ‘cultural’ racism, bloodlines and phenotypes are still frequently utilised in race-making discursive work. Third, in provincial urban England, there is a marked ambivalence towards Britishness (as compromised by Others) and an openness to Englishness as a more authentic source of identification

Disenchanting secularism (or the cultivation of soul) as pedagogy in resistance to populist racism and colonial structures in the academy

This paper explores pedagogic strategies for resisting the racism of contemporary populism and age-old coloniality through challenging secularism in the academy, especially in social theory. Secularism sustains racism and imperialism in the contemporary academy and is inscribed, in part, through the norms of social theory. Post-secular social theory has been positioned by some as the decolonial answer, but often replicates the most problematic aspects of secularism. Whereas post-secularism affirms the previously denigrated side of the secular vs religious dualism, I am more interested in unworking those classificatory schemas, setting the critical thought of religious teachers in relation with ‘secular’ social and political theorists such that boundaries erode. The ambition in this is to resist the hierarchical orderings of knowledge that pit Islamic, indigenous, and feminised subjectivity as backwards, dangerous or intrinsically inferior to secular, Christian, rational knowledge. It is also to disenchant the secular Gods (progress, money, growth, health) and hold open space for critical play in relation to the transcendental - to create a permissive, legitimising, space for students’ spiritual dimension, conocimiento, or the cultivation of soul. The paper draws theoretical inspiration from Gloria Anzaldúa, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Sylvia Wynter. It also draws on a practical experiment in disenchanting secularism through teaching an undergraduate module in social theory called Capitalism and Religion

The figure of authority: The affective biopolitics of the mother and the dying man

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis via the DOI in this recordThis paper discusses the relationship between authority-production and experience through a consideration of the emergence of certain figures as authorities on particular matters as a result of extraordinary experiences that they have undergone. It argues that analysis of such figures of experiential authority can help us to identify 'objectivities': foundational tenets upon which their authority is based and to which it ultimately refers. With reference to Harry Patch, a veteran of the First World War and Doreen Lawrence, the mother of Stephen Lawrence, who was murdered in a racially motivated attack at a bus stop, I contend that the authority carried by these figures testifies to certain socially produced objectivities which elicit an affective response, an embodied demand that they are listened to. © 2013 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC

Endurance, exhaustion and the lure of redemption

This is the author accepted manuscriptThis paper is concerned with the lure of redemption in contemporary academic and accounts of exhaustion, endurance and biopolitical life. Drawing on, and contributing to recent work on negativity in cultural geography, the paper analyses how optimism and redemption find their way in to academic writing on the contemporary condition. It interrogates the optimism in these literatures, paying attention to the genealogical roots of the drive to redeem accounts of slow and attritional violence and biopolitical subjectivity. In particular, we chart the implicit politics and ethics at play in the invocation of the Deleuzian ‘otherwise’ which haunts many accounts of the transformatory potential of exhaustion, and the remnants of dialectical historicism and Christian morality at the heart of redemption narratives in accounts of endurance. The paper ends by questioning the motives behind such hopeful readings, and asks whether we have a responsibility not to redeem tales of violence with optimistic glimmers of another world