Urban interventionism as a challenge to aesthetic order::Towards an aesthetic criminology

This article is concerned with ideas of urban order and considers the scope for playing with people’s expectations of order. In particular, drawing on criminological, philosophical and urban studies literatures, the article explores the notion of aesthetic order. The power to dictate aesthetic order is highlighted. The example of urban interventionism is used to consider those that challenge an approved aesthetic order. Here the article draws on cultural criminology and visual criminology, with illustrations coming from research in Toronto, Canada. Influenced by Alison Young’s (2014a) conceptualisation of ‘cities within the city’, the article considers how different people using the same space have different or overlapping ways of understanding aesthetic order. Of relevance to criminology, it is contended that people or things that contravene an approved aesthetic order may face banishment and criminalisation. It is concluded that respect for such difference is required. An aesthetic criminology is suggested

What’s missing from legal geography and materialist studies of law? Absence and the assembling of asylum appeal hearings in Europe

This is the final version. Available on open access from Wiley via the DOI in this recordData availability statement: Due to the ethical and legally sensitive nature of the research, ethnographic notes taken in court could not be made openly available. Appellant interviewees were not asked for their permission to share their interview transcripts in an online open archive because of concerns that they could misunderstand what was being asked for, or feel obliged to agree but subsequently feel less able to conduct free conversation in research interviews as a result, thereby negatively impacting on the quality of the data generated. Additional details relating to, and data resulting from, to a survey taken during observations of British asylum appeals between 2013 and 2016 are available from the UK Data Archive (persistent identifier: 10.5255/UKDA-SN-852032).There is an absence of absence in legal geography and materialist studies of the law. Drawing on a multi‐sited ethnography of European asylum appeal hearings, this paper illustrates the importance of absences for a fully‐fledged materiality of legal events. We show how absent materials impact hearings, that non‐attending participants profoundly influence them, and that even when participants are physically present, they are often simultaneously absent in other, psychological registers. In so doing we demonstrate the importance and productivity of thinking not only about law's omnipresence but also the absences that shape the way law is experienced and practiced. We show that attending to the distribution of absence and presence at legal hearings is a way to critically engage with legal performance.Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)European Research Council (ERC

Counter-Mapping as Assemblage: Reconfiguring Indigeneity

Part 2: Ethnographic Accounts of IS UseInternational audienceThis paper explores the utility of assemblage theory for intergenerational counter-mapping and, through this, for reconfigurations of indigeneity. Counter-mapping is theorised as a kind of assemblage that, through intergenerational learning, is fundamentally memetic (composed of evolving units of information) in nature. Assemblage is theorised as having three aspects (relations of exteriority, meshworks and memes) for reconfiguring indigeneity in line with spatio-temporal aspects of memes. Counter-mapping assemblages are explored with examples of First Nations’ (indigenous peoples residing in Canada) political and commemorative activity. Kaachewaapechuu, a long commemorative walk in the northern Quebec Cree village of Wemindji, acts as a case study for exploring how assemblages-as-memes can be used to theorise new kinds of counter-mapping that reconfigure indigenous commemoration precisely as political, and therefore as not separate from more media-driven aspects of Canadian politics, including those concerning its First Nations. Global positioning systems and Google Earth mapping platforms were used during the primary author’s participation in kaachewaapechuu, providing for the exploration of new media platforms upon which such a re-theorised politics might be envisioned

The autonomous city: towards a critical geography of occupation

This paper explores the recent resurgence of occupation-based practices across the globe, from the seizure of public space to the assembling of improvised protest camps. It re-examines the relationship between the figure of occupation and the affirmation of an alternative ‘right to the city’. The paper develops a critical understanding of occupation as a political process that prefigures and materializes the social order which it seeks to enact. The paper highlights the constituent role of occupation as an autonomous form of urban dwelling, as a radical politics of infrastructure and as a set of relations that produce common spaces for political action

Embodying plurality: becoming more‐than homeless

Arising from seven months of auto/ethnographic research in an English city, this paper attends to the mundane practices through which we – ‘the homeless’ ‐ renegotiate ourselves to become more‐than‐homeless. The ‘we’ through which these auto/biographies are writ denotes an inflection on the spectral presence of my own experiences of homelessness, spectral because they reflect a historic occurrence brought back in the doing of this research. Affording a unique position of betweenness, this article thus seeks to add depth and nuance to the homeless literature by emphasising the embodied performances through which we become more‐than‐homeless. To this end, this paper contributes to recent approaches in homelessness research drawing on performativity and embodiment to show how we are neither ontologically nor existentially reducible to our homelessness. Exploring the webs of relational engagements between human and non‐human others, space and subjectivity, the ongoing (re)negotiations expressed in acts of remembering, forgetting, supressing, misremembering and imagining, distance the moment of homelessness so that we are able to become someone other than ‘homeless’. This distancing is not to shade the ways in which we are different. Rather, it is to reveal a dimension of possibilities, both spatial and temporal, through which we resist a subsumption into the singular mass of ‘the homeless’, becoming instead someone more‐than‐homeless

Retail regulation in England and Wales: the results of a survey

Debates on the Shops Act (1950), which regulates the hours and conditions of retail employment and operation in England and Wales, have largely occurred in ignorance of the realities of enforcement at local level. This paper, drawing upon a postal survey and official prosecution statistics, is an attempt to examine spatial, temporal, and sectoral variations in proceedings and offenders. The findings seem to reflect the breakdown in local compliance with the Act. This can be related to the major restructuring of some sectors of retail capital. It also seems that enforcement is locally specific. The Act, in other words, is not applied , but interpreted at local level in the light of place-specific conditions.

Spatial categories, legal boundaries, and the judicial mapping of the worker

It is argued that there are important parallels and intersections between critical theoretical analysis in legal studies and in geography. Each critical tradition is sceptical about the ontological status of its disciplinary foundation -- 'law' in legal studies, and 'space' in geography. Furthermore, the reification of particular distinctions in legal discourse is deepened by spatial distinctions. A convergence of critical legal and geographic analyses can thus have powerful analytical consequences, and the authors attempt to demonstrate this point by investigating judicial approaches to the regulation of worker health and safety in two federal states, Canada and the United States. They conclude with a discussion of the theoretical and political significance of critical legal geography, and suggest some directions it might take in the future.