Digital witnessing and the erasure of the racialized subject

Humanitarian agencies are relying more frequently on remote sensing, satellite imagery and social media to produce accounts of violence. Their analysis aims at creating more compelling narratives for the court of law or of public opinion and has contributed towards a forensic turn, thus complicating the already fraught relationship between the practice of witnessing and political subjects. This article explores how digital witnessing allows us to ‘see’ further and deeper into places that are at a distance from us, whilst at the same time creating the conditions that make certain subjects recede from view. I will discuss these issues in relation to a country I am familiar with and one that has been central to the forensic imagination – Pakistan – although the particular geographies within Pakistan that this imagination works with are not mine. Thinking with non-linear temporalities of violence, I explore how the forensic turn may have actually contributed to the erasure of the racialized political subject

Amy Brandzel, Against Citizenship: The Violence of the Normative

Review of Amy Brandzel, Against Citizenship: The Violence of the Normative (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2016)

Performing on the streets: Infrastructures of subaltern resistance in Pakistan

This article explores infrastructures of subaltern resistance in Pakistan through a focus on spatial and performative modes and across a number of historical and contemporary examples. I start with the figure of the puppet, tracing it historically as an example of how culturally specific modes of dissent have evolved from a colonial to a postcolonial context, and further into a neoliberal space. I then analyse the practice of ‘wall chalking’, which could be considered a local form of graffiti that also embodies debates over religious and ethnic identity through the contested status of script in the country. In narrating these examples, my aim is to show how a specific form of resistance has developed in the country through the displacement of the dissenting subject. Here I conceptualise resistance as a Foucauldian counter-conduct that transforms space through a creative and embodied use of tactics. It is a form of subaltern resistance that emerges in relation to non-humans and everyday rituals and has developed in subtler (and more resistant) forms, through ways of enacting that thrive within and through the vulnerability of the subject

Affective Witnessing: [Trans]posing the Western/Muslim Divide to Document Refugee Spaces

Architectural Affects after Deleuze and Guattari is the first sustained survey into ways of theorising affect in architecture. It reflects on the legacy and influence of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in the uptake of affect in architectural discourse and practice, and stresses the importance of the political in discussions of affect. It is a timely antidote to an enduring fixation on architectural phenomenology in the field. The contributors offer a variety of approaches to the challenge

Diasporic urbanism : concepts, agencies & 'mapping otherwise'.

The term ‘diasporic urbanism’ addresses the difficulties of operating with diasporic space and of accommodating the material complexities of migrant lives. It proposes displacement and reterritorialisations as methodologies and ‘mapping otherwise’ as a tool for representing and working with migrant spatialities. Diasporic space is theorised as a relational space, whilst diasporic subjectivity is described as ‘nomadic consciousness’. The politics of the diaspora are addressed through the need to accommodate conflict (Mouffe) and through introducing ‘things’ and ‘matters of concern’ (Latour) into the democratic relationship. These concepts were tested in practice through my research which focuses examples of diasporic agencies in the everyday. From the Turkish and Kurdish kahve to a street whose physicality forces a certain visibility on to those who traverse it, to a park in East London that through being claimed by one diasporic group has come to symbolise wider notions of political representation. The mapping of these particular spaces has addressed the question: within the networked, global condition of the migrant, what objects, subjects and processes can play the role of mediation and translation that is required between ‘here and there’, or between the layers of this multiple subject? The need for such approaches is apparent in the increasing diversity of European cities. The everyday geographies of people’s lives can easily lose themselves in the enormity of the questions and the complexities of the issues surrounding migration. Yet, it is exactly the specificity of individual lives, the way that geo-political borders and territories inscribe themselves onto the intimate topology of migrant and diasporic bodies, half-here and half-there, that is so difficult to account for. This then is the challenge set down for ‘diasporic urbanism’—how to make the conditions necessary for those other than the privileged to participate in the imagining of our cities