The contested politics of climate change and the crisis of neo-liberalism

Climate change must be placed in relation to broader contestation of unequal social and environmental relations and specifically in relation to the crisis of neoliberalism. I contest those accounts of climate change which isolate carbon emissions from the unequal social and environmental relations upon which neoliberal globalization depends. I locate the mobilizations during the COP15 round of climate negotiations in relation to political trajectories that have shaped antagonistic ways of constructing climate change politics. These forms of contentious action challenge the dominant terms of climate change politics in a number of important ways, and at the same time the repressive policing of demonstrations and actions open up the space for protests and for productive debates around the environmental politics of climate change

Contested spaces of hegemony: left alliances after the crisis

This reflects on the insights that geography can bring to bear on discussions of hegemony. It draws heavily on the work of Doreen Massey, for whom this essay is a form of tribute. It shows how Massey was able to make a very specific contribution to discussions about the politics of a given moment (the conjuncture) through her insistence on including the specificities of place into the many overlapping levels that constitute a political moment. This can be seen in her work on London, in which she drew attention to its role as a city in shaping the emergence of neoliberalism, or her work on de-industrialisation, which showed how unequal regional development is driven by specific interest groups – as seen in the strikingly different kind of help offered by successive governments to the bankers of the City as compared with the steel workers of the de-industrialised regions. Drawing on this work, David Featherstone draws on this work to discuss the current political situation in the devolved nations, the Northern Powerhouse, and relationships between nationally based parties and the Labour Party

Review of Carl J. Griffin, The Rural War: Captain Swing and the Politics of Protest

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Rehearsing the state: the political practices of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile

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The Greek government’s target of zero public sector layoffs and the troika’s of 150,000 over ten years are both ultimately self-defeating

The new Greek government recently announced that there would be no layoffs in the public sector, flying in the face of the country’s agreements with the IMF and the ECB to implement public administration reforms. For Kevin Featherstone, the futility of this target is matched by the troika’s (the ECB, EU, and IMF) demand for 150,000 public sector job cuts over the next 10 years. He argues that both of these targets are self-defeating and will do nothing to encourage Greece to change its priorities towards designing a new economic model for the country

Black internationalism, international communism and anti-fascist political trajectories: African American volunteers in the Spanish Civil War

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Recent political developments mean that Greece is no longer on the brink of economic collapse: but the European Commission, the ECB and the IMF will be keeping a close watch for some time to come.

The recent crisis of the Greek economy, and the threat of its withdrawal from the Eurozone, was only averted by the rejection of a referendum on the EU bail-out and the resignation of the country’s prime minister. Kevin Featherstone argues that, while the situation has now stabilised, instability and uncertainty still remain. European and global economic institutions will be keeping a close eye on the Greece’s political developments.

Spatial relations, histories from below and the makings of agency: Reflections on The Making of the English Working Class at 50

In this paper we propose a conversation between work in labour history and labour geography, in part centring on the formative contribution of E.P. Thompson. We contend that the commitment to multiple and political forms of agency and working-class experience and the positioning of class as process, which are lasting contributions of The Making of the English Working Class, offer resources for re-invigorating debates on agency within labour geography and beyond. The paper scrutinizes the spatial politics at work in Thompson’s account of agency and experience through drawing on critiques of Thompson by feminist and post-colonial scholars. The paper explores the significance of Thompson’s work for asserting a spatial politics of labour and argues for attention to the diverse agentic spatial practices shaped through labour organizing and struggles. The paper concludes by setting out some key aspects of the terms of a conversation between labour geographies and labour histories