Observing silent, smooth and striated space: The case of Indian national curriculum policy 2009

The paper employs the assemblage approach to unfold India’s 2009 education policy, the National Curriculum Framework, in order to uncover its multiple international, national or other links. In doing so, a deconstruction approach (as strategy, not as rationale) is applied, in order to uncover the policy text and what is identified as a construction and reconstruction of meaning. The contested notion of student-centred learning and its perspective is proposed as a solution to deal with the professionalism problem of Indian teachers and the criteria to develop teachers’ professional skills are closely analysed. As a result, it is not only student-centred learning that is apprised to be part of the National Curriculum Framework, but also its multiple versions, linked to local and global policy studies. In turn, this highlights the complicated nature of the policy. The multifaceted and manifold versions of student-centred learning are further unfolded through the assemblage rationale. Silent spaces (e.g. teachers’ voices, teaching evaluation methods, etc.) are observed in the policy text to accommodate the emergence of student-centred learning.

Human Geographies of Outer Space

Human geographies of outer space encompass a burgeoning body of social science and humanities scholarship exploring the application of geographical perspectives, concepts, and approaches through the study of outer space, human–outer space relations, and space travel. Humanity’s engagement with outer space has everyday effects, spanning the way we act and interact with each other here on Earth—how we live with other species, and our imagined landscapes and futures. In the last decade or so, a growing number of geographers have explored these themes. However, the emergence of geographies of outer space must be understood as an innately interdisciplinary endeavor, inspired by, and inspiring, wider social science engagements with outer space. For this reason, in this guide work is included that has been published by geographers within and outside geography departments and centers, as well as those located in allied fields, particularly sociology, anthropology and organization studies. These interdisciplinary engagements are necessarily wide-ranging—in terms of their: (i) empirical objects of analyses, (ii) purpose, and (iii) theoretical influences. Empirical engagements encompass: off-world mining, astropolitics, space art, space tourism, astronomy, space-themed toys, moon landings, orbital work practices, space law and much more. In terms of purpose, although a great deal of published work consists of critiques of imperialist-nationalistic-capitalistic space activities and imaginaries, research has also increasingly sought to advance alternative, more socially inclusive visions of outer space. Geographies of outer space are also theoretically diverse, informed by David Harvey’s critique of capitalism through Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of smooth/striated space to Peter Sloterdyk’s theorization of spaces of containment. However, despite this diversity, research remains predominately Western; this is despite the longstanding presence of Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Indian space hardware and millennia of non-Western cosmographies. While this focus may partly stem from the lack of availability of research materials, it remains a challengeable trend. Nonetheless, geographical studies of outer space have certainly explored critical questions of power that are mostly absent in popular and technoscientific framings of outer space—namely, whose interests and agendas do human activities in space serve? How can outer space help us understand how to live on Earth with other peoples and species? And what futures will space activities open up or close down? These questions open up new horizons of geographical inquiry, while also returning geography to its early cosmographical origins.

Reimagining lace in a digital space

This paper presents how a contemporary lace practice explored the medium of animation as a digital tool for craft research. Research is practice based and theoretically framed around notions of smooth and striated space as a means to articulate how a designer engages in textile thinking to reimagine new expressions for (p)lace in a digital age. The author sought to test out if animation could capture and disseminate an ephemeral lace process. This led to a curious convergence between two disciplines. What was initially to be a tool for efficiency and speed unexpectedly turned out to be a method for abstracting an allusive lace making process. Learning about the idiosyncrasies of another discipline opened new aesthetic opportunities for a contemporary lace practice and introduced novel methods to disseminate future material research.

Ocean Thinking

How do scientists produce the ocean as space through their work and words? In this article, I examine how the techniques and tools of oceanographers constitute ocean science. Bringing theoretical literature from science and technology studies on how scientists “do” science into conversation with fine-grained ethnographic and sociological accounts of scientists in the field, I explore how ocean science is made, produced, and negotiated. Within this central concern, the technologies used to obtain data draw particular focus. Juxtaposed with this literature is a corpus by ocean scientists about their own work as well as interview data from original research. Examining the differences between scientists’ self-descriptions and analyses of them by social scientists leads to a productive exploration of how ocean science is constituted and how this work delineates the ocean as a form of striated space. This corpus of literature is placed in the context of climate change in the final section.

Killing Reindeer: A Spatial Analysis of Nordic States and Nomadic Forms of Life in the Arctic

To conceptualize the violence of the Nordic states in the Arctic, this article provides a spatial analysis of relationships between Norway, Sweden, and Finland and the Sámi and reindeer inhabiting their northern parts. The analysis is informed by Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of smooth and striated space and examines how the Nordic states, through their striation activities, are perpetrating violence toward nomadic forms of life. Rather than casting the spatial relationships between states and reindeer herders as “land use conflicts,” the article shifts the focus from competing activities to violence toward one form of life perpetrated by another. Tracing state efforts of bordering, rationalization of reindeer herding as an industry, infrastructure developments, and cultivation of selected predatory lines of flight, the article illuminates an indirect violence that is slowly eliminating nomadic forms of life. This loss highlights that in the sixth great extinction, the world is losing not only distinct biological species but also different forms of life within species. Ultimately, the striation activities of the biopolitical Nordic states, in their narrow focus on Western knowledge regimes, security, profit, and geopolitical positioning for an impending Arctic resource boom, enact a violent and destructive homogenization of what constitutes life.

Schizoecologic Cartographies

The chapter first defines the status of the diagram that underlies Schizoanalytic Cartographies as a formal diagram of an informal world. As such, it is itself a figure of the various complementarities that are defined within it. Using foldings of the diagram to organize the text, the chapter subsequently provides an in-depth analysis of the relations between and the superpositions of its four functors: Flows, Phyla, Territories and Universes. Next, it presents the diagram’s inherently ecological parameters. By way of tracing the vectors between its various positions, it defines the diagram as a meta-model of the expressive relation between the world and its creatures. After showing Guattari’s recalibration of the distinction between smooth and striated space, it exemplifies the notion of an expressive ecology in four sections that perform the squaring of concepts (chlorophyll), of the unconscious (Lacan), of aesthetics (Balthus) and of media studies (the analog and digital divide).

When Personal Becomes Political: M. Jenea Sanchez Documenting Migration from Mexico

Even though “migration, immigration, and relocation is normative human behavior” (Blommaert and Verschueren in Byczkiewicz 5), migration across the U.S.-Mexico border has always been a controversial issue, raising incessant debates that have become even more acrimonious in the aftermath of the recent political debate on the immigration in the U.S. Owing to that, the stories of Latinx in the U.S. that should be read through both indigenous and immigrant paradigms have been reinterpreted through the latter one solely. The resulting borderlands tales illustrate “similar sentiments of nationalism, racism and nativism” (Byczkiewicz 5), while attempting at the more complex depiction of this conflicted and striated space. The purpose of this article is to analyze border stories depicted in Historias en la Camioneta and examine how M. Jenea Sanchez documents the journeys of those who want to get al otro lado, combining personal accounts and documentary footage, thus contributing to the ongoing discussion on the U.S.-Mexico border and borderlands.

Disruptive protests

This chapter builds on themes established in Chapter Two and considers the naked or nearly naked protest as a carnivalesque disruption in public space. Part One posits that these protests rely on spectacularisation (in the Debordian sense (1994 [1967]) of the naked body to function. We explore this in the context of so-called feminist anti-rape protests, such as SlutWalk or Femen. Part Two analyses these gendered dynamics in the context of non-human animal rights protests including those of PETA and Lush, One of these campaigns is analysed and I draw on the auto-ethnographic experience of participating in naked protest to explore the potentialities of this as a mode of forging a war machine. This chapter demonstrates how the eroticisation of sexual violence is mobilised as part of these politics.This chapter examines the interplay between smooth and striated space, rape culture and the capacity that protest harbours for revolution.

“Mapping” Media Spaces: Smoothness, Striation, and the Expropriation of Desire in American Journalism from Postindustrial to Datafied Capitalism

The future of journalism in the digital age is a major topic of both vocational and academic debate—as is the question of whether anything is “new” with the rise of the digital more broadly. This article argues for a redeployment of Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of “smooth” and “striated” space. Conducting a synthesis of a new wave of scholarship on digital journalism with the body of “sociology of news” literature from the late 1970s and 1980s, it maps continuities and intensifications of processes in the interplay between journalistic desire and the constraints of liberal capitalism, while also noting a key shift in the relationship between journalism and dominant economic classes, concomitant with a new form of “datafied capitalism.”