Playing Locally but Commuting to a Better School: Urban Planning and Education Policies in Parental Involvement Practices and Local Community Formation

In this article, we analyse the formation of local communities from the perspective of the practices of parental involvement. Adopting a practice-based approach to empirical research on six estates in three Polish cities, we reconstruct the connections between the spatial logics of the housing areas, national education, and housing polices, and their impact on the everyday life practices inside and outside the estate. Using the category of practice of parental involvement, we show the complex, long-term impact of state and local education policies on everyday life and, as a result, on the processes of structuring or fragmentation of territorial communities. The results of our qualitative studies not only develop knowledge about the connections between national polices and everyday life practices but also, we hope, could help to design effective public policies.

A Body of Authority: Reorienting Gender and Power in Julian of Norwich’s Revelations

The 14th century mystic Julian of Norwich’s theology, dissolving gender binaries and incorporating medieval constructs of the female into the Trinity, captivates scholars across rhetorical, literary, and religious studies. A “pioneering feminist”, as Cheryll Glenn dubs her, scholarship attempts to account for the ways in which Julian’s theology circumvented the religious authority of male clerics. Some speculate that Julian’s authority arises from a sophisticated construction of audience (Wright). Others situate Julian in established traditions and structures of the Church, suggesting that she revised a mode of Augustinian mysticism (Chandler), or positing that her intelligence and Biblical knowledge indicate that she received religious training (Colledge and Walsh). Drawing from theories on space and gender performativity, this essay argues that Julian’s gendered body is the generative site of her authority. Bodies are articulated by spatial logics of power (Shome). Material environments discipline bodies and, in a kind of feedback loop, gendered performance (re)produces power in time and space. Spaces, though, are always becoming and never fixed (Chavez). An examination of how Julian reorients hierarchies and relations among power, space, and her body provides a hermeneutic for recognizing how gender is structured by our own material cultures and provides possibilities for developing practices that revise relations and create new agencies.

Southeast Asia after the Caliphate: Identifying Spatial Trends in Terrorism and Radicalization in Malaysia

Recent scholarship on militant Islamist radicalization in Southeast Asia highlights the significance of local context in understanding support and recruitment into militancy. While research on terrorism in Southeast Asia engenders a dynamism of epistemic inquiry in diverse areas of research, an empirical mapping of radicalization is generally absent. Research on militant Islamic radicalization in Southeast Asia needs more robust consideration of geospatial relations and data to fill this lacuna. A geospatial analysis is, above all else, synthesis. It bridges spatial statistical analytics and qualitative socio-spatial investigation. We argue that a geospatial analytical approach to understanding radicalization offers a way in which to begin empirically mapping radicalization in the region. Correspondingly, our work considers militant Islamic radicalization in Malaysia by employing geospatial analysis to build a more nuanced layering and comprehensive understanding of the spatial arrangements of radicalization. Viewed from this perspective, radicalization can be understood through spatial logics and practices aimed at facilitating better understandings of socio-political relations of political violence and terrorism more broadly.

Aerial Politics of Visibility: Actors, Spaces, and Drivers of Professional Drone Usage in Switzerland

This article draws upon a large-scale survey of professional (public institution and private company) drone usage in Switzerland. The authors argue that professional drone usage includes a wide range of applications and objectives and, thus, logics of vision and visibility. Instead of being systematic and predictable, the visibilities created by professional drone usage are punctual in occurrence, highly varying in spatial logics and articulations, and, therefore, often unpredictable. This raises important questions and problems with regard to the power dynamics unfolding from the visual and visualising capabilities of the technology that reach far beyond the usual focus on surveillance in current academic engagements with the topic.

Affirmatively Reading Post-consumerism. Distributed Participatory Creativity and Creative Destruction of the Malled Metropolitan Centres of Auckland, New Zealand, during COVID-19 Lockdown

The impact of the progressive spatial financialisation of contemporary on the centres of public life has involved the privatisation of a relevant portion of their social, cultural, political and economic nodes and their polarisation into the private precincts of integrated shopping and entertainment enclosures. This dispossession and dislocation have increased spatial inequality and atomised the networks of local communities. A recent occurrence of creative destruction presided by the inexorable logics of capital reproduction has hit the paradigm that informed these enclosure. The production of the ultimate model of these centres, here defined as ultra-modern centres with totalising superlative simulated civicness, has intimately combined consumption with production in what Ritzer calls prosumption. I submit that the novel prosumer has become a primary actor of dynamic choral practices of semi-complicit participatory consumption that originate counterspatial associative assemblages by articulating three novel digitally augmented phenomena: networked translocalisation, multiassociative-metastable transduction, and desiring-resistant transgression. To validate this hypothesis I set out an observational analysis of grassroots social networks of digital spatialities emplaced in the malled urban centres of Auckland, New Zealand during COVID-19 lockdown, a period of outright access negation to the physical centres of public relational life. Empirical findings not only provided evidence of the formation, high resilience and independence of the novel emplaced translocal networks, but also documented their explicit redistribution of orders of ownership and belonging, and their assertive reappropriation and reassociation of commoning spatialities. The found effectiveness of these assemblages in breaching of the fundamental rule of non-response of dominant powers controlling the places of superlative abstract civicness, deconstructing the dominant spatial logics of the simulative infrastructure that inhibit the elaboration of sign values that affirm the right to identification, and supplementing the post-consumerist use-exchange value amalgamation that sustains the commodity fetishism mechanism of these civic simulacra underpins my critical affirmative interpretation of the post-consumerist condition.

Forging alternatively sacred spaces in Singapore’s integrated religious marketplace

This paper expands the notion of sacred space within the geographies of religion by arguing that spaces of religious praxis need to be understood in relation to the broader spatial logics within which they are embedded. Given that the spatial logics of urban environments tend to be secular and neoliberal in nature, it considers how religious groups respond to the realities of the marketplaces in which they operate by forging ‘alternatively sacred’ spaces. These spaces augment the appeal of religious groups in non-religious ways, thus making them more competitive players in a religious marketplace. Specifically, it explores how independent churches in Singapore create alternatively sacred spaces that are used for religious purposes, although their appeal and affective value do not accord with more traditional understandings of how sacred spaces should look, feel, or otherwise be engaged with. These spaces are designed to appeal to younger people, and to draw non-Christians to Christian spaces, and Christians to alternatively religious spaces. The extent to which they appeal to these groups provides insight into reimagination of religion under market conditions, spatial politics of value and ideological fissures between different Christian communities.

Learning from lines: Critical COVID data visualizations and the quarantine quotidian

In response to the ubiquitous graphs and maps of COVID-19, artists, designers, data scientists, and public health officials are teaming up to create counter-plots and subaltern maps of the pandemic. In this intervention, we describe the various functions served by these projects. First, they offer tutorials and tools for both dataviz practitioners and their publics to encourage critical thinking about how COVID-19 data is sourced and modeled—and to consider which subjects are not interpellated in those data sets, and why not. Second, they demonstrate how the pandemic’s spatial logics inscribe themselves in our immediate material landscapes. And third, they remind us of our capacity to personalize and participate in the creation of meaningful COVID visualizations—many of which represent other scales and dimensions of the pandemic, especially the quarantine quotidian. Together, the official maps and counter-plots acknowledge that the pandemic plays out differently across different scales: COVID-19 is about global supply chains and infection counts and TV ratings for presidential press conferences, but it is also about local dynamics and neighborhood mutual aid networks and personal geographies of mitigation and care.