The financialization of remittances and the individualization of development: A new power geometry of global development

The article argues that the increasing financialization of remittances produces an enormous shift in the political economy of development and contributes to a new power geometry of development. Exploring this power geometry, the article focuses on three main issues: First, migrants intend to support their friends and families on an individual level as remittance senders, and together with the corresponding recipients they form a translocal moral economy. On a macro level, the value of these transactions is high when currency hierarchies remain strong. Financialization of remittances amplifies this micro–macro divergence inherent to remittance flows. Deepening the financial “development” impact of remittances then goes hand in hand with cementing global inequality. Second, economic and political elites in remittance-receiving societies who are able to organize direct and indirect access to remittances with the help of financial instruments and through financialization are able to emancipate from national political control. This indirectly contributes to fostering elite rule in remittance-receiving societies. Third and finally, development is no longer a “national” objective but has become the individual risk of migrants and their relatives and friends. Financialization of remittances therefore consolidates an individualized notion of development. This paper aims to go beyond the narrow economistic and problem-solving approach on which many studies on remittances and financial inclusion draw. It illustrates how financialization of remittances (re)shapes power relations both within the Global South and between the Global South and the Global North.

Being between binary: Personal narratives and power geometry: A visual essay

Being Between Binary is a visual critical auto-ethnography, combining collage, cartoon, narrative and photomontage in the form of a four-page A2 scrapbook. Conceptually and materially, the design combines map and memoir, placing Massey’s concept of power geometry into dialogue with personal experiences of sexuality and gender. The piece explores binaries and geographies of here/there, Global North/South, through a lens of borderlands, boundaries and crossings, modelling dissemination as a fluid space of continuing enquiry. This visual essay first contextualizes the making of the piece as creative fieldwork, matching ‘a synthesis of shattered fragments’, and then presents images of the work with brief commentary.

Situating the “Cultural Reach” of Cities in a Multiscalar Field

On the basis of empirical material from a city bordering Syria and Turkey, this article aims to situate the city’s emerging landscape of culture and arts in the 2000s within the dynamics of neoliberalizing city-making. It provides a political economy of the city’s “cultural reach” by connecting the dynamics of cultural production to value creating processes in and through urban regeneration to understand when, how, and which groups and sites become de- and re-valorized. It highlights the futility of nation state-city, state-civil society binaries in analysing the power geometry of multiscalar actors involved in the work, efficacy and the potency of cultural networks, institutions, and “cultural diplomacy.”

Asymptotic analysis of Feynman diagrams and their maximal cuts

The ASPIRE program, which is based on the Landau singularities and the method of Power geometry to unveil the regions required for the evaluation of a given Feynman diagram asymptotically in a given limit, also allows for the evaluation of scaling coming from the top facets. In this work, we relate the scaling having equal components of the top facets of the Newton polytope to the maximal cut of given Feynman integrals. We have therefore connected two independent approaches to the analysis of Feynman diagrams.

Forced Displacement from Ukraine’s War-Torn Territories: Intersectionality and Power Geometry

The number of internally forcibly displaced persons is growing every year across the globe and exceeds the number of refugees. To date, Ukraine has the highest number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Europe, with about 1.4 million people forced to flee from the conflict in eastern Ukraine. Employing Massey’s concept of ‘power geometry’, the modalities of borders, and taking an intersectional approach, this article theorizes how IDPs are situated politically within a protracted conflict. Such an approach offers the chance to see how the reaction to the war brings authorities to see displaced people as a static category and reproduces a war-lexicon in policies, which fractures the space of everyday life. Drawing upon qualitative research on IDPs, the civil society, international organizations, and public officials in Ukraine, the article concludes that intersections of gender and older age with displacement, and the lack of state recognition of these differing groups of IDPs, together with the lack of the economic resources for social policy, produces multiple forms of social exclusion.

POWER GEOMETRY IN LOCAL RESOLUTION OF SINGULARITIES OF AN ALGEBRAIC CURVE

The main goal of this work is to provide a consistent set of general-purpose algorithms for analyzing singularities applicable to all types of equations. We present the main ideas and algorithms of power geometry and give an overview of some of its applications. We also present a procedure that allows us to distinguish all branches of a spatial curve near a singular point and calculate the parametric appearance of these branches with any degree of accuracy. For a specific case, we show how this algorithm works.

The politics of stuckness: Waiting lives in mobile worlds

This paper develops our geographical understanding of the gendered politics of (im)mobility by exploring the hidden politics of waiting experienced by some mobile working households. Reflecting on qualitative fieldwork with female partners of mobile workers in Australia who remain at home, we explain how ‘stuckness’ is a specific form of waiting that highlights a power-geometry where their immobility is exacerbated by the mobility of their partner. Its key contribution is to spotlight an overlooked durational aspect to immobility which supplements a previous focus on spatial immobility. Taking the self-governing activity of emotion management as our point of departure, we draw on qualitative interviews to highlight the multiple ways that our female participants become focused on short-term processes of getting by, leaving them stuck in the present. A more extensive immersion into the lifeworld of one woman through a photo diary and subsequent interview draws attention to the more passive, insidiously listless dimensions of stuckness which can compromise wellbeing for mobile worker partners.

Walking, Haunting, and Affirmative Aesthetics: The Case of Women without Men

Walking and ‘haunting space’ have become means of political and aesthetic resistance to the invisibility or inhospitality that women face in the public sphere. Power imbalance in spatial habitation—‘power-geometry’ in Doreen Massey’s terms— negatively affects women, just as shown in an Iranian context in Shirin Neshat’s film Women without Men (2009) and through feminist social movements such as #mystealthyfreedom. As these women wilfully assert themselves against their exclusion from certain places, they challenge the binaries public/private, men/women, and mobility/stasis both politically and aesthetically. Ghost characters and haunting narratives disrupt the linearity between dead and alive, virtual and actual (following the works of Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze respectively), and open up possibilities that challenge the status quo. Through a micro-analysis of Women without Men, this article reveals that shapes, structures and lights participate to dismantling gendered norms, expectations, and power-geometries. Both the magical realism of the film and an affirmative analytical approach invite to seeing beyond the negativity of narratives and unveilalternative conceptions of space, gender and power.