Who will man the rigs when we go?” transnational demographic fever dreams between Qatar and Texas

The educational project of producing engineers in Qatar is uniquely embedded in global capitalism, particularly as a field closely tied to the development of the oil and gas industry, the military and logistics spaces across the Gulf. Over the past two decades, U.S. universities based in the region have become significant spaces where new generations of managerial engineering labor are educated. Drawing on 18 months of institutional ethnographic research, I examine Texas A&M University at Qatar’s (TAMUQ) role in managing the gender demographics of Qatari engineering labor and the experiences of students navigating these institutional mechanisms. The increasing number of women studying at Texas A&M’s engineering branch campus are publicly celebrated by the university as the embodiment of progress in Qatar. At the same time, TAMUQ has worked to mitigate the feminization of engineering through outreach activities that present engineering as a masculine patriotic endeavor. To unpack these contradictory tendencies, I build on the feminist concept of “demographic fever dreams.” Through an examination of contradictory population-based anxieties about Qatari engineering students, I argue that a U.S. land-grant university is a participant and driver of fantasies and fears regarding the future of racialized and gendered labor hierarchies and fossil-fueled capitalism in the Gulf. In doing so, this article offers a grounded feminist intervention to examine the connections between transnational education, U.S. hegemony, and the fossil fuel industry.

Critical political geographies of slow violence and resistance

Engaging Rob Nixon’s conceptualization of slow violence, this special issue provides a critical framework for how we understand violence relevant to political geography. In this introduction, we highlight three key contributions of the collection that build upon and extend Nixon’s framing of slow violence. First, we attend to the spatialities of slow violence, revealing how the politics of disposability and racialized dispossession target particular people and places. Next, we foreground critical feminist and anti-racist perspectives that are largely absent in Nixon’s original account. And third, through engaging these approaches, the papers together employ an epistemological shift, uncovering hidden and multi-sited violences that prioritise the accounts of those who experience and are most affected by slow violence.

Becoming WestConnex – Becoming Sydney: Object-oriented politics, contested storylines and the multi-scalar imaginaries of building a motorway network in Sydney, Australia

Drawing on and developing literatures on automobilities, vertical urbanisms and the use of storylines to understand mega transport projects, we imagine infrastructure as a shifting assemblage of actors, storylines and material objects and practices. In the case of motorway building, this requires an understanding of how competing storylines about how both the infrastructure itself and the city it is located in are mobilised and politicised across diverse local geographies and multiple scales as the process proceeds. Our case study focuses on WestConnex, a 33 km motorway being built in Sydney, Australia. Similar to other major transport infrastructure projects, WestConnex morphed over time, growing in ambition, budget, complexity, debate and by enrolling new actors.

Networked insurgence and an anti-electoral democracy: Bangkok space 2014–2020

Bangkok presents a rich history of popular uprisings directed against its periodic military dictatorships. Then, in 2006 and 2010 there were uprisings of increasing theatricality, playing to a hoped-for global audience, but now against democratically elected governments. January 2014 saw this insurrectional performance art raised to a new plateau where the city itself became the stage and the portrayed villain no longer the government, but government as such— against electoral democracy and for some vague, imagined ideal that might be seen as post-electoral democracy based in civil society rather than political parties. An ensuing military-drafted constitution built on this rejection, leading to manipulated elections in 2019 and a new, quasi-elected, monarchist-military government scarcely understandable outside the context of the dark euphoria of 2014. Then in 2020 the tide of insurgence turned again, against the military hegemony but also against the monarchy—a seismic shift. The paper’s focus is on these events of 2014 and their 2020 denouement, also on their implications for both the space and the form of the city in a digital age.

Aid micropolitics: Everyday southern resistance to racialized and geographical assumptions of expertise

Aid partnerships between global north and global south institutions are critiqued for maintaining colonial knowledge politics and restricting the participation of southern development experts. This paper draws on lifework interviews with senior civil servants within the Antigua and Barbuda government to explore how southern development experts subvert the development hierarchies that permeate partnership micropolitics. The paper first reveals how southern development experts draw on their experiences and normative discourses of ‘local knowledge’ to dismantle assumptions that whiteness and ‘westerness’ symbolise expertise in partnerships. Second, southern development experts engage in small-scale acts of everyday resistance to assert their expertise and decentre the authority and knowledge of foreign consultants. Everyday resistance allows this paper to reveal southern experts’ personal agency and subtle forms of resistance, which Foucauldian analyses of power and ‘spectacular’ theories of resistance are unequipped to recognise. I suggest that the racialised and geographic hierarchies, which structure power and privilege in the micro-level encounters between donors and beneficiaries are not as entrenched as we may think.

For political geographies of fertilities

Debates ranging from parental leave within universities to abortion rights, ‘anchor babies,’ racialized maternal mortality, and the continued disproportionate role of indigenous children within foster care systems demonstrate the wide range of politics informed by fertility. In this paper, I aim to prompt further academic research and personal reflection about the politics that underpin questions about fertility and the life course. There is an analytic potential and political urgency to understand these debates under the conceptual umbrella of ‘political geographies of fertility,’ as matters of fertility cross disciplinary and subdisciplinary boundaries and are – literally – matters of life and death. In this paper, I argue for framing fertility as a continued state of being, an anticipatory weight, that influences lives, behaviors, and politics at a variety of scales, from the border and the nation-state to academic workplaces and the body. By considering the range of spaces and scales where the politics of fertility take shape, I hope to encourage future researchers to devote attention to what gets made political through fertility – including but not limited to the biological events of reproduction.

Linguistic ambivalence amidst suburban diversity: LGBTQ2S municipal ‘social inclusions’ on Vancouver’s periphery

Social inclusion frameworks to enhance ‘diversity’ inform late neoliberal municipal governance in North American metropolitan areas, especially in central cities, but suburban LGBTQ2S constituencies are neglected by researchers. This paper, therefore, uses linguistic discourse and content analysis of an LGBTQ2S-inclusion archive of municipal public-facing communication in the Canadian peripheral municipalities of Burnaby, New Westminster, and Surrey, in the Vancouver city-region to trace the micro-patterns of linguistic ambivalence shaping suburban sexual citizenship. It demonstrates municipal variance in vernacular vocabularies of LGBTQ2S social inclusion that signals equivocation within divergent local linguistic political opportunity structures for suburban sexual and gender minorities. It concludes with a typological narration that details varied gradations of linguistic obfuscation, revealing patterns of civic ambivalence towards LGBTQ2S social inclusion amidst suburban diversity. Across a shared regional geography, the paper shows that LGBTQ2S populations are infrequently referenced relative to other marginalized social groups and that their presence in social inclusion frameworks is dictated by the extent to which they align with civic priorities, particularly festivalization and marketization, but also safety, welcoming newcomers, integrating seniors, and anti-discrimination initiatives.

“We just need the developer to develop”: Entrepreneurialism, financialization and urban redevelopment in Lexington, Kentucky

Since the 1980s US city governments have increased their use of more speculative means of financing economic redevelopment. This has involved experimenting with a variety of financial and taxation instruments as a way of growing their economies and redeveloping their built environments. This very general tendency, of course, masks how some cities have done well through the use of these instruments while others have not. The work to date has tended to pivot around a “winner-loser dichotomy”, which emphasises either the capacity of US cities to be able to experiment and speculate through the use of one financial instrument or another or their failings with these instruments, resulting in bankruptcy and fiscal crisis. This paper presents a case study of Lexington, Kentucky and using archival research and interviews we argue that speculative financial instruments are harder to choreograph for some cities than for others. We draw particular attention to US cities beyond those that tend to be over-represented in the metro-centric academic literature. This argument has conceptual significance. Building theory out of the experiences of US cities such as Lexington, Kentucky turns attention to the work required by city governments as they seek to finance the redevelopment of their downtowns. We make the case for a continued appreciation of the messy politics around the use of financial instruments, and its indeterminate, open and unpredictable nature in an era of fragile and uncertain entrepreneurial US urban policy-making.

Indigenous participation and knowledge justice in deliberative systems: Flooding and wild creek remediation controversies in Taiwan

Research on deliberative systems with detailed discussions on the deliberative features of Indigenous activism is limited. The systemic approach of deliberative democracy argues that activism constitutes an integral part of public deliberation. Drawing on the controversy on flooding and wild creek remediation on Orchid Island, Taiwan, this article explored how Tao tribespeople have used deliberative ways to influence political processes at multiple scales and improve the democratising quality of deliberative systems. Tao tribespeople engaged in communication and activated deliberation across scales when facing the government’s dominant policy framing and expert claims with limited discursive space. Tao activists use the virtual community as both an internal and external communication platform and engaged in transmitting policy ideas and visualizing Tao traditional knowledge system and situated practices to address knowledge injustice. This article illuminates connectivity of Indigenous deliberation and activism at multiple scales. These connectivity contribute to shaping knowledge production and dynamics of governance practices.