In geographic scholarship, urban exploration (urbex) has been examined as an embodied practice with radical potential for re-appropriating urban spaces. However, geographic literature on urban exploration has largely ignored the particular qualities of the urban explorer as a subject and neglected feminist scholarship on embodiment and social difference. Based on our examination of both popular and academic treatments of urbex we identify a prevalent and largely unacknowledged culture of masculinism. We ask: Whose bodies explore? What counts as experience? What constitutes the exchange between body and place? And, with what effects? Addressing these questions permits considerations of exclusions and marginalizations left unaddressed in much geographic literature on urbex.
Interpersonal conflict poses a serious threat to social justice activism. In the context of indigenous solidarity activism in southern Arizona, conflicts are often born of the challenges accompanying differentials in social privilege due to differences in race and ethnicity relative to white supremacist settler colonialism. This paper examines activist collaboration between Tohono O'odham and non-Native anarchist activists in southern Arizona, arguing that a topological activist polis is a useful lens through which we can better understand the roots of conflict in social justice activism. Non-Native activists are often aware of the ways white supremacist settler colonial society privileges particular identities while marginalizing others. Nonetheless, settler and white privilege give rise to tensions which can be seen topologically through the very different relationships non-Native and indigenous activists have to ongoing processes of white supremacy and to histories of the genocide of indigenous peoples.
This commentary explores some of the threads developed by the editors of Dialogues in Human Geography in light of the recent publication and online conversation surrounding our article, ‘Citation Matters’. We examine the precariousness of academic speech, question when it’s necessary to conscientiously disengage from dialogue, and posit whiteness as a limit of and condition for dialogue. We frame this around the claim, building further on Mouffe’s concept of agonism, that different speech acts, in particular within spheres like the academy, and especially in the absence of a clear foundation for dialogue, can be viewed from a point of view of nonequivalence.
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