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General rightsThis document is made available in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite only the published version using the reference above. Full terms of use are available: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/pure/about/ebr-terms AbstractMicropolitical investments and minor theoretical energies are of growing concern to geographers, yet conceptual ambiguity has inhibited broader discussion and deployment of these terms; even if they are the pivots of what we understand as, or take to be, the 'political'. In an effort to reinvigorate a dialogue about these crucial but underplayed concepts, and in an effort to push a micropolitical ethos in and of itself, we introduce a forum composed of six short interventions by geographers engaged in matters of the minor and micropolitical. Following these interventions, and leaning on a landmark article published in this journal twenty-one years ago, Cindi Katz revisits and reflects upon a vibrant conceptual assemblage that perhaps matters more now than ever, not least in questions of hope, discipline, ethics, existence, and politics itself. Key wordsMicropolitics; minor theory; ethics; hope; discipline Twenty-one years ago this journal published 'Towards a Minor Theory' by Cindi Katz (1996). i Despite the scale of the conceptual challenge laid down by Katz, specifically in unpicking the 'mastery' at work in much of critical geography, the article garnered little attention, in citation at least. It was something of a slowburner, a sleeper-hit lurking in the annals of contemporary geography. Harnessing, therefore, what seems to be a recent growing interest in the micropolitical and the minor in geography and the social sciences, the aim of this forum -itself composed of minor interventions by several geographers -is to re-invigorate these enigmatic concepts. These interventions return to the intellectual forum that gave rise to such concerns, but in a time when these provocations matter still further. This highlighting begins with a moment of critique. Specifically, that questions concerning the what, why and where of micropolitics and minor theory are missing, even from scholarship in which they act as anchoring concepts, not least in our own research

Cartography and geopolitics have a troubled relationship. While maps have been complicit in the worst excesses of colonial venturing and Cold War politicking, they have also been deployed as inscriptions of recalcitrance and resistance. Yet regardless of the ends to which they have been deployed, mapping and cartography are creative, aesthetic performances and sometimes outwardly experimental and artistic. To what extent then, might contemporary forms of cartographic practice be producing spaces that are simultaneously creative and geopolitical? This article employs the wiki-based OpenStreetMap as a fieldwork intervention in exploring how online, virtual, crowd-sourced cartographies can be conjured as 'ethico-aesthetic projects' (Guattari 1995) that valorise creative processes in negotiating emergent problems, politics, events and spaces. It shows how OpenStreetMap is at once a technology, a set of performances and a series of communities that allows users to create and alter maps, thereby generating capacities to edit worlds. The article explores how these capacities inflect geographical imaginations while being generative of a minor geopolitics. 'Minor' in this context alludes not to scale or tenor, but instead refers to the non-representational registers of cartography so as to spotlight the unspoken, anticipatory geopolitics of mapping.

In April 2017 Ecuador halted the continental drift to the conservative right in Latin America by electing leftist Lenín Moreno to the Presidency. Attention has turned, therefore, to the legacy of outgoing President Rafael Correa's decade in power. To that end, this paper examines one of Correa's signature programmes, 'Buen Vivir' (Living Well), a strategic plan for development underscored by the indigenous Kichwa cosmology of 'sumak kawsay'. Sumak kawsay is a notion that has been co-opted into policy mechanisms in an attempt to both challenge neoliberal modes of governance, and to disrupt the ontological bifurcation of nature and society. Given the emphasis placed on ecological sensibility in sumak kawsay and Buen Vivir, critics have been quick to highlight the contradictory relations between Ecuador's mode of environmental governance and its extractivist agenda. Such critiques are as staid as they are well rehearsed. Acknowledging the precarious composition of sumak kawsay, the paper questions the extent to which the ethos of experimentalism in politics can be sustained, eliding stymied technocratic forms of the political. It turns, therefore, to Baruch Spinoza's treatise on adequate and inadequate ideas. In so doing, the paper examines how one can critique an idea without perpetuating a moral economy in judgment. Consequently, the paper considers the way in which Spinoza's thought can be charged to recuperate imperilled political ideas.