In this paper, I examine how linguistic tropes that emerged during ethnographic fieldwork in a Delhi resettlement colony both capture and reaffirm the experiences of forced eviction and marginalization on the urban periphery. By analyzing the urban subjectivities embedded in recurrent metaphors, I explore how people "make sense" of dispossession and ultimately, articulate their "place" in the city. Drawing on Lakoff and Johnson (1980, Metaphors We Live By; 1999, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought), I argue that the utilization of metaphors in everyday language influences how people structure their relationships-with the state, with other residents of the resettlement colony, and with the city itself-and captures the pervasive uncertainty of resettlement. Unpacking such metaphors as "guides" to thought and practice can contribute to theories on spaces of insecurity and performativity of the marginalized in the city.

Recent studies have reconceptualized infrastructure as comprising both material and social processes, thus offering insights into lived experiences, governance, and socio-spatial reordering. More specific attention to infrastructure’s temporality has challenged its supposed inertia and inevitable completeness, leading to an engagement with questions of the dynamics of infrastructure over different phases of its lifespan, and their generative effects. In this paper, we advance these debates through a focus on the processes of decay, maintenance, and repair that characterize such phases of infrastructural life, by exploring how specific infrastructures are materially shaped by, and shape, social, political, and socio-ecological arrangements. Our intervention has two related aims: first, to conceptualize decay, maintenance, and repair as both temporal phases of infrastructure’s dynamic materiality and its specific affective conditions; second, to trace how these phases of infrastructural life rework embodied labor, differentiated citizenship, and socio-ecological relations. We argue that attention to infrastructure’s “temporal fragility” elucidates the articulation between everyday capacities and desires to labor, the creation of and demands made by political constituents, and the uneven distribution of opportunities and resources.

Though a perennial problem in postcolonial Kenya, extrajudicial executions (EJE) show few signs of ending and in recent years are even accelerating amongst young men in informal settlements. Avenues for legal, institutional and civil society redress, nominally expanded in recent years, display an ongoing tendency towards disconnection from the grassroots. A case study from Mathare, Nairobi, seeks explanations for the lack of urgency in addressing EJE and also the limited effectiveness of responses to them that are rooted in the political economy of interests of civil society actors, which tends to perpetuate these ‘excluded spaces’ of the slum. The authors do so, however, by exploring one particular struggle to show how frustration with civil society is being used by social justice activists to articulate ideas of ‘everyday’ violence to mobilise for change that disrupts the apparent normalisation of EJE

This paper focuses on self-organized, grassroots volunteers who have emerged as key actors in the humanitarian response to Europe's contemporary "refugee crisis." Based on ethnographic research on the Greek island of Chios and in Paris and taking established critiques of humanitarianism as our point of departure, we explore how volunteers providing humanitarian care navigate the ethical and political dilemmas traditionally encountered by aid workers. More specifically, we ask: what kinds of social relations do volunteers enact through their practices and in their everyday encounters with refugees in and beyond refugee camps? How do the specific qualities of these encounters affect the possibilities of enacting alternative modes of humanitarian practice? Focusing firstly on volunteer-refugee interactions during camp distributions-the paradigmatic mode of humanitarian work-we explore how volunteers simultaneously mimic disciplinary humanitarian practices and engage in processes of ethical deliberation that inform more dignified forms of care. Secondly, we show how everyday volunteer-refugee interactions, formed within diverging spatiotemporal contexts of the two sites, lend themselves to exchanges of "biographical life," opening up spaces for creative solidarities with refugees and more political interventions vis-à-vis the contemporary border regime. We conclude that commonly considered humanitarian logics of depoliticization and dehumanization are not guaranteed outcomes of volunteer humanitarianism. Instead, some of the volunteer practices and everyday encounters that we document hold the potential for more fluid and humane responses to an ever-changing landscape of refugee flows and containment.

This special issue bridges human geography, anthropology and political ecology to understand infrastructure in between conditions of decay and repair, and how embodied experiences of infrastructure intersect with processes of socio-spatial transformation. Our focus on decay and repair builds on literature that understands infrastructure as material processes articulated through social and affective dimensions, with implications for infrastructural access and broader political claims (