Prosaic geographies of stateness

Interventions in teaching political geography: Reflections on practice

“…I ask students to look out for the border; most miss the moment of crossing over or realise only when their mobiles switch back to UK service providers. But this anti-climax is often prompts much discussion later about the historical making of borders and boundaries, the everyday work of the state at the border (Painter 2006), the changing nature of this border over time, and the continuities and shifts in its political status, material form and symbolism.…”

Dreaming the ordinary

“…There is a profusion of writing these days that seems to celebrate the banal (e.g., Billig, 1995;Katz, 2007), the prosaic (e.g., Painter, 2006), the quotidian or everyday (e.g., Mountz, 2003) and the ordinary (e.g., Amin and Graham, 1997;Robinson, 2006). The purpose of this writing, of course, is to show how the boring, banal, prosaic or ordinary are anything but what is implied by the descriptor; it is to show just how important daily life and the "taken-for-granted" are to broader processes that shape our world.…”

New state-theoretic approaches to asylum and refugee geographies

“…Within geography, for example, Jones (2007) appeals for greater attention to be paid to the personal politics and immediate cultural context of key powerful decision-makers within the state, drawing upon historical studies around Welsh nationalism and devolution to illustrate the decisive influence that individuals' convictions and social positions can have over nation-state formation. Within post-structural geographies of the state in particular, a rich vein of research has also opened up concerning the degree to which states rely upon social re-production through mundane and repetitive practices in local contexts (Ferguson and Gupta, 2002;Painter, 2006;Mountz, 2007). Again, central to state power in these accounts are the people that enact states and put them to work.…”