Category Archives: Place

Political Economy of Soil Erosion

Posted on June 28, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Blaikie, Piers. 1985. The Political Economy of Soil Erosion in Developing Countries. London: Longman. [Ch. 1-2] Besides the uncertainties generated by scarce, long-term measurement and the difficulty of parsing out human impacts on environmental degradation, Piers Blaikie’s classic study on … Continue reading →

Posted in Agriculture, Land, Place, Political Ecology, Political Economy, Scale, Spatiality, The State | Comments Off

Denaturalizing Dispossession

Posted on June 24, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Hart, Gillian. 2006. “Denaturalizing Dispossession: Critical Ethnography in the Age of Resurgent Imperialism,” Antipode 38(5): 977-1004. Through empirically grounded examples and encompassing debates on resurgent imperialism and ongoing primitive accumulation, Gillian Hart offers theoretical and methodological suggestions for analyzing dispossession. … Continue reading →

Posted in Agriculture, Antonio Gramsci, David Harvey, Henri Lefebvre, Historical-Geographies, Land, Networks, Place, Post-Colonial, Primitive Accumulation, Race & Ethnicity, Scale, Spatiality | 2 Comments

Frontiers: Civil Society and Nature

Posted on June 20, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Redclift, Michael. 2006. Frontiers: Histories of Civil Society and Nature. Boston: MIT Press. Through a series of brief case studies, Michael Redclift explores the meanings, practices, and imaginaries associated with frontiers, which he analyzes through the mutually interacting interfaces of … Continue reading →

Posted in Agriculture, Boundaries, Frontiers, Henri Lefebvre, Historical-Geographies, Illegality, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Land, Law, Place, Power, Sovereignty, Spatiality, Territory, The State, Violence | Comments Off

A Scale Debate

Posted on May 23, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Marston, Sallie. 2000. “The Social Construction of Scale.” Progress in Human Geography 25: 219-42. Brenner, Neil. 2001. “The Limits to Scale? Methodological Reflections on Scalar Structuration.” Progress in Human Geography 25(4): 591–614. Marston, Sallie and Neil Smith. 2001. “States, Scales … Continue reading →

Posted in Gender, Henri Lefebvre, Nation/Nationalism, Networks, Place, Power, Scale, Spatiality, Territory, The Body, The State | 3 Comments

Seeing Like a State

Posted on May 20, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Scott, James. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press. I can see why James C. Scott’s book has been such a generative work, even if there’s a … Continue reading →

Posted in Assemblages, City, Forests, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Law, Maps, Nation/Nationalism, Place, Power, Science & Tech., Spatiality, Violence | 2 Comments

Masons, Tricksters and Knowledge Spaces

Posted on May 11, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Turnbull, David. 2000. Masons, Tricksters, and Cartographers: Comparative Studies in the Sociology of Scientific and Indigenous Knowledge. New York: Routledge Turnbull aims to show that all knowledge production, including the technoscientific, is “motley”—i.e. a messy meshwork of places, practices, contingencies, … Continue reading →

Posted in Assemblages, Maps, Networks, Place, Power, Science & Tech., Spatiality | 1 Comment

Human Territoriality

Posted on May 6, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Sack, Robert D. 1986. Human Territoriality: Its Theory and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Intro and Ch. 1] Sack describes human territoriality as a specifically strategic process, departing instantly from the notion of territoriality as a biological human drive. He … Continue reading →

Posted in Boundaries, Place, Power, Spatiality, Territory, The State | Comments Off

Suffering for Territory

Posted on May 3, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Moore, Donald. 2005. Suffering for Territory: Race, Place, and Power in Zimbabwe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. This is a hard book to summarize because of the intricacy of the argument, its theoretical architectures, and its deep ethnographic empirics—they are … Continue reading →

Posted in Antonio Gramsci, Governmentality, Historical-Geographies, Michel Foucault, Nation/Nationalism, Place, Post-Colonial, Power, Race & Ethnicity, Scale, Spatiality, Territory, Violence | 1 Comment

Hollow Land and the Politics of ‘Archupation’

Posted on April 30, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Weizman, Eyal. 2007. Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. London: Verso. All military occupations are spatial operations and strategies. But the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and government have managed to make space the continuation of war by other means. New … Continue reading →

Posted in City, Illegality, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Law, Maps, Michel Foucault, Nation/Nationalism, Networks, Place, Power, Spatiality, Territory, The State, Violence | 4 Comments

Territory, Place, Scale, Network

Posted on April 24, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Jessop, Bob, Neil Brenner, and Martin Jones. 2008. “Theorizing Sociospatial Relations.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26(3): 389-401. This is an important article—short and to the point. The authors claim that thinking around sociospatial relations has tended to … Continue reading →

Posted in Historical-Geographies, Networks, Place, Scale, Spatiality, Territory | Comments Off