The Geographies Of Threat And The Production Of Violence

The Geographies of Threat and the Production of Violence exposes the spatial processes of racialising, gendering, and classifying populations through the encoded urban infrastructure – from highways cleaving neighbourhoods to laws and policies fortifying even more unbreachable boundaries. This synthesis of narrative and theory resurrects neglected episodes of state violence and reveals how the built environment continues to enable it today within a range of cities throughout the world. Examples and discussions pull from colonial pasts and presents, of old strategic settlements turned major modern cities in the United States and elsewhere that link to the physical and legal structures concentrating a populace into neighbourhoods that prep them for a lifetime of conscripted and carceral service to the State.

"Violent Geographies is essential to understanding how the politics of fear, terror, and violence in being largely hidden geographically can only be exposed in like manner. The 'War on Terror' finally receives the coolly critical analysis its ritual invocation has long required." —John Agnew, Professor of Geography, UCLA "Urgent, passionate and deeply humane, Violent Geographies is uncomfortable but utterly compelling reading. An essential guide to a world splintered and wounded by fear and aggression—this is geography at its most politically engaged, historically sensitive, and intellectually brave." —Ben Highmore, University of Sussex "This is what a ‘public geography’ should be all about: acute analysis of momentous issues of our time in an accessible language. Gregory and Pred have assembled a peerless group of critical geographers whose essays alter conventional understandings of terror, violence, and fear. No mere gazetteer, Violent Geographies shows how place, space and landscape are central components of the real and imagined practices that constitute organised violence past and present. If you thought terror, violence, and fear were the professional preserve of security analysts and foreign affairs experts this book will force you to think again." —Noel Castree, School of Environment and Development, Manchester University "A studied, passionate and moving examination of the way in which the violent logics of the ‘War on Terror’ have so quickly shuttered and reorganized the spaces of this planet on its different scales. From the book emerges a critical new cartography that clearly charts an archipelago of a large multiplicity of ‘wild’ and ‘tamed’ places as well as ‘black holes’ within and between which we all struggle to live." —Eyal Weizman, Director, Goldsmiths College Centre for Research Architecture

Direct, interpersonal violence is a pervasive, yet often mundane feature of our day-to-day lives; paradoxically, violence is both ordinary and extraordinary. Violence, in other words, is often hidden in plain sight. Space, Place, and Violence seeks to uncover that which is too apparent: to critically question both violent geographies and the geographies of violence. With a focus on direct violence, this book situates violent acts within the context of broader political and structural conditions. Violence, it is argued, is both a social and spatial practice. Adopting a geographic perspective, Space, Place, and Violence provides a critical reading of how violence takes place and also produces place. Specifically, four spatial vignettes – home, school, streets, and community – are introduced, designed so that students may think critically how ‘race’, sex, gender, and class inform violent geographies and geographies of violence.

Laundering Black Rage: The Washing of Black Death, People, Property, and Profits is a spatial and historical critique of the capitalist State that examines how Black Rage—conceived as a constructive and logical response to the conquest of resources, land, and human beings racialized as Black—is cleaned for the unyielding means of White capital. Interlacing political theory with international histories of Black rebellion, it presents a thoughtful challenge to the counterinsurgent tactics of the State that consistently convert Black Rage into a commodity to be bought, sold, and repressed. Laundering Black Rage investigates how the Rage directed at the police murder of George Floyd could be marshalled to funnel the Black Lives Matter movement into corporate advertising and questionable leadership, while increasing the police budgets inside the laundry cities of capital - largely with our consent. Essayist/Performer Too Black and Geographer Rasul A. Mowatt assert Black Rage as a threat to the flow of capital and the established order of things, which must therefore be managed by the process of laundering. Intertwining stories of Black resistance throughout the African diaspora, State building under capitalism, cities as sites of laundering, and the world making of empire, Laundering Black Rage also lays the groundwork for upending the laundering process through an anti-colonial struggle of reverse-laundering conquest. Relevant to studies of race and culture, history, politics, and the built environment, this pathbreaking work is essential reading for scholars and organizers enraged at capitalism and White supremacy laundering their work for nefarious means.

The contributors to Mapping Geographies of Violence explore the multi-layered meaning of violence and the various ways it occupies our daily lives, be they overt, institutional, structural or covert. With an eye towards social justice, each chapter offers a discrete definition of violence and provides readers with a range of theoretical orientations, from social psychology, symbolic interactionism and Marxism to discourse analysis. From these perspectives, several examples of violence are explored: anti-feminism, police raids, gendered violence, mental illness, sex work and poverty. Mapping Geographies of Violence presents readers with a larger understanding and analysis of how violence, far from just an expression of individuals or groups, is rooted in social constructs like class, patriarchy and racism.

"This book tells the story of US performance artists who adopted guerrilla tactics during the 1970s and 1980s in response to the "cultural domestication of militancy" in the United States. In the 1960s, as US news was covering anti-colonialist resistance in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia, they fashioned the persona of the "guerrilla fighter" as the embodiment of a "foreign" agent of threat. A key example was Che Guevara, resplendent in his beret and camouflage garb. It wasn't long before the nation was consuming endless images of militant protestors donning berets and carrying guns in gestures conjuring Che. As the Black Panthers, Brown Berets, Young Lords, and Weathermen adopted the uniforms and the tactics of armed and psychological interference, artists across the country began to use sabotage, hijacking, deception, and other "risk work" to wage conceptual war on both art and society. They fabricated Chicano gang wars, held TV talk shows hosts hostage, and posed as hijackers in the garb of guerrilla-terrorists made iconic by the news"--

This is the first book to explore in breadth and in depth the complex intersections between sport, leisure, and social justice. This book examines the relations of power that produce social inequalities and considers how sport and leisure spaces can perpetuate those relations, or act as sites of resistance, and makes a powerful call for an activist scholarship in sport and leisure studies. Presenting original theoretical and empirical work by leading international researchers and practitioners in sport and leisure, this book addresses the central social issues that lie at the heart of critical social science – including racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, religious persecution, socio-economic deprivation, and the climate crisis – and asks how these issues are expressed or mediated in the context of sport and leisure practices. Covering an incredibly diverse range of topics and cases – including sex testing in sport; sport for refugees; pedagogical practices in physical education; community sport development; events and human rights; and athlete activism – this book also surveys the history of sport and social justice research, as well as outlining theoretical and methodological foundations for this field of enquiry. The Routledge Handbook of Sport, Leisure and Social Justice is an indispensable resource for any advanced student, researcher, policymaker, practitioner, or activist with an interest in the sociology, culture, politics, history, development, governance, media and marketing, and business and management of sport and leisure.