Suchergebnisse

Many accounts of resistance within systems of migration control pivot upon a coherent migrant subject, one that is imbued with political agency and posited as oppositional to particular forms of sovereign power. Drawing upon ethnographic research into the role of creativity within the UK asylum system, I argue that grounding resistance with a stable, coherent and agentic subject, aligns with oppositional narratives (of power vs resistance), and thereby risks negating the entangled politics of the (in)coherence of subject formation, and how this can contain the potential to disrupt, disturb or interrupt the practices and premise of the UK asylum system. I suggest that charity groups and subjects should not be written out of narratives of resistance apriori because they engage with 'the state': firstly, because to argue that there is a particular form that resistance should take is to place limits around what counts as the political; and secondly, because to 'remain oppositional' is at odds with an (in)coherent subject. I show how accounts which highlight a messy and ambiguous subjectivity, could be bought into understandings of resistance. This is important because as academics, we too participate in the delineation of the political and what counts as resistance. In predetermining what subjects, and forms of political action count as resistance we risk denying recognition to those within this system.

The impetus for this intervention comes from my own experiences of advice to 'wait for a permanent contract' before trying to conceive a child. I contend that this considerate guidance, frequently given to Early Career Researchers, nonetheless re-inscribes a linear capitalist temporality, and that there is a need to resist this binding of the temporalities of (in)fertility to the metrics of the neoliberal academy. I suggest that to promote 'waiting' negates the nonlinear, everyday and intimate politics of our varied, embodied experiences of (in)fertility. It is also grounded within problematic assumptions: first, that waiting is linear; that we will arrive at a permanent job in the future, if we persist with the present; and second, that our (in)fertility is known to us, that we are able to, and will, make a rational decision to conceive a child. These are pervasive assumptions with deeply personal implications. Moreover, they are compounded by the short-term contracts, and expectations of institutional mobility that characterise many experiences of UK academia. My hope for this piece is that it invites geographers to further explore embodied politics of (in)fertility.

This paper interrogates the attention that Chelsea Manning has received within the academy. It begins from the observation that despite being responsible for the largest classified document leak, work within Political Geography and International Relations that engages with this data remains notably scant. This claim emerges from a systematic search of peer-reviewed materials using WikiLeaks materials as their empirical base, compiling a database of papers written about Manning. We then examine the possible reasons for this absence, focusing upon a series of what we term 'obfuscating practices' by which state actors complicate access to publicly accessible knowledge, including access to the US Army's Freedom of Information Request Website, and the court documents from Manning's court-martial. Finally, we look at claims of an embargo around the publication of academic work in this area, conceptualising this as a politics of paranoia and commenting upon the implications of this for knowledge curation within the academy.

This paper interrogates the attention that Chelsea Manning has received within the academy. It begins from the observation that despite being responsible for the largest classified document leak, work within Political Geography and International Relations that engages with this data remains notably scant. This claim emerges from a systematic search of peer-reviewed materials using WikiLeaks materials as their empirical base, compiling a database of papers written about Manning. We then examine the possible reasons for this absence, focusing upon a series of what we term 'obfuscating practices' by which state actors complicate access to publicly accessible knowledge, including access to the US Army's Freedom of Information Request Website, and the court documents from Manning's court-martial. Finally, we look at claims of an embargo around the publication of academic work in this area, conceptualising this as a politics of paranoia and commenting upon the implications of this for knowledge curation within the academy.

On 14 July 2017, the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) announced that it would shorten the time period for holding 11 kinds of noncitizen detainee records and invited public comment on these changes. NARA stated that the decision to recategorize many of these records as 'temporary' was because they held "little or no research value." The files included records of abuse, assault and deaths of people in immigration detention. Curious how NARA's valued research, we designed a project asking what could be learned—about abuse in detention and NARA—from these documents. This article describes our methodological approach, our findings, and discusses the implications of both for future research on immigration, government archiving practices, and accountability. We submitted Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Requests for the 11 document types slated for earlier disposal and analysed ICE's documentation of neglect and abuse in immigration detention. To do so, we traced the documents' intertextuality, showing how each document relied upon—and further produced—other documents. Challenging NARA's calculative logics, we show that disposing of these documents would widen gaps, holes, and silences in an already partial, state-centric archive, limiting which future histories of US immigration policies may be told.

Research conducted over the past 30 years has demonstrated a reduction in errors and improvement in
data quality when face–to-face social surveys are carried out using computers instead of paper and
pencil. However, research examining the quality of data collected by interviewers using mobile devices is
in its infancy and is based in developed countries. In a small pilot study conducted during the World
Bank's Kenya State of the Cities Baseline Survey, a face-to-face survey on living conditions,
infrastructure and service delivery, the authors compared the quality of data collected using smartphones
to data collected using tablets. The study of mobile touchscreen devices showed that tablets
outperformed phones in some cases, but that the results were highly dependent on the interviewer.

This paper addresses how the ten-year anniversary of the London bombings was made present through political affects and atmospheres on 7 July 2015. Although the anniversary of a terrorist event forms an opportune moment for invoking the nation as united in feeling, we are interested in how people attune to political atmospheres of memory and trauma in multiple ways, which do not always cohere to sovereign narratives about unity and certainty. By focusing on these events through an attentiveness to the atmospheric and affective, we examine how these events were recalled, memorialised, felt and sensed in the small-scale ceremonies taking place across London on that morning, by way of a multi-authored sensory auto-ethnography. As such, we are led towards various moments of encounter, which involve 'minor gestures' (Manning, 2016), and imply ways of responding to acts of terror that rub against the unifying forces of the state. In contrast to the 'rolling maelstroms of affect' (Thrift 2004: 57) pursued by the state and media following a terrorist attack, this project is attentive to multiple, uncertain and ambivalent encounters. These matter because they suggest other ways of being political and of responding to both terrorist and state-led violence.

AbstractFace-to-face (FTF) surveys have been the traditional method to gather nationally representative data and remain the dominant data collection mode in resource-poor countries. Conducting these surveys is expensive and time consuming. With the rapid expansion of mobile phone use, Short Message Service presents an opportunity to conduct inexpensive, fast, and scalable surveys. However, these samples are typically not representative of the target population. Standard adjustments to correct for nonrepresentative sampling are insufficient, due to two types of bias: residual sampling bias based on unobserved variables and survey mode effects. We introduce calibrated multilevel regression with poststratification (cMRP), a procedure that corrects for residual bias by incorporating a relatively small sample of FTF data that is known to be unbiased. We apply this method to the problem of estimating financial inclusion (access to formal banking systems) in Uganda. We find that our cMRP approach is effective in replicating estimates from a larger and much more expensive FTF survey. This article includes a description of our methods as well as results from the financial inclusion study and a discussion of limitations and future areas for research.