Latest Issue Summary
Welcome to Issue 40:5 (October 2008) of Antipode
This issue covers state powers and protest movements; national security, rights and surveillance; contemporary social theory; geography and anthropology; and the politics of publishing and academic production. The three front essays in the Interventions symposium on the politics of academic production and publishing illustrate the urgency for making free access to our writing, our teaching and our other academic labours a priority, especially for radical or progressive geographers. “ Open Access Publishing: Hypocrisy and Confusion in Geography,” by Jenny Pickerell, “A Special Brand of Sausage,” by Winifred Curran and Euan Hague, and “Knowledge Grab: Corporate Appropriation and Exploitation of Academic Geographers,” by Harald Bauder and Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro place critical attention on how access to academic production lies at the interstices of ethics and politics within the academy, within communities, within activism and across geographies. The stakes for public access to academic production are clearly shown in Nocola Ansell’s article entitled, “Substituting for Families? Schools and Social Reproduction in AIDS-affected Lesotho,” on public education in the AIDS-affected communities of Lesotho as she calls for a better understanding of the role of public education in relation to an ethics of care in this context.
Several of the articles in this issue focus on the militarization of the state, its impact on particular communities and the challenges of organizing for the protection of human and civil rights in relation to government abuse. In “International Accompaniment and Witnessing State Violence in the Philippines,” Geraldine Pratt exposes the tricky dynamics of ethics and politics within the formation of international solidarity networks formed among Philippine and Canadian human rights organizations that are responding to extra-judicial violence within the Philippines. Lynn A. Staeheli and Caroline R. Nagel turn their focus in, “Rethinking Security: Perspectives from Arab-American and British Arab Activists,” on the experience of Arab activists with the U.S. and Britain as their governments heighten surveillance of their communities in the name of national security. In, “Cutting Through Topologies: Crossing Lines at the School of the Americas,” Sara Koopman also illustrates activist strategies to challenge the militarization of public life undertaken in the name of “national security.” In the case of the School of the Americas, she demonstrates how this militarization involves the training of torture and other brutal techniques within the US and for use in Latin American countries, where human rights abuses are well documented. All of these articles show how opening access to these political processes requires coordination among scholars working with community-based activists and international rights organizations.
Fortifying this nexus is the explicit theme within the collective essay, “What’s Just? Afterthoughts on the Summer Institute in the Geographies of Justice 2007,” by the 283 Collective, as the collaborators reflect on the meaning of justice for radical geography. This topic also resonates through the four essays within the Symposium, “Geographies of the Grundrisse,” organized by Geoff Mann and Joel Wainright and with additional contributions by Vinay Gidwani and Nathan Sayre. The now famous preparatory notes of Marx contain geographic ideas that few have ever teased out systematically. The symposium begins this overdue project with some élan. Collectively, these submissions deploy sharp analysis and internationalist critique to combat the current apologists of national security and neoliberal policies. And all demonstrate that opening access to information, to politics and to governance is vital in such struggles.
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