The spatialities of contentious politics
Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Helga Leitner,* Eric Sheppard* and Kristin M. Sziarto†
The question of how space matters to the mobilisation, practices and trajectories
of contentious politics has frequently been represented as a politics of scale.
Others have focused on place and networks as key spatialities of contentious politics.
Yet there are multiple spatialities – scale, place, networks, positionality and mobility
– that are implicated in and shape contentious politics. No one of these should be
privileged: in practice, participants in contentious politics frequently draw on several
at once. It is thus important to consider all of them and the complex ways in which
they are co-implicated with one another, with unexpected consequences for
contentious politics. This co-implication in practice, and its impact on social
movements, is illustrated with the Immigrant Workers’ Freedom Ride
in the United States.
key words contentious politics
immigrant rights activism
social movements
spatialities
*Department of Geography, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA
email:
[email protected]
†
Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI 53211, USA
revised manuscript received 1 October 2007
Introduction
The last 15 years have seen a flourishing of scholarship in and beyond geography that has interrogated
the spatiality of social movements. This research has
challenged social movements theorists to incorporate
spatiality into their conceptualisations of social
movements (cf. Miller 2000; Sewell Jr 2001; Martin
and Miller 2003). This has been complemented by
a flurry of case studies of resistance and activism
around such topics as environmental justice, immigrant rights, neoliberalism and globalisation, animated
by geographers’ steadily increasing interest in
activist scholarship and the spatiality of all forms of
politics. More generally, there is much interest in
how social norms, most notably neoliberalism, can
be subject to (and possibly shaped by) contestations
of all kinds (Leitner et al. 2007). The subject matter of
this paper takes up a subset of these literatures. We
seek to offer a conceptual framework for analysing
the spatialities of contentious politics.
Within sociology, ‘contentious politics’ has come
to replace ‘social movements’ as the term used to
describe the phenomenon of organised social resistance
to hegemonic norms. In the introduction to the book
signalling this shift in discourse (Aminzade et al.
2001), Sidney Tarrow quotes the following definition of contentious politics, taken from his previous
work with Doug McAdam and Charles Tilly:
public, collective and episodic interactions between makers
of claims when a) at least some of the interaction adopts
non-institutional forms, b) at least one government is a
claimant, an object or (sic.) claims, or a party to the claims,
and c) the claims would, if realised, affect the interests
of at least one of the claimants. (Tarrow 2001, 7)
We find this definition overly state-centric and interest
oriented, and insufficient in acknowledging the
differences within all collective action. Thus we adopt
the following definition for this paper:
Contentious politics refers to concerted, counterhegemonic social and political action, in which differently positioned participants come together to challenge
dominant systems of authority, in order to promote
and enact alternative imaginaries.1
Concerted social action refers to forms of contestation in which individuals and groups organise and
ally, with various degrees of formality, to push
for social change that challenges hegemonic norms
(whether the latter are located in the state, the market
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or civil society). In this view, such action entails
developing strategies and practices that advance
alternative imaginaries (cf. Leitner et al. 2007).
Construction of such political alliances necessarily
means engaging with and drawing in individuals
and other organisations with distinct positionalities.
These differences are negotiated, and contested,
shaping the positionality of the group/organisation
itself vis-à-vis the hegemon. (One is reminded here
of Antonio Gramsci’s ‘war of position’, although he
had in mind social change on a broader geographical
and longer historical scale.)
Discussions of the spatiality of contentious politics
seek to analyse the ways in which geography matters to the imaginaries, practices and trajectories
of contentious politics. At issue is how the various
theoretical frameworks developed to account for the
location, dynamics and outcomes of contentious
politics are complicated by socio-spatial theory.
This question has, of course, received a good amount
of attention from geographers and others, as noted
above. Yet, in our view, these accounts remain
incomplete. In particular, and reflecting the shifting
fashions of socio-spatial theory, there has been a
tendency to privilege a particular spatiality – only
to abandon that in favour of another. Since 1995,
for example, there has been a strong tendency to
discuss the spatiality of contentious politics through
the lens of the politics of scale. The literature on
contentious politics in geography, and beyond, thus
became replete with such ideas as scale-jumping,
scalar and multi-scalar strategies. More recently,
with recognition of the limits to scalar thinking and
calls to abandon scale, scalar tropes have been
replaced by networks, and now mobility (Sheller
and Law 2006).2
In one sense, our argument is straightforward.
Analysts of contentious politics have a variety of
spatialities available to them (notably, for the purposes of this paper, place, scale, networks, mobility
and socio-spatial positionality). In determining how
geography matters, we assert that a priori decisions
(ontological or otherwise) to reduce this multi-valency
to any single master concept can only impoverish
analysis, by offering a partial viewpoint into how
geography matters in contentious politics.3 Further,
it is necessary to pay attention not only to the
pertinence of particular spatialities in particular
contexts, but also to their co-implication. It is not
simply a question of the co-presence of the pertinent
spatialities, but also how they shape one another
and, thereby, the trajectory of contentious politics.
Helga Leitner et al.
This is similar to the notion of intersectionality in
feminist theory, in which it is argued that positionality is not simply a question of where an individual
is located with respect to different aspects of
identity.
[R]ace, class, and gender are not distinct realms of experience, existing in splendid isolation from each other; nor
can they be simply yoked together retrospectively like
armatures of Lego. Rather, they come into existence
in and through relation to each other – if in contradictory
and conflictual ways. (McClintock 1995, 5; quoted in Swarr
and Nagar 2003, 496)
Our emphasis on the multivalent and co-implicated
spatialities of contentious politics is not arrived at
simply through abstract philosophical discussion,
although such an argument could surely be constructed (for a continental European perspective
on theoretical and philosophical debates, see the
collection of essays in Dünne and Günzel 2006). In
Anglophone geography, there is a tendency not
only to swerve from one fashionable spatiality to
the next, but also to construct ontological rationales
for the choice of one or the other as the master
spatiality. The practice of contentious politics is quite
different, however, as we will attempt to show.
Participants in contentious politics are enormously
creative in cobbling together different spatial
imaginaries and strategies on the fly, without
deep reflection on the philosophical implications.
Pragmatically, we seek to capture this empirical
practice in our conceptualisation.
Finally, we argue for the importance of paying
attention to the materiality of contentious politics
(indeed, of social actions of all kinds). To do so
means paying close attention to how agency is
distributed across the more-than-human world, and
not solely located with humans. This undermines
attempts to separate (human) subjects and (nonhuman) objects. The conceptualisation of spatiality
at the centre of contemporary socio-spatial theory,
that spatiality is constituted through but also shapes
social action, can be embraced within a materialist
account, as long as ‘social action’ is extended to
embrace non-human agency – the manifold biophysical processes and technologies that also shape
the spatiality of the world. As John Law and Kevin
Hetherington put it: ‘spatial phenomena . . . are
made by materials which are in space – but which
also have spatial effects’ (2000, 36).
The remainder of the paper is organised into two
broad sections, plus a conclusion. The first section
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The spatialities of contentious politics
illustrates the relevance of each of the five spatialities listed above for the trajectories of contentious
politics, treated as if in artificial isolation. Since
so much attention has been paid to scale, until
recently, we treat scale in somewhat greater detail
– both to argue for its relevance notwithstanding
recent scepticism, and to point to its limitations.
We complement conceptual analysis with brief
empirical examples showing how a focus on that
spatiality mattered to the practice and trajectory of
contentious politics. The second section interrogates
their co-implication (intersectionality). To illustrate
how this matters in practice, we provide a more
extended examination of the Immigrant Workers
Freedom Ride in the United States, in order to
draw out the complex ways in which the strategies
pursued by the organisers and freedom riders
draw on the various spatialities discussed here.
Multiple spatialities
Before examining the five spatialities that we seek
to link with contentious politics, it is important to
motivate our strategy. Why these five spatialities
and not others; and why present them separately,
given that we intend to argue for the importance
of their interdependence and co-implication? The
reason for this is that they are already in circulation in socio-spatial theory, as tropes that have been
successively drawn on to describe why geography
matters (for contentious politics, but for many
other phenomena also. For a related discussion
of the spatialities of globalisation, see Law and
Hetherington 2000; Sheppard 2002).
Scale and contentious politics
It has recently been popular to conceptualise the
spatiality of politics, including contentious politics,
through the lens of the politics of scale. Scale is
conceptualised as a relational, power-laden and
contested construction that actors strategically
engage with, in order to legitimise or challenge
existing power relations. In the course of these
struggles new scales are constructed, and the relative importance of different scales is reconfigured.
Central to the politics of scale is the manipulation
of relations of power and authority. This process is
highly contested, involving numerous negotiations
and struggles between different actors as they
attempt to reshape the scalar spatiality of power
and authority (Leitner 1997). For some, scale is
invoked as an indication of the geographical extent,
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or scope, of a political practice – distinguishing, for
example, between global, national and local social
movements. We argue, however, that the politics of
scale should be invoked in a more restrictive, relational
sense; to examine the ways in which various scales
articulate with one another. As Brenner puts it:
[I]n the absence of an explicit causal argument linking
the substantive social content of the spatial unit in question to its embeddedness or positionality within a broader
social hierarchy, there is little reason to theorize the
issues connoted by the singular usage of the ‘politics of
scale’ in a scalar terminology rather than through an
alternative geographical lexicon, such as that of place,
locality, territoriality, or networks. (2001, 601)
Some have argued that scale can be jettisoned
altogether, in favour of a flat ontology (Marston et al.
2005). We disagree with this reading of the scale
literature and the conclusion drawn (cf. Leitner and
Miller 2007). Even the self-described flat ontologist
Bruno Latour now argues that the proposition that
‘[s]cale is the actor’s own achievement . . . is the oldest,
and in my view, the most decisive proposition
made by ANT’ (Latour 2005, 185). For contentious
politics, scale matters in at least four ways.
First, much contentious politics takes on state
institutions, whose spatiality has traditionally been
dominated by nested scales, ranging from the
national to the local (cf. Swyngedouw 1997; Ferguson
and Gupta 2002; Brenner 2004). This scalar spatiality
is reconfigured by state and non-state practices in
ways that shift the relative importance of different
scales, occasionally even resulting in the construction
of new scales. For example, local legal aid organisations in the United States have had to adjust to
funding restrictions stemming from the devolution
of legal aid funding from Federal to state governments, accompanied by Federal recommendations
that local legal aid organisations should be consolidated into state-wide organisations. A supportive
state bar association, state Supreme Court and state
political environment may be crucial to the ability
of such local organisations to survive the transition
away from Federal to state and private sector
resources, as happened in Minnesota (Laws 2004).
To the extent that contentious politics interacts
with the state, therefore, the strategies available
will be shaped by state-constructed scalar configurations and the different conditions of possibility
within local places.
Second, social movements often engage in scalar
strategies. Some involve overcoming limitations of
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localness through scale jumping, turning local into
regional, national and global movements to expand
their power (Smith 1992). Movements ranging from
the Zapatistas, to labour unions, indigenous people’s
organisations, feminism, environmental justice and
the living wage campaign have successfully used such
strategies to advance their cause (cf. Herod 1997;
Froehling 1999; Miller 2000). Others have argued
that social movements can gain strength through
keeping it local. Such localisation strategies often
rely on attachments to place and culture, seeking
to reaffirm the importance of local particularity
as necessary to successful broader-scale strategies.
For example, Escobar suggests that place-based
cultural, ecological and economic practices are important sources of alternative visions and strategies
for reconstructing local and regional worlds, no
matter how produced by ‘the global’ they might
also be (Escobar 2001). Multi-scalar strategies,
simultaneously broadening the scale of action while
drawing strength from reinforcing the local scale,
are frequently employed. As Harvey observes:
‘the choice of spatial scale is not “either/or” but
“both/and” even though the latter means confronting
serious contradictions’ (2000, 51).
Third, the development and deployment of scale
frames are important in contentious politics (Kurtz
2003; Martin and Miller 2003). For example, opposition to the concentration of power over immigration
policy at the supra-national scale of the European
Union has come from both nationalist right-wing
political parties and transnational non-governmental
human/immigrant rights organisations, each employing different scale frames (Leitner 1997). Nationalist
right-wing political parties presented themselves as
guardians of the national interest and of a national
identity and cultural/racial distinctiveness that is
in danger of being obliterated by European integration and foreigners. In contrast, non-governmental
human/immigrant rights organisations framed their
grievances within a universal/global framework
that would require Europe to fulfil its human
rights obligations towards economic migrants and
political refugees, granting equality of treatment to
all legal residents within its territory.
Fourth, an as yet under-examined aspect of scale
in contentious politics involves the difficulties
faced when conflicting scale frames and scalar
strategies coexist within social movement alliances,
potentially undermining their cohesion and shaping
their strategies. For example, in the Minneapolis-St.
Paul metropolitan area in the United States, the
Helga Leitner et al.
Alliance for Metropolitan Stability has advocated a
metropolitan scale solution to address socio-spatial
inequities within the metropolitan area. Yet its
coherence has been partially undermined by the
different scale frames of Alliance members (Walling 2004). The metropolitan scale is of particular
importance to middle-class white participants in the
Alliance, such as those advocating metropolitanwide fair housing. By contrast, the Just Equity Caucus,
advocating on behalf of people of colour, eschewed
the regional or metropolitan designation entirely,
framing socio-spatial inequities at both the neighbourhood and the national scale. Differences in the
scales at which problems are framed also influence
the scale envisioned for action. In the case of the
Alliance for Metropolitan Stability, disparities in
scale frames of the problem/grievance resulted in
conflicts over the scale at which Alliance action
should be focused. Eventually, a compromise was
forged in the form of a multi-scalar strategy, with
the Alliance combining a focus on the metropolitan
scale, for data analysis, with localised actions in
particular minority neighbourhoods.
Yet an over-reliance on scale in understanding
contentious politics does create problems. First, it
presumes that vertical, inter-scalar relations dominate the spatiality of politics (Sheppard 2002). Yet
the spatiality of contested politics often connects
people and places directly, horizontally across
space. When activists gathered at a World Social
Forum meeting in Porto Alegre or Mumbai, they
were not being brought together via some larger
spatial scale that they each are embedded within.
Rather, cyber networks established among activists
allowed them to link up with each other and plan
the event. They travelled to these events on their
own initiative, and their co-presence and face-toface deliberations in the space of the WSF meetings
allowed for the further development of common
agendas and strategies, and strengthened networks
among activists from different parts of the globe.
Such networks, deliberations and co-presence in
place cannot simply be subsumed under a master
narrative of scalar politics, but are suggestive of
other spatialities not readily reducible to scale;
socio-spatial connectivities through trans-local
networks, mobility across space, and the building
of social relations in place.
Second, the verticality entailed in any nested
set of territorially bounded political entities can be
suggestive of hierarchical power relations. In ecology
and physical geography, scales are often conceptualised
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in exactly this way. According to what is known as
hierarchy theory, broader scales shape conditions
of possibility at local scales (Sheppard and McMaster
2004). Such a top-down power hierarchy has been
roundly and appropriately criticised by feminist
and post-structuralist theorists for its neglect of
the potential transformative power of the local
(Freeman 2001). Yet it is important to remember
that many scale theorists reject the assumption
that scalar power operates through a top-down
hierarchy (Leitner and Miller 2007). Power hierarchies
always exist, with dominant, nodal and marginal
scales, but the largest scales need not dominate
(Collinge 1999). As Sayre notes, ‘this is, in fact, what
much of the recent literature on geographical scale
is concerned to show and understand’ (2005, 286).
Third, scale theorists typically conceptualise
scalar relations as connecting territorially bounded
entities, ranging from the body to the globe.4 This
conceptualisation has been starkly critiqued, however, by place theorists who call attention to the
open and heterogeneous nature of places (Massey
1991 2005; Verstraete and Cresswell 2002). They
emphasise how places are heterogeneously constituted through the polyvalent inter-connectivities
linking them, rather than as having distinctive
essential characteristics that emerge behind the
boundaries separating them from the rest of the
world. In this view, place (and, indeed, any territorial entity) emerges from
the coming together of the previously unrelated, a constellation of processes rather than a thing. This is place
as open and internally multiple. . . . Not intrinsically
coherent. (Massey 2005, 141)
Such a conception of place does not mesh well with
the bounded territorial entities often at the centre of a
politics of scale. Of course, the inter-connectivities
among places may themselves have important scalar
aspects, such as scaled networks (local, regional,
transnational networks). But these reflect the
co-implication of scale and connectivity, and are
not reducible to either scale or network (Leitner
et al. 2002). We conclude, therefore, that while scale
does matter to contentious politics, it is one of a
variety of co-implicated spatialities whose complex
intertwining cannot adequately be captured through
a scalar lens.
The politics of place
Places are sites where people live, work and move,
and where they form attachments, practice their
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relations with each other, and relate to the rest of the
world (Massey 1991). Yet they are more than just sites
where dense social relations within and beyond
that place join up. They have a distinct materiality,
a material environment that is historically constructed
– networks of roads and railroads, the layout and
design of residences, offices, factories, public parks
and recreation areas, fences, walls, etc. This materiality regulates and mediates social relations and
daily routines within a place, and is thus imbued
with power. For example, the walls and fences of
gated communities, a distinct feature of US suburbia,
work to restrict access and exclude non-residents.
In this case the walls and fences facilitate the ability
of its residents to control access to ‘their’ space,
creating socio-spatial boundaries that define who
belongs and often become the object of contention.
By shaping social interaction and mobility, the
materiality of space also shapes the nature and
possibility of contention. For example, at the 2003
Cancun WTO ministerial, authorities fortified
the space around the conference centre on the
peninsula with a massive system of barricades, steel
fences, and thousands of federal police, seeking to
control anti-WTO protesters. Different groups of
protesters were forced to divide among the different
spaces made accessible to them, preventing faceto-face interaction among the different groups and
access to the conference centre. As Joel Wainright
describes, this manipulation of space was, however,
only partially successful in keeping the multitude
at bay.
That afternoon, the multitude staged the second major
demonstration of the week with some 7,000 activists
marching from downtown Cancun toward the conference center. As throughout the week, this march was
met at ‘kilometer zero’ by steel walls and police lines.
Denied further passage and unable to reach the ministerial, a Korean farmer at the head of the assemblage
named Lee Kyung Hae climbed the steel fence in their
path. From the top of the fence, Lee led chants as he sat
poised between the two massed forces. Then he took
his life, plunging a knife into his heart. . . . 2 days after
his death . . . they marched back to the place where he
died. They dismantled the fence that had kept Lee from
advancing toward the WTO. (2007, 192)
Places are imbued with meaning as well as power,
which is also of critical importance in contentious
politics. Social movements often seek to strategically manipulate, subvert and resignify places
that symbolise priorities and imaginaries they are
contesting; to defend places that stand for their
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priorities and imaginaries; and to produce new spaces
where such visions can be practised, within that
place and beyond. For example, the manipulation
of micro-spaces within the city was an important
component in the repertoire of the tactics of progressive religion–labour alliances in the MinneapolisSt. Paul metropolitan area, advocating for workers’
and immigrants’ rights (Sziarto 2003). One spatial
tactic of protest involved transporting their
grievances into the workplace. Thus a group of
clergy entered the lobby of a hotel where working
conditions were being contested in downtown
Minneapolis, and prayed in support of the hotel
workers before joining them on the picket line. By
transporting religious modes of expression into
the secular space of the hotel, these activists were
temporarily re-signifying the meaning of this space
of consumption as one of political contention.
A similar resignification of corporate places and
symbolic practices occurred around a 1999 national
movement by Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender employees of United Airlines (UA), in
cooperation with queer community activists in San
Francisco, pressuring UA to extend its employerpaid benefits to employees’ domestic partners
(Murphy 2004). Much of this successful campaign
was staged outside the confines of corporate,
government and law offices; on the streets and at
the ticket offices of UA in San Francisco.
[T]he activists adopted a spatial strategy, bringing queer
comedy, theatrics, and irreverence into United’s ticket
offices, places coded in the airline’s image as a highly
regulated, sterile, and conservative Fortune 500 multinational corporation. The ironies and dissonances of
United Airlines ticket offices becoming centers of queer
performance brought unprecedented visibility to the
campaign against the airline. After it came out that United
was working in concert with the American Center for
Law and Justice, a right-wing think tank funded by
Christian evangelist Pat Robertson who had bizarrely
lambasted the purple British Teletubby TV character for
being ‘gay’, local activist Gilbert Baker . . . sewed several
purple Tinky Winky costumes. Tinky Winky-clad
demonstrators then shut down United’s California Street
ticket office, and were hauled away to jail in front of a
wildly amused public and press. In a similarly striking
disturbance, queer activists collected dozens of old suitcases and decorated each one with details of a different
discrimination lawsuit against United filed by employees. They then barricaded the doors to the Geary Street
ticket office, publicly demanding that United ‘Get Rid
of its Tired Old Baggage’ before making headlines with
another comedic arrest. (Murphy 2004, 11)
Helga Leitner et al.
The politics of networking
In order to challenge states and corporations, which
have their own space-spanning networks and technologies, ‘social movements must build their own
rival communication networks’ (Sewell Jr 2001, 59).
Such networks are crucial for sharing knowledge
about strategies and tactics, and developing common
political identities and alternative imaginaries. Networking may occur through face-to-face interaction
as well as in virtual space with the help of diverse
contemporary communications technologies. It is
well known that technologies such as the Internet
and cell phone are instrumental not only for connecting members of civic organisations and social
movements locally, nationally and internationally,
but also for the construction of activist networks.
The general role of the materiality of such objects and
technologies in the constitution of webs of social
and economic relations has been highlighted by actornetwork theorists, who associate networks with a
distinct spatiality. For example, Law and Hetherington
(2000) suggest that material networks imply a topological spatiality that he contrasts with continuous
Euclidean space. Elsewhere, with Annemarie Mol
(Law and Mol 2001), he contrasts network space to
that of regions.5 The argument is that this topological
spatiality – spanning rather than covering geographic
space – is necessary for stable ideas and practices
to move through geographic space and between
regions (immutable mobiles).
Contested politics is hardly about immutable
mobiles. It seeks to contest current hegemonic
norms, and may or may not seek to substitute this
with stabilised alternatives. Yet such topological
spatiality is often vital to contentious politics. Recent
work on geographies of resistance has shown the
importance of dynamic trans-local networks, connecting individuals, institutions and activists in
different places, for preventing contestations from
being contained spatially by stretching them to other
places (Routledge 2003; Featherstone 2005). For
example, since its inception in a living wage ordinance passed in Baltimore, the US living wage
movement has spanned the country (without
covering it) to create an inter-urban network of
activists, NGOs and locally based political parties
seeking to implement living wage ordinances in a
variety of cities and counties. Organisers were well
aware of the dangers of spatial divide and conquer,
as local authorities dismiss living wage initiatives
on the grounds that they would undermine local
competitive advantage. Thus representatives from
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The spatialities of contentious politics
some 12 local living wage initiatives, along with
members of the activist non-profit Association of
Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN)
and the New Party, gathered in Chicago in 1998 to
plan a common strategy, subsequently reproduced
through both email and face to face meetings (MJ
Maynes, personal communication). This network
became a source of information for new local
initiatives, which could draw on the knowledge,
experience and strategies developed by previously
successful initiatives in other cities to enhance their
own success (and thereby that of the network). It
also facilitated some coordination and standardisation of living wage activities across the nodes of
the living wage network (in the process, promoting
the living wage agenda and its underlying political
imaginary nationwide) – although local activities
varied with local context in a departure from Law’s
association of networks with immutable mobiles.6
In a study of strikes in eighteenth-century London,
David Featherstone (2005) shows that the importance of a politics of networking to political activism
did not await the advent of twenty-first-century
information technologies. The formation of political
identities and place-based political activities, such
as strikes, was facilitated through networks of
correspondence connecting distinct movements and
struggles in different places, for example weavers
in Dublin and London. He concludes that
political struggles in particular localities bring together
different routes of political activity. They do not exist merely
as discrete struggles waiting to be brought together by
intellectuals or broader political movements. (2005, 262)
This enables him to take issue with David Harvey’s
(1996) well-known concern about the limitations
of militant particularism. He argues that Harvey
reinscribes an essentially bounded notion of place,
in which the local is elided with the particular, and
universalism becomes defined against the practices
of local struggles. It then becomes the task of
intellectuals and class-based movements to abstract
from the particular in order to develop broader
and more effective political imaginaries. Featherstone suggests that close attention to the inter-local
networking practices of contentious politics calls
Harvey’s theoretical argument, and its political
implications, into question.
Socio-spatial positionality
We have argued elsewhere that whereas networks
constitute an important insight into the distributed
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and relational nature of agency and power, there
has been a tendency in recent discussions to downplay the power hierarchies that co-evolve within
and across them. To summarise, the fluidity and
contingent nature of many networks should not be
taken to mean that anything goes (Leitner et al. 2002;
Leitner and Sheppard 2002). Sheppard (2002) has
proposed consideration of socio-spatial positionality
as one way to keep analysis open to the resilience
of unequal power relations within networks, as well
as the possible emergence of new power relations
(in Latour’s terms, centres of calculation).
In feminist theory, positionality has been used to
describe the social situatedness of subjects ‘in terms
of gender, race, class, sexuality and other axes of
social difference’ (Nagar and Geiger 2007, 267).
Positionality means, first, that differently positioned
subjects have distinct identities, experiences and
perspectives, shaping their understanding of and
engagement with the world – subjectivities, imaginaries, interests and knowledge (cf. Haraway 1988).
It frames their ontological and epistemological
stance, the starting point for action (Kline 2006).
Second, positionality emerges relationally, through
connections and interactions with differently positioned subjects. Third, unequal power relations are
part and parcel of positionality: it is not only that
feminine, for example, emerges through its relations
with masculine, but that the latter often dominates
the former. Thus positionality is simultaneously
about difference and inequality – while calling into
question the generality and normative function of
any positionality.
Yet a subject’s positionality cannot simply be
read off from her social situatedness because the
social and the spatial are mutually constitutive.
Space is always already implicated in positionality,
as when Chandra Mohanty chides Western feminists for their blindness to the distinct experiences
and positionalities of third world women (Mohanty
2003). We use the adjective socio-spatial to mark
this. Finally, socio-spatial positionality is not fixed.
It is re-enacted on a daily basis, in ways that simultaneously reproduce and challenge positionalities;
a process that Judith Butler has dubbed citation
(Butler 1990). On the one hand, everyday practices
routinely reproduce pre-existing positionalities,
giving them a durability that seemingly naturalises
them. Yet they remain social constructs, always subject
to the possibility of transformation. Through subjects’ practices and imaginaries, relations of power
and situated understandings are contested and
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164
re-negotiated, as are socio-spatial relations, thereby
potentially transforming socio-spatial positionalities (Rose 1997b; Valentine 2002).
Social movements always face the challenge of
building alliances between individuals and groups
with diverse socio-spatial identities, interests and
imaginaries. The challenges include mobilising
differently positioned subjects and negotiating
differences among them for collective action. Negotiations are never unproblematic. Alliance politics is
plagued by power differences, some embedded in
the social positionalities subjects bring to a social
movement (male/female, professional/activist, local/
non-local, native/foreign); others emergent as
certain individuals or groups become influential in
a movement, marginalising other participants.7 For
example, Paul Routledge’s analysis of People’s Global
Action, an international network of social movements contesting neoliberal globalisation, has shown
how disparities in wealth, and differential access to
communications technologies between ‘Southern’
and ‘Northern’ activists, allowed certain groups to
assume disproportionate discursive and material
power within the network (Routledge 2003).
Yet at the same time subjects’ participation in
collective action can be transformative. Participation
almost always is productive of novel inter-personal
relations and experiences; shaping individuals’
subjectivities, imaginaries, interests and knowledge
– whether temporarily or permanently. The World
Social Forum’s (WSF) annual gatherings have been
described by many participants as such a transformative experience, in terms of how they conceive of the
world and see themselves in relation to others.8
The World Social Forum coalesces around a series
of place-based events and ‘virtual common spaces’
(websites, blogs, etc.) that connect and bring together
subjects embodying, and differently empowered
through, sometimes wildly different socio-spatial
positionalities. For all its self-consciously collective,
consensual and even anarchic organisational
philosophy, differences in participants’ socio-spatial
positionality, articulated through the emergent spaces
of the WSF, help shape its agenda and trajectory.
For example, participants at place-based events
come from all walks of life and regions of the
world, but a few are invited to address plenary
forums, others sit in the audience, while others
again are performing street theatre or demonstrating. As these meetings have shifted geographical
location (from Brazil to India and Africa) and scale
(from world to regional to urban social forums),
Helga Leitner et al.
corresponding shifts in access to an event and the
socio-spatial positionality of its participants further
affect the WSF’s trajectory. Thus when the WSF
was relocated from Porto Allegre to Mumbai in
2004, the presence there of South Asian indigenous
rights and dalit activists who had been unable to
travel to Brazil called into question the emergent
self-understanding of the Brazilian-based movement and altered its focus (Conway 2004). The
WSF is far from an immutable mobile.
Recall that taking materiality seriously means
that agency is not simply located in and between
the variously positioned human participants in a
social movement. We are not aware of any attempts
to extend the theory of positionality to the morethan-human world invoked in materialist accounts.
Pending such an extension, we simply remark that
the positionality of non-human agents must also
always be at stake in contentious politics. For
example, decisions about the use of information
technologies create new inequalities among differently positioned social movement participants because
of social and geographical inequalities in access to
and comfort with such technologies, including the
languages that they enable. Here, technology, itself
occupying a particular socio-spatial positionality,
empowers along some lines of difference while
disempowering along others.
Although every social movement attracts a variety
of different, and differently empowered participants,
collective action requires expounding an explicit
standpoint on the issues being contested. This is often
the result of intense negotiation of antagonisms, is
sometimes arrived at through enforced consensus
and can catalyse residual disagreement within the
organisation. This standpoint is simultaneously spatial
and social, a product of internal negotiations and
external contexts shaping the trajectory of contentious politics, productive of those trajectories, and
subject itself to renegotiation. Steven Pile draws on
Mohanty’s (1987) idea of a politics of location in
feminist identity politics to describe the spatiality
of resistance, making it more explicitly geographical:
resistance is formed through the production of location
as much as through the uncovering of location. . . . If
locations disrupt any sense of singular, isotropic, universal experience of power relations in space and time,
then boundaries are about the definition of resistant
spaces. (Pile 1997, 29)
There are clear affinities here with the notion of sociospatial positionality, although other spatialities are
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The spatialities of contentious politics
also in play. Social movements’ agendas and priorities are shaped by their socio-spatial positionality (the kinds of participants, from where, who
participate in various ways; the social priorities and
geographical situatedness of the organisation itself),
but this positionality is continually subject to negotiation. It makes a difference where an organisation
seeking a particular kind of political change is located
geographically, and its location shapes the kinds of
social issues it is likely to contest. In short, context
matters (Martin and Miller 2003). Yet political
strategy is all about shifting social and geographical
location as circumstances demand – very possibly
altering the social movement in the process.
Thus far, we have artificially separated consideration of spatiality from temporality, even though
all these spatialities have a temporality and time is
always spatialised. Our final category, mobility,
makes time explicit.
The politics of mobility
Mobility is currently heralded as the latest spatial
master narrative. The turn to mobility is presented
as a way of acknowledging the ever-changing nature
of space-time.9 For Tim Cresswell, mobility, unlike
movement, involves paying close attention to how
the displacement of people entails meaning, power,
practice and embodiment: ‘If movement is the
dynamic equivalent of location, then mobility is the
dynamic equivalent of place’ (Cresswell 2006, 3).
For Mimi Sheller and John Law the ‘new mobilities
paradigm’ seeks to capture how ‘[a]ll the world
seems to be on the move’ (Sheller and Law 2006,
209); emphasising the located and materialised
nature of mobility and associated immobilities.
(For a sketchy application to social movements, see
Urry 2003, 71–2.)
Mobility refers to the material or virtual movability
of individuals or objects through space-time, within
and between places. It is essential to the strategies and
struggles of contentious politics. As Pile suggests,
it is no coincidence that communities of resistance are
termed movements. . . . The point seems to be that
social movements move because they have an origin, a
projected destination and a path to travel, over an overt
public political terrain. (1997, 29)
Social movements have long used various mobilities, including mass demonstrations, rallies, pickets
in public spaces, and bike and bus rides traversing
and transgressing space, to transform their spatiotemporal conditions of possibility. Indeed the
165
ability of social activists to appear unexpectedly in
certain places, ahead of those seeking to contain their
actions, is widely recognised, by activists and their
opponents, as an effective tactic – at scales ranging
from local street protests to national revolutionary
movements. Mobility also shapes the experiences
and identities of participants. The shared experience of being in motion, together with co-presence
in particular spaces, may induce negotiations of
differences among movement participants, while also
helping create the collective understandings, visions,
strategies and tactics essential for collective
action.
Examining the politics of women’s suffrage in
New England, USA, Creswell highlights not just
the mobilities associated with protest, as a deliberate political strategy, but also the role of individual
mobilities – of bodies and objects in space – in
advancing the women’s suffrage movement between
1911 and 1915 (Cresswell 2006). He suggests that
the travel by two movement leaders on a steamship to England allowed them to connect with
fellow suffragettes there, and car trips through New
England enabled them to reach wider audiences
beyond the spaces of suffrage activists. Mobility
involved not only the movement of bodies, but also
ideas and things/objects. Together, they enabled
the reconfiguration of the moral geography of
gender at that moment.
Co-implicated spatialities: the Immigrant
Workers’ Freedom Ride
The scholarly literature on geographies of resistance and social movements has produced valuable
insights into each of these various spatialities (scale,
place, networking, socio-spatial positionality and
mobility), showing how they have shaped both
political mobilisation and the trajectories of contentious politics (e.g. Knopp 1997; Moore 1997; Rose
1997a; Slater 1997; Miller 2000; Wainwright et al.
2000; Rose 2002; Featherstone 2003 2005; Routledge
2003; Wainwright 2007). Yet the co-implication of
these diverse spatialities remains at times underexposed, in face of the tendency in contemporary geographic scholarship either to privilege one particular
spatiality, or to subsume diverse spatialities under
a single master concept. For example, Glassman’s
(2001) insightful analysis of resistance movements
to neoliberal globalisation discusses multiple sociospatial practices, but his conceptual framework
focuses on scale and scale jumping by local activists.
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Similarly, in analysing black social movements in
Colombia, Oslender (2004) subsumes scale, networks of spatial connectivity and mobility under
the concept of place.
Deborah Martin and Byron Miller, together with
William Sewell Jr, have noted the complementarities
that consideration of different spatialities bring to
theorising contentious politics (Sewell Jr 2001;
Martin and Miller 2003), and others have highlighted the variegated spatialities drawn on in political
struggle (Featherstone 2003; Routledge 2003;
Sarre and Jehlicka 2007). Yet these scholars have
paid less attention to how different spatialities
intersect and may affect one another. John Law
and his colleagues examine the intersectionality of
different spatialities (in their case, regions, Euclidean
space, network, fluid and ‘fire’ space, Law and
Hetherington 2000; Law and Mol 2001), but in science studies rather than contentious politics.10
We argue that multiple spatialities are co-implicated
and co-constitutive in complex ways during social
movement struggles, with unpredictable consequences. Those practising contentious politics do
not necessarily sit around discussing the merits of,
say, mobilities vs place as domains of action. Rather,
they draw on their experience and knowledge,
crafting and intuiting strategies that they hope
will succeed, and which simultaneously engage
multiple spatialities. We use the example of the
Immigrant Workers’ Freedom Ride (IWFR) to
document this, illustrating the complexity of these
inter-relations, and indicating how they shaped
the movement’s mobilisation and trajectory.11
In the United States, the last five years have seen
increased political activism by immigrants, in
alliances with community and faith-based organisations and unions, to challenge dominant public and
political discourses about the negative impacts of
immigration and immigrants’ illegality; to contest
US immigration policies that focus on border enforcement and deportation of undocumented immigrants
rather than the integration of immigrants; to publicise
the discrimination of immigrants in diverse spheres
of life; and more generally to push back against
the increasing abrogation of workers’ rights under
the onslaught of neoliberalism. In 2003, such an
alliance staged what was dubbed the Immigrant
Workers’ Freedom Ride (IWFR), which in turn was
instrumental in the emergence of what is now
known as the immigrant rights movement in the
US. The purpose of the IWFR was to publicise a
broad agenda for, and to build a movement in
Helga Leitner et al.
support of, immigrants’ rights and national immigration policy reform – with the longer-term goal of
changing US Federal policy. Specifically, the alliance
was advocating: the legalisation of working and
taxpaying undocumented immigrants; eased access
to citizenship; restoration of workers’ rights on the
job; reunification of families separated by immigration laws; and respect for and the upholding of
civil rights and liberties for all.
In September 2003, nearly 1000 immigrant workers
and activists in 18 buses set out from ten different
cities in the US for a week’s journey across the
United States, bound for Washington DC, with stops
in 103 cities and towns (Figure 1). The idea of the
freedom ride originated in 2001 with a staff person
of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees
International Union (HERE) Local 11 in Los Angeles,
an organisation with a large immigrant membership.
This reflects the re-emergence of Los Angeles as a
place of union, immigrant and race-based activism
(Pulido 2006). Maria Elena Durazo, then president
of Local 11 in Los Angeles, took up the idea with
HERE’s national leadership. The national leadership was receptive to the idea, and announced
their intention to organise an ‘immigrant freedom
ride’ in cooperation with civil rights leaders and
immigrant rights activists.
The choice of a bus ride, traversing the country
towards the centre of national political power, was
simultaneously strategic and symbolic. It enabled
activists to carry alternative messages about the impact
of immigrants, and demands for immigrant rights
and workers’ rights more generally, across the US
territory. It also represented a re-enactment and
commemoration of the Freedom Rides of the 1960s
Civil Rights Movement. This symbolic connection
was reinforced by the participation of activists from
the Civil Rights Movement, drawing on its strategies
and tactics, and stopping at its memorial sites. For
example, participants in the Immigrant Workers
Freedom Ride from Houston visited memorial sites
important to the collective memory of the Civil Rights
Movement, such as the Slavery and Civil Rights
Museum in Selma, Alabama, and held a rally at Dr
Martin Luther King Jr’s Ebenezer Baptist church.
The symbolism inscribed in these places was utilised
by IWFR organisers to help to make connections with both the imaginaries and remembered
successes of the Civil Rights Movement and to
commemorate struggles of people of colour.
The mobility of the IWFR enabled activists of
different backgrounds and from different locales to
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Figure 1
167
Immigrant Workers’ Freedom Ride
link up with one another in the places where the
buses stopped, constructing trans-local networks in
support of immigrants’ and workers’ rights. IWFR
organisers combined nation-wide mobility with
local mobilisation at the stops along the route –
working with a wide range of secular and religious
organisations in order to build a national movement. In planning the stops, local coalitions were
formed among union locals, community organising
networks (e.g. the Association of Community
Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and Jobs
with Justice), local churches and local chapters of
faith-based organising networks (e.g. the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference, and Interfaith
Worker Justice), local chapters of United Students
against Sweatshops, and locally based immigrant
organisations (Sziarto and Leitner 2007). At the
stops along the route, participants in the freedom
ride engaged in a multiplicity of practices that
drew upon the different identities of participating
groups, including union rallies, pickets, marches,
prayer breakfasts or lunches, and worship services.
These shared practices and the coming together in
place helped create a shared political identity and a
sense of solidarity.
While the sharing of lived experiences and
visions of social justice was central to many of the
events at the stops, it was particularly the ‘safe’
space-time of the buses, relatively autonomous
from the state and/or hegemonic public, that provided a material base for developing alternatives to
hegemonic discourses (e.g. No Human Being is
Illegal), in the process constructing and enacting a
shared political identity among diverse riders. On
the bus, immigrant workers shared stories – their
experiences of crossing the borders, of being separated from their families, of being discriminated
against at work, of fears of deportation, etc. – with
other bus riders, each learning from one another.
They also taught each other songs and sang together,
and learnt and prepared themselves to practise
civil disobedience. For example, riders on the buses
from Los Angeles were stopped by the Border
Patrol outside El Paso, Texas. Anticipating this, bus
riders had hidden their legal identification and
wore only IWFR identification cards with their first
name. They presented these identifications to
border patrol agents who had boarded the bus and
demanded identification from all riders of colour.
In response, border patrol agents ordered all riders
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off the bus, separated them into small detention
cells in the checkpoint station, and threatened them
with arrest unless they divulged their names and
citizenship. None of the riders acquiesced, and
those in the cells kept singing ‘We Shall Overcome’,
a song they had started on the bus. Throughout the
four hours of interrogation, all riders were neither
immigrants nor citizens, but state-less human beings
without papers successfully challenging the authority
of the territorially bounded nation-state.12
This practice of civil disobedience was a performance of solidarity that was made possible by riders
being able and willing to negotiate pre-existing
differences in positionality – along lines of gender,
class, legal and citizenship status, place of residence,
culture/religion. Alternative imaginaries were constructed and strengthened through getting acquainted,
sharing lived experiences, and learning together.
As bus riders began to connect with one another,
the day-to-day performance of positionalities could
result in shifts in positionality (Butler’s process of
citation). For some, these may have been temporary
changes (see below), for others they may have
become permanent life-altering experiences.
While such changes were part and parcel of
alliance politics, it does not follow that individual
differences are sublimated into a shared subjectivity.
This became evident as the IWFR entered into and
came to confront the spaces of Washington DC and
New York City, where national and international
political, corporate and media power concentrate.
In these places shared political identities and discourses, forged during the IWFR, were pulled apart
and differences in socio-positionalities asserted
themselves. In order to gain access to the sanitary
confines of the Congressional offices of national
politicians, IWFR discourses were adjusted to
align with dominant discourses about immigrants.
For example, as buses arrived in Washington DC,
claims-making about immigrant rights shifted from
a human rights discourse (‘no human being is
illegal’) to one of ‘hardworking, tax-paying, playby-the rules’ immigrants, in line with discourses
framing the two proposed immigration reform bills
then under discussion, the Craig-Kennedy farmworkers’ bill, and the McCain-Kennedy immigration
bill. Furthermore, pre-existing power asymmetries
between differently positioned IWFR participants
reemerged as union leaders and activists with
national experience took centre stage. For example,
the voices that were heard at the final mass rally of
150 000 people in New York City were not those of
Helga Leitner et al.
the riders, but mostly those of white male union
organisers and politicians familiar with this context. While this might be interpreted as a purely
strategic move, many riders felt marginalised, and
found these strategic shifts to be problematic.
Above we have stressed the capability of social
movements to practise complex socio-spatial
strategies, shaping space to advance their agendas,
but the events in Washington DC and New York
City remind us that already-existing spatialities
with their existing power geometries intrude on
social movements.
Notwithstanding such challenges to IWFR alliance politics, the IWFR laid the foundation for the
contemporary immigrant rights movement in the
US. At the local scale, as the ride ended and riders
returned home, existing coalitions were strengthened and new coalitions were formed among diverse
activist groups to promote and organise for immigrants’ and workers’ rights. In 2004 and 2006,
highly publicised demonstrations for immigrants’
rights occurred in cities across the United States.
These multi-sited demonstrations were coordinated
by the New American Opportunity Campaign
(NAOC), which emerged from the sponsors and
extra-local networks established during the IWFR.
This national-scale coalition has also been engaged
in grassroots lobbying for comprehensive national
immigration reform. The NAOC has faced its own
difficulties in negotiating differences between more
radical and reform-oriented local coalitions, after
the euphoria of the initial mass rallies triggered
increased anti-immigrant crackdowns by the office
of Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE).
Nevertheless, the political space of immigration
debates has been expanded through the multiple
and co-implicated socio-spatialities of grassroots
organising and collective action.
Mobility and trans-local networks were instrumental in not only achieving a wider geographic
circulation of the alternative imaginaries and
messages of the IWFR, but also creating local and
national immigrant rights organisations. Key to
movement building were both the safe space-times
of the buses and the places where the riders
stopped en route to Washington DC. The daily
coming together and performances of riders in the
safe space-times of the bus provided a material
base for developing a shared political identity and
practising solidarity. Stops at places symbolising
struggles for civil rights and racial justice were
chosen to commemorate and rework the political
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spaces that the Civil Rights Movement had opened up.
At other stops freedom riders joined local residents
in a multiplicity of practices that drew upon the
different identities of participating groups to at
least temporarily rework power-geometries in those
places. These events and practices enhanced an
emergent sense of solidarity, connecting the riders
with those who greeted and joined them in the
diverse activities. The stops also enabled activists
of different backgrounds and from different locales
to link up with one another, constructing a translocal network connecting disparate people and groups
in different places in support of immigrants’
and workers’ rights. This example also shows
that the IWFR, like any social movement, has to
negotiate power relations within the movement,
and the power geometry of the socio-spatial relations
it is embedded in.
Conclusion
In this paper, we have sought to establish that a
variety of spatialities (place, scale, networks, positionality and mobility) matter for the imaginaries,
material practices and trajectories of contentious
politics. Scale is one of these, particularly given the
scaled nature of political and economic structures,
but the spatialities of contentious politics cannot
and should not be reduced to scale or any other
spatial ‘master concept’. No single spatiality should
be privileged since they are co-implicated in complex
ways, often with unexpected consequences for contentious politics.
Our arguments are grounded in the practices of
contentious politics rather than theoretical and
philosophical debates. Through case study vignettes
we have sought to show the variety, complexity and
co-implication of spatialities in contentious politics.
The Immigrant Workers’ Freedom Ride illustrates
these complexities and their co-implication, as
organisers and participants deploy imaginaries and
practices that, while centred on mobility, simultaneously work through and rework place, networks,
scale and socio-spatial positionality. It also shows
that these spatialities are not completely malleable
to such reworkings. They emerge as a result of
manifold material and discursive processes, and
exhibit a certain durability that shapes the conditions of possibility for political action. For example,
the production and control of the safe space of the
bus allowed freedom riders to extract themselves,
at least temporarily, from the larger socio-spatial
169
power relations, until they reached and tried to
enter the centres of corporate and political power.
Nevertheless, an immigrant rights movement of
national scope did emerge from imaginaries and
practices that were grounded in and built alliances
across diverse localities and participants. Such
complex and multi-faceted material socio-spatial
practices are worth recalling as a corrective in times
when socio-spatial theory seems overly abstract,
theoretical and polarised.
Acknowledgements
This paper originated from a lecture presented at
the conference ‘The Politics of Scale’ held at York
University, Toronto, in February 2003, to be published in Leviathan Undone? Towards a Political
Economy of Scale edited by R. Keil and R. Mahon
(University of British Columbia Press). While drawing
on that chapter, this paper advances a reformulation
and reframing of the spatiality of contentious politics.
We are grateful to Roger Keil and Rianne Mahon
for stimulating this line of reflection, to the challenges
posed by four anonymous referees that have helped
us clarify our thinking, and to the students in a 2003
‘Contested Urban Futures’ graduate seminar at the
University of Minnesota, whose own stimulating
research we have drawn on in this paper. We thank
the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral
Sciences, and Elizabeth Fairley of the University of
Minnesota Cartography Lab for their support.
Notes
1 We will use the term social movement interchangeably with contentious politics.
2 This has not only been true for contentious politics,
but for theorisations of spatiality more generally.
3 Our ontological claim is that spatiality matters, rather
than that some particular spatiality trumps others.
4 Some geographers argue that the politics of boundarymaking is a politics of scale (Martin and Miller 2003;
D’Arcus 2006). In our view, this only makes sense if
a relational understanding of inter-scalar relations is
essential to boundary-making; otherwise, it is a politics
of place.
5 In our view, Law’s discussion of distinct spatialities
develops a too rigid distinction between continuous
‘Euclidean’ space – which by definition is external to
social action – and network space to which he
attributes the material properties summarised here.
This is problematic because continuous space need
be neither Euclidean nor external to socio-natural
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6
7
8
9
10
11
12
Helga Leitner et al.
processes (consider Einstein’s relational conception of
a continuous space-time).
Law and Mol (2001) coin the idea of fluid space to
describe the spatiality of such ‘mutable mobiles’.
Transversal politics has been proposed as a way of
negotiating the power differences always already
bound up in alliance politics, in which participants
recognise inter-personal differences in socio-spatial
positionality and seek to work across these without
imposing consensus or accepting unexamined notions
of community (Yuval-Davis 1999).
The WSF is ‘a permanent political and social process
of networking inside organised civil society across the
world punctuated with forum events, regulated by WSF
charter of principles’ (http://www.wsfprocess.net/).
Massey (2005) identifies constant change as an essential
element of space, without reducing this to mobility.
Fluid space is much like what has since been dubbed
mobility. ‘Fire’ space, ‘a flickering relation between
presence and absence’ (Law and Mol 2001, 615), is
the realm of what they call mutable immobiles.
The materials presented here, drawing on fieldwork
by Kristin Sziarto, are excerpted from Sziarto and
Leitner (2006).
This civil disobedience replicated a strategy of the
civil rights movement, in which jailed protestors
refused to communicate with police, instead singing
‘We Shall Overcome.’
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