Interviews by Deborah Cowen
Papers by Deborah Cowen
Cities Centre, University of Toronto, Jun 1, 2011
Political Geography, 2017
AJIL Unbound
Heraclitus's words remind us that law and infrastructure have lived in intimate relation, in ... more Heraclitus's words remind us that law and infrastructure have lived in intimate relation, in practice and thought, for millennia. This intimacy is palpable in the context of settler worldmaking where colonial jurisdiction is enacted by constraining, with an eye to replacing, Indigenous jurisdiction. Here, the authority to have authority is often asserted in practice through violent attempts to control connectivity and movement. To this day, imperial powers assert jurisdiction over space through infrastructures that enhance or inhibit the motion of goods and people, like railroads, pipelines, border walls, and police.2 This Essay investigates the co-production of colonial law and infrastructure on Turtle Island—an Indigenous name for the continent of North America, which already highlights a different conception of jurisdiction and law through its anchor in creation stories. The brief sketches that follow emphasize the co-constitution of law and infrastructure, yet they also prop...
South Atlantic Quarterly, 2018
Urban Geography, 2019
This paper investigates urban life through the contested formation of settler colonial infrastruc... more This paper investigates urban life through the contested formation of settler colonial infrastructure. Trespassing nationalist narratives, it 'follows the infrastructure' across imperial space, time and struggle, illuminating the extraordinary power of cities both in and as infrastructural systems. It tracks a set of circulations through cities across Canada and beyond, to explore how the making of 'national infrastructure' holds together seemingly disparate archives of Indigenous dispossession and genocide, of the transatlantic slave trade, and of unfree migrant racial labor regimes. Infrastructure, almost by definition, reproduces material relations, although at times in very queer ways. With an eye toward a future for urban infrastructure otherwise, I ask: what does a map of infrastructure's afterlives look like, and what is at stake in its refusal and in claims to repair? ARTICLE HISTORY
Just Labour, 1969
Systems of social protection are being quickly and quietly recast by developments in a surprising... more Systems of social protection are being quickly and quietly recast by developments in a surprising policy area. The rapidly expanding infrastructure of national security policy in Canada compromises labour rights and social forms of security. Security clearance programs, under development for port workers, compromise employment security by making workers and their families subject to invasive screenings that violate privacy, allow for job suspension based on 'reasonable suspicion' of terrorist affiliation, and offer no meaningful independent appeals process. New security regulations threaten to institutionalize racial profiling and undermine collective bargaining. Moreover, there are plans to generalize these programs across the transport sector - a large part of the labour force that includes trucking, mass transit, airport, and rail workers. In this paper I look at ongoing struggles over port security in Canada. I suggest that national security policy as backdoor labour pol...
Military Workfare, 2008
Reviewed by Scott N. Romaniuk P arliament Hill served as the venue for a speech by Prime Minister... more Reviewed by Scott N. Romaniuk P arliament Hill served as the venue for a speech by Prime Minister Stephen Harper in the spring of 2006, in which he spoke of new plans to be implemented for veterans of the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF). 'War on Terror'-(WoT) induced pressures on Canada heightened controversy over the nation's mission in Afghanistan initiated back in October 2001. His address, like that of William Lyon Mackenzie King in 1942, focused upon emerging "blueprints" regarding soldiers as citizens, and upon bringing the concepts of warfare and welfare closer together. In Military Workfare: The Soldier and Social Citizenship in Canada, Deborah Cowen, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Toronto, incisively examines the warfare-welfare-citizenship triad in the contemporary period, and raises important questions in a period substantially different from the one in which Canada found itself some 60 years ago. The soldier assumes a paramount position in this investigation because the soldier serves as the basis for rethinking "social citizenship and social obligation in neoliberal times" (p. 7). Cowen considers the "continuities and transformations of both in the relationship between soldiers and the social," and the potential for learning outcomes in the context of making the geographies of citizenship, welfare, and warfare explicit rather than assumed" (p. 7). The book's framework emerges from these points, and the time frames of the Second World War and the WoT also emerge. She contends that during the course of global government funding of extensive confrontation in distant theatres of war (i.e., George W. Bush's Wilsonian idealism-inspired foreign policy in the post-2001 period), concern for the health and welfare of states' populations demands greater attention in which we "take the spatiality of politics and identity serious in both its fixity and its flux (p. 7)." Cowen examines five decades of political struggle, economic change, cultural shifts, and geographic transformation with respect to many aspects of Canadian citizenship and labour. The idea of the nationalization of citizenship as a particularly 'loaded idea' figures strongly throughout the book. The notion helps to deliver the central argument of the soldier representing a core element in the puzzle of social citizenship. In doing do, Cowen
The Deadly Life of Logistics, 2014
The diagram in Figure 10 appeared as part of a 2006 New York Times article on the growing challen... more The diagram in Figure 10 appeared as part of a 2006 New York Times article on the growing challenge of securing global supply chains (Fattah and Lipton 2006). Assembled using data from the RAND Corporation, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the Government Accountability Office, and AMR Research, "Securing the Flow of Goods" illustrates the transnational journey of an imaginary shipping container from source to destination. The diagram highlights the myriad sites along the route where "security concerns" arise: opportunities for tampering with the contents of containers, sites where inspection technologies are outdated or inadequate, and places where physical security (gates, fences, locks, cameras) around ports and other transshipment facilities is lacking. The diagram also showcases a variety of security initiatives that have been designed in response to these perceived risks, but in stark contrast to typical national security initiatives, the border does not serve as the "geographical pivot" here. The national border has not vanished, but it requires some effort to determine its exact whereabouts. The border can be found, presumably, between the zones labeled "at sea" and "United States"-the site where CBP does one of its many marked screenings and inspections. A literal move away from borders, and away from territorial models of security on which they rely, is characteristic of broader attempts to secure the transnational material and informational networks of global trade. This diagram helps mark the rise of a new paradigm of security-supply chain security-that is increasingly challenging geopolitical forms organized by nation-state territoriality. At least two other things are notable about this graphic representation of security in the global supply chain. First, it is striking how closely this
The Deadly Life of Logistics, 2014
The Deadly Life of Logistics, 2014
Theory & Event, 2007
In an inconspicuous footnote towards the end of his Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci presents us... more In an inconspicuous footnote towards the end of his Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci presents us with a startling observation. Writing in a very different time and place, he suggests that a political-geographic rift had emerged between urbanism and cosmopolitanism on the one hand, and ruralism and nationalism on the other. Gramsci offers the intriguing thought that, "these conflicting attitudes can in a sense be seen as two sides of the coin of fascist imperialism." 2 While 'fascist' may not be an apt term to describe contemporary imperialism, the rest of the equation seems strangely fitting 3. I characterize this observation as 'startling' in part because it speaks to a formidable challenge of politics and geography in our own time, but also because it remains an overlooked footnote. This paper takes Gramsci's observation seriously. In fact, my analysis is crafted in the shadows of this footnote, and in its interstices with another. The second note-not a literal footnote like the first-is instead a social 'fact' that has largely been treated as a footnote, a point of marginal importance. This second footnote tells us that the militaries of advanced capitalist nations with voluntary forces are made up overwhelmingly of rural soldiers, and that rural areas have become the heartland of militarism and 'authentic' patriotism. I will suggest that this second footnote is extraordinarily important in that it is a constitutive element of contemporary forms of organized violence. Far from a banal detail of 'location', urban/rural geographies of militarism and military service are a key to the historical geographies of citizenship that constitute our violent present. Armed conflict, war, and terrorism are today increasingly urban affairs. From Fallujah to Baghdad, to New York and London, organized human violence explicitly targets cities. A brave new urban geography is said to define armed conflict in much of the world, and reshapes militarized policing and surveillance domestically. State and non-state responses to this global city violence are also practiced at the urban scale, with national border control, surveillance and counter-terrorist initiatives, and military training exercises, increasingly working through urban space. There has been a marked and now well-documented urban revolution in military affairs that is not limited to the current war in Iraq, but is certainly a stark feature of violence there 4. Indeed, the revolutionaries in military affairs champion urban warfare and imagineer light and flexible fighting forces. But even with the demise of the Revolution in Military Affairs leadership, specifically Donald Rumsfeld's departure in late 2006, the growing skepticism surrounding a future of winning network-centric wars, and a broad consensus that US efforts in Iraq and the ideas guiding them have failed, urban warfare is still considered almost 'inevitable'-a result of the forward march of global urbanization as much as of ideologies of military reorganization. George W. Bush's plan for a 21,500member troop surge in Baghdad, and the installment of Lt. General David Petreaus, a leader of (failed) urban warfare in Mosul, as top commander in Iraq may face stark criticism from many corners, but the conviction that warfare itself has radically changed from a clash of national armies in non-urban theatres to a future of irregular warfare in city streets lives on.
Social & Cultural Geography, 2005
The decline of 'universal', welfarist forms of social citizenship and the rise of selec... more The decline of 'universal', welfarist forms of social citizenship and the rise of selective or targeted social policy is generally considered to be a recent phenomenon, and a constituent element of neo-liberal citizenship and state forms (Brodie 1997), or 'advanced liberal' technologies ...
Social & Cultural Geography, 2010
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2010
An entire category of urban space, albeit hardly recognized as such, is disappearing across North... more An entire category of urban space, albeit hardly recognized as such, is disappearing across North America. As retail logistics globalizes and big-box power centres replace enclosed shopping malls from the postwar era, a distinct form of social infrastructure vanishes as well. 'Dead malls' are now a staple of North American (sub)urban landscapes, and have provoked local activism in many places. But despite popular concern for the demise of mall space, critical urban scholarship has largely sidelined the phenomenon. Much of the disjuncture between popular outcry and academic silence relates to conceptions of 'public' space, and specifically the gap between formal ownership and everyday spatial practice. Spatial practice often exceeds the conceptions of designers and managers, transforming malls into community space. This is particularly true in declining inner suburbs, where poor and racialized communities depend more heavily on malls for social reproduction as well as recreation and consumption. In this article we investigate the revolution in logistics that has provoked the phenomenon of 'dead malls' and the creative activism emerging that aims to protect mall space as 'community space'. Taking the case of the Morningside Mall in an old suburb of Toronto, we investigate the informal claims made on mall space through everyday spatial practice and the explicit claims for community space that arise when that space is threatened. We argue that many malls have effectively become community space, and activism to prevent its loss can be understood as a form of anti-globalization practice, even if it never employs that language.
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2012
Antipode, 2005
Over the past few decades, new forms of citizenship have emerged in the context of a globalizing ... more Over the past few decades, new forms of citizenship have emerged in the context of a globalizing and urbanizing world. The government of citizens and economies, it is argued, is increasingly trans-, supra-, or sub-national in scale, and characterized by the eclipse of Keynesian ...
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Interviews by Deborah Cowen
Papers by Deborah Cowen