Spaces of the Geosocial Exploring Transnational Topologies

Geopolitics ISSN: 1465-0045 (Print) 1557-3028 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fgeo20 Spaces of the Geosocial: Exploring Transnational Topologies Katharyne Mitchell & Kirsi Pauliina Kallio To cite this article: Katharyne Mitchell & Kirsi Pauliina Kallio (2016): Spaces of the Geosocial: Exploring Transnational Topologies, Geopolitics To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2016.1226809 Published online: 14 Sep 2016. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=fgeo20 Download by: [212.90.213.98] Date: 14 September 2016, At: 23:37 GEOPOLITICS http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2016.1226809 INTRODUCTION Spaces of the Geosocial: Exploring Transnational Topologies Katharyne Mitchella and Kirsi Pauliina Kalliob a Department of Geography, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA; bSpace and Political Agency Research Group, University of Tampere, Finland Introduction Our goal for this special issue is to highlight the theoretical value of the geosocial as a way of conceptualising the contemporary constitution of subjects and spaces within transnational relations. While there has already been a good amount of individual research that could be characterised as geosocial, we think there remains a need in geography for a larger statement on the explanatory power and theoretical value of foregrounding these types of relationships. Socially reorganising transnational relations take many forms and are established by various individual and collective actors. The key characteristic informing our conceptualisation here is the power of these social relations to constitute new transnational geographies through situated, relational practices. Our conceptualisation of the geosocial draws from older concepts vis-à-vis the reciprocal constitution of society and space, as well as from more recent ideas about topological spatial formations.1 The traditional usage of the term topology comes from geometry: the study of the properties of space and spatial relations in the context of stretching and bending and other ‘deformations’. Social topologies, instead, describe the spatial properties of society that have no fixed form, but rather are outlined by lived worlds organised through ongoing social relations, discourses, and networks.2 In investigating transnational topologies, we use the geosocial as a focus for examining the dynamic relations by which, on one hand, the borders and territories of the world order are maintained, challenged, and (re) defined; and on the other hand, people constitute themselves as subjects and communities capable of transformative agency across and within such borderladen realities. In short, we set out to ask how geosocial subjects are constitutive of transnational topological space and vice versa. Feminist Geopolitics: Four Key Insights and Interventions In addition to drawing explicitly on theories of transnationalism, a geosocial emphasis is also deeply embedded in feminist and critical geography traditions. CONTACT Katharyne Mitchell [email protected] Smith Hall, Box 353550, Seattle, WA 98195, USA. © 2016 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC Department of Geography, University of Washington, 2 K. MITCHELL AND K. P. KALLIO Our theoretical framing in this special issue thus builds on over two decades of critical research in feminist geopolitics.3 In this section we briefly point to what we see as the key interventions in this field as they pertain to theorising transnational topologies; these include scalar and linguistic disruptions, embodied notions of statecraft, geographies and relationships of emotion, identity, and vulnerability, and new modes of interrogation. We then continue by introducing some of the ways in which the concept of the geosocial may help to illuminate and expand on these critical insights. The first intervention, scalar disruptions, begins with the critique of separate categories of containment, particularly that of the local and the global. Pratt and Rosner note, for example, how this binary often sets one scale against the other in typically masculinist terms, conjuring up hierarchies of global capitalist power versus local defences and defensiveness. They emphasise the importance of language in disrupting rigid scalar categories and assumptions such as these, offering, in contrast, the idea of the global and the intimate. These terms are not “defined against one another but rather draw their meaning from more elliptically related domains.”4 Pratt and Rosner’s vocabulary calls on different conceptual realms, uniting a scalar term connected with geography and scientific exploration with one linked more with emotion and the pastoral. The language itself does part of the work in resisting obvious pairings and leading the reader to reflect on the ways that binaries act to structure our thinking, and how new terms can help us to unlearn and critique normative patterns and assumptions.5 The next move is to foreground the interconnections and interdependencies across scales, categories and borders and also between things. These include ‘things’ such as the relationship of production to social production and of formal to informal economies.6 Documenting the interdependencies between all aspects of life helps in disrupting traditional notions of scale. In the articles collected in this issue there are unusual and distinctive links across scales and between scales. These include, for example, between the scales of the individual celebrity humanitarian and geopolitical networking, transnational families and economic strategies of reproduction and survival, and a single entrepreneur and a regional democratisation movement. These types of analyses and studies help us to eschew rigid hierarchies and antagonisms and recognise the myriad ways that macro and micro scales and politics are intertwined and mutually constitutive. This leads us to a second important intervention, the idea of embodied statecraft. Hyndman introduces this term to elucidate how we can trace geopolitics ‘trickling up’ through an investigation of the movements of bodies and the spaces of population management.7 In her essay, which focuses on the geopolitics of migration, she calls attention to people-in-motion, to border-crossers, rather than to the borders themselves. Focusing on systems of surveillance, she notes how biopolitics and geopolitics converge at the GEOPOLITICS 3 border with the management of both territories and populations. While noncritical views from above observe only the formation of laws and policies designed to regulate and control territory – alongside the internecine struggles over these spatial demarcations – a feminist geopolitics insists on a simultaneous view from below, where people act and/or are managed and constrained in ways that also shape borders and broader policy outcomes. This agency can be practised by anyone – even young children, as Christou and Spyrou’s analysis on Greek Cypriot children’s lives demonstrates.8 Iris scans, fingerprints, heartbeats, and DNA testing – all connect bordercrossers to borders, biopolitics to geopolitics, and micro to macro forces; these are the molecular sites of institutionalised statecraft, where complex databases are coordinated between international players attempting to manage risk. “Fear and insecurity are linked across scales”; they are linked via the emotive body of the migrant and through the management of ‘risky’ populations.9 These border-crossers, a group that comprises figures of carceral cosmopolitanism and extraordinary rendition alongside nexus lanes of free-floating businessmen, bring the concept of embodied statecraft to life.10 They are the flesh on the narrative bones of Western empire, the vulnerable bodies that move across borders and expose the complicity of geopolitical frameworks from on high with ongoing forms of colonial knowledge production.11 It is through embodiment – a mode of interrogation from below that challenges antiseptic binaries and views from above – that feminists in geography and anthropology have been able to connect scales and simultaneously highlight human agency in spatial production. In ethnographies such as Donald Moore’s Suffering for Territory, for example, we can see how pain and the memory of pain – of suffering – produced the grounds for territorial land claims in Zimbabwe.12 Broader geopolitical disputes and policies were critical; these included laws and regulations promoted by foreign actors and domestic elites, from the programmes and schemes of the World Bank to those of the United Nations. Also important to this story are macro geoeconomic processes – the expansion of new forms of racialised dispossession in the march towards a more liberalised economy. But equally productive (yet unobserved in views from above) was the violent struggle and physical suffering of human beings on the ground – suffering that demarcated places and forms of resistance in collective consciousness and thus assumed an active, integral role in spatial production. Emphasising the micro scale in relation to macro processes thus underscores the importance of human agency – including the productive power of emotions as divergent as memory, pain, fear, and hope; these feelings can be constitutive of both real and imagined geographies spanning time from past to future.13 This takes us to the third intervention, which is the now extensive feminist literature on emotion and identity. 4 K. MITCHELL AND K. P. KALLIO While research on emotional geographies boasts a rich legacy, including work on method and interpretation, we are more concerned here with the ways in which individual affect and interpersonal relations are imbricated in transnational politics.14 Political geographers writing in this genre investigate the ways that emotional and affective ties create cross-border spaces that are both intimate and geostrategic. These ideas are examined particularly with respect to the production and uses of intimacy across borders and the ways that various forms of affect are facilitated and constrained by different actors, including the nation-state. Feminist geographers emphasise the importance of recognising and analysing emotions in relation to everyday, embodied moments and encounters rather than simply through grand metanarratives that lack grounding. In recent work by Pain, for example, she has focused on the scalar interconnections between an omnipresent “globalized fear” in the wake of 9/11 and the War on Terror, and what occurs in the local, quotidian moments and spaces inhabited and produced by actually existing people.15 The intimate fears of people ‘on the ground’ are differentiated by their intersecting subject positions, those of gender, race, class, age, nationality, and other axes of difference that constitute the differential vulnerability of individual bodies. Feminist geographers thus link a politics of feeling and emotion to the body, and these bodies to geostrategic discourses set in a globalised frame.16 In this issue, geopolitically situated fears are analysed, for example, in the contexts of marginalised German youth and families in forced transnational life situations. The contemporary manner in which such affective relations are transmitted and circulate across borders is a critical factor in our push for a theory of the geosocial, as we discuss below. A fourth critical intervention in feminist geopolitics is the critique of normative disembodied and universalising narratives and the ongoing search for new modes of scholarly interrogation. This is at the very heart of feminist analysis in this genre: the recognition of the dual need to unsettle existing categories and assumptions and to produce new ways of observing, thinking, feeling, and understanding. Moreover, these new modes must not be relegated to the status of case study explanations or relativistic interpretations. As Dixon and Marston note, while giving up the desire for a “universalizing framework” we want to hold onto “a project of universal reach.”17 Drawing on a broader tradition of feminist work in geography, feminist geopolitics critiques visual and other dominant modes of inquiry that offer a singular perspective and which are frequently made from an abstracted vantage point.18 It demands engagement with a politics on the ground, one that is attentive to political acts and ways of being that are not always captured in liberal, universalistic framings of rights-bearing actors participating in normative political systems. It also seeks to expose the Western orientation of much of the earlier geopolitical work, providing a healthy scepticism about research GEOPOLITICS 5 conducted on subjects in the developing world, and the respective analyses of geopolitical strategies and global affairs from a hegemonic perspective.19 Perhaps most importantly, the project to expose and disrupt pre-existing categories and methodologies, especially those that promulgate a disembodied, totalising, and uncritical view from above, is paired with an open attitude to change – to new methods and ways of seeing. It is this “diversity of attitudes” combined with care about fieldwork and openness to change that most clearly reflects and refracts the tradition of feminist geopolitics research.20 As Hyndman has argued, we need to “make space for a non-essentialist ‘politics on the ground,’” reflect on our shared vulnerabilities, keep on thinking in new ways, and through that very openness, find a way forward.21 What can the Geosocial Bring to this Conversation? Here we outline four interconnected themes that indicate how the concept of the geosocial can help to expand and deepen some of the situated knowledge generated by feminist research into transnational topological relations and geopolitics. First, similar to Pratt and Rosner’s linguistic and scalar interventions with critiques of global/local binaries, the concept of the geosocial introduces a new vocabulary and new concerns around scale that decentre normative binaries and present a linguistically aware way of coming to terms with the geoeconomic and the geopolitical as geostrategic discourses. While the geopolitical and the geoeconomic have long been used to theorise the construction of these discourses internationally,22 we believe that their meanings can be usefully complemented with closer attention to the stretching of geotactical social relations, and to the production of social subjects in and amidst these transnational ties and tensions.23 Insisting on the power of the geosocial adds a necessary third leg to the stool, disrupting the linguistic bipolarity of geoeconomics and geopolitics and, hopefully, some of the ontological assumptions about the ‘big picture’ that too often inform this work. Dualistic ontologies of this kind have been framed as geopolitical struggles over territory, containment and control versus geoeconomic visions of integrative networks, flows, and cross-border opportunities. Cowen and Smith, for example, write of the geopolitical social as being supplanted by the geoeconomic social, as if one historical era must follow another.24 A more interesting and relevant approach, we think, is to examine the connective ties and practices of discursive and practical co-generation in the contemporary moment. Essex writes: “It is important, then, not to see geopolitics and geoeconomics as either cleanly separated from one another in a neat strategic and discursive bifurcation or the same… They remain, rather, bound together and cogenerative in complex ways that are in turn complementary and contradictory, with varying degrees of 6 K. MITCHELL AND K. P. KALLIO connections to the specific interests and strategies of class-relevant social forces.”25 We believe that the key intersecting relationship between free market desires of unimpeded capital circulation and political desires of territorial control – or more bluntly, the grand macro narrative of the logic of capital and the logic of territory, can be nuanced and augmented with the addition of this third, co-generative axis of the geosocial. In addition to problematising efforts to ontologise the geopolitical and geoeconomic as the only social force-fields that matter internationally, the introduction of the geosocial provides a meaningful frame of reference for research in growing areas of interest on the transnational in everyday practices. We believe that, in addition to empirical findings, an in-depth and concurrent exploration of geostrategic and geotactical dynamics and agencies may be helpful in generating new methodologies for researching transnational social topologies. The papers in this special issue help us to see how geosocial subjects and spaces are constituted in and through the everyday geopolitical and geoeconomic and vice versa. Mitchell shows, for example, how the intimate and highly emotional long-distance relationships between fans and celebrities can reverberate in ways that impact global economic narratives and policies;26 Hörschelmann indicates how the everyday social relations and feelings of vulnerability of teenagers challenges the supremacy of geostrategic state and market interests in security politics; Ybarra and Peña discuss transnationalisation as a collective, familial experience and practice that exceeds the individual subject; and Ho documents the ways that global geographies of power are bound up in the forms of social reproduction sought by international students. Further, the contributions by Sparke and Kallio and Häkli reveal how geopolitically and geoeconomically embedded human agencies may translate in unexpected ways in the discursive and actual practices of everyday living, leading to unforeseen and sometimes unintended political outcomes. These examples manifest some of the myriad ways that a new vocabulary and conceptions of scale help to decentre binary thinking and open up new opportunities for investigating transnational topologies from the ground up. A second useful way that the geosocial can augment feminist geopolitics is through an emphasis on the digital world and knowledge production in the digital era, especially vis-à-vis new social media. In conceptualising how ‘embodied statecraft’ actually operates in the global era it is necessary to turn to the new forms of communication that have revolutionised personal relations at every level and scale over the past decade and a half. The sense of closeness that is made possible by new social media such as Facebook, Twitter, BuzzFeed, and YouTube, for example, has altered both the form and the content of everyday interactions, from the personal interactions between friends and lovers, to the transnational relationships between politicians and constituents, celebrities and fans, and GEOPOLITICS 7 donors and grantees.27 These global intimacies are made possible through digital relations – connective online networks that carry personal, embodied feelings such as desire, fear, suffering, and anger from one part of the world to another in a highly visceral and immediate manner.28 In Kallio and Häkli’s work in this volume we can see the significance of these new patterns in the production and transmission of knowledge across borders, which may lead to quickly emerging transnational connective ties and collectives, fast-spreading political attitudes and activities, and various regional, national, and local results unfolding in the immediate future or over a long period of time. What is more, their analysis reveals the power of such topologically established networks and connective activities to be so effective that some political lives and geosocial agencies may become hidden or transmuted as certain projects, like the democratisation attempts known under the label of ‘Arab Spring’, are pushed forward. Mohammed Bouazizi’s figure provides an apt example of such a case, where a locally embedded and nationally conditioned political agency of a repressed entrepreneur was seized by transnationally networked democracy activists. They used his agency for their own politicisation purposes – for a politics that Bouazizi, who burned himself alive as an objection towards the prevailing economic situation in Tunisia that had placed him and his family into a desperate position, had little interest in. Sparke’s paper, drawing on evidence from the discussion boards of his MOOC about globalisation, illustrates in turn how attention to the geosocial creates new opportunities for challenging myths of geoeconomic flatness and global integration without assuming or asserting geopolitical ontologies as an alternative. MOOCs have been widely hailed as levelling the playing field of global education, creating class-blind, gender-blind, race-blind and nationality-blind access to courses from the world’s leading universities. But Sparke’s geosocially aware account of the situated knowledges shared in his MOOC takes away the blinders in such boasts, showing instead how it was precisely in moments where class, gender, race and nationality were thematised that new opportunities for learning were created in the transnational educational space of the MOOC. Such opportunities included divergent and dissenting perspectives from around the world on simple visions of geopolitics and geoeconomics. In this way, therefore, the ‘recasting’ of the so-called ‘geopolitical social’ by the ‘geoeconomic social’ outlined by Cowen and Smith is itself recast by Sparke as the geosocial remaking of what remain profoundly entangled geostrategic discourses and practices.29 In her research Mitchell shows the power of digital forms of communication and its connection to contemporary statecraft through her analysis of Bono’s Ted Talk and its promulgation of a new form of humanitarian reason. In this paper she documents both the ‘factivist’ message – a configuration of 8 K. MITCHELL AND K. P. KALLIO quantitative reasoning with Christian-themed notions of duty and care – and its reception and dissemination worldwide. Mitchell argues that this message is diffused successfully through elite geosocial networking and also through the internet and new social media. It is via new forms of digital connection that factivism is ‘embodied’ in the figure of the celebrity humanitarian Bono, statecraft is made, and consent is won. These webs of belief are actively created, drawing on historical motifs and cultural assumptions, but transformed and transmitted through connective channels of communication that feed into new kinds of transnational topologies. Third, we draw on the geosocial to open up inquiry into the myriad new relationships of emotion and affect characterising global relations and transnational identities in the twenty-first century. These include, among others, new kinds of social, familial and educational relations across international borders, and new/old productions of precarity involved in movement and transnational life. Investigating the geosocial through the movement and production of transnational affect in the current moment helps us to understand the multiple ways that these new subject positions, partnerships, families, and forms of identity are constituted and new geostrategic domains of power are (re)configured.30 Especially in the current moment of the war on terror and the rise of both forced and unforced migration and heightened forms of securitisation and mass deportation it is critical to look at how assumptions and categories of identity both cross borders and make borders – and how people affected by these processes act and react in geosocial ways to protect and regenerate themselves, their friends, and their global households. Examining the intertwining of geopolitical agendas and everyday social relations enables us to see sites of resistance, as well as the production and negotiation of vulnerability, for example, in new forms of gendering and racialisation occurring worldwide on an ongoing basis. Together these intertwined geostrategic and geotactical connections give rise to relational worlds traversed by countless visible and hidden power-laden borders. In Ybarra and Peña’s paper they examine the impact of forced transnationality on families, investigating how it is implicated in the production of new gender roles as well as on the ways that families are forced to rework and resituate themselves to act as a translocal social subject. Transnational families having to negotiate the laws and logistics of national borders is not a new issue, but it is one that has reemerged in the contemporary historicalgeographical context with renewed force.31 In the specific context of contemporary mass deportations from the US to Mexico, Ybarra and Peña trace the ways in which families that have been separated by the border have to negotiate social space in novel configurations; it is the family itself that becomes the space and focal point of emotion, and it is the claim to belonging as a family that forms the basis of identity and action. These new GEOPOLITICS 9 geosocial spaces are thus simultaneously bodies and practices – ones, moreover, that require constant vigilance to keep coherent and intimate in the context of enforced long-distance forms of intimacy that must continue over long stretches of time. In another paper that engages new forms of vulnerability and resistance in the context of transnational movement and social reproduction, Ho examines the effects of ‘global householding’ on youth and families. She shows how China’s geostrategic influence draws students from developing countries in Africa, who seek to regenerate their family’s class and status positions through the imprimatur of a degree from what is seen from afar as a powerful, modern nation. After the students have lived in China for some time, however, this view and their assumptions begin to change. Because of frequent hostile social interactions, dry and uncreative teaching, and numerous racial barriers, most of her informants described their educational experiences as negative, and also rejected the view of China as ‘modern’ and worthy of aspiration. Ho argues that these forms of ‘everyday sociality’ encountered by the students are often overlooked, but are important in understanding how subjectivities are formed and knowledge about geostrategic power and influence is circulated globally. In their new understandings and expressions of disdain, the students geotactically rework hegemonic assumptions of China and ‘Western’ forms of modernity and education, and topologies of power shift ever so slightly as a result of these resistant forms of geosocial knowledge circulation. In her discussion of security in Leipzig Hörschelmann also examines the micro scale of interpersonal relations and their articulation with a more macro scale of geostrategic state and market interests. Drawing on the notion of ‘security practices’ in the context of different forms of violence, she shows how a geosocial perspective can broaden our understanding of the multiple and complex forms of insecurity that may be experienced by marginalised subjects ‘on the ground’. Focusing on both physical and symbolic violence and their interconnections, she documents the entangled webs of human (in) security that are often unseen or ignored in geopolitical and/or geoeconomic views from above. From bullying to unemployment to familial, gendered, and relational forms of violence, Hörschelmann’s informants expressed both economic and emotional forms of anxiety that reverberate out to broader concerns about the nation, immigration, foreigners, and the economy, but not always in easily explicable ways. In order to fully understand and capture “these relational and often contradictory configurations of (in)security” it is necessary, she argues, to nuance “how we understand young people’s (re) enrolment in geostrategic securitization processes” through a geosocial analysis. This type of grounded and relational investigation can help reveal both the vulnerability of lives and livelihoods for marginalised youth under neoliberal capitalism, and also make the link between fraught personal 10 K. MITCHELL AND K. P. KALLIO relationships, emotional insecurities, and broader forms of geopolitical and geoeconomic violence. Hörschelmann’s emphasis on the geosocial as method of analysis ties into our fourth intervention. We see the geosocial as a mode of interrogation that builds on the understandings and methods of feminist and critical geopolitics, and hopefully opens up even more ways of moving forward. As the geosocial lives that people lead are taken as the preliminary starting point of the analysis both ‘the political’ and ‘the spatial’ can be approached from perspectives that do not carry locked presumptions about the unfolding and connections of people’s lived realities, and what things are political in these worlds and how. This approach is taken, in different ways, in all the papers in this collection; including the perspectives of the transnational families in Mexico/US, those of the fans of celebrity humanitarians, active MOOC participants, German youth, African students in China, and Mohammed Bouazizi in Sidi Bouzid. We strongly believe that further research following similar methodological lines will lead into novel insights on transnational topologies and their political dimensions. The openness to interdisciplinary methods, vocabularies and technological shifts is itself an effort to stimulate other linguistic interventions and ways of seeing. In this vein the concept of the geosocial can, we think, provide a more direct articulation with other contemporary scholarly projects, including, for example, some of the current work on the geo-human. One of the exciting interdisciplinary projects now drawing both theoretical and empirical attention, for example, is the notion of the Anthropocene. This work can be seen as a new epoch of the geosocial involving not just human-human relations but also a “new understanding of time, matter, and agency for the human as a collective being and as a force.”32 In a special issue of Theory, Culture and Society, Nigel Clark and Kathryn Yusoff specifically introduce the idea of “geosocial formations and the Anthropocene” to highlight the intersections of feminist thought, cultural studies, geopolitics, and nature. With this interdisciplinary configuration they want to manifest the ways that the concept of the Anthropocene represents an opportunity (and a necessity) to rethink the human and knowledge production itself. While the environmental apocalypse occasioned by geopolitical failures around climate change accords and ongoing fossil fuel extraction haunts the very word itself, Yusoff acknowledges this ‘worldmaker/destroyer of worlds’ motif, while simultaneously reflecting on the epistemological openings for a radical rewriting of “human history and its material and discursive capacities.”33 The new epoch of thought opened up by notions such as the geosocial and the Anthropocene is one example of the ontological disruptions and openness to thinking in new, grounded and reflexive ways that we believe is integral to feminist theory generally, and to a critical and feminist GEOPOLITICS 11 geopolitics in particular. However, we also want to caution that the aims to ontologise politics, in this and other new openings, risk losing the understanding of the specificity of human agency in political processes. We see more fruitful the efforts to promote political agency as a plural concept, based on ontological openness. Leaning on the Meadian idea of ‘intersubjectively mediated self-consciousness’ that only humans have access to, we acknowledge, together with Schmidt,34 the ‘inner life which equips us exceptionally well with adaptive capacities, such as attitude adjustment and expectation management…’. We believe this to be a critical ethical position because ‘this sphere of constantly reorienting ourselves in the face of unpredictability is also where we can be held accountable’.35 Taking this position does not imply setting people above other living creatures and things, or considering them as self-sufficient, singular subjects. Rather, it proposes an ‘open understanding of anthropos’, as outlined by Joronen and Häkli, ‘which departs from Eurocentrism and the onto-theological idea of human mastery over non-human entities, without portraying humans simply as entities among other entities and thus sacrificing the vital element that is unique to the relation between being and human beings’.36 Mobilising ‘the geo’ in the geosocial and incorporating the natural and social features of earth and landscape as research method builds on Katz’s insights from a decade and a half ago in “On the Grounds of Globalization.”37 Drawing on Haraway’s iconic article on perspective and epistemology she critiqued the location of ‘situated knowledges’ in the personal subjectivity of the knower alone, asking us to make that situated knowledge locatable in ‘actually existing spaces’. This collection contextualises knowledges, subjectivities, and individual and collective agencies in the spaces of neoliberal globalisation, where knowledge producers act and respond to macro forces such as shifts in capital investments and economic and environmental restructuring; these are also the spaces of the micro practices and relations of everyday worlds that are linked to but not determined by broader geopolitical and geoeconomic forces. Tracing the connections between these human practices and social, environmental, and political-economic worlds, and constantly thinking and rethinking the meaning of the ‘ground’ and ‘politics’ in the twenty-first century, is the aim of geosocial thinking and the exploration of transnational topologies that we wish to advance. Notes 1. The older insights and debates about the mutual constitution of society and space are captured well in Edward Soja’s introduction in Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso 1989). 2. For contemporary discussions of social topologies, see A. Secor and L. Martin, ‘Towards a Post-mathematical Topology?’, Progress in Human Geography 38/3 (2014) 12 K. MITCHELL AND K. P. KALLIO 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. pp. 420–438; M. Joronen, ‘Politics of Being-Related. On Onto-Topologies and ‘Coming Events’’, Geografiska Annaler B: Human Geography 98/2 (2016) forthcoming. This is a necessarily limited list that indicates just a small example of the growing literature on feminist geopolitics: J. Hyndman, ‘Towards a Feminist Geopolitics’, The Canadian Geographer 45/2 (2001) pp. 210–222; L. Dowler and J. Sharp, ‘A Feminist Geopolitics?’, Space and Polity 5/3 (2001) pp. 165–176; J. Hyndman, ‘Mind the Gap: Bridging Feminist and Political Geography through Geopolitics’, Political Geography 23 (2004) pp. 307–322; A. Mountz, ‘Introduction: Reconceptualizing the State from the Margins of Political Geography’, Political Geography 23 (2004) pp. 241–243; J. Sharp, ‘Geography and Gender: Finding Feminist Political Geographies’, Progress in Human Geography 31/3 (2007) pp. 381–387; J. Williams and V. Massaro, ‘Feminist Geopolitics: Unpacking (In) Security, Animating Social Change’, Geopolitics 18/4 (2013) pp. 751–758; J. Fluri, ‘Feminist Political Geography’, in J. Agnew, V. Mamadouh, A. Secor, and J. Sharp (eds.), The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political Geography (Wiley Blackwell 2015) pp. 235–247. G. Pratt and V. Rosner, ‘Introduction: The Global and the Intimate’, in G. Pratt and V. Rosner (eds.), The Global and the Intimate (2012) p. 2; see also A. Mountz and J. Hyndman, ‘Feminist Approaches to the Global Intimate’, Women’s Studies Quarterly 34/1/2 (2006) pp. 446–463. For similar work contesting the rigid and unproblematised vocabulary of much of international relations scholarship see A. Ingram and K. Dodds, ‘Spaces of Security and Insecurity: Geographies of the War on Terror’, in A. Ingram and K. Dodds (eds.), Spaces of Security and Insecurity: Geographies of the War on Terror (New York/Oxford: Ashgate 2009) pp. 1–18. K. Strauss and K. Meehan, ‘New Frontiers in Life’s Work’, in K. Strauss and K. Meehan (eds.), Precarious Worlds: Contested Geographies of Social Reproduction (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press 2016) pp. 1–22. J. Hyndman, ‘Introduction: The Geopolitics of Migration and Mobility’, Geopolitics 17 (2012) pp. 243–255; see also J. Sharp, ‘Embodying the State and Citizenship’, Geoforum 38 (2007) pp. 602–604. M. Christou and S. Spyrou, ‘Children’s Emotional Geographies and the Geopolitics of Division in Cyprus’, in M. Benwell and P. Hopkins (eds.), Children, Young People and Critical Geopolitics (Farnham: Ashgate 2016) pp. 75–89. Hyndman (note 7) p. 247; see also J. Häkli, ‘Biometric Identities’, Progress in Human Geography 31/2 (2007) pp. 139–141; A. Mountz, Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and Bureaucracy at the Border (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2010). See M. Sparke, ‘A Neoliberal Nexus: Economy, Security and the Biopolitics of Citizenship on the Border’, Political Geography 25 (2006) pp. 151–180; T. Paglen and A. C. Thompson, Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights (Brooklyn: Melville House 2006). J. Hyndman, ‘Critical Geopolitics: Deconstructing the Old and Reconstructing Anew’, Progress in Human Geography 39/5 (2015) pp. 666–667. D. Moore, Suffering for Territory: Race, Place, and Power in Zimbabwe (Raleigh/ Durham: Duke University Press 2005). M. Sparke, ‘Geopolitical Fears, Geoeconomic Hopes, and the Responsibilities of Geography’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 97/2 (2007) pp. 338–349. See C. Pedwell, Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2014). R. Pain, ‘Globalized Fear? Towards an Emotional Geopolitics’, Progress in Human Geography 33/4 (2009) pp. 466–486; R. Pain and S. J. Smith, ‘Fear: Critical GEOPOLITICS 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 13 Geopolitics in Everyday Life’, in R. Pain and S. J. Smith (eds.), Fear: Critical Geopolitics and Everyday Life (Aldershot: Ashgate 2008) pp. 1–19. Pratt and Rosner (note 4); S. Cele and D. van der Burgt, ‘Children’s Embodied Politics of Exclusion and Belonging in Public Space’, in K. P. Kallio and S. Mills (eds.), Politics, Citizenship and Rights, Vol. 7 of T. Skelton (ed.), Geographies of Children and Young People (Singapore: Springer 2016) pp. 189–205. D. Dixon and S. Marston, ‘Introduction’, in D. Dixon and S. Marston (eds.), Feminist Geopolitics at the Sharp End (New York: Routledge 2013) pp. 1–9. G. Rose, Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1993); G. Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials (London: Sage 2001); J. Seager and L. Nelson (eds.), Companion to Feminist Geography (Williston, VT: Blackwell Publishing 2004); P. Moss, Feminisms in Geography: Rethinking Space, Place, and Knowledges (New York: Rowman and Littlefield 2007). Pratt and Rosner (note 4). Dixon and Marston (note 17). J. Hyndman, ‘Forging the Political’, in L. Jones and D. Sage (eds.), ‘New Directions in Critical Geopolitics: An Introduction’, Geojournal 75 (2010) pp. 315–325. S. Roberts, A. Secor, and M. Sparke, ‘Neoliberal Geopolitics’, Antipode 35/ 5 (2003) pp. 886–897; M. Coleman, ‘What Counts as the Politics and Practice of Security, and Where? Devolution and Immigrant Insecurity after 9/11’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 99/5 (2009) pp. 904–913; D. Cowen and N. Smith, ‘After Geopolitics? From the Geopolitical Social to Geoeconomics’, Antipode 41/1 (2009) pp. 22–48; M. Sparke, ‘Geopolitical Fears, Geoeconomic Hopes, and the Responsibilities of Geography’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 97/2 (2007) pp. 338–349. With strategic and tactical agency we refer to De Certeau’s conceptualisation; see K. P. Kallio, ‘Body as a Battlefield: Approaching Children’s Politics’, Geografiska Annaler B: Human Geography 90/3 (2008) pp. 285–297; for the geosocial constitution of political subjects in tensioned geopolitical situations, see D. Marshall, ‘All the Beautiful Things: Trauma, Aesthetics and the Politics of Palestinian Childhood’, Space and Polity 17/1 (2013) pp. 53–75; S. Laketa, ‘Youth as Geopolitical Subjects: The Case of Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina’, in K. P. Kallio and S. 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Schmidt, ‘The Empirical Falsity of the Human Subject: New Materialism, Climate Change and the Shared Critique of Artifice’, Resilience 1/3 (2013) pp. 174–192, quote on pages 189–190. See also S. R. Krause, ‘Bodies in Action: Corporeal Agency and Democratic Politics’, Political Theory 39/3 (2011) pp. 299–324. On Mead, see N. Crossley N, ‘Citizenship, Intersubjectivity and the Lifeworld’, in N. Stevenson (ed.), Culture and Citizenship (London: Sage 2001) pp. 33–47. M. Joronen and J. Häkli, ‘Politicizing Ontology’, Progress in Human Geography (in EarlyView, doi:0.1177/0309132516652953). C. Katz, ‘On the Grounds of Globalization: A Topography for Feminist Political Engagement’, Signs 26/4 (2001) pp. 1213–1234.