EN:

How does the process of producing a zine contribute to resistance and action to create new spaces of solidarity? This article reflects on such a process to account for the experiences of the ‘Concrete Collective,’ a research collective of staff and doctoral researchers of colour. The project was initiated to understand what 'belonging' can mean, or fail to mean, when inhabiting the spaces of UK Higher Education (HE). A key output of this project was our co-produced zine, which became a means to express the collective’s distinctive journeys through HE and experiences of (un)belonging within and beyond the university. In this article, we reflect on how we worked to create a safe space within the institution and how arts-based making practices were central to expressing experiences not easily communicated through more traditional methods; using these collaborative and creative methods generated learning encounters, producing not only material for the zine but a new sense of community beyond the institutionalized spaces available within a university. The act of crafting the zine went together with learning to imagine, understand, think, and feel as a collective. We explore how the physical and political act of zine-ing provided a space to collectively critique and resist isolationist tendencies that create a sense of unbelonging amongst historically under-represented groups within HE. This act of creation allowed us to critically reflect on the dynamics of how solidarities may be produced. Finally, we reflect on the possibilities of nurturing and sustaining solidarities and collective spaces while carefully attending to hierarchical relationships present within the university.

EN:

Mineral rights, and more generally, the land below the surface, are legally classified as real property and sold separately from surface property. The vertical separation of property rights, coupled with intricate procedures for accessing property information, poses complex challenges for people seeking to safeguard their communities, including activists, Indigenous communities, homeowners, environmental organizations, and local communities. Drawing from the conceptual framework of administrative burdens, as defined by Herd and Moynihan (2018), I argue that these deliberate opacities and complex bureaucratic obstacles create significant challenges for individuals seeking government goods and services. In this context, I identify the key legal, bureaucratic, spatial, and cost barriers to uncovering subsurface property details as well as the methods that facilitate the identification of mineral claimants, two pieces of knowledge that can enable the exercise of Indigenous sovereignty and offer a countermeasure against unbridled mineral extraction. In addition, this paper illustrates how limited accessibility to such information benefits the state and corporations while excluding local communities from decision-making. The identification of mineral claimants brings to light dual power dynamics: one at the surface attempting to access public information that remains elusive, and the other delving deep beneath the Earth's surface, unraveling the holders of mineral claims as a strategic resistance against unchecked extraction.

ES:

A menudo, durante o tras las crisis, el impulso de la urbanización y la actividad turística intensifican los procesos de explotación de la naturaleza. En este trabajo abordamos la protesta contra el desarrollo urbano-turístico y la mercantilización de la naturaleza en la isla canaria de Tenerife a través de determinados procesos de acaparamiento verde y gris, tratando de ilustrarla mediante tres ejemplos. Estas intervenciones han generado una importante movilización y repulsa social contra la destrucción de los recursos socio-naturales. A partir de la observación participante, el diálogo con activistas y la administración, y la cobertura de los medios de comunicación, analizamos las estrategias de acaparamiento verde y gris. Su relación con las protestas y la idea de derechos a la naturaleza y a la isla permiten una mejor comprensión de las complejas relaciones sociedad-naturaleza y su potencial emancipatorio. Entendemos estos dos conceptos como el control de las sociedades que habitan esos lugares sobre la toma de decisiones y los recursos naturales, pero también como marco hacia un potencial decrecimiento y como proyecto político redistributivo orientado a una transición ecosocial.

EN:

Often, during or after crises, the impulse of urbanisation and tourist activity intensifies the processes of nature exploitation. In this paper we address the protest against urban-tourist development and the commodification of nature on the island of Tenerife through the processes of green and grey grabbing, trying to illustrate them through three examples: a mega-port in Granadilla de Abona and two tourist infrastructures (a luxury hotel in La Tejita and a large luxury residential housing complex in Puertito de Adeje). These three interventions generate an important social mobilisation and repulsion against the destruction of socio-natural resources. Based on participant observation, dialogue with activists involved in the protest and the administration, and media coverage, we analyse the strategies of green and grey grabbing on the island. Their relationship to the protests and the idea of rights to nature and to the island allow for a better understanding of complex society-nature relations and their emancipatory potential. We understand these two concepts as the control of the societies inhabiting these places over decision-making and natural resources, but also as a framework towards a potential degrowth and redistributive political project oriented towards an ecosocial transition.

EN:

This roundtable tells a story of three early career feminist critical geographers, facing disabling conditions and the pressures of neoliberal time in academia. Our introductory essay reviews the rich literature on slow scholarship, crip time, disabilities, and neurodivergence that resonated with us. We connect these themes with our personal journeys navigating crip time and refusal in North American academic institutions through a recorded roundtable discussion, transcribed below. In rethinking what slowing down and refusal mean from the perspective of an already slowed bodymind, we hope that this article stimulates more conversations among critical scholars at all stages of their careers. Aspects of the roundtable will be relatable to those facing varying levels of precarity, neurodivergence, and disabling conditions. With compassion for embodied barriers and time pressures we also encourage tenured and variously more secure and well-established scholars to read this piece and consider ways to alter the material conditions of inequity, stress, and mental and physical pain experienced by scholars at the intersections we describe. A commitment to slow scholarship in feminist and critical geographies, we contend, demands a commitment to those who wrestle with time and disability in academia, and to those who inhabit the paradox between slowing down and keeping up.

EN:

The award-winning and best-selling book The Secret Barrister (2018) took the general public into the unfamiliar space of the courtroom. Inspired both by its candour and illumination of the legal world and its proceedings, this roundtable reveals some of the hidden stories of geographers, including ourselves, who are engaged in scholar-activism in law. The roundtable comprises four conversations and takes the reader into a range of legal realms in and beyond the courtroom. It explores geographers’ professional/personal experiences of navigating these spaces, the actors present in them, and the wider political terrains in which they sit. The conversations evidence the ‘shape-shifting’ of identities, disciplinary and institutional affiliations, and positionalities dependent on audience, insider/outsider status, place, and (political) goal. By going ‘behind the scenes’ the roundtable also offers new insights into how explicitly or outwardly ‘activist’ geographers are able or want to be in their scholar-activism in law. Activism tends to be understood as an intentional, planned-for, and public endeavour, yet the roundtable tells a more nuanced story. Honing in on the legal reveals experiences of scholar-activism that are also accidental, unexpected, and private, but which, we argue should equally ‘count’ and be ‘counted’ as examples of meaningful geographical engagement with social justice movements and endeavours. Ultimately, our coming together in the roundtable is solidaristic in aim. It arises from a collective desire for connection in an academy which has yet to grapple with what it means to support geographers in their justice-oriented legal endeavours. By beginning to unshroud the secrecy of such endeavours in geography, we hope the roundtable inspires others to think more and potentially share more on their varied legal engagements in scholar-activism moving forward.

EN:

Urban self-management is an activity that can be exhausting and may not always be sustainable over the long term. This is partly because it involves not only typical activist activities but also the management and maintenance of a physical space. Drawing on a study conducted with activists from five self-managed spaces in Rome, I analysed the mechanisms that explain why some individuals continue to engage in activism for years, despite various challenges, while others choose to leave. It became clear that the decision to stay or leave results from a delicate and complex balance between centripetal forces (which hold the activists back) and centrifugal forces (which compel them to leave). To prevent the balance from tipping towards leaving, self-managed spaces must be more than just arenas of struggle and interaction; they must also be spaces of care, which can make these experiences not only valuable but also sustainably humane.