Volume 24, numéro 5, 2025

EN :

In the last two decades, shuttered warehouse-manufacturing sites and emptied retail across Los Angeles/Tovaangar were repurposed into the largest medical cannabis dispensary and indoor cultivation economy in the US. Drawing from more than twelve years of ethnographic participation, this paper bridges Black radical theory, disability studies and Buddhist humanist geographic perspectives to understand how cannabis workers, owner-operators, and patients produced fugitive forms of value. These forms of care, collective relationships, and material benefit challenge racial capitalist accumulation and offer distinct, even if fleeting moments of freedom. Facing death-dealing violence, marginalized communities created places of care at the “outlaw edge” that housed an undercommons of health practices and knowledge that include pleasure and non-hierarchical solidarities. These created respite and relief from interrelated geographies of abandonment, broken windows urban governance, and dispossession defining early 21st Century LA. Exploring cannabis economies offers a means to reconceptualize criminalization as a singular relation to carcerality, and to deepen our understanding of law, capitalism, and the forms of value generation being targeted. Ultimately, legalization in this context poses critical conundrums for participants in fugitive economies on what is gained and lost in further assimilation into racial capitalist urban economies. In other words, cannabis begs the question: can freedom only be found in flight?

EN :

Thinking with W.E.B. Du Bois’s elucidation of the General Strike, this essay is concerned with reading the Strike as constitutive of black embodied spatiotemporal crisis. In giving attention to Du Bois’s descriptions of the embodied and spatial pedagogies of the enslaved in the landscape of the U.S. South, I contend that it was through these pedagogies of protest that the General Strike both disrupted and suspended a Western linear ordering of time and geographical space. In re-mapping the General Strike as crisis through attention to black embodied praxis, I consider the political reverberations of the Strike in the Caribbean which I read through Jamaica’s Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865 and a Black Lives Matter protest in Kingston during the summer of 2020. In tracing the linkages between the General Strike, the Rebellion, and the protest, I disrupt the spatiotemporally familiar in order to propose a cartographic and epistemological shift predicated on situating the U.S. South and the Caribbean as an imaginary. This imaginary resists both territorialization and chronology and compels us to be attuned to the entanglement of black radical historical actors, landscapes, and embodied practices across spacetime.

EN :

The neoliberal university, by commodifying and individualising learning, teaching and research, has been linked to growing mental health issues and presents many challenges for delivering adequate mental health services. We use concepts of critical geographies, including mutual aid, as a framework to explore the potential of Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) as a ‘care-full’ intervention within the neoliberal university environment. Through a case study of MHFA-trained staff at a research-intensive university in the United Kingdom, we analyse the tension MHFA holds of being instrumentalised by the neoliberal university while also holding potential as a care-full tool for mutual aid. Our analysis demonstrates that schemes to achieve support and uptake. At the same time, it became evident that uncertainty with role boundaries and the delegation of responsibility for welfare in the campus environment created confusion about the role of MHFA and revealed a tension between commitments to cultivating an ethic of care whilst resisting a neoliberal individualisation of responsibility. We conclude that, despite this potential, MHFA, in our empirical case study, is limited by its role boundaries and risks becoming a neoliberal problem itself. Yet, MHFA could open up advantageous responses to neoliberal challenges if framed and implemented effectively, with a clear focus on building care-full communities and valuing mutual aid.

FR :

L'accès au logement est un enjeu central pour les politiques urbaines contemporaines. Les Community Land Trusts (CLT) cherchent à garantir durablement l’accès à des logements abordables en s’appuyant sur trois principes : la dissociation entre la propriété foncière et la jouissance du logement ; la limitation des plus-values ; une gouvernance tripartite impliquant les résidents, la communauté locale et les acteurs publics. Ces politiques, ni publiques ni privées, visent à renforcer le contrôle collectif sur le parc immobilier dans le but de favoriser l’accès au logement pour les ménages modestes ou issus des minorités. En France, une institution similaire, l'Organisme de Foncier Solidaire (OFS), a été intégrée au code de l'urbanisme (2014) et les grandes villes promeuvent son développement afin d'enrayer la suburbanisation de la classe moyenne. L’article examine la genèse des CLT aux États-Unis et le développement des OFS en France dans le cadre théorique des communs et avec une approche de géographie légale critique. Dix ans après l’introduction de l’OFS, cette analyse interroge les règles de sa gouvernance interne et multiniveau. Malgré des références récurrentes aux CLT, l’OFS ne saurait être qualifié de commun car il privilégie l’accès au logement pour les classes moyennes inférieures et la sécurisation des fonds publics, plutôt que la politisation du logement abordable en tant que commun urbain. Enfin, les ambiguïtés persistantes au sein de sa gouvernance territoriale entraînent des questionnements quant à la capacité de l’OFS à jouer un rôle redistributif dans le système français des politiques du logement largement marqué par le néolibéralisme.

EN :

Access to housing is a key issue in contemporary urban policy. Community Land Trusts (CLTs) seek to guarantee long-term access to affordable housing based on three principles: separating land ownership from housing tenure; limiting capital gains; and tripartite governance involving residents, the local community and public actors. These policies, which are neither public nor private, aim to strengthen collective control over the housing stock in order to promote access to housing for low-income households and minorities. In France, a similar institution, the Organisme de Foncier Solidaire (OFS), was incorporated into the Urban Planning Code (2014), and large cities are promoting its development in order to curb the suburbanisation of the middle class. The article examines the origins of CLTs in the United States and the development of OFSs in France within the theoretical framework of the commons and using a critical legal geography approach. Ten years after the introduction of the OFS, this analysis questions the rules of its internal and multi-level governance. Despite recurring references to CLTs, the OFS cannot be described as a commons because it prioritises access to housing for the lower middle classes and control of public funds, rather than the politicisation of affordable housing as an urban commons. Finally, the ambiguities that remain within its territorial governance raise questions about the OFS's ability to play a redistributive role in the French housing policy system, which is largely marked by neoliberalism.

EN :

Many of us in academia navigate a visceral tension: our role as learners, teachers, and employees allows us the refuge to do meaningful work and deep thinking on issues of importance, yet, this privilege comes amid long-standing and ongoing racialized exclusions and neoliberal rationalities of productivity in the academy. We explore, here, the role that collective refusal can play in this navigation. We describe ways that we can come together, even if our positionalities are different and our benefits uneven, to refuse the most oppressive aspects of higher education. We draw on various notions of refusal, largely rooted in Black and Indigenous scholarship, to identify both the harms of higher education and how “to be in but not of” (Harney and Moten 2013, 26) the university. This requires collective support of one another through acts of refusal in learning, knowledge production, and employment that allow us to have a shared stake in the reform of academic life.

EN :

Chongqing, the largest urban agglomeration in its namesake municipality, has experienced rapid urban expansion since the early 2000s, driven by economic growth and land monetisation, bolstered by China’s “Open Up the West” policy. This paper focuses on Beibei District, a peripheral space at the urban-rural interface, which embodies new symbolic and material shifts as part of this urban reconfiguration. Specifically, it examines the use of propaganda posters associated with the China Dream campaign during the redevelopment of selected land plots in Beibei, analysing their content and spatial distribution through a relational socio-semiotic lens. By unpacking the (trans)national and local narratives embedded in these posters, the study reveals how ecological modern neighbourhoods and idealised citizens are co-constructed through public-private spatial encounters. The research critiques the territoriality of power and spatial inequalities, especially in China’s southwestern peripheries, highlighting the entanglement between state-driven urban identity-making and upscale real estate development as a local governmentality tool. It argues that informal learning, facilitated through visual storytelling in public spaces, politicises everyday environments by promoting representations of Chinese virtues. This work contributes to the study of peri-urban micro-spatialities in the Global East, employing a decolonial approach that centres local languages and ontologies for critical reflection on urban knowledge production.