Sarah Elwood

Critical digital geographies scholarship has a well-developed repertoire for theorizing adverse relations between technology, media, society, and space, setting up an enduring ambivalence in the analysis of minor, small-scale, improvisational efforts to rewrite these relations. At this impasse, I argue for an intentional turn to analytic frames rooted in queer of color critique, such as methodologies of hope. This approach emerges from Jose Esteban Muñoz’s writings on queer futurities, which he crafted as an epistemological-political frame for apprehending hope, justice, and life-affirming futures from positions of deep material and ideological exclusion. Muñoz’s approach offers vital off-ramps from the theoretical cycles of negation found in much critical digital geography thought. My article demonstrates how orienting to minoritarian digital activisms through a queer methodology of hope illuminates dynamic cycles of critique and creation that transgress accepted limits to urban inhabitations and demonstrate normatively unthinkable, yet already existing, possibilities for being and being in relation in the city. I demonstrate this approach through a close reading of the digital mediations and mediatizations advanced in the social media tactics of Stop the Sweeps Seattle, a local collective fighting the systematic eviction of tent encampments of unsheltered people by municipal authorities. A queer relational analysis of these emplaced politics illuminates the digital, material, and ideological pathways they forge toward staying put and living well in the city against seemingly impossible odds.

We theorize the epistemological orientations and methodological possibilities of cycling as a sociotechnical, kinesthetic, and emplaced practice relevant across human geography. Foregrounding the liminalities, contingencies, and improvisational potentials of cycling, we highlight how its unique pacing and capacity to traverse and transcend infrastructural and social constraints foster embodied engagements. Our cycling experiences illustrate the activity’s generativeness across research lifecycles. We conceptualize cycling as an exemplar of kinesthetic methodologies, which integrate body, machine, and motion in ways that deepen embodied knowing, inspire serendipitous interactions, prompt reflection on positionality, and expand possibilities for understanding the world in and across place.

For critical scholars, abiding concerns about geomedia futures have included utopian–dystopian formulations of geomedia in popular culture and governance, the deep harms and inequalities that inevitably flow from technocapitalist geomedia regimes, and the urgent need for a plurality of counter-normative ways of theorizing and engaging geomedia. Toward these concerns, I argue here that Indigenous futurism and Afrofuturism hold vital conceptual and analytic insights for thinking and realizing geomedia futures that assemble time, space, and digitality in just and life-sustaining ways. Here, I briefly explore work by geographers, historians, and digital studies scholars that has engaged Indigenous and Black feminist speculative traditions to critique the structural, embodied, and emplaced violence of racial capitalist and settler colonial histories, chronopolitics, and futures. The minoritarian futures expressed and circulated through speculative fiction, visual arts, everyday digital practices, and technocultures by structurally-oppressed groups for whom the future has never been taken for granted hold vital conceptual and analytical insights for thinking geomedia futures beyond the limits of its technocapitalist roots and present structures.

Networks are a classic topic. The Seven Bridges of Königsberg problem written by Euler (1736) marks the beginning of network research. A network consists of nodes and links, and the simple form lea...

In this article we analyze the relational construction of the middle class from a comparative study between Seattle and Buenos Aires during the period of relative recovery of the socioeconomic crisis. With the theory of relational poverty as a conceptual axis, we understand that class subjectivities are reproduced or challenged through interactions that cross or confront the boundaries between social groups. Our analysis reveals that poverty is a key point for the formation of middle-class groups in both countries and that poverty can produce alternative readings of the formation of the middle class in the United States and Argentina. En el presente artículo analizamos la construcción relacional de la clase media en relación con la pobreza a partir de un trabajo comparativo entre Seattle y Buenos Aires durante el período de recuperación relativa de la crisis socioeconómica de la primera década del milenio. Con la teoría de la pobreza relacional como eje conceptual, entendemos que se reproducen o se desafían subjetividades de clase mediante interacciones que atraviesan o confrontan los límites entre grupos sociales. Y, también, que las relaciones con la pobreza pueden producir lecturas alternativas de la formación de la clase media en Estados Unidos y Argentina.

Digitality is deeply implicated in sociospatial processes of exclusion, adverse incorporation, impoverishment and enrichment. Theorizing digital practices of life and thriving is politically and epistemologically urgent, and more robustly intersectional theory in digital geographies scholarship offers crucial pathways. I argue for theorizing digital geographies at the intersection of feminist relationality and Black, queer and feminist code studies. I demonstrate these theoretical horizons through an analysis of ‘glitch politics’ that refuse normative digital-social-spatial relations of technocapitalist urban life, and catalyze sociospatial relations of thriving otherwise, drawing examples from digital practices of street newspapers sold by unsheltered people in cities worldwide.

This collection of essays extends cross‐disciplinary conversations between co‐authors that began as part of a podcast series by the Relational Poverty Network, “New Poverty Politics for Changing Times”. The authors engage impoverishment as a relation, as an outcome of intersecting political projects of racialised oppression, political‐economic injustice and socio‐legal control. Across various sites, the collection’s essays trace poverty politics, providing conjunctural and multi‐scalar analyses that illuminate the operations of power in producing impoverishment. They direct our attention beyond topics typically associated with poverty studies, showing how processes such as bordering, migrant illegality, racial capitalism and caring community politics intersect in poverty politics today. Our introductory essay argues for a relational poverty analysis that addresses the entanglements of cultural politics, those that produce classificatory schemes, together with political‐economic processes that produce various forms of poverty politics in the current conjuncture. We chart thinkable and unthinkable poverty politics across the collection’s essays in order to analyse current hegemonic formations of poverty governance as well as alternative imaginations and actions that are resisting and reworking relations of impoverishment. Ultimately, this collection expands vocabularies and analytical repertoires for understanding the ongoing ways in which impoverishment is produced and resisted, positing relationality as key to re‐politicising poverty towards a more just future.