Reterritorialization

Abstract: One consequence of the hype around globalization and education and debates on global political actors such as the World Bank, IMF and WTO—is that there has not been sufficient attention paid by education theorists to the development of a rigorous set of analytic categories that might enable us to make sense of the profound changes which now characterize education in the new millennium. 1 This is not a problema confined to education. Writing in the New Left Review, Fredric Jameson observes that debates on globalization have tended to be shaped by “…ideological appropriations— discussions not of the process itself, but of its effects, good or bad: judgements, in other words, totalizing in nature; while functional descriptions tend to isolate particular elements without relating them to each other.” In this paper we start from the position that little or nothing can be explained in terms of the causal powers of globalization; rather we shall be suggesting that globalization is the outcome of processes that involve real actors—economic and political—with real interests. Following Martin Shaw, we also take the view that globalization does not undermine the state but includes the transformation of state forms; “…it is both predicated on and produces such transformations.”3 Examining how these processes of transformation work, however, requires systematic investigation into the organization and strategies of particular actors whose horizons or effects might be described as global.

Abstract: This chapter deals with critical feminist judgment in order to "enter into" the project articulated in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus. It explores how this text might possibly be used by and for feminist theoretical projects, which involves some commitment to their overarching framework, basic presuppositions, and central concepts. Deleuze and Guattari's work raises a number of crucial questions about the political investments of specific positions within feminism—liberal, Marxist, and socialist forms—which can be seen to participate in a molarization, a process of reterritorialization, a sedimentation of women's possibilities of becoming. The chapter focuses on a relatively small cluster of concepts that may overlap with feminist interests: the notions of rhizome, assemblage, machine, desire, multiplicity, becoming, and the Body without Organs (BwO). Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the BwO constitutes their attempt both to denaturalize the human body and to place it in direct relations with the flows or particles of other bodies or entities.

Abstract: This paper explores the emergence of urban spaces of partnership between people of faith and those of no religious faith who come together to offer care, welfare and justice to socially excluded people. The activities of such groups are understood in terms of adjustments to the secularization thesis pointing to the possibilities of a series of emerging geographies relating to postsecular rapprochement and different forms of reterritorialization in the city. In particular, the accounts of postsecularism by Klaus Eder and Jurgen Habermas are used to explain both how the hushed-up voice of religion is being released back into the public sphere in some settings, and how the assimilation and mutually reflexive transformation of secular and theological ideas may represent crossover narratives around which postsecular partnerships can converge around particular ethical precepts and practical needs. Taking the particular example of Christian religion in western Europe, the paper traces both how a critique of secu...

Abstract: The concern with space and, more fundamentally, the formulation of a larger, guiding spatial theory, was central to achieving Nazi objectives during the Third Reich. We disclose critical elements of that theory, focusing on two contributions: the first by the jurist and international legal and political theorist Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) and the second by the geographer Walter Christaller (1893–1969). Applying the perverted biopolitical logic of National Socialism required the military accomplishment and bureaucratic management of two interrelated spatial processes: deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Deterritorialization involved moving non-Germanized Germans (mainly Jews and Slavs) off conquered Eastern lands to create an “empty space” that was then “reterritorialized” by the settlement of “legitimate” Germans (although often not German citizens). Although many German academics were involved in designing and implementing these spatial strategies, we single out two. Carl Schmitt provided a poli...