Publications

Critical approaches to logistics, in dialogue with geography and related disciplines, have exposed the turbulence behind apparently seamless transnational circulations of stuff. As everyday urban life becomes increasingly structured through logistical practices and expectations which imbricate consumption and distribution, now is an appropriate moment to take stock of these dialogues. Reviewing them, the article identifies three spatial assumptions – peripheral geographies, seamless consumption, forward motion – proposing that they express an additive, forward-leaning representation of logistics. In response, it draws upon debates on ‘negativity’ to suggest geographers pay greater attention to logistics’ negative spaces (voids), affects (dis-appointments) and mobilities (reversals).

This paper traces the growing influence of logistics as power in the governance of the London Underground, a system of public transportation in the midst of multiple processes of digitisation, connecting trains and passengers deep below ground to systems of real-time monitoring and communication. The article explains these processes by building upon theories of logistics as a form of power constituted through the amalgamation of ‘subtractive’ and ‘extractive’ aspects of circulatory governance. On the one hand logistics aims to ensure circulations by managing their frictions; on the other it attempts to extract added value from the circulations it ensures. The paper concludes by examining the ramifications of logistics as power for how urban infrastructures are used and experienced.

A book on the political and cultural history of chocolate production, circulation, and consumption.

Despite the proliferation of studies concerning 9/11, the academic field struggles to find a coherent framework within which to position arguments over terrorism and the measures to which it has given rise. The political, moral and ethical sensitivities of these topics – especially heightened in the United States– have become manifest as an uncomfortable, ambiguous relation between governance and the production of knowledge. The scholarship reviewed here reflects upon this relation at different times and from different perspectives, and as such takes on a new significance when explored comparatively.

Addressing the strange case of the Israeli Giro d’Italia – wherein the opening stages of the Italian cycling tour’s 2018 edition were hosted 2000 km away, by a country with little cycling heritage – the paper poses the question, not ‘Why Israel?’ but ‘Why cycling?’. In response, it draws on theory at the intersection of mobilities, aesthetics, and ideology, together with an empirical analysis of the Israeli Giro’s TV coverage, to claim that the cycling tour is characterised by a uniquely ‘kin-aesthetic’ capacity. This capacity performs and orders territorial identities as coherent, self-evident wholes, thus enacting an ideological ‘illusion of closure’.

A short essay on the vertical, commercial and political aesthetics of the cycling tour.

The media’s conflation of military and civilian unmanned aerial vehicles is deeply problematic. Such blurred boundaries pave the way for a wholesale militarisation of the civilian domain.