proliferation of small hydropower highlights the conceptual and political limitations of focusing on a single “project” or the size of the dam itself. In this review, we emphasize how global hydropower assemblages help us understand the significance of socio
What Makes a Megaproject?
A Review of Global Hydropower Assemblages
Grant M. Gutierrez, Sarah Kelly, Joshua J. Cousins, and Christopher Sneddon
Diana Espírito Santo
exactly by its relationship to its ‘exteriors’, and that lenience (or lenience-as-plasticity) is built into this process as a principle of assemblage and adaptation—it is, in the end, what makes the self-system continually move itself. A large part of the
Lorenzo Cañás Bottos
Based on fieldwork undertaken in 2004–2005, I analyze how the Irish border has been constructed, represented, challenged, and imagined by both the state and borderlanders as a means to discuss processes of constructing sovereignty. I focus on the concept of “assemblage” to integrate and highlight the tensions and contradictions between different levels of analysis: the juridical, the academic representation of the border, and the memories and practices of borderlanders. I argue that sovereignty, rather than a claim to be taken at face value by states, is the emergent property of the combination of a variety of forces, forms, and practices involved in the making of borders, and that its very enactment also produces anti-sovereign effects.
Response
The Mobile Itineraries of Knowledge-scapes
Mimi Sheller
This special section elucidates intersections between the historiography of mobilities and the interdisciplinary field of mobilities research. The articles highlight relationships between mobilities and stabilization, circulation and place-making, deterritorialization and reterritorialization. This response essay seeks to dispel three myths about mobility studies: (1) that it is purely about the contemporary world, rather than the historical dimensions of mobile processes; (2) that it focuses solely on material phenomenon of physical transport (i.e., of things and people) and ignores the movement of ideas, knowledge, and culture; and (3) that it is purely about “flows” and “circulation” and has little to teach us about friction, resistances, blockages, or uneven power relations. The most important intersections of the histories of mobilities and the field of mobility studies can be found in the ways in which each emphasizes power differentials, blockages, friction, and the relation between mobilities and immobilities.
Gold Teeth, Indian Dresses, Chinese Lycra and ‘Russian’ Hair
Embodied Diplomacy and the Assemblages of Dress in Tajikistan
Diana Ibañez-Tirado
Tajikistan. In this article I examine how these types of instance concerning the assemblages of dress and bodies are important sites of diplomacy, or the processes to which I refer as ‘embodied diplomacy’. First, ‘embodied diplomacy’ refers to the
Target Practice
The Algorithmics and Biopolitics of Race in Emerging Smart Border Practices and Technologies
Tamara Vukov
technopolitical mechanism that makes particular promises of a more rational, scientific, and “postracial” mode of border control. I go on to consider key theoretical approaches that help to inform my inquiry into race as a biopolitical assemblage as it is produced
Noncitizens’ Rights
Moving beyond Migrants’ Rights
Sin Yee Koh
common status of being noncitizens. Their noncitizen status, in turn, circumscribes the assemblage of rights they may have in their host countries. 1 Moreover, both underprivileged and privileged migrants are equally subjected to systems of discretionary
Decoupling Seascapes
An Anthropology of Marine Stock Enhancement Science in Japan
Shingo Hamada
example from my research on the practice and discourse of the herring stock enhancement program in Japan. The examination of stock enhancement as a more-than-human assemblage in the context of marine science and seascaping crosses methodological and
Is the Kingdom of Bicycles Rising Again?
Cycling, Gender, and Class in Postsocialist China
Hilda Rømer Christensen
“assemblage(s)” seems to provide a promising analytical lens for exploring the formation of the current postsocialist modernity and the new global cultures of mobility. 15 The idea of a global assemblage is convenient for examining the intertwining of social
The Inertia of Collections
Changes against the Grain in the Rosenlew Museum of Pori, Finland
Francisco Martínez
addresses the specificity of industrial heritage and corporate collections by inviting readers to pay attention not only to what industrial artifacts mean, but also to what they do once they are a part of a museum assemblage—affecting the long-term strategic