ABSTRACT
The ‘cultural turn’ of the last decades has shifted the attention of the social sciences toward the micrological and contingent fabrics through which social relations are established. As a result, problems of cultural meaning and politics tend increasingly to be thought together. Across the disciplines new conceptual tools for deconstructing the power dynamics embedded in texts, semiotics, and wider constructions of meaning have been generated. But, as a partial critique of the abstract, disembodied bent of this turn, theorists of transforming cultures have more recently turned to the body as locus of this meaning-making process (McCormack 2007, Anderson 2006, Connolly 2005, Thrift 2004, Dewsbury 2003, Butler 1997, McDowell 1993); a site at which alternative possibilities for ‘worlding’ the social are being constantly generated (Gibson-Graham 2008, Massumi 2002). In human geography, the development of ‘aesthetics’ as a register of analysis builds upon this repertoire, foregrounding the specific politics at stake between fields of affected feeling, and specific regimes or economies of visibility (Hawkins 2010, Dixon 2009, Pinder 2009, Benediktsson 2007, Bonnett 1992). As Jacques Rancière’s philosophical work on politics and aesthetics sees a rapid uptake into this active field, a new agenda for critique is emerging. Creating concepts to attend to the political potentialities of contagious aspects of feeling (Hynes and Sharpe 2009, Gibbs 2001), to engage technologies which instrumentalize or exploit such potentialities (Beyes 2010, Beltràn 2009, Dixon 2009), and to politicize the new forms of exclusion that accompany these developments (Swyngedouw 2011, May 2010, Yusoff 2009, Dikeç 2007, Nyers 2003), such scholars emphasize aesthetics as a crucial terrain of geographical futures. This chapter contributes to this emergent scholarship, laying out key dimensions of this new turn through conceptual and empirical attention to activist pedagogies employed by the activist network No Borders.
