Overflowing the myth of help: gendered affects, collective action, and governance in Chilean small-scale fisheries

Affirming Dispossession: Governmentality and the Power of Positive Narratives in Indonesia’s New Rice Field Project

In 2024, President Prabowo Subianto reaffirmed Indonesia’s commitment to achieving national food self-sufficiency by continuing large-scale agricultural initiatives, including the establishment of 1 million hectares of new rice fields in Merauke, South Papua. While previous studies have highlighted how food estate programmes are legitimised through narratives of crisis and indigenous incapacity,comparatively little attention has been given to the role of affirmative or positive narratives in facilitating land conversion. This study examines how the new rice field project is implemented and legitimised through the combined operation of regulatory frameworks, security involvement, market incentives, and discursive strategies. Employing a qualitative case study design, data were collected through in-depth interviews with key government and community stakeholders in June 2025, supplemented by documentary analysis of policy reports and media coverage. Drawing on the concepts of power and exclusion, and of governmentality, the study argues that land dispossession in Merauke is facilitated not only through coercive or institutional mechanisms, but also through affirmative narratives that portray indigenous communities as productive participants in national development. These narratives function as techniques of governance that normalise exclusionary land-access arrangements while encouraging voluntary compliance with state-led agrarian transformation.

Collective mandates and gender dimension

This article examines the phenomenon of collective mandates in Brazil as an institutional innovation in the field of political representation to understand how this emerging model reconfigures traditional practices of representation. Widely discussed in the literature as a partial response to persistent patterns of political exclusion, collective mandates are here analyzed through the lens of women's underrepresentation. The aim is to reflect on the institutional innovations proposed by this model and assess their potential to expand access to legislative power. Methodologically, the research adopts a qualitative approach, based on semi-structured interviews with representatives engaged in collective mandates across different regions of Brazil. The main findings suggest that, although still limited in scope, collective mandates present significant potential as a tool for facilitating the access of women – particularly Black and transgender women – to elective office. By challenging traditional norms of political representation and creating new forms of linkage between representatives and represented, these experiences point to promising, albeit incomplete, pathways toward more inclusive legislative institutions.

Learning with overflows Feminist engagements with water in agriculture in Maharashtra (India) and beyond

(Im)possibility of Redress: Mega‐Infrastructures and the Voided Politics of Contestation

Drawing on critical geography's recent engagement with negativity, this article intervenes in dominant relational approaches to infrastructure by examining the (im)possibility of redress under mega‐infrastructure development through a case study of the Lamu Port–South Sudan–Ethiopia Transport (LAPSSET) Corridor in coastal Kenya. Based on six months of ethnographic research conducted between 2019 and 2023 with displaced fishermen, civil society activists and state representatives, it traces how demands for redress are articulated, negotiated and continually deferred across legal, bureaucratic and everyday terrains of governance. Focusing on four interlinked configurations—law, representational legibility, compensation governance and everyday precarity—the article shows how redress, as a struggle over recognition, livelihood repair and futurity, is simultaneously pursued yet structurally foreclosed by the scalar, social and political‐institutional conditions reproduced by mega‐infrastructure. It argues that, under conditions of ongoing dispossession, relations generate recognition, claims and forms of accountability that are persistently enacted but rarely resolved, thereby revealing the limits of relational thinking that, even when attentive to disconnection and unevenness, presumes relations are analytically stable and politically generative. The article names this patterned failure a ‘void’: not an absence of politics or relation, but a structural and lived condition in which efforts towards repair persist precisely through their own foreclosure.

“It’s all about the money!”: Challenges and tensions in the institutionalization of a community-based collective

The Protetoras da Leste collective is a social mobilization network made up of more than 200 women from the eastern periphery of São Paulo. The group operates by transforming women’s networks of care and solidarity into a driving force for territorial change, providing support, facilitating access to rights, and offering assistance in times of crisis, such as the recurrent floods that affect the territory where they live. Created during the Covid-19 pandemic to address its impacts on vulnerable families, the collective gained strength and legitimacy through its community-based actions. Its success led a local civil society organization to support and foster new initiatives developed by the group. With financial and institutional backing, the collective expanded its scope of action and established its own headquarters. As the group transitions from an organic support network to a more formalized structure, it faces the challenge of professionalizing its management and accessing public funding opportunities without losing active grassroots participation, while dealing with technical bureaucracy and the emotional burden placed on its leadership. The case thus explores the tensions and challenges involved in the collective’s institutionalization process.

Gender Governance in Frontier Universities: Ethnographic Insights from Rajiv Gandhi University, Arunachal Pradesh

This article examines the emergence, institutionalisation and lived functioning of gender governance mechanisms at Rajiv Gandhi University (RGU), Arunachal Pradesh. It conceptualised RGU as a Frontier University shaped by processes of state formation, regional histories and local social hierarchies. Drawing on long-term participant observation, interviews and archival materials, it analyses the functioning of institutional mechanisms such as the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013, and the Internal Complaints Committee (ICC). The analysis highlights how institutional responses to gender-based complaints are shaped not only by legal mandates but also by social hierarchies, affective dynamics and organisational constraints. Through case studies, the article demonstrates how ambiguity in procedures, discretionary governance and insider-outsider distinctions influence both the articulation and resolution of complaints. It further reveals how gender norms are deeply embedded in the larger patriarchal structure and reproduced in everyday institutional practices. The findings reveal that gender governance in RGU operates through a layered and negotiated terrain, where centralised institutional mandates intersect with local sociocultural dynamics, producing uneven outcomes.