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This paper aims to bring clarity to the term topology as it has been deployed in human geography. We summarize the insights that geographers have garnered from thinking topologically about space and power. We find that many deployments of topology both overstretch topology’s conceptual merit and limit its insights for spatial thinking. We show how topology, with its structuralist and modernist baggage, requires some theoretical reworking to be put to work by poststructuralist geographers. Our purpose is not to consolidate a specific topological approach for geographers, but to call for an ongoing consideration of what topology offers poststructuralist spatial theories.

French thinkers such as Lacan and Derrida are often labelled as representatives of 'poststructuralism' in the Anglophone world. However in France, where their work originated, they use no such category; this group of theorists - 'the poststructuralists' - were never perceived as a coherent intellectual group or movement. Outlining the institutional contexts, affinities, and rivalries of, among others, Althusser, Barthes, Foucault, Irigaray, and Kristeva, Angermuller - drawing from Bourdieu's concepts of cultural capital and the academic field - insightfully explores post-structuralism as a phenomenon. By tracing the evolution of the French intellectual field after the war,Why There is No Poststructuralism in Franceplaces French Theory both in the specific material conditions of its production and the social and historical contexts of its reception, accounting for a particularly creative moment in French intellectual life which continues to inform the theoretical imaginary of our time.

In recent years, the dominant political-economic approach to scale has been subject to critique from poststructuralist perspectives. In this paper, I argue that the charge of ‘reification’ has been accepted too readily, masking areas of conceptual overlap between political-economic and poststructural approaches, particularly in terms of their shared concern with the construction of scale. On this basis, I propose to replace the established concept of ‘the politics of scale’ with ‘scalar politics’, arguing that it is often not scale per se that is the prime object of contention, but rather specific processes and institutionalized practices that are themselves differentially scaled.

Racializing affect draws on Black feminist theories to extend affect theory and related poststructuralist approaches within literacy studies. The authors examined literacies via a study of affect and youth of color in career and technical education (CTE) and the reconfiguration of CTE to enable radical change in the racializing experiences of/with technologies. An information technology classroom and its spatial arrangements, plus the larger CTE school, offered a lens into how material spatial movement (mobility and dislocation) affects bodily movements (rhythm, relationality, intensity, and energy) in a rhizomatic becoming process of reconstituted racializing affect with technology. Interested in the emergent rhythms and living intensities within affect theory, the authors also drew on the movie Black Panther to further theorize affect in relation to the discussion on becoming-technologist through the character of Shuri. This creative rendering provided a different methodological approach to reflect the authors’ own intensities as researchers and consumers of popular culture in the analysis. Together, the authors hope to shed light on CTE as an understudied educational context and to reimagine race, gender, and difference in relation to technology and literacy learning.

The authors considered the capacious feeling that emerges from saying no to literacy practices, and the affective potential of saying no as a literacy practice. The authors highlight the affective possibilities of saying no to normative understandings of literacy, thinking with a series of vignettes in which children, young people, and teachers refused literacy practices in different ways. The authors use the term capacious to signal possibilities that are as yet unthought: a sense of broadening and opening out through enacting no. The authors examined how attention to affect ruptures humanist logics that inform normative approaches to literacy. Through attention to nonconscious, noncognitive, and transindividual bodily forces and capacities, affect deprivileges the human as the sole agent in an interaction, thus disrupting measurements of who counts as a literate subject and what counts as a literacy event. No is an affective moment. It can signal a pushback, an absence, or a silence. As a theoretical and methodological way of thinking/feeling with literacy, affect proposes problems rather than solutions, countering solutionfocused research in which the resistance is to be overcome, co-opted, or solved. Affect operates as a crack or a chink, a tiny ripple, a barely perceivable gesture, that can persist and, in doing so, hold open the possibility for alternative futures.

The author introduces the concept of vitality and its relation to affect. Stern defined vitality as the feeling of flow and aliveness. The author drew on research from literacy, curriculum theory, and the work of Stern to argue for the value of the concept of vitality for thinking about how literacy comes to feel vital. The author argues that researchers and teachers need to attend to students’ embodied expressions of vitality. These forms of vitality communicate the energy of a given classroom event. The author highlights Stern’s conceptualization of affect attunement—the ability of one party to share the subjective state of the other party transmitted through polymodal matching of vitality forms—as giving rise to and carrying vitality. Central to Stern’s work is that most affect attunement occurs out of conscious awareness, as the body is affected through multiple registers, in its psychobiological rhythms, in multisensory dynamic flow, and in the dynamic shifts and patterns of the body in movement in and out of constantly emergent assemblages. The author argues that in literacy research and teaching, conscious, language-based learning has been overvalued. Contending that students’ embodied identities create differences in how their expressions of vitality are received in classrooms, the author concludes by arguing for vitality rights: the basic rights of all students to experience themselves as vital members of a classroom community.

Existing work on literacy and affect has posed important questions for how we think about meanings and how and where they get made. The authors contribute to such work by focusing on the relation between text and affect. This is a topic that has received insufficient attention in recent work but is of pressing concern for education as text interweaves in new ways with human activity, through social media, surveillance capitalism, and artificial intelligence—ways that can be unpredictable and poorly understood. Adopting a sociomaterial sensibility that foregrounds the relations between bodies (people and things), the authors provide conceptual tools for considering how texts affect and are affected by the heterogeneous entanglements from which they emerge. In situating their argument, the authors outline influential readings of Spinoza’s theories of affect, explore how these have been mobilized in literacy research, and identify how text has been accommodated within such research. Using texts from a political episode in the United Kingdom, the authors explore the idea of social-material-textual affects to articulate relations among humans, nonhumans, meaning making, and literacies. The authors conclude by identifying four ways in which text participates in what happens, raising questions about how different materializations of text (or indeed “not text”) are significant to the diversifying communicative practices that inflect social, cultural, economic, and political life.

In recent decades, ethnographic research in Brazil has been influenced by a model termed perspectivism that inverts the equation between nature (as a given) and culture (as variable). Focusing on the interaction between humans and animals, this model attempts to generalize about thought processes across indigenous Amazonia, resulting in the proposition that nature is the variable whereas culture remains the same. The model's generality has resulted in a remarkable similarity of ethnographic interpretations, giving the false impression that the Amazon is a homogeneous culture area. This critique of perspectivism highlights its theoretical and empirical flaws and points out that the recurrent use of certain laden expressions can have adverse consequences for indigenous peoples.

At the heart of this book is the argument that the fact that so many post-structuralist French intellectuals have a strong ‘colonial’ connection, usually with Algeria, cannot be a coincidence. The ‘biographical’ fact that so many French intellectuals were born in or otherwise connected with French Algeria has often been noted, but it has never been theorised. Ahluwalia makes a convincing case that post-structuralism in fact has colonial and postcolonial roots. This is an important argument, and one that ‘connects’ two theoretical currents that continue to be of great interest, post-structuralism and postcolonialism. The re-reading of what is now familiar material against the background of de-colonial struggles demonstrates the extent to which it is this new condition that prompted theory to question long-held assumptions inscribed in the European colonial enterprise. The wide-ranging discussion, ranging across authors as different as Foucault, Derrida, Fanon, Althusser, Cixous, Bourdieu and Lyotard, enables the reader to make connections that have remained unnoticed or been neglected. It also brings back into view a history of struggles, both political and theoretical, that has shaped the landscape of critique in the social sciences and humanities. This clear and lucid discussion of important and often difficult thinkers will be widely read and widely debated by students and academics alike. Pal Ahluwalia is Pro Vice-Chancellor of the University of South Australia. He was previously Professor of the Politics Department, University of Adelaide, Australia, then Professor with the University of California, San Diego USA and Professor at Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK. He is editor of the Routledge journals African Identities, 　 Social Identities and Sikh Formations. 1. Introduction 2. Algeria and Colonisation 3. Sartre, Camus and Fanon 4. Derrida 5. Cixous 6. Althusser, Bourdieu, Foucault and Lyotard 7. Conclusion

As urban self-organization grows into a key concept in spatial planning—explaining spontaneous spatial transformations—the understandings and applications of the concept divert. This article turns to the ontological dimension of urban self-organization and scrutinizes how a critical realist and a post-structuralist ontology inspire theoretical practices, analytical tendencies, empirical readings, and subsequent planning interventions in relation to urban self-organization. This is illustrated with an example of the self-organized regeneration of a deprived street in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. With this contribution, we aim to create ontological self-awareness among planning scholars in studying urban self-organization and invite them to reflect on how their positions complement, deviate, and potentially challenge or inspire those of others. We argue that by clarifying ontological diversity in urban self-organization, theoretical practices and complexity-informed planning interventions can be further deepened and enriched.