Through an analysis of contestation over neighborhood schooling in New Orleans, this dissertation examines how participation in collective action is impacted by the socio-spatial construction and negotiation of difference. New Orleans has been a testing ground for market-based school reforms that disproportionately affect black families and black geographies: the mass-firing of public school employees, the closure of nearly all of the city’s neighborhood schools, and the institution of autonomous charter schools that are largely unaccountable to the communities they serve. These policies, the way they were instituted, and the narratives used to legitimize them, have provoked intense contestation even as they inhibit collective action. Existing geographic scholarship illuminates how education policy dovetails with other forms of urban neoliberalization to displace poor black and brown residents. In addition, geographers have demonstrated how similar policies in other sectors have short-circuited political contestation. But geographers have not paid sufficient attention to the democratic implications of the racialized socio-spatial violence associated with contemporary school reform, nor to how those affected conceptualize and resist barriers to politics in the context of place-based schooling struggles. As a result, practical and ethical dimensions of an increasingly prevalent form of political struggle remain unexamined, and theorizations of democracy are insulated from potentially important empirical challenges.

I contribute to existing geographic work on democracy, pluralism, and the politics of race/place by refocusing attention on the understandings of participants in collective action, and the active (if always constrained) role that people play in shaping socio-spatial orders. Drawing on qualitative research conducted in New Orleans from 2010 until 2015, I examine how barriers to neighborhood-school politics are erected in New Orleans, how struggles to reopen and/or gain more control over neighborhood schools challenge these barriers, and how participants negotiate ethical conflicts within their own political communities. I argue that dominant school reform narratives deploy both neoliberal and plantation logics that specifically discredit black politics by depicting black places as bereft of value and black people as incapable of self-determination. Yet my research also demonstrates the incompleteness of these political barriers. I find that participants in black-led schooling struggles trouble dominant understandings of violence and failure by circulating counter-narratives that link school reforms to the evisceration of black geographies, the death of black children, and the repudiation of black political subjectivity. Using a Deweyan lens to analyze values conflicts within a political community, I illuminate the ethical complexities associated with participating in place-based politics and place-based practices that allowed participants to “learn to learn” from their engagements across difference.

This thesis aims to locate the kampung (urban village) within the broader mobilization of ‘slums’ as urban blight in Global South cities. Slums have been widely known as settlements with poor living conditions: comprising a lack of basic services, such as water, sanitation, drainage, waste collection, street lighting, and paved footpaths; as well as a lack of community space, schools, and clinics within easy reach. However, in Indonesian cities including Jakarta, the label of ‘the slum’ has been attached to the unique space of the ‘kampung’, which are densely populated areas of poor and working-class communities in the center and peripheries of the city. For decades, the kampung has been understood in a derogative way. Beginning in the Dutch era, kampungs have been identified as disorganized and relatively problematic space: a nest of disease, filth, and crime. The contested understanding of the kampung continued but the similar and misguided label of ‘the slum’ was added. I argue that the double stigma has strengthened the aspiration to “fix” the kampung through city beautification projects, that leads to massive forced evictions. These projects have reduced the number of kampungs and displaced hundreds of thousands of residents in the city – threatening the notion of the kampung as distinct settlement form and space of life in Indonesian cities.

This thesis examines the securitization of a light rail transit line in Los Angeles, California called the Blue Line, conceptualizing securitization as the disproportionate use of law, police, and socio-technical systems of security to regulate individuals as they move throughout the transit network. To understand this process, I develop a theoretical framework that integrates two largely divergent literatures, mobilities theory and urban political economy. I argue that together these literatures provide a productive framework for examining different modalities of regulating human mobility in the capitalist city, what a term a mode of mobility regulation. Methodologically, I extend the current limitations of mobilities research through a Gramscian-inspired conjunctural approach to the study of mobility and immobility. A conjunctural approach provides an historical analytic that analyzes the mechanisms and relations by which urban mobility regimes attempt to secure dominance through complex articulations of ideology, economy, and race. Through this approach, I examine the socio-spatial forces that shaped the mode of mobility regulation within Los Angeles rail transit as one of securitization. Drawing on archival research into these ideological, economic, and racial relations of force, I show how everyday transit mobilities intersect with macro-scale relations and processes. Ultimately, I argue that different modalities of regulating human mobility in the capitalist city both draw on and reproduce various axes of social difference, and the ways in which mobilities are unevenly organized around such difference.

Autonomous Tokyo is an assemblage of locally embedded activists and spaces that is credited with starting the anti-nuclear movement in Japan after the triple disaster of 3.11. Since then, their work has focused on building transnational connections and solidarity. Given that we inhabit a dominant geopolitical and ecological landscape that promotes individualist and ethnic nationalist understandings of security and scarcity, there is an urgency to understanding how social movements cultivate political will, particularly across national boundaries. The literature on social movements is dominated by largely instrumentalist, state-centric perspectives. These center a limiting view of politics that make some movements, like the post-3.11 anti-nuclear movement, appear to arise out of nowhere. It also devalues the significance of the majority of social movements because according to a metric of state policy transformation, they could be classified as failures. This dissertation, based on an ethnographic study of a radical movement geography based mainly in Japan, contributes to this literature in three ways. In the first chapter, I highlight the importance of alternative place-based politics that seek to primarily subvert, rather than confront, the state, and show how grappling with the contradictions of autonomous/anarchist praxis is a political process that enlivens radical possibilities. The second chapter unpacks the gendered dynamics of their radical politics by interrogating the role of emotion and affect in digital spaces. The third chapter analyzes how the dominant global racial regime of whiteness is intertwined with Japanese supremacy to consider how an activist vision of “Asian” political subjectivity suggests some possibilities of transnational solidarity and the impossibilities of "color-blind" anti-capitalism.

While urban adaptation projects are designed to protect urban residents, their differentiated impacts on communities warrant critical scholarly attention. This dissertation contributes to deepening our understanding of why particular forms of adaptation prevail over others in different contexts and the implications for social and environmental justice by examining the planning, promotion and contestation of Jakarta’s planned Great Garuda Sea Wall (GGSW) project. Drawing on a critical discourse analysis of the project master plan and supporting engineering and financial reports and documents, press releases, policy documents and legislation, and news articles from local and national sources, as well as 60 in-depth interviews with consultants, bureaucrats and activists conducted during seven months of cumulative fieldwork in Jakarta and the Netherlands, I examine how different environmental imaginaries, situates forms of expertise, and discourses are mobilized by consultants, bureaucrats, and activists in debates concerning flood mitigation. Chapter 2 examines how the GGSW project retains its allure as the optimal solution for Jakarta, despite failing to address what is understood to be a primary cause of flooding: land subsidence. Drawing on the theoretical insights of science and technology studies, urban political ecology, and postcolonial urban theory, I contribute to understandings of the political and economic forces that drive large infrastructure projects. While Chapter Two illustrates the broader structural processes driving the project forward, Chapter Three documents the processes of articulation between Dutch consultants and Indonesian bureaucrats. I interrogate both the disruptive and productive elements of friction, as Dutch consultants seek to realize the GGSW project in Jakarta. Examining the GGSW project as a liminal project that constitutes neither a success nor a failure, I advance theoretical understandings of policy immobility and failure. Chapter 4 examines the contentious politics of flood mitigation in Jakarta more broadly through an analysis of the environmentalism of Forum Kampung Kota, a network of activists, architects and academics. By tracing its changing tactics, from one centered on appeals to social and environmental justice to what I call ‘insurgent expertise’, this chapter enriches understandings of localized and differently positioned forms of environmental politics.

Amidst a rapid re-organization of the global economy around the extraction of big data by platform firms like Amazon, Uber, or Alibaba (“platform capitalism”), this dissertation explores shifting regimes of market formation, urban governance, and labor organizing in Jakarta, Indonesia. Drawing on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork, I examine the digitization of the motorbike taxi (ojek) market by the super-app platforms Grab and Gojek. Within just seven years, these firms have become two of the largest companies in Indonesia, an integral part of the country’s urban transportation system, and a major source of employment for millions. Combining ethnographic research with ojek drivers, qualitative interviews with government officials, transportation experts, and platform employees, and archival document analysis, I explore how these companies have worked to impose platform technologies onto the informal ojek industry by enclosing its labor pool, customers, and socio-economic infrastructures. In doing so, I contribute to theorizations of how digital platforms are transforming key processes and actors of capital accumulation: marketization and the firm; regulation and the state; labor and workers. Overwhelmingly, existing platform studies scholarship on these topics remains narrowly focused on case studies in the United States and Europe, problematically assuming that concepts developed in the Euro-American core will translate to much of the formerly colonized world. Drawing on postcolonial urban theory, I argue that the particularities of Jakarta’s urban form, informal livelihood practices, and cultural norms of mutual aid shape processes of platform capitalism in ways that cannot fully be explained by the existing Euro-American literature. Re-examining extant theories from the margins of the global platform economy—what I call provincializing platform capitalism—the dissertation’s empirical chapters analyze the uneven outcomes of platformization for Jakarta’s urban majority. I find that gig workers have autoconstructed their own online and offline mutual aid communities (komunitas) to improve the conditions of their work, even as their labor, subjectivities, and socio-spatial relations become increasingly enrolled into global financial circuits and state developmental interests.