About
Limn is an experiment in outlining.
It combines the collaborative focus of a special issue of a journal with the spontaneity and interactivity of new media. Limn focuses on reconstruction and recomposition of concepts in contemporary culture. Limn is modeled on the convivial and critical features of a studio in art, architecture or design. Each episode differs from the last-different curators bring different problems and approaches to the basic concepts and tools developed in and through the process.
Issue 10, 2018
Chokepoints
Editors: ASHLEY CARSE, JASON CONS, and TOWNSEND MIDDLETON
April 2018: Migrants gather in “jungles” at the mouth of the Chunnel, awaiting an opportunity to cross from mainland Europe into the UK undetected. Somali pirates attack ships queuing up at the Bab-El-Mandeb strait, a critical passage between the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean Sea. A flash crash in the stock market triggers a digital “circuit breaker” that instantly shuts off digital trade until cooler heads prevail. Transcontinental internet connectivity is funneled through bundles of undersea cables, making global information flow susceptible to disruption by something as minor as a misplaced ship anchor. These tunnels, corridors, and cables illustrate how some conduits can become chokepoints, sites where malfunction, blockage, or strategic pressure constricts—or “chokes”—the flows and connections upon which contemporary life depends. Limn 10 brings together anthropologists, geographers, photographers, media scholars, sociologists, ecologists, and historians to explore chokepoints. We ask: When and why do these sites of constriction and connection emerge? How and for whom do they work? And what do chokepoints reveal about the the past, present, and future?
Articles
Preface: Chokepoints
The editors of Limn 10 challenge you to think about “chokepoints” as simultaneously geographical and deeply social phenomena.
Strangling the Internet
Every network has its chokepoints. Nicole Starosielski brings us under the ocean to explore the hidden ones along the information superhighway.
The Art of In/Detectability
Traffic impedes. But does it also enable? Townsend Middleton traces the cat-and-mouse interplays of trafficking and regulation in one of South Asia’s most notorious chokepoints: India’s Chicken Neck.
How pipelines constrict oil flows
Christopher Jones explores how oilmen have used conduits as weapons to crush competitors, maintain industry dominance, and rake in huge profits.
The Invisible ‘Jungle’ of Calais
In 2016, French authorities bulldozed the migrant camp known as ‘the Jungle’ at the mouth of the Chunnel. In 2017, migrants returned. Photographer Eric Leleu and anthropologist Vincent Joos combine images and words to humanize this chokepoint and counter its infrastructures of invisibility.
Chokepoint Sovereignty
Jatin Dua reveals why Djibouti’s history, geography, and precarious present make it a site where national sovereignty and chokepoint dynamics are intimately tied.
Shipping corridors through the Inuit homeland
Claudio Aporta, Stephanie C. Kane, and Aldo Chircop explore the conceptual and lived tensions around ice in Arctic straits. They show how one group’s obstacle can be another group’s means of connection.
Disservice Lines
In any delivery system, the final leg is often the hardest. Michael Degani takes to the streets of Dar es Salaam to explore the “last-mile problem” of Tanzania’s energy grid.
“World-World” Logistics in Tangier, Morocco
Janell Rothenberg explores a transshipment port complex along the Strait of Gibraltar. While transshipped cargo is never supposed to enter Morocco beyond the port, its movement ultimately depends on local mediation.
Remittance Channels & Regulatory Chokepoints
Since 2008, new financial regulations have reformatted the channels of global remittances. Ivan Small examines how the Vietnamese diaspora is navigating this landscape of regulatory chokepoints.
The Funnel Effect
In the docks of Sicily, surveillance and humanitarianism mingle with traces of lives and deaths beyond the point of entry. Cristiana Giordano explores what happens when migrants rescued at sea arrive at Europe’s shores.
Ecological Chokepoints
What does keeping the lower Mississippi River open for shipping have to do with coastal land loss, regional ecological change, and a pile of rocks? Joshua Lewis explores the relationship between transportation and ecological chokepoints in Louisiana.
Viscosity: A Minor Theory of Oil Capital Flow
Gabriela Valdivia traces the sticky interplays of infrastructure, toxic waste, and labor that shape life and value at Ecuador’s Esmeraldas oil refinery.
Bottlenecks: An Urban Physics
From within the interminable traffic jams of Dakar, Senegal, Caroline Melly examines how bottlenecks—or embouteillages—have become a fixture of modern life and a window into local ideas about global im/mobility and future possibility.
Cool Trading
Financial algorithms have smoothed the vagaries of overheated markets. Christian Borch shows how algorithmic trading produces its own set of new chokepoints.
Blockade: The Power of Interruption
Carwil Bjork-James explores the politics of blockades in Bolivia, a country where terrain, a scarcity of connecting roads, and a tradition of mass protest make it a land of chokepoints.
Dredge Dump Dike
The Dredge Research Collaborative show how sediment management undergirds the social and economic life of the Great Lakes region. Dredging embodies a central fact of the Anthropocene: there is no away.
Golden Futures
Orit Halpern visits the blasted grounds of a Canadian gold-mine to understand how mines work as convergence points of speculation, engineering, information, and futures and derivatives trading.
The Times of Chokepoints
Chokepoints are problems not only of space, but also of time. Jason Cons explores this temporality in Bangladesh’s Sundarbans, a mangrove forest that has become a laboratory for fashioning the future in a warming world.