Place-and-world making as social movement practice in Jordan and Palestine

Rarely is geography itself considered a constitutive stake of political struggle. How do social movements inscribe their claims into the world? How do they inscribe the world into their claims? And how do they reassemble the elements of geography to create a world within which their claims might be made intelligible and effective?

Drawing on evidence from Jordan and Palestine, this paper situates social movements within place-and-world making (and deeply intertwined) projects of colonialism and commodification, suggesting how they mobilize elements of the material world to establish alternative relations of power, economy and significance, and counter-geographies of possibility. My concern is not so much with the constitution of relations within space, but with the constitutive relationality of space itself—the ways in which place and world are co-produced in ways that make some political claims intelligible and effective at the expense of others.