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In this provocative exploration, Michele Lancione and AbdouMaliq Simone examine housing not as shelter or asset but as an operation shaping desires, bodies, and possibilities of urban life. Drawing on experiences from Jakarta to Naples, Bucharest to Dakar, Lancione and Simone reveal how the “thing of the house” works as a magnetic field, promising belonging while simultaneously producing forms of captivity and violence. Through three key operations—spacing, seeing, and surfacing—they unpack how housing interrupts and rearranges life under racial capitalism, creating subjects who must constantly negotiate between habitation and its annihilation. Beyond Inhabitation challenges conventional housing studies by centering the house itself as an active force that mediates between the intimate and structural, the ordinary and catastrophic. By attending to how people at the thresholds of dispossession hold onto housing’s promise despite its failures, the authors illuminate the edges where new forms of collective life might emerge—beyond the current fold of habitation, toward more liberatory futures.

How the cinematic gaze reveals the hidden operations of border zones


Examining a variety of documentary films made along the borders of Europe since the turn of the twenty-first century, Border Mediascapes takes a cinematic eye to the technologies employed in governing spatial movement. Working at the intersections of social sciences, political theory, contemporary media, and cinema aesthetics, this book expands our understanding of the border as not just a static political boundary inscribed on a map but a complex, dynamic network of human and nonhuman agents. 

 

Francesco Zucconi asserts that contemporary borders are environments defined by media: a perpetually shifting set of interactions between physical bodies and sensors, surveillance cameras, satellites, mapping programs, digital signage, and cellular devices. Analyzing documentaries filmed by or in collaboration with migrants, Border Mediascapes demonstrates how cinema can be used to reveal the otherwise unseen apparatuses that facilitate systematized practices of recognition, expulsion, and erasure.

 

As he details the ways specific border technologies measure and identify individuals as part of the larger project of territorial control, Zucconi illustrates the effectiveness of cinema for capturing the entanglement of geopolitics and biopolitics. Viewing the cinematic perspective as simultaneously analytical, critical, and complicit with the new technological frontier, Zucconi shows how the medium can deepen our understanding of borders as sites of power, resistance, and resilience.

 

 

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