Working with, against and beyond the state: A response to Katie Meehan's ‘Water Shutoffs, Social Reproduction, and the Carceral State’

Abstract

This response builds on Katie Meehan's 2023 Political Geography RGS plenary address on “Water Shutoffs, Social Reproduction, and the Carceral State”. Thinking with the case of Mexico City, I consider what other racial divisions of nature might be created through the exclusionary and violent logics of state infrastructural power. I focus particularly on the labour that sustains these forms of violence, and ask how we can depart from labour to think about political ecologies otherwise.