Reading the geometries of control: power, oppression, and contemporary forms of resistance

Abstract

This essay frames the second issue of Geometries of Control: Dynamics of Power, Oppression and Resistance by developing a critical interpretation of how power operates across contemporary social life. Rather than treating control as a fixed or exclusively institutional structure, the text approaches it as a mobile and relational configuration that takes shape through norms, discourses, bodies, territories, digital environments, and communicative processes. Through a reading of the contributions collected in the volume, the essay maps the heterogeneous sites in which oppression is produced, legitimised, and experienced, while also foregrounding the plurality of resistant practices through which such arrangements are challenged, re-signified, or unsettled. In doing so, it proposes geometries of control as an analytical lens for understanding the symbolic, spatial, embodied, and normative dimensions of power in contemporary societies.