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AbstractThis article focuses on cross-border medical connections between Myanmar and Manipur, India. Non-state actors have been instrumental in creating the networks to bring bodies and body parts back and forth, first bypassing, then enmeshing, state actors. I focus on the movement of patients and medical samples across the border—from western Myanmar to Imphal city and back again—and the health infrastructure that enables it. Analysing these connections makes several contributions to the study of border governance. First, movement from Myanmar to Manipur is primarily for treatment or diagnosis, and these connections project particular ways of thinking about each place—western Myanmar as poor and remote, Manipur as advanced and networked. Second, both Manipur and western Myanmar can be considered in 'transition'—as territories being recalibrated by political dynamics emanating elsewhere yet becoming connected through shared needs. Third, patients and samples move through territories controlled by paramilitary forces, underground groups, and different tribal councils. Routes are sometimes blocked or passage treacherous, testing the limits of conventional notions of bilateral border governance. Finally, cross-border medical connections between Manipur and Myanmar draw attention to the risky cross-border medical mobility of the poor. Rather than seeking to minimize cost, patients utilize Manipur's health infrastructure out of necessity, providing insights into the contours of cross-border medical care in times of transition.

This article explores the centrality of China's cities to skate video; the most popular form for capturing, circulating, and consuming skateboarding. China's urban growth produces endless spots to skate; a spot is assemblage of objects and surfaces that offer the opportunity to perform skateboarding maneuvers (tricks). Skate video is the substance of skate culture, the once quintessentially Californian pastime turned global subculture and industry. After skateboarding left the skatepark for the streets in the 1990s, and once video became easier to circulate digitally through streaming platforms in the mid-2000s, the search for spots to perform and capture unsanctioned street skateboarding spread to China's urban landscapes, beginning with Shenzhen. China's cities are sites of global desire among skateboarders for the perfect surfaces and obstacles created in the built environment and the speed at which they are produced. Using skate video as an archive I make four arguments. First, China's cities imputed with a mythical character; endless spots produced with miraculous speed. Second, skate videos re-map China's cities through the skater's gaze, a form of urban knowledge both unique and widely shared. Third, the search for spots indexes urban development in China, privileging the recent and shunning the past. Fourth, skateboarding in China's cities create spaces for inter-cultural encounter between skateboarders and authority, the public and other skateboarders. The article concludes by discussing the utility of skate video as an alternative visual archive of urban China for foreign audiences and increasingly for skate communities in China itself.

ABSTRACTNamchi, in the Indian state of Sikkim, is undergoing a building boom that is transforming a small district headquarters into an urban showpiece. Centred on religious theme parks and urban beautification, the boom captures Sikkim's emphasis on tourism as a development strategy. Growth in hydropower and pharmaceutical industries within the state, and infrastructure enabling this growth, seek to reduce dependency on the Indian government and have turned Sikkim into a 'backyard' for Indian capital. In contrast, Namchi epitomizes the transition from rural to urban space through tourism‐led growth, creating a 'front yard' exhibit which was recently awarded Smart City status despite its small size and relative unimportance. This article explores Namchi's boom by analysing the politics that drive it, the buildings and landscapes that capture its excess, and the town's lived urban spaces. The authors focus on three aspects of Namchi's boom: first, it is crucial for projections of success in Sikkim and aligns urban transformation with a particular vision of development actively promoted by the Chief Minister and ruling party; second, it is not based on resource extraction or agrarian expansion but on funds transferred to cultivate and reward loyalty in this border region; and third, it is drawing migrant workers to the town in large numbers, causing fissures and tensions, and simultaneously creating an emergent, though uneasy, cosmopolitanism.

Namchi, in the Indian state of Sikkim, is undergoing a building boom that is transforming a small district headquarters into an urban showpiece. Centred on religious theme parks and urban beautification, the boom captures Sikkim's emphasis on tourism as a development strategy. Growth in hydropower and pharmaceutical industries within the state, and infrastructure enabling this growth, seek to reduce dependency on the Indian government and have turned Sikkim into a 'backyard' for Indian capital. In contrast, Namchi epitomizes the transition from rural to urban space through tourism‐led growth, creating a 'front yard' exhibit which was recently awarded Smart City status despite its small size and relative unimportance. This article explores Namchi's boom by analysing the politics that drive it, the buildings and landscapes that capture its excess, and the town's lived urban spaces. The authors focus on three aspects of Namchi's boom: first, it is crucial for projections of success in Sikkim and aligns urban transformation with a particular vision of development actively promoted by the Chief Minister and ruling party; second, it is not based on resource extraction or agrarian expansion but on funds transferred to cultivate and reward loyalty in this border region; and third, it is drawing migrant workers to the town in large numbers, causing fissures and tensions, and simultaneously creating an emergent, though uneasy, cosmopolitanism.

This article examines the history of a similarity measure—the Mahalanobis Distance Function—and its movement from colonial India into contemporary artificial intelligence technologies, including facial recognition, and its reapplication into postcolonial India. The article identifies how the creation of the Distance Function was connected to the colonial "problem" of caste and ethnic classification for British bureaucracy in 1920-1930s India. This article demonstrates that the Distance Function is a statistical method, originating to make anthropometric caste distinctions in India, that became both a technical standard and a mobile racialized technique, utilized in machine learning applications. The creation of the Distance Function as a measure of "similitude" at a particular period of colonial state-making helped to model wider categories of classification which have proliferated in facial recognition technology. Overall, we highlight how a measurement function that operates in recognition technologies today can be traced across time and space to other racialized contexts.