Editorial: Tropical Connections and Traumas

Abstract

Since 2013, the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography awards annual prizes (each of whose authors receive USD 1000—shared in the case of co-authorship) for the best paper by a graduate student (where the lead author is a graduate student) and the best overall paper. Members of the journal's wider Editorial Board, who independently read papers short-listed by us, the editors, made the final selection of the winning papers. We are pleased to announce the winners (and runners up) of the 2023 awards are:

Category	Best graduate student paper	Best overall paper
Winning paper	Framing China's tropics: Thermal techno-politics of socialist tropical architecture in Africa (1960s − 1980s) Zhijian Sun	Unbracketing the multiplicity of trauma in North Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo Stephen Taylor, Laurent Mavinga and Moise Bashiga
Other shortlisted papers	The ebb and flow of capital in Indonesian coastal production systems Yunie N. Rahmat and Jeff Neilson
	Letting failure be: COVID-19, PhD fieldwork and to not (want to) learn from failures Chayanika Saxena

As per last year (see Sidaway et al., 2023), the award-winning paper with a graduate student author cuts across environmental and human geographies, whist developing an original case study of tropical architecture, a theme that also featured in a special issue of the SJTG over a decade ago (Chee et al., 2011). In turn, ‘tropical architecture’ connects with the journal's long-standing concerns with actions, boundaries, discourses and visons of tropicality (Driver & Yeoh, 2000; Sidaway et al., 2018). The prize-winning paper, by NUS Department of Architecture doctoral student, Zhijian Sun (2023: 51):

examines how the techno-politics of China and the Soviet-bloc's socialist tropical architecture differently reconfigured thermal exchanges between the environment, human body and a series of other multi-scalar things in Africa during the 1960s−1980s.

Focused on the decades after the Sino-Soviet split of 1961 yielded what Jeremy Friedman (2015) termed a Shadow Cold War, Sun's paper speaks also to contemporary debates about climate change, architectural design air-conditioning and welfare (themes considered too in the paper by Rituraj Neog, 2024, in this issue). Hence Sun (2023: 534) concludes by asking:

how did the narrow understandings of thermal comfort become so globally dominant? How did their underlying techno-politics and thermal material culture co-constitute and transform each other?

The other two short-listed papers with graduate students as an author were close-runners up. The paper by Chayanika Saxena (2023) highlights the disruptive experience of the COVID-19 pandemic on her doctoral research plans, and the corresponding anxieties, and the strategies she developed in the face of the challenges. Whilst the paper is a personal account, it speaks to all faced with fieldwork in times of adversity. Another shortlisted paper, by Yunie N. Rahmat and Jeff Neilson (2023), deploys multiple empirical sources (national data are supplemented with onsite surveys) to examine shifting commercial relations, extending the pertinent debates in agricultural transformations to fisheries and coastal communities in Indonesia.

The winning best overall paper for 2023 is by two authors (Laurent Mavinga and Moise Bashiga) based in Goma, on the shores of Lake Kivu in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, and another (Stephen Taylor) based in East London. This collaboration has yielded an account, drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, in the contexts of protracted conflict and attendant death and displacement in Eastern Congo:

how the multiplicity of trauma is experienced, bridging insights from geographies of trauma into global mental health scholarship that has to date focused on how trauma is encoded, recognized and addressed (Taylor et al., 2023: 343).

Along the way, their paper also navigates the geographies of ‘Post-traumatic stress disorder’ (PTSD). Notably, it was especially after the American War in Vietnam that PTSD started to acquire citations in medical and allied discourses. As Taylor et al. (2023: 342), note:

PTSD as a nexus of discourse and practice, exculpated returning veterans of the US war in Vietnam by providing medical legitimacy for their alienation following the brutalizing effects of conflict. However, the heterogeneous epidemiological profile of PTSD in veterans gave rise to contrasting views of the disorder as a marginal, ubiquitous and even contradictory condition.

Western military service continues to be a key in discussions of PTSD (especially following further ill-fated wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq). In contrast, Taylor, Mavinga, and Bashiga seek to learn from civilian and vernacular understandings and experiences of trauma in eastern Congo. As such, via grounded accounts of the multiplicity of traumas, their paper sets out important tracks for further research and critical analysis, beyond dominant Western frames.

This issue of the SJTG contains ‘An open letter to the SJTG and the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG): The War on Gaza, the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), and a Palestinian literary event. Griffiths et al. (2024) begin their letter by noting how a prior SJTG editorial had declared that the journal ‘hopes to publish more scholarship on the past, present and future geographies of decolonization and the decolonization of geography’ (Sidaway et al., 2021: 6). We have learnt that after the Society's cancellation of the literary event mentioned in the letter, it took place at an alternative venue in London, with participants that included, amongst others, the actor Julie Christie, the novelist Esther Freud, the Nobel literature laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah, and the playwright Sabrina Mahfouz, see: https://www.palfest.org/). The SJTG has invited the Director of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) (and/or other staff of the Society) to reply if they wish, and we undertake to publish any such response in a future issue.