Hand‐drawn maps are an effective method for collecting information around sense of place. In this project, we have used a hand‐drawn mapping methodology as a tool for supporting children and young people in navigating and articulating their experiences of COVID‐19 at home. The nationwide exercise was conducted in partnership with the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers and National Museums Liverpool, and was part of the larger AHRC‐funded ‘Stayhome Stories’ project. The mapping initiative provided a platform for children and young people to visually convey their encounters with the pandemic and provides a lens through which to view how they understood and renegotiated meanings of home through the repeated lockdowns.
{"title":"Mapping COVID‐19 at home","authors":"Georgina H. Endfield, Jacqueline Waldock","doi":"10.1111/tran.12702","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12702","url":null,"abstract":"Hand‐drawn maps are an effective method for collecting information around sense of place. In this project, we have used a hand‐drawn mapping methodology as a tool for supporting children and young people in navigating and articulating their experiences of COVID‐19 at home. The nationwide exercise was conducted in partnership with the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers and National Museums Liverpool, and was part of the larger AHRC‐funded ‘Stayhome Stories’ project. The mapping initiative provided a platform for children and young people to visually convey their encounters with the pandemic and provides a lens through which to view how they understood and renegotiated meanings of home through the repeated lockdowns.","PeriodicalId":48278,"journal":{"name":"Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers","volume":"156 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141867523","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
For almost everyone in the world, the last few years have been unlike any experienced in their lifetimes. The public health crisis, spawned by the SARS‐CoV‐2 virus and the outbreak of COVID‐19, presented a geospatial analysis challenge like none other as public health officials, emergency rooms, and the general public struggled to track the spread of the disease, allocate resources for testing and care, and understand the origin of this new zoonotic pathogen. During this period, the combination of rapid and open access genomic data combined with case counts and the mapping tools of geographic information systems allowed for near real‐time tracking of the pandemic. This paper describes these tools, how they were used to advise policy‐makers in the US at the height of the pandemic, and some of the lessons learned.
{"title":"To save lives: Lessons of a pandemic cartographer","authors":"John Hessler","doi":"10.1111/tran.12703","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12703","url":null,"abstract":"For almost everyone in the world, the last few years have been unlike any experienced in their lifetimes. The public health crisis, spawned by the SARS‐CoV‐2 virus and the outbreak of COVID‐19, presented a geospatial analysis challenge like none other as public health officials, emergency rooms, and the general public struggled to track the spread of the disease, allocate resources for testing and care, and understand the origin of this new zoonotic pathogen. During this period, the combination of rapid and open access genomic data combined with case counts and the mapping tools of geographic information systems allowed for near real‐time tracking of the pandemic. This paper describes these tools, how they were used to advise policy‐makers in the US at the height of the pandemic, and some of the lessons learned.","PeriodicalId":48278,"journal":{"name":"Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers","volume":"41 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141867463","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper unfolds in three parts. In Part 1, I describe how I have contended with the fraught relationships among mapping, nationalism, and colonialism in my teaching and research. When writing my first book, Contesting Race and Citizenship, I had to reckon with the positivist impulse to enumerate and map Black Italianness—and, more broadly, with the politics of visibility at a time of increasingly virulent racial nationalisms, xenophobia, and outright anti‐Black violence. In Part 2, I describe the ways my own thinking about mapping has been pushed in new directions by insights from Black geographies. Drawing on Clyde Woods, Katherine McKittrick, and Édouard Glissant—as well as essays from the edited volume The Black Geographic—I argue that Black geographic counter‐cartographies foreground insurgent Black spatial knowledges and practices that have always exceeded racial‐spatial violence, and approach mapping as both a material and poetic process. In Part 3, I conclude by advancing some tentative ideas about what it might mean to map new or alternative geographies of abolitionist struggle that attend to the interconnections between Black Atlantic and Black Mediterranean histories of racial capitalism.
{"title":"Mapping black geographies","authors":"Camilla Hawthorne","doi":"10.1111/tran.12700","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12700","url":null,"abstract":"This paper unfolds in three parts. In Part 1, I describe how I have contended with the fraught relationships among mapping, nationalism, and colonialism in my teaching and research. When writing my first book, <jats:italic>Contesting Race and Citizenship</jats:italic>, I had to reckon with the positivist impulse to enumerate and map Black Italianness—and, more broadly, with the politics of visibility at a time of increasingly virulent racial nationalisms, xenophobia, and outright anti‐Black violence. In Part 2, I describe the ways my own thinking about mapping has been pushed in new directions by insights from Black geographies. Drawing on Clyde Woods, Katherine McKittrick, and Édouard Glissant—as well as essays from the edited volume <jats:italic>The Black Geographic</jats:italic>—I argue that Black geographic counter‐cartographies foreground insurgent Black spatial knowledges and practices that have always exceeded racial‐spatial violence, and approach mapping as both a material and poetic process. In Part 3, I conclude by advancing some tentative ideas about what it might mean to map new or alternative geographies of abolitionist struggle that attend to the interconnections between Black Atlantic and Black Mediterranean histories of racial capitalism.","PeriodicalId":48278,"journal":{"name":"Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers","volume":"62 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141775684","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Mapping is now thoroughly digital at all stages of production and maps are widely used in digital form. This digital turn has transformed the nature of mapping and maps. Maps need no longer be static representations, but rather constitute spatial media, providing an interactive, dynamic means for creating, discussing, and sharing spatial information and mediating spatial practices. This has included the development of 3D mapping, including nascent digital twins and digital deep maps. In this short paper, we reflect on our attempts to produce a 3D city information model for Dublin that acts as a basic digital twin, which we have also used to explore deep mapping, as well as map projecting data onto a printed 3D map model of the city. We consider what digital twins and deep maps mean for how we understand the nature of mapping, arguing that they produce a dyadic intertwining of map and territory; a literal, material expression of post‐representational, ontogenetic conceptions of mapping.
{"title":"Digital twins and deep maps","authors":"Rob Kitchin, Oliver Dawkins","doi":"10.1111/tran.12699","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12699","url":null,"abstract":"Mapping is now thoroughly digital at all stages of production and maps are widely used in digital form. This digital turn has transformed the nature of mapping and maps. Maps need no longer be static representations, but rather constitute spatial media, providing an interactive, dynamic means for creating, discussing, and sharing spatial information and mediating spatial practices. This has included the development of 3D mapping, including nascent digital twins and digital deep maps. In this short paper, we reflect on our attempts to produce a 3D city information model for Dublin that acts as a basic digital twin, which we have also used to explore deep mapping, as well as map projecting data onto a printed 3D map model of the city. We consider what digital twins and deep maps mean for how we understand the nature of mapping, arguing that they produce a dyadic intertwining of map and territory; a literal, material expression of post‐representational, ontogenetic conceptions of mapping.","PeriodicalId":48278,"journal":{"name":"Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers","volume":"38 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141775685","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
While legal geographers have considered the geography of legal processes, there has been less attention on how geographers are contributing to the making of law. By orientating attention to the experiences and attitudes of the geographical profession, this paper examines how specific forms of knowledge become legally useful and the ensuing ethical, legal, and disciplinary implications. We are interested in the situated nature of these productions, as scholars seek to advocate for specific communities, interests, or environments, practices that are set within and, at times, against personal or institutional priorities. We argue that geographical legal work involves transgressing established professional practices and locations of knowledge production. Through our interviews with geographers, we explore three aspects of transgression as a situated practice: the experiences of boundary crossing, the costs and benefits of entering new epistemic communities, and the lasting impacts of intervening in legal processes. In conclusion, we outline the mechanisms through which geographical legal work could be better accommodated within the work of professional geographers.
{"title":"Geography and legal expertise: The transgressive nature of research at the boundary of geography and law‐making","authors":"Alex Jeffrey, Katherine Brickell, Fiona McConnell","doi":"10.1111/tran.12696","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12696","url":null,"abstract":"While legal geographers have considered the geography of legal processes, there has been less attention on how geographers are contributing to the making of law. By orientating attention to the experiences and attitudes of the geographical profession, this paper examines how specific forms of knowledge become legally useful and the ensuing ethical, legal, and disciplinary implications. We are interested in the situated nature of these productions, as scholars seek to advocate for specific communities, interests, or environments, practices that are set within and, at times, against personal or institutional priorities. We argue that geographical legal work involves transgressing established professional practices and locations of knowledge production. Through our interviews with geographers, we explore three aspects of transgression as a situated practice: the experiences of boundary crossing, the costs and benefits of entering new epistemic communities, and the lasting impacts of intervening in legal processes. In conclusion, we outline the mechanisms through which geographical legal work could be better accommodated within the work of professional geographers.","PeriodicalId":48278,"journal":{"name":"Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers","volume":"47 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141608349","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Scientists and policy‐makers promote 'Nature‐based Solutions' to the interconnected challenges associated with the Anthropocene. Often these involve the strategic use of ecosystem engineers: animals, plants, and microbes with disproportionate ecological agency capable of regional or even planetary‐scale niche construction. This environmental mode of biopolitics is promoted as biomimicry: restoring, rewilding, or rewetting diverse ecological systems. This paper critically examines the multispecies relations promised by this model through a focus on beaver in Britain over the last 12,000 years. It begins with beaver making Britain hospitable for early settlers and agriculturalists as they returned after the last ice age. It traces the subsequent demise of beaver due to hunting and land use change, and then follows the recent return of beaver as tools for natural flood management and nature recovery. It attends to situations in which these multispecies world‐making projects go awry in the weird ecologies of the Anthropocene. This story of beaver helps situate enthusiasms for proactive ecosystem engineering in deeper time. It highlights the beguiling potential of Nature‐based Solutions while cautioning against tendencies towards anthropocentrism, an apolitical mononaturalism, and an ecomodernist hubris. The paper combines concepts from archaeology, ecology, anthropology, and geography into a new framework for theorising multispecies acts of worlding and weirding.
{"title":"Worlding and weirding with beaver: A more‐than‐human political ecology of ecosystem engineering","authors":"Jamie Lorimer","doi":"10.1111/tran.12698","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12698","url":null,"abstract":"Scientists and policy‐makers promote 'Nature‐based Solutions' to the interconnected challenges associated with the Anthropocene. Often these involve the strategic use of ecosystem engineers: animals, plants, and microbes with disproportionate ecological agency capable of regional or even planetary‐scale niche construction. This environmental mode of biopolitics is promoted as biomimicry: restoring, rewilding, or rewetting diverse ecological systems. This paper critically examines the multispecies relations promised by this model through a focus on beaver in Britain over the last 12,000 years. It begins with beaver making Britain hospitable for early settlers and agriculturalists as they returned after the last ice age. It traces the subsequent demise of beaver due to hunting and land use change, and then follows the recent return of beaver as tools for natural flood management and nature recovery. It attends to situations in which these multispecies world‐making projects go awry in the weird ecologies of the Anthropocene. This story of beaver helps situate enthusiasms for proactive ecosystem engineering in deeper time. It highlights the beguiling potential of Nature‐based Solutions while cautioning against tendencies towards anthropocentrism, an apolitical mononaturalism, and an ecomodernist hubris. The paper combines concepts from archaeology, ecology, anthropology, and geography into a new framework for theorising multispecies acts of worlding and weirding.","PeriodicalId":48278,"journal":{"name":"Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers","volume":"43 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141608440","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper explores the complexities of conviviality in a London neighbourhood by using primary qualitative data to analyse the implications of the (in)visibility of difference for superdiverse social relations. It develops the concept of power‐geometries to examine the implications of how social differences are produced, imagined, and experienced in the neighbourhood's public spaces. Drawing on three situated examples from a visual ethnographic research project, it explores the affective intensities of how gender, sexuality, class, and race intersect with ethnicity, religion, and migrant status to shape urban conviviality. The paper argues the way different positions and identities are layered and intersect can shape the development of ‘cosmopolitan outlooks’ and intercultural relations. In doing so, the analysis refines understandings of superdiversity conceived narrowly within the remit of majority/minority relations. It promotes instead more critically ethnographic explorations of the complex and varied ways difference has meaning in everyday lives in superdiverse places and shapes everyday forms of recognition and equality. The paper contributes to debates on geographies of difference, encounter, and public space by analysing how power relations affect conviviality. It demonstrates how conviviality is an ambivalent process that is punctuated by both prejudices and solidarities and is shaped by structural inequalities and wider political discourses. The paper concludes by highlighting the role of agency and space for dialogue for residents negotiating differences among urban change.
{"title":"‘Are we invisible?’ Power‐geometries of conviviality in a superdiverse London neighbourhood","authors":"Katherine Stansfeld","doi":"10.1111/tran.12688","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12688","url":null,"abstract":"This paper explores the complexities of conviviality in a London neighbourhood by using primary qualitative data to analyse the implications of the (in)visibility of difference for superdiverse social relations. It develops the concept of power‐geometries to examine the implications of how social differences are produced, imagined, and experienced in the neighbourhood's public spaces. Drawing on three situated examples from a visual ethnographic research project, it explores the affective intensities of how gender, sexuality, class, and race intersect with ethnicity, religion, and migrant status to shape urban conviviality. The paper argues the way different positions and identities are layered and intersect can shape the development of ‘cosmopolitan outlooks’ and intercultural relations. In doing so, the analysis refines understandings of superdiversity conceived narrowly within the remit of majority/minority relations. It promotes instead more critically ethnographic explorations of the complex and varied ways difference has meaning in everyday lives in superdiverse places and shapes everyday forms of recognition and equality. The paper contributes to debates on geographies of difference, encounter, and public space by analysing how power relations affect conviviality. It demonstrates how conviviality is an ambivalent process that is punctuated by both prejudices and solidarities and is shaped by structural inequalities and wider political discourses. The paper concludes by highlighting the role of agency and space for dialogue for residents negotiating differences among urban change.","PeriodicalId":48278,"journal":{"name":"Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers","volume":"36 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2024-05-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140932534","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Commercial vessels play a significant role in rescuing migrants on the Mediterranean. There are physical and financial risks to performing these commercial rescues that are poorly understood and often ignored. For ship captains, migrants in maritime distress embody the close linkages between geoeconomic and geopolitical risk. I argue that the negotiation of migrant rescues by commercial shipping captains captures the ways in which geoeconomic and geopolitical security‐seeking discourses become entangled and contradictorily embodied in everyday life and suffering. The rationale and logic that underwrite the securitisation of the supply chain is the discursive site where geopolitical and geoeconomic strategy define the risks in maritime rescue space. This study extends from a conceptual framework that identifies the spatial structuring of an ongoing dialectic between geopolitical and geoeconomic strategy as a defining feature of geoeconomic analyses. The research is based on interviews with 24 maritime professionals and a series of freedom of information requests to the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex) for information about rescues involving commercial ships. This paper contributes new information on the human geography of maritime rescues that involve commercial ships and migrants in the Central Mediterranean.
{"title":"The geoeconomics of protecting profits from migrants in maritime distress","authors":"Terence Adam Rudolph","doi":"10.1111/tran.12686","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12686","url":null,"abstract":"Commercial vessels play a significant role in rescuing migrants on the Mediterranean. There are physical and financial risks to performing these commercial rescues that are poorly understood and often ignored. For ship captains, migrants in maritime distress embody the close linkages between geoeconomic and geopolitical risk. I argue that the negotiation of migrant rescues by commercial shipping captains captures the ways in which geoeconomic and geopolitical security‐seeking discourses become entangled and contradictorily embodied in everyday life and suffering. The rationale and logic that underwrite the securitisation of the supply chain is the discursive site where geopolitical and geoeconomic strategy define the risks in maritime rescue space. This study extends from a conceptual framework that identifies the spatial structuring of an ongoing dialectic between geopolitical and geoeconomic strategy as a defining feature of geoeconomic analyses. The research is based on interviews with 24 maritime professionals and a series of freedom of information requests to the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex) for information about rescues involving commercial ships. This paper contributes new information on the human geography of maritime rescues that involve commercial ships and migrants in the Central Mediterranean.","PeriodicalId":48278,"journal":{"name":"Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers","volume":"66 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2024-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140932469","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this paper I argue through the double entendre of ‘data‐bility’ that how dateable one is on a dating app relies on data. This techno‐social framework enables an understanding of how dating apps are reconfiguring a politics of sexuality, circumscribed by digital technologies and data. Drawing on research with middle‐class women and gender‐minority dating app users in Mumbai and one dating app executive, the paper investigates how algorithms and users' digital behaviour together constitute data‐bility in three ways. First, dating app algorithms are designed to match those of similar social identities to one another. Second, dating app users engage with others' digital data on profiles and through message chats, reading class through these processes, deciding who to match/reject and correspondingly who is data‐ble. Third, users and algorithmic infrastructures come together to create new regimes of verification, through deeming some users ‘real’ and others ‘fake’ on dating apps, extending violent legacies of categorisation. Together, these processes result in data‐bility, a techno‐social order of digital dating oriented around the exclusion of those labelled ‘creeps’ along class and caste lines.
{"title":"Data‐bility: Endogamous social intimacies on dating apps in Mumbai","authors":"Kavita Dattani","doi":"10.1111/tran.12687","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12687","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper I argue through the <jats:italic>double entendre</jats:italic> of ‘data‐bility’ that how dateable one is on a dating app relies on data. This techno‐social framework enables an understanding of how dating apps are reconfiguring a politics of sexuality, circumscribed by digital technologies and data. Drawing on research with middle‐class women and gender‐minority dating app users in Mumbai and one dating app executive, the paper investigates how algorithms and users' digital behaviour together constitute data‐bility in three ways. First, dating app algorithms are designed to match those of similar social identities to one another. Second, dating app users engage with others' digital data on profiles and through message chats, reading class through these processes, deciding who to match/reject and correspondingly who is data‐ble. Third, users and algorithmic infrastructures come together to create new regimes of verification, through deeming some users ‘real’ and others ‘fake’ on dating apps, extending violent legacies of categorisation. Together, these processes result in data‐bility, a techno‐social order of digital dating oriented around the exclusion of those labelled ‘creeps’ along class and caste lines.","PeriodicalId":48278,"journal":{"name":"Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers","volume":"46 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2024-05-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140833035","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
With what intentions and expectations does one arrive at reading a new philosophical text? In the case of the late Martinican thinker Édouard Glissant, engaging with his work usually begins from the premise that his thought is adapted from, or indebted to, that of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. In this paper I seek to intervene in these non‐representational aspects of our thinking that escape habituated perception and condition, yet colour our reading and thus our resulting research and writing. If — as Paul Gilroy writes, ‘Glissant's time is now’, how do we as geographers respond? I argue that rather than reject the association of Glissant's work with Deleuze and Guattari's, the more philosophically, poetic, and politically challenging and creative task comes from reconceptualising their relationship to one of connection. In order to do this, I begin with Glissant's concept of ‘opacity’, which supports difference against assimilation and which Katherine McKittrick understands as a political tool. Taking this tool in hand, I develop my conceptualisation of the opacitic to refer to the staging or taking‐place of this opacity on a subterranean and micro‐political level. Opacitic‐reading as method contends how our reading of philosophical texts can create anew moments of clarity and connection through complexity, rather than aspiring towards transparent understanding that seeks to ‘grasp’ ideas and hold onto them. For geographers, opacitic‐reading intervenes in important debates about reading Glissant specifically, engaging with the work of so‐called minority thinkers from Western perspectives, as well as contributing to broader debates about how geographers engage with philosophy and theory.
{"title":"Édouard Glissant and the importance of reading well: Opacitic‐reading as geographic method","authors":"Tara Elisabeth Jeyasingh","doi":"10.1111/tran.12685","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12685","url":null,"abstract":"With what intentions and expectations does one arrive at reading a new philosophical text? In the case of the late Martinican thinker Édouard Glissant, engaging with his work usually begins from the premise that his thought is adapted from, or indebted to, that of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. In this paper I seek to intervene in these non‐representational aspects of our thinking that escape habituated perception and condition, yet colour our reading and thus our resulting research and writing. If — as Paul Gilroy writes, ‘Glissant's time is now’, how do we as geographers respond? I argue that rather than reject the association of Glissant's work with Deleuze and Guattari's, the more philosophically, poetic, and politically challenging and creative task comes from reconceptualising their relationship to one of connection. In order to do this, I begin with Glissant's concept of ‘opacity’, which supports difference against assimilation and which Katherine McKittrick understands as a political tool. Taking this tool in hand, I develop my conceptualisation of the opacitic to refer to the staging or taking‐place of this opacity on a subterranean and micro‐political level. Opacitic‐reading as method contends how our reading of philosophical texts can create anew moments of clarity and connection through complexity, rather than aspiring towards transparent understanding that seeks to ‘grasp’ ideas and hold onto them. For geographers, opacitic‐reading intervenes in important debates about reading Glissant specifically, engaging with the work of so‐called minority thinkers from Western perspectives, as well as contributing to broader debates about how geographers engage with philosophy and theory.","PeriodicalId":48278,"journal":{"name":"Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers","volume":"62 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140833033","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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