Pregnancy apps have become a popular healthcare tool with millions of users worldwide. While branded as inclusive, they nevertheless normalise a particular pregnancy journey: one culminating in birth. Knowing that pregnancies end for various reasons – with one in five resulting in miscarriage – we seek to challenge this narrow framing. Deviating from existing literature, our paper explores the emotional geographies of pregnancy apps when birth is not the outcome. Set through a series of ‘app annotations’ by two sisters navigating pregnancy loss, our paper explores how a leading app was intimately encountered. Drawing inspiration from graphics literature, we advance a new method and activist tool that centres the body – and particularly embodied loss – in digital debates. In so doing we hope to turn geography's ‘digital turn’ towards a more creative set of tools, heeding feminist calls to engage technological intimacies. Vitally, this work illuminates those lives (and losses) systematically excluded – often in the name of life itself.
{"title":"Digital geographies of miscarriage: A ‘sister‐ethnographic’ approach to pregnancy apps and loss","authors":"Caroline (Carly) Bagelman, Jen Bagelman","doi":"10.1111/tran.12683","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12683","url":null,"abstract":"Pregnancy apps have become a popular healthcare tool with millions of users worldwide. While branded as inclusive, they nevertheless normalise a particular pregnancy journey: one culminating in birth. Knowing that pregnancies end for various reasons – with one in five resulting in miscarriage – we seek to challenge this narrow framing. Deviating from existing literature, our paper explores the emotional geographies of pregnancy apps when birth is not the outcome. Set through a series of ‘app annotations’ by two sisters navigating pregnancy loss, our paper explores how a leading app was intimately encountered. Drawing inspiration from graphics literature, we advance a new method and activist tool that centres the body – and particularly embodied loss – in digital debates. In so doing we hope to turn geography's ‘digital turn’ towards a more creative set of tools, heeding feminist calls to engage technological intimacies. Vitally, this work illuminates those lives (and losses) systematically excluded – often in the name of life itself.","PeriodicalId":48278,"journal":{"name":"Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers","volume":"34 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140571314","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}
Critical engagement with spaces of exposure is an important research agenda in the contemporary social sciences and humanities. Developing and extending this agenda, this paper offers an account of how scenes of exposure at border zones are mediated materially, aesthetically, and politically by forms of envelopment. Specifically, it discusses the geographies of exposure and envelopment that unfold through the use and re‐use of the emergency blanket at these zones. Fabricated from metallised polymer films, emergency blankets are used commonly to provide thermal protection for bodies at risk of exposure in a range of situations. More than functional, however, these objects also have a distinctive aesthetic allure. By attending to the material and aesthetic qualities of the emergency blanket, this paper explores its visibility and significance in scenes of exposure at border zones. Highlighting how the blanket is deployed as a device of minimal comfort, the paper then considers artistic works that repurpose this object as part of a creative critique of conditions at these zones. Drawing on the work of Stacy Alaimo and Ronak Kapadia, among others, the paper develops the concept of insurgent envelopment to understand how artists use the emergency blanket in works that simultaneously foreground, disrupt, and reimagine relations between exposure and envelopment.
{"title":"Insurgent envelopment: The emergency blanket and scenes of exposure at border zones","authors":"Derek McCormack","doi":"10.1111/tran.12680","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12680","url":null,"abstract":"Critical engagement with spaces of exposure is an important research agenda in the contemporary social sciences and humanities. Developing and extending this agenda, this paper offers an account of how scenes of exposure at border zones are mediated materially, aesthetically, and politically by forms of envelopment. Specifically, it discusses the geographies of exposure and envelopment that unfold through the use and re‐use of the emergency blanket at these zones. Fabricated from metallised polymer films, emergency blankets are used commonly to provide thermal protection for bodies at risk of exposure in a range of situations. More than functional, however, these objects also have a distinctive aesthetic allure. By attending to the material and aesthetic qualities of the emergency blanket, this paper explores its visibility and significance in scenes of exposure at border zones. Highlighting how the blanket is deployed as a device of minimal comfort, the paper then considers artistic works that repurpose this object as part of a creative critique of conditions at these zones. Drawing on the work of Stacy Alaimo and Ronak Kapadia, among others, the paper develops the concept of insurgent envelopment to understand how artists use the emergency blanket in works that simultaneously foreground, disrupt, and reimagine relations between exposure and envelopment.","PeriodicalId":48278,"journal":{"name":"Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers","volume":"11 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140571388","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}
The career of the incentive has been meteoric and global, cropping up in peace‐building, state‐building, global health, and humanitarian contexts across the world. In this paper, I consider incentive work from the vantage point of independence‐era South Sudan. In doing so, I build conversations between geography and spatially sensitive anthropology about the power of social forms to shape action, through an attention to the porous and polyvalent logics of legitimation entailed in ‘creative fictions’. Attention to the modes of legitimation help to understand not only what social forms do, but also how they emerge, travel, and are appropriated and repurposed for use by new sets of actors. In tracing the transit of incentive work from development practice into humanitarian programming, I understand incentive work as a creative fiction—an intangible social form that animates and channels action to generative ends. While incentive work emerged as a tidy solution to constraints within the humanitarian sector on who might be paid for what kind work, the social form of incentive work proliferated. Set free from those constraints, incentive work offered up channels of accumuclation to new actors—including mid‐level state functionaries—by mobilizing and ligitimating claims on un‐ and under‐compensated labour though a call to voluntas, the morally inflected volitional ethos of volunteerism.
{"title":"Creative fictions: Incentive work and humanitarian labour in South Sudan","authors":"Léonie S. Newhouse","doi":"10.1111/tran.12682","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12682","url":null,"abstract":"The career of the incentive has been meteoric and global, cropping up in peace‐building, state‐building, global health, and humanitarian contexts across the world. In this paper, I consider incentive work from the vantage point of independence‐era South Sudan. In doing so, I build conversations between geography and spatially sensitive anthropology about the power of social forms to shape action, through an attention to the porous and polyvalent logics of legitimation entailed in ‘creative fictions’. Attention to the modes of legitimation help to understand not only what social forms do, but also how they emerge, travel, and are appropriated and repurposed for use by new sets of actors. In tracing the transit of incentive work from development practice into humanitarian programming, I understand incentive work as a creative fiction—an intangible social form that animates and channels action to generative ends. While incentive work emerged as a tidy solution to constraints within the humanitarian sector on who might be paid for what kind work, the social form of incentive work proliferated. Set free from those constraints, incentive work offered up channels of accumuclation to new actors—including mid‐level state functionaries—by mobilizing and ligitimating claims on un‐ and under‐compensated labour though a call to <jats:italic>voluntas</jats:italic>, the morally inflected volitional ethos of volunteerism.","PeriodicalId":48278,"journal":{"name":"Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers","volume":"156 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2024-03-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140165629","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 2020, a market in convalescent blood plasma developed as a potential treatment for COVID-19. During this time, commercial plasma centres—which collect the blood plasma from paid donors for pharmaceutical production—paid recovered patients as much as US$100 for a donation of blood plasma containing COVID-19 antibodies, from which they manufactured an experimental treatment. This paper uses the commercial collection of COVID-19 antibodies found in plasma as an entry point into exploring how racially uneven exposures to disease may produce biovalue. The first section considers the spatial history of antibody-derived plasma products, using historical research to examine how inmates at predominantly black plantation-prisons in the US South were valued for antibody production in the 1960s. Against this historical relief, the second section examines the spatiality of antibodies in current practices of the plasma industry, as well as in the plasma industry's response to the COVID-19 pandemic (even as those efforts eventually failed in clinical trials). If geographical literatures on environmental exposure, as well as on COVID-19 transmission, discuss exposure as an outcome of racial capitalism, this paper emphasises the productive opportunities that capital can solicit from exposures, especially those that are useful to different forms of biomedicine. By critically scrutinising the practice of ‘sharing immunity’ and attending to its decidedly geographic constitution, we can see how what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls the ‘death-dealing logics’ of racial capitalism may also work through the seemingly affirmative practices and communal imaginaries behind the redistribution of antibodies as medicine.
{"title":"An economy of immunity: The racial-spatial lives of antibodies in the American blood plasma economy from 1960s prisons to COVID-19","authors":"Kelsey Johnson","doi":"10.1111/tran.12679","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12679","url":null,"abstract":"In 2020, a market in convalescent blood plasma developed as a potential treatment for COVID-19. During this time, commercial plasma centres—which collect the blood plasma from paid donors for pharmaceutical production—paid recovered patients as much as US$100 for a donation of blood plasma containing COVID-19 antibodies, from which they manufactured an experimental treatment. This paper uses the commercial collection of COVID-19 antibodies found in plasma as an entry point into exploring how racially uneven exposures to disease may produce biovalue. The first section considers the spatial history of antibody-derived plasma products, using historical research to examine how inmates at predominantly black plantation-prisons in the US South were valued for antibody production in the 1960s. Against this historical relief, the second section examines the spatiality of antibodies in current practices of the plasma industry, as well as in the plasma industry's response to the COVID-19 pandemic (even as those efforts eventually failed in clinical trials). If geographical literatures on environmental exposure, as well as on COVID-19 transmission, discuss exposure as an outcome of racial capitalism, this paper emphasises the productive opportunities that capital can solicit from exposures, especially those that are useful to different forms of biomedicine. By critically scrutinising the practice of ‘sharing immunity’ and attending to its decidedly geographic constitution, we can see how what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls the ‘death-dealing logics’ of racial capitalism may also work through the seemingly affirmative practices and communal imaginaries behind the redistribution of antibodies as medicine.","PeriodicalId":48278,"journal":{"name":"Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers","volume":"5 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2024-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140098729","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}
Crisis narratives have long been a prominent feature of the climate movement to spur system change. The COVID-19 pandemic brought to the fore the complexities of navigating climate action through the overlapping crises of the Anthropocene. While crisis is seen to offer possibilities for transformational change, it also threatens to prioritise urgency over justice. It is therefore important to understand how climate activists, in practice, are mobilising different narratives of crisis. To this end, we empirically examine climate activists' reflections on crisis in Aotearoa New Zealand through their experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic. We identify a narrative of ‘panic-activism’ that uses crisis to demonstrate the severity of the climate threat to enable drastic action. Such narratives are often underpinned by a ‘hierarchy of crisis’ that positions climate change as the most imminent existential crisis. We caution that this crisis narrative is troubling for climate justice, particularly as it positions one crisis as more urgent than others. However, in contrast to panic-activism, our study suggests climate activists in Aotearoa tended to approach crisis cautiously and with reluctant necessity, rather than as something to be actively catalysed or capitalised on. Instead, activists cultivated a narrative of ‘crisis solidarity’ that highlights the networks of reciprocity and vulnerability across and within communities for more intersectional social movement organising.
{"title":"Panic activism or crisis solidarity? Reworking crisis narratives in climate activism through the COVID-19 pandemic","authors":"Sylvia Nissen, Raven Cretney","doi":"10.1111/tran.12678","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12678","url":null,"abstract":"Crisis narratives have long been a prominent feature of the climate movement to spur system change. The COVID-19 pandemic brought to the fore the complexities of navigating climate action through the overlapping crises of the Anthropocene. While crisis is seen to offer possibilities for transformational change, it also threatens to prioritise urgency over justice. It is therefore important to understand how climate activists, in practice, are mobilising different narratives of crisis. To this end, we empirically examine climate activists' reflections on crisis in Aotearoa New Zealand through their experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic. We identify a narrative of ‘panic-activism’ that uses crisis to demonstrate the severity of the climate threat to enable drastic action. Such narratives are often underpinned by a ‘hierarchy of crisis’ that positions climate change as the most imminent existential crisis. We caution that this crisis narrative is troubling for climate justice, particularly as it positions one crisis as more urgent than others. However, in contrast to panic-activism, our study suggests climate activists in Aotearoa tended to approach crisis cautiously and with reluctant necessity, rather than as something to be actively catalysed or capitalised on. Instead, activists cultivated a narrative of ‘crisis solidarity’ that highlights the networks of reciprocity and vulnerability across and within communities for more intersectional social movement organising.","PeriodicalId":48278,"journal":{"name":"Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers","volume":"35 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2024-03-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140072117","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 presents the first spatial analysis of racial disparities in the UK welfare sanction regime. As part of their austerity programme, the UK government tightened the conditionality of welfare programmes and intensified the use of financial penalties against welfare claimants who failed to demonstrate compliance with these conditions. Analysing Jobseeker's Allowance (JSA) data from the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) and the Office for National Statistics between 2012 and 2019 we draw attention to the spatially uneven and highly racialised geography of welfare sanctions in England. Claimants from racially minoritised backgrounds are consistently more likely to be referred for a sanction by Jobcentre caseworkers and receive an adverse decision at the hands of institutional decision‐makers. Within this, however, there are important scalar and spatial differences that warrant critical attention. In rural England, the risk of being sanctioned is substantially higher for all groups, but especially for Mixed heritage and Black/Black British claimants who in some areas are over twice as likely to be sanctioned as their White counterparts. Since ethnicity data have not been published for Universal Credit sanction decisions, the presented evidence offers critical insight into the potential persistence of racial injustice in applying welfare sanctions. We identify ‘hotspots’ of racism in the sanction regime, most of which are in rural areas, before offering three interpretative frameworks through which spatial and racial disparities might be explained. Any suggestion that such disparities simply derive from the behaviour of DWP staff fails to adequately account for deeply entrenched histories of welfare racism, rural racism and the role of welfare sanctioning in dynamics of racial capitalism: that is, disciplining and impoverishing racialised populations in ways that generate conditions for capital accumulation. By contributing new empirical and theoretical insights to the often neglected study of rural austerity and welfare, the paper calls for scholarship to investigate the variegations of welfare, austerity and racial capitalism in diverse rural contexts.
本文首次对英国福利制裁制度中的种族差异进行了空间分析。作为紧缩计划的一部分，英国政府收紧了福利计划的条件，并加强了对未能证明符合这些条件的福利申请者的经济处罚。通过分析英国就业与养老金部（DWP）和国家统计局（Office for National Statistics）在 2012 年至 2019 年期间的求职者津贴（JSA）数据，我们发现英格兰的福利制裁在空间上存在不均衡性和高度种族化。来自少数种族背景的申领者一直以来都更有可能被就业中心的个案工作者转介接受制裁，并在机构决策者手中收到不利的决定。然而，这其中也存在着重要的尺度和空间差异，值得重点关注。在英格兰农村地区，所有群体受到制裁的风险都要高得多，尤其是混合血统和黑人/英国黑人申领者，在某些地区，他们受到制裁的可能性是白人申领者的两倍多。由于通用信贷制裁决定的种族数据尚未公布，所提供的证据为我们深入了解在实施福利制裁时可能持续存在的种族不公正现象提供了重要依据。我们发现了制裁制度中存在种族主义的 "热点 "地区，其中大部分在农村地区，然后提出了三种解释框架来解释空间和种族差异。任何认为这种差异仅仅源于 DWP 工作人员行为的观点，都无法充分说明根深蒂固的福利种族主义、农村种族主义历史，以及福利制裁在种族资本主义动态中所扮演的角色：即以创造资本积累条件的方式，对种族化人群进行约束并使其贫困化。通过为经常被忽视的农村紧缩和福利研究提供新的经验和理论见解，本文呼吁学术界研究福利、紧缩和种族资本主义在不同农村背景下的变化。
{"title":"Racism and the uneven geography of welfare sanctioning in England","authors":"Andrew Williams, Brian Webb, Richard Gale","doi":"10.1111/tran.12677","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12677","url":null,"abstract":"This paper presents the first spatial analysis of racial disparities in the UK welfare sanction regime. As part of their austerity programme, the UK government tightened the conditionality of welfare programmes and intensified the use of financial penalties against welfare claimants who failed to demonstrate compliance with these conditions. Analysing Jobseeker's Allowance (JSA) data from the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) and the Office for National Statistics between 2012 and 2019 we draw attention to the spatially uneven and highly racialised geography of welfare sanctions in England. Claimants from racially minoritised backgrounds are consistently more likely to be referred for a sanction by Jobcentre caseworkers and receive an adverse decision at the hands of institutional decision‐makers. Within this, however, there are important scalar and spatial differences that warrant critical attention. In rural England, the risk of being sanctioned is substantially higher for all groups, but especially for Mixed heritage and Black/Black British claimants who in some areas are over twice as likely to be sanctioned as their White counterparts. Since ethnicity data have not been published for Universal Credit sanction decisions, the presented evidence offers critical insight into the potential persistence of racial injustice in applying welfare sanctions. We identify ‘hotspots’ of racism in the sanction regime, most of which are in rural areas, before offering three interpretative frameworks through which spatial and racial disparities might be explained. Any suggestion that such disparities simply derive from the behaviour of DWP staff fails to adequately account for deeply entrenched histories of welfare racism, rural racism and the role of welfare sanctioning in dynamics of racial capitalism: that is, disciplining and impoverishing racialised populations in ways that generate conditions for capital accumulation. By contributing new empirical and theoretical insights to the often neglected study of rural austerity and welfare, the paper calls for scholarship to investigate the variegations of welfare, austerity and racial capitalism in diverse rural contexts.","PeriodicalId":48278,"journal":{"name":"Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2024-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139956409","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}
Jouni Häkli, Gintarė Kudžmaitė, Kirsi Pauliina Kallio
The latest EU policy initiative to regulate migration to the European Union is called the New Pact on Migration and Asylum. Compared with previous policies, the New Pact promotes and normalises multiple procedures that can have far-reaching consequences on migrants' agency, dignity, personhood, and vulnerability. As the EU's migration and asylum policies set the parameters for the governance of forced migration and access to asylum in the Member States, they also provide framings for the practical encounters between asylum seekers and the migration regime. These framings legitimise certain approaches to the management of asylum migration and the related interpretations of international human rights treaties both in the Member States and in the EU. By examining how migrants and their encounters with the EU are discussed and represented in the New Pact, we join the critical scholarship that has questioned the EU's supposed turn towards a more humane approach to migration. Examining the official voice of the EU, we conduct a critical policy analysis with a focus on terminology and framing, exploring three major frames through which the New Pact characterises migrants as part of its attempt to transform European asylum and migration governance. These frames relate to human classification, spatial coordination, and temporal control, each of which is linked to the management of encounters between migrants and the migration regime. We conclude by discussing what the New Pact's framing reveals about the EU's approaches to human vulnerability, dignity, agency, and (de)valued personhood.
{"title":"Devaluing personhood: The framing of migrants in the EU's new pact on migration and asylum","authors":"Jouni Häkli, Gintarė Kudžmaitė, Kirsi Pauliina Kallio","doi":"10.1111/tran.12676","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12676","url":null,"abstract":"The latest EU policy initiative to regulate migration to the European Union is called the New Pact on Migration and Asylum. Compared with previous policies, the New Pact promotes and normalises multiple procedures that can have far-reaching consequences on migrants' agency, dignity, personhood, and vulnerability. As the EU's migration and asylum policies set the parameters for the governance of forced migration and access to asylum in the Member States, they also provide framings for the practical encounters between asylum seekers and the migration regime. These framings legitimise certain approaches to the management of asylum migration and the related interpretations of international human rights treaties both in the Member States and in the EU. By examining how migrants and their encounters with the EU are discussed and represented in the New Pact, we join the critical scholarship that has questioned the EU's supposed turn towards a more humane approach to migration. Examining the official voice of the EU, we conduct a critical policy analysis with a focus on terminology and framing, exploring three major frames through which the New Pact characterises migrants as part of its attempt to transform European asylum and migration governance. These frames relate to human classification, spatial coordination, and temporal control, each of which is linked to the management of encounters between migrants and the migration regime. We conclude by discussing what the New Pact's framing reveals about the EU's approaches to human vulnerability, dignity, agency, and (de)valued personhood.","PeriodicalId":48278,"journal":{"name":"Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers","volume":"2 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2024-02-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139768811","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}
Encounters with, within and between digital technologies have become characteristic of life in the contemporary moment. This is, often, no different for displaced individuals seeking asylum across European states. Smartphones have become part of the everyday ‘doing’ of life for individuals governed through asylum systems which now includes routinely encountering the state. Whilst smartphones are commonly said to offer the promised affordances of increased connection or communication, this paper aims to explore how everyday encounters with the UK asylum state fall short of these imagined expectations. In its place, the paper identifies how a series of ongoing (non)encounters—encounters that fail to manifest in expected ways; characterised by pauses, delays or voids—become characteristic of the everyday experience of being a digitally connected asylum seeker in the UK. Drawing upon a year-long ethnographic research project with people actively seeking asylum in the UK between 2022 and 2023, this paper thus explores how the increased uptake of smartphone affordances within the UK asylum system contributes to the ongoing administration of state slow violence: experienced as exhaustion through everyday digital (non)encounters. Developing the concept of the (non)encounter for geographic research, this paper outlines how forms of dis/connection become characteristic of the state encounter for asylum-seeking individuals. These modes of dis/connection are traced as slow violence along the contours of neoliberalisation and hostile assemblages of asylum governance within the UK context.
{"title":"Everyday digital dis/connection: Locating slow violence in (non)encounters with the UK asylum state","authors":"Hannah Morgan","doi":"10.1111/tran.12674","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12674","url":null,"abstract":"Encounters with, within and between digital technologies have become characteristic of life in the contemporary moment. This is, often, no different for displaced individuals seeking asylum across European states. Smartphones have become part of the everyday ‘doing’ of life for individuals governed through asylum systems which now includes routinely encountering the state. Whilst smartphones are commonly said to offer the promised affordances of increased connection or communication, this paper aims to explore how everyday encounters with the UK asylum state fall short of these imagined expectations. In its place, the paper identifies how a series of ongoing (non)encounters—encounters that fail to manifest in expected ways; characterised by pauses, delays or voids—become characteristic of the everyday experience of being a digitally connected asylum seeker in the UK. Drawing upon a year-long ethnographic research project with people actively seeking asylum in the UK between 2022 and 2023, this paper thus explores how the increased uptake of smartphone affordances within the UK asylum system contributes to the ongoing administration of state slow violence: experienced as exhaustion through everyday digital (non)encounters. Developing the concept of the (non)encounter for geographic research, this paper outlines how forms of dis/connection become characteristic of the state encounter for asylum-seeking individuals. These modes of dis/connection are traced as slow violence along the contours of neoliberalisation and hostile assemblages of asylum governance within the UK context.","PeriodicalId":48278,"journal":{"name":"Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2024-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139768994","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}
Zena Agha, James Esson, Mark Griffiths, Mikko Joronen
This commentary addresses three objectives: (1) to situate and contextualise the ongoing military assault on Gaza within longer colonial histories in Palestine; (2) to collate resources that can equip geographers—specialist and non-specialist, academic and non-academic—with resources to build decolonial politics on Palestine–Israel; and (3) to contribute to discussions on what we, as geographers, can do to support Palestinian calls for liberation. These objectives are informed by a strong conviction that now is not a time for equivocation or silence. Palestinians, both in Palestine and in exile, need robust support and solidarity. This commentary offers one example of the form this support and solidarity can take in the context of academia. It does so by calling forth our discipline's plural and deep commitment to justice and thoroughgoing critique of the deleterious power structures and colonial legacies that have brought us to this current moment of crisis in Palestine.
{"title":"Gaza: A decolonial geography","authors":"Zena Agha, James Esson, Mark Griffiths, Mikko Joronen","doi":"10.1111/tran.12675","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12675","url":null,"abstract":"This commentary addresses three objectives: (1) to situate and contextualise the ongoing military assault on Gaza within longer colonial histories in Palestine; (2) to collate resources that can equip geographers—specialist and non-specialist, academic and non-academic—with resources to build decolonial politics on Palestine–Israel; and (3) to contribute to discussions on what we, as geographers, can do to support Palestinian calls for liberation. These objectives are informed by a strong conviction that now is not a time for equivocation or silence. Palestinians, both in Palestine and in exile, need robust support and solidarity. This commentary offers one example of the form this support and solidarity can take in the context of academia. It does so by calling forth our discipline's plural and deep commitment to justice and thoroughgoing critique of the deleterious power structures and colonial legacies that have brought us to this current moment of crisis in Palestine.","PeriodicalId":48278,"journal":{"name":"Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers","volume":"24 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2024-02-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139768804","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}
Spain's berry industry relies on the agricultural labour of both local and seasonal migrant workers. A significant part of this migrant workforce comprises Moroccan mothers who leave their children with relatives in order to perform this wage labour. The bilateral recruitment regime favours the employment of Moroccan women with children for this labour to ensure that workers return home at the end of the harvesting season. Drawing on multi-site ethnographic research in Spain and Morocco, this study revealed the effects of this bilateral labour regime on the intimate lives of migrant workers. We argue that the geopolitical prescriptions of this labour migration regime, along with the working and living conditions of migrant workers in Huelva, result in experiences of intimate liminality. We examined these experiences by exploring: (1) how the role of female workers as mothers becomes liminal as transnational labour agreements marginalise and outsource care obligations, (2) how governmental neglect of migrant workers' occupational health exposes them to reproductive health risks and (3) how this neglect places them in a liminal space in terms of access to healthcare, and (4) how, despite their liminality, migrant workers contest precarious conditions through everyday solidarity practices. We advance a feminist approach to liminality, emphasising the importance of an embodied, intersectional, and multiscalar perspective.
{"title":"Intimate liminality in Spain's berry industry","authors":"Nora Komposch, Carolin Schurr, Angels Escriva","doi":"10.1111/tran.12673","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12673","url":null,"abstract":"Spain's berry industry relies on the agricultural labour of both local and seasonal migrant workers. A significant part of this migrant workforce comprises Moroccan mothers who leave their children with relatives in order to perform this wage labour. The bilateral recruitment regime favours the employment of Moroccan women with children for this labour to ensure that workers return home at the end of the harvesting season. Drawing on multi-site ethnographic research in Spain and Morocco, this study revealed the effects of this bilateral labour regime on the intimate lives of migrant workers. We argue that the geopolitical prescriptions of this labour migration regime, along with the working and living conditions of migrant workers in Huelva, result in experiences of intimate liminality. We examined these experiences by exploring: (1) how the role of female workers as mothers becomes liminal as transnational labour agreements marginalise and outsource care obligations, (2) how governmental neglect of migrant workers' occupational health exposes them to reproductive health risks and (3) how this neglect places them in a liminal space in terms of access to healthcare, and (4) how, despite their liminality, migrant workers contest precarious conditions through everyday solidarity practices. We advance a feminist approach to liminality, emphasising the importance of an embodied, intersectional, and multiscalar perspective.","PeriodicalId":48278,"journal":{"name":"Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers","volume":"32 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2024-01-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139590471","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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