Anna J Secor
Durham University, Geography, Faculty Member
- Modern Turkey, Geography, Gender, Political Geography, Social Theory, Psychoanalysis, and 21 morePsychogeography, Veiling and Embodiment, Gender and Sexualities, Transnational Feminisms, Women and Political Islam, Postcolonial Theory, Gender and Citizenship, Feminist Methodologies, Gender Studies, Migration Studies, Urban Geography, Geopolitics, Civil Society, Kurdish Studies, Istanbul, Citizenship identities, Citizenship and Identity, Gilles Deleuze, Critical Theory, New Materialism, and Turkish Studiesedit
- I am a political and cultural geographer working on questions of space, politics, and difference.edit
The aim of this essayistoexplorethe political and ethical potential of (re)birthing through Barad'sc onceptualisation of transmateriality. This article puts Barad'st hought on entanglement, emergence,and responsibility... more
The aim of this essayistoexplorethe political and ethical potential of (re)birthing through Barad'sc onceptualisation of transmateriality. This article puts Barad'st hought on entanglement, emergence,and responsibility into conversation with other work in feminist philosophy and psychoanalysis that has grappled with questions of the maternal, birthing, and ethics. On the one hand,this encounter suggests that there are other ways of posing questionsofseparation,responsibility, and power through the maternal that might challenge aspects of Barad'stelling. But at the same time, by bringing Barad'sthought into these conversations, Is how how Barad'st ranspositions of (re)birthing havet he potential to radically reopen and trans*figurefeministethics and politics via amore dispersed, immoderate, and ultimately queer perspectiveonhow the ethics that inheres in the coming into (non)being of the world.
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T he theme of this issue, “Gendered and Sexual Mobilities,” opens onto several possibilities regarding the significance of mobility for our understanding of difference—gendered and sexual difference, to be sure, but also questions of... more
T he theme of this issue, “Gendered and Sexual Mobilities,” opens onto several possibilities regarding the significance of mobility for our understanding of difference—gendered and sexual difference, to be sure, but also questions of race, class, religion, and ethnicity. Drawing on the articles in this issue, I will discuss three tacks one can take in approaching questions ofmobility and difference. This is not an exhaustive typology of approaches to mobility and difference, of course, but a heuristic for understanding the ways that these four articles contribute to this field. First, mobility can call subjects into question, canmark them as different and dangerous and therefore potential objects of surveillance and regulatory intervention. As Tim Cresswell (2006) argues, mobile peoples (such as nomads, Roma, Jews, traveling performers, migrants, and refugees) have historically been cast as threatening to the established social, economic, political, and moral orders of a place. In t...
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This article argues for an understanding of material geographies as invested with an unconscious dimension. I put forward the notion of spacetimeunconscious not as an inverse, double, or 'other' to Karen Barad's concept of... more
This article argues for an understanding of material geographies as invested with an unconscious dimension. I put forward the notion of spacetimeunconscious not as an inverse, double, or 'other' to Karen Barad's concept of spacetimematter, but as a supplement. Manifesting the spacetimeunconscious through the technique of montage, I draw together a range of phenomena, from the icing of water and the flashing of lightning to the awakenings of traumatised and displaced subjects. Across these juxtaposed parts, I argue that the unfolding of space and time responds to the enigmatic, irreducible message of the unconscious in the real. Spacetimeunconscious arrives as the ambassador of an unknown knowledge remembered foror in the place ofa forgetful substance: water, dreamer, or electron. In an echo of the analytic method, I use montage to create generative connections, discontinuities, and instabilities between events, poetry, literature, and film, in the interstices of which the spacetimeunconscious may make an appearance.
Research Interests: Psychoanalysis, Cultural Geography, Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud, Psychoanalytic Geography, and 13 moreGeographies of Displacement, Montage, Spatial Theory, Topology (Psychology), Geopoetics, New Materialism, Unconscious, Karen Barad, Elemental Geographies, New Materialisms, Feminist new materialism, Creative Geography, and Geographies of Trauma
The aim of this essayistoexplorethe political and ethical potential of (re)birthing through Barad'sc onceptualisation of transmateriality. This article puts Barad'st hought on entanglement, emergence,and responsibility into conversation... more
The aim of this essayistoexplorethe political and ethical potential of (re)birthing through Barad'sc onceptualisation of transmateriality. This article puts Barad'st hought on entanglement, emergence,and responsibility into conversation with other work in feminist philosophy and psychoanalysis that has grappled with questions of the maternal, birthing, and ethics. On the one hand,this encounter suggests that there are other ways of posing questionsofseparation,responsibility, and power through the maternal that might challenge aspects of Barad'stelling. But at the same time, by bringing Barad'sthought into these conversations, Is how how Barad'st ranspositions of (re)birthing havet he potential to radically reopen and trans*figurefeministethics and politics via amore dispersed, immoderate, and ultimately queer perspectiveonhow the ethics that inheres in the coming into (non)being of the world.
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The concept of encounter has long been central to a cosmopolitan ethos in which coming together in urban public space is expected to yield tolerance and pluralism. More recently scholars have reworked this concept to account for not only... more
The concept of encounter has long been central to a cosmopolitan ethos in which coming together in urban public space is expected to yield tolerance and pluralism. More recently scholars have reworked this concept to account for not only what is potentially transformative in encounters but also how encounters
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Trauma does not have a single definition. Within Western paradigms, across humanities and social sciences, it has largely been characterized through temporal and spatial dislocation. Critical studies of trauma, however, suggest that such... more
Trauma does not have a single definition. Within Western paradigms, across humanities and social sciences, it has largely been characterized through temporal and spatial dislocation. Critical studies of trauma, however, suggest that such framings of rupture, catastrophe, and mass displacement can obscure longer term and structural forms of violence, such as colonialism and gender-based violence. This article explores the displacement, emplacement, and transitivity of trauma through the process of refugee resettlement. It is part of a broader qualitative study that traces how trauma concepts and practices are mobilized in the process of refugee resettlement, specifically for Iraqis who are resettled in the United States. This article argues that trauma is neither a one-time event that is endlessly relived and reactivated in identical episodes nor does trauma emplace a singular geography. Rather, trauma can be understood as a set of serial emplacements and displacements across multiple sites, in our case transnationally. Apart from the distress and geopolitics of war, securitized migration policies produce trauma for people who have been displaced. This trauma of family separation, however, should not be regarded merely as an extension of war-making but as an additional manifestation produced by the global refugee regime.
This study takes a critical perspective on the making of sectarian difference and Alevi precarity in contemporary Turkey. Drawing on our research from 2013 to 2016, we present an analysis of stories and conversations that took place... more
This study takes a critical perspective on the making of sectarian difference and Alevi precarity in contemporary Turkey. Drawing on our research from 2013 to 2016, we present an analysis of stories and conversations that took place amongst Alevi and Sunni focus group participants, primarily in Istanbul. These conversations illustrate how sectarian difference can be made in the relations between neighbors as differences become coded as sectarian and taken up within systems of power and domination. At the same time, our research also shows how, in the entangled relations between neighbors, questions of ethics and mutual responsibility arise, though these relations sometimes become uneasy or even unbearable. Finally, we show how the question of "knowing" difference is taken up within a powerladen discourse of sectarianism, one that is tied to the history of Alevis (and others) in Turkey while also extending well beyond this context.
The concept of encounter has long been central to a cosmopolitan ethos in which coming together in urban public space is expected to yield tolerance and pluralism. More recently scholars have reworked this concept to account for not only... more
The concept of encounter has long been central to a cosmopolitan ethos in which coming together in urban public space is expected to yield tolerance and pluralism. More recently scholars have reworked this concept to account for not only what is potentially transformative in encounters but also how encounters
How do the lost futures of forced displacement converge with the impasse of being resettled to a "post-future" society such as the U.S.? Based on interviews conducted between 2016 and 2019 with resettlement agents, service providers and... more
How do the lost futures of forced displacement converge with the impasse of being resettled to a "post-future" society such as the U.S.? Based on interviews conducted between 2016 and 2019 with resettlement agents, service providers and Iraqis resettled in the U.S., we argue that the condemnation of "expectations" (that is, realistic hope) coupled with the demand for refugees' gratitude means that Iraqis resettled to the U.S. are asked to sustain a "hope against hope" for the fullness of American futurity, even in the face of its collapse. We argue that this prescribed structure of feeling distorts the affective realities of those for whom resettlement has meant at once the loss of past futures (e.g. professional qualifications, career trajectories, social status, or intergenerational cycles of care) and the running aground of capacities for futurity-especially as these capacities are bound up with transnationally stretched and reconfigured familial relations. What is at stake is the recognition of the crisis of futurability in the spacetime of resettlement and the rightfulness of refugee expectations for a more humane and fulfilling resettlement.
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In this brief editorial, we chart the past and future of the journal cultural geographies as we launch our 25th volume. On a daring course, we seek to publish the most creative cultural work, and here suggest what that may include.
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This study takes a critical perspective on the making of sectarian difference and Alevi precarity in contemporary Turkey. Drawing on our research from 2013 to 2016, we present an analysis of stories and conversations that took place... more
This study takes a critical perspective on the making of sectarian difference and Alevi precarity in contemporary Turkey. Drawing on our research from 2013 to 2016, we present an analysis of stories and conversations that took place amongst Alevi and Sunni focus group participants, primarily in Istanbul. These conversations illustrate how sectarian difference can be made in the relations between neighbors as differences become coded as sectarian and taken up within systems of power and domination. At the same time, our research also shows how, in the entangled relations between neighbors, questions of ethics and mutual responsibility arise, though these relations sometimes become uneasy or even unbearable. Finally, we show how the question of “knowing” difference is taken up within a power-laden discourse of sectarianism, one that is tied to the history of Alevis (and others) in Turkey while also extending well beyond this context.
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How do the lost futures of forced displacement converge with the impasse of being resettled to a “post-future” society such as the U.S.? Based on interviews conducted between 2016 and 2019 with resettlement agents, service providers and... more
How do the lost futures of forced displacement converge with the impasse of being resettled to a “post-future” society such as the U.S.? Based on interviews conducted between 2016 and 2019 with resettlement agents, service providers and Iraqis resettled in the U.S., we argue that the condemnation of “expectations” (that is, realistic hope) coupled with the demand for refugees’ gratitude means that Iraqis resettled to the U.S. are asked to sustain a “hope against hope” for the fullness of American futurity, even in the face of its collapse. We argue that this prescribed structure of feeling distorts the affective realities of those for whom resettlement has meant at once the loss of past futures (e.g. professional qualifications, career trajectories, social status, or intergenerational cycles of care) and the running aground of capacities for futurity – especially as these capacities are bound up with transnationally stretched and reconfigured familial relations. What is at stake is ...
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In this commentary, we respond to Derek Ruez and Daniel Cockayne’s article ‘Feeling Otherwise: Ambivalent Affects and the Politics of Critique in Geography’. We do so by picking up ambivalence—or more precisely, ambivalence about... more
In this commentary, we respond to Derek Ruez and Daniel Cockayne’s article ‘Feeling Otherwise: Ambivalent Affects and the Politics of Critique in Geography’. We do so by picking up ambivalence—or more precisely, ambivalence about ambivalence—as a tool with which Ruez and Cockayne leave us. We find this tool somewhat difficult to grasp, but we understand this as part of its design. Ambivalence undoes the subject’s mastery. In doing so, we find that an airing of ambivalence gives other kinds of entangled, indeterminate, and unknowing relations room to breathe.
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This paper reflects on the status of ‘negativity’ in contemporary social and geographical thought. Based on a panel discussion held at the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting 2021, each contributor discusses what negativity... more
This paper reflects on the status of ‘negativity’ in contemporary social and geographical thought. Based on a panel discussion held at the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting 2021, each contributor discusses what negativity means to them, and considers its various legacies and potential future trajectories. Along the way, the contributors offer ways of attending to negative spaces (voids, abysses, absences), affects (vulnerabilities, sad passions, incapacities, mortality) and politics (impasses, refusals, irreparabilities). However, rather than defining negativity narrowly, the paper stays with the diversity of work on negativity being undertaken by geographers and other scholars, discussing how varying perspectives expand or dismantle particular elements within spatial theory. Collectively, the contributors argue for paying attention to negativity as the faltering, failure or impossibility of relations between body and world, thus situating it in conversation with re...
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This paper aims to unlock the potential for the politicization of art in the age of the meme. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s ideas, we suggest that technologies of viral reproduction create the tools and conditions for blasting the present... more
This paper aims to unlock the potential for the politicization of art in the age of the meme. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s ideas, we suggest that technologies of viral reproduction create the tools and conditions for blasting the present moment out of the oppressive vice of classical historiography. While fascism retrenches on “art for art’s sake” in defense of principles of origin, authenticity, and mastery, we envision a politicization of the art of the meme not simply through content but through practice. This paper attempts to engage in this practice through creative invention. We work across two cases, one “real” (Richard Spencer gets punched) and one of our own creation: the viral life and death of Quodlibet, an anachronistic DJ. Our wager is that the blast of now-time that the meme unleashes can be used to lay bare the myth of mastery and open a space for new subjects, forms, and practices. At the same time, we show how the meme is prone to boomerang effects and reterritorializations that can reverse back into fascist aestheticism, the catastrophic status quo, and the dominance of the market. Playfully and without self-seriousness, our goal in this paper is to open the image sphere: to slip into the Internet’s dream house and rummage its drawers for a revolutionary politics.
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The relation between difference and space has long been and continues to be an animating problem in theoretical and political conversations across the discipline of geography, including in much recent work on encounter. In this paper, we... more
The relation between difference and space has long been and continues to be an animating problem in theoretical and political conversations across the discipline of geography, including in much recent work on encounter. In this paper, we make the case for the value of a less explored angle on space in Deleuze's work, which we call the topologies of space-as-difference. We highlight the Möbius strip as a central figure in his ontological system, and we show the significance of this topological structure both for understanding key Deleuzian concepts, such as the virtual and actual, and for understanding space and difference in productive ways. We demonstrate this by showing how Deleuzian topologies of difference enable us to further theorise the encounter-a key theme in recent geographical scholarship-as spatial and embodied, connecting up with material feminism and work on the skin, touch, and breath. We suggest that Deleuze's concept of space-as-difference thus contributes to the intensification of relational and topological approaches to space that are currently shaping the discipline. K E Y W O R D S body, Deleuze, difference, encounter, materialism, space, topology
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In this paper we map out what we are calling a " geopolitics of trauma " by examining the role of trauma in transnational refugee regimes and the individualisation of geopolitical relations through mental health... more
In this paper we map out what we are calling a " geopolitics of trauma " by examining the role of trauma in transnational refugee regimes and the individualisation of geopolitical relations through mental health diagnosis and service provision. Focusing on one site of entry into the international regime of refugee administration , we present findings from fieldwork that we conducted in August, 2015 in Turkey with NGOs and IGOs involved in the protection, mental health and psy-chosocial service provision, and resettlement of refugees. The findings that we present demonstrate the challenges of refugee care and management on the front lines in Turkey and the significance of mental health diagnosis, treatment and documentation in the early stages of refugee administration. We suggest that practices of refugee screening and resettlement are imbued with traumatic stressors and trace how trauma intersects with the administration of refugees in different sites and at different times. We argue that the protracted situation of refugees in Turkey (many of whom will wait 8 years for their Refugee Status Determination interview) and the multiple interviews and demands for documentation through which a displaced person applies for refugee status and third-country resettlement become sites of ongoing traumatisation for the refugee subject. Further, in the practices of screening and documentation, we can trace the medicalisation of the refugee subject as not only a question of care but also a practice of legibility on which the state and international organisations base their decisions about inclusion and exclusion. The geopolitics of trauma thus emerges not only in cartographies of war, displacement and resettlement, but also in the minute details and perfor-mative demands of the refugee determination and resettlement process.
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This paper explores the affective making of geopolitics through an analysis of how long-term residents of Turkey narrate their encounters with displaced people from Syria. Situating these narratives in relation to Turkey’s policies and... more
This paper explores the affective making of geopolitics through an analysis of how long-term residents of Turkey narrate their encounters with displaced people from Syria. Situating these narratives in relation to Turkey’s policies and practices concerning the Syrian war and Syrian refugees, our project asks: What are the affective dimensions of encountering Syrians in Turkey and how do these encounters unfold an embodied geopolitics on the street and in neighborhoods? Our analysis of focus group conversations (conducted between 2014 and 2016 in Istanbul, Konya, and Malatya) centers on three dimensions of the affective geopolitics of the Syrian refugee crisis in Turkey. First, we draw out feelings of threatening proximity, in which the denigration of Syrian bodies and lives converges with the desire for a spatial organization of bodies that would put literal boundaries between “us” and “them.” Second, we present how the Adalet and Kalkınma Partisi’s geopolitical orientation towards ...
Research Interests: Geography, Political Geography and Geopolitics, Ethics, Feminist Theory, Political Theory, and 15 moreRefugee Studies, Geopolitics, Focus Groups, Jacques Lacan, Cultural Encounters, Political Geography, Modern Turkey, Feminist Geography, Anxiety, Refugees, Feminist Geopolitics, Refugee, Feminist Geographies, ANXIETY, and Feminist Political Geography
Abstract The term post-Islamism has been broadly applied to suggest that we are witnessing a new phase of Islamist politics in which the goal is not to make the state Islamic but to change the lived experiences of Islam. Whether... more
Abstract The term post-Islamism has been broadly applied to suggest that we are witnessing a new phase of Islamist politics in which the goal is not to make the state Islamic but to change the lived experiences of Islam. Whether post-Islamism applies to the Turkish case has been a matter of much debate. We approach post-Islamism in Turkey using a feminist geographic analytic that shifts our focus from formal politics to the embodied and the everyday. Drawing upon eight focus groups with men and women in Istanbul in 2013 and 2014, we analyze discussions of education reform, the possibility of religious politics and religious difference to demonstrate how the premises of post-Islamism depend upon the (often unsuccessful) papering over of multiplicity. We argue that everyday, embodied solutions to the questions of post-Islamism often undermine the very categories (state, society, religion and secularism) upon which the post-Islamic problematic is based.
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The concept of difference has long been integral to geographical thought. However, it is rare for geographers to consider precisely what difference is, or how it functions, and there are several contrasting traditions through which... more
The concept of difference has long been integral to geographical thought. However, it is rare for geographers to consider precisely what difference is, or how it functions, and there are several contrasting traditions through which difference is understood. We argue that geographers could helpfully extend their theorizations of difference through Deleuze’s philosophy of ‘difference-in-itself’. We examine the value of a ‘difference-in-itself’ that views difference as generative, originary, and primary, in productive tension with conceptions of difference that tend to, purposefully or otherwise, subordinate difference to presupposed identity-based, representational categories, or dialectical forms of contradiction and opposition.
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The question of the veil and what it conceals has long been a trope within orientalist discourses. In our research with veiled women in Turkey, we find that the veil continues to work as an ambivalent signifier through which women... more
The question of the veil and what it conceals has long been a trope within orientalist discourses. In our research with veiled women in Turkey, we find that the veil continues to work as an ambivalent signifier through which women position themselves within both Islamic and secular modernity in Turkey. We find that women who cover in a controversial style that has become popular in Turkey since the 1980s (what we are calling veiling fashion, or tesettür fashion) deploy the figure of the more completely veiled woman (those ...
Research Interests: Art and Modern Turkey
Research Interests: Sociology, Human Geography, Political Geography and Geopolitics, Political Science, Religious Pluralism, and 15 moreTurkey, Politics of Secularism, Islam in Turkey, Political Geography, Secularisms and Secularities, Modern Turkey, Minorities in Turkey, Public Space, Pluralism, Geography of Religion, Alevism and Sunnism in Turkey, Secularism, Islam and Secularism, Public spaces, and Istanbul
This paper aims to bring clarity to the term topology as it has been deployed in human geography. We summarize the insights that geographers have garnered from thinking topologically about space and power. We find that many deployments of... more
This paper aims to bring clarity to the term topology as it has been deployed in human geography. We summarize the insights that geographers have garnered from thinking topologically about space and power. We find that many deployments of topology both overstretch topology’s conceptual merit and limit its insights for spatial thinking. We show how topology, with its structuralist and modernist baggage, requires some theoretical reworking to be put to work by poststructuralist geographers. Our purpose is not to consolidate a specific topological approach for geographers, but to call for an ongoing consideration of what topology offers poststructuralist spatial theories.
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In this paper we present an argument for a psychoanalytic understanding of space. While Freud struggled to move away from his own early prepsychoanalytic attempts at mapping the psyche through cerebral localization, he nevertheless found... more
In this paper we present an argument for a psychoanalytic understanding of space. While Freud struggled to move away from his own early prepsychoanalytic attempts at mapping the psyche through cerebral localization, he nevertheless found himself compelled to use spatial language and topographical models throughout his career. In his ambivalence, Freud emphasized that the space of the psyche should be read as no more than metaphorical. We argue that the topographical models that Freud struggled with were constrained by the metrics of Euclidean space. The psyche is spatial, just not in topographical terms. For Jacques Lacan many of the psychic operations that Freud described (such as the transference) are better understood in terms of topological operations. Lacan uses such figures as the torus, the cross-cap, and the Möbius strip to demonstrate how the subject is formed through internal exclusions and external inclusions. Using Freud's famous case of the Rat Man, we argue that th...
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Aiming to bring local context into studies of social capital, our study uses samples of 4006 individuals in Istanbul and 3476 in Moscow using a comparable questionnaire. The stratification of each city’s neighbourhoods on the basis of... more
Aiming to bring local context into studies of social capital, our study uses samples of 4006 individuals in Istanbul and 3476 in Moscow using a comparable questionnaire. The stratification of each city’s neighbourhoods on the basis of socio-economic characteristics provided the basis for the sampling. Using a multilevel modelling procedure, we show both that locality matters ( neighbourhood effect proved significant) and that social capital may indeed be constituted in particular ways in illiberal democracies such as Russia and Turkey. Social and political trust are frequently thought to contribute to social capital – that is, to provide social resources upon which individuals or groups may draw for their political efficacy. Trust in fellow citizens in Istanbul exhibits a positive relationship to associational activities (joining clubs etc), while in Moscow social trust can be explained predominantly in terms of (lower) socio-economic status. At the same time, important similarities...
What does it mean to claim, as French protesters did in 2004, that the headscarf is not a sign? Drawing on our focus group interviews with covered women in Turkey, we examine this proposition theoretically and empirically. Regarding the... more
What does it mean to claim, as French protesters did in 2004, that the headscarf is not a sign? Drawing on our focus group interviews with covered women in Turkey, we examine this proposition theoretically and empirically. Regarding the headscarf as a thing, rather than an object or a sign, opens up an important critique of how the headscarf has been cast within public discourse. The headscarf, we argue, is one element of an assemblage oriented towards the ethical problematic of Islamic modesty. By engaging the claim that the headscarf is not a sign, we move beyond the logic of the sign and towards an understanding of the veil that is attuned to the protests of those who wear it.
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Abstract While the academic focus on Muslim women’s dress and comportment has enriched our understanding of the multifaceted formation of pious femininities, there has been much less consideration of the embodied practices of Muslim men.... more
Abstract While the academic focus on Muslim women’s dress and comportment has enriched our understanding of the multifaceted formation of pious femininities, there has been much less consideration of the embodied practices of Muslim men. What work does exist on Middle Eastern men’s piety, sexuality, and everyday conduct too often falls back on established categories, such as traditional, Western, or Islamic identities. Yet it is crucial not only to critically examine how we conceptualize masculinity in the Middle East, but also to recognize the political and cultural importance of how masculinities are enacted through everyday practices. In this article, we argue that questions of dress and bodily practice are relevant to an understanding of how young devout Muslim men navigate the complex spatiality of piety, morality, and masculinity in contemporary urban Turkey. Drawing on fieldwork with young devout men in Konya and Istanbul, we illustrate how multiple, competing devout Muslim masculinities participate in the production of uneven moral geographies in these two very different Turkish cities. Further, we find that the possibility of different ways to enact devout masculinity opens questions about the universality of Islamic knowledge and practice. We suggest that the embodied construction and regulation of the looking-desiring nexus tethers male sexual desire to the public performance of Islamic morality. Our intervention is thus to demonstrate how different versions of masculinity and Islamic piety striate the moral geographies of these two Turkish cities, and thereby to further recognition of the contingency and plurality of both masculinity and Islam.
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It is June 2013 at the TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh, Scotland. On the stage there are two chairs. In one, a woman who looks Chinese sits primly in a high collarless shirt and loose pants. In the other chair squats a man who appears... more
It is June 2013 at the TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh, Scotland. On the stage there are two chairs. In one, a woman who looks Chinese sits primly in a high collarless shirt and loose pants. In the other chair squats a man who appears South Asian. He is wearing an Indian kurta pyjama, which consists of a long tunic over loose pants. When he starts speaking, he is speaking Mandarin Chinese. The woman seated next to him translates his words into English with a strong Chinese accent.
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Downloadable (with restrictions)! This paper begins with the question of what about dialectics might be interesting to geographers today. I argue that, for those who are interested in engaging dialectical thought, Slavoj iek's work... more
Downloadable (with restrictions)! This paper begins with the question of what about dialectics might be interesting to geographers today. I argue that, for those who are interested in engaging dialectical thought, Slavoj iek's work offers a productive way of conceptualizing an open ...
Since the 19805, fashionable Islamic dress for women, or tesettur, has become a growing segment of the textile industry in Turkey, yet its meaning and practice remain hotly contested. Through an analysis of the representation of these... more
Since the 19805, fashionable Islamic dress for women, or tesettur, has become a growing segment of the textile industry in Turkey, yet its meaning and practice remain hotly contested. Through an analysis of the representation of these styes in company catalogs and of the ways in which covered women in Turkey view the styles, this article provides insight into how women's fashion and the question of tesettur become negotiable elements of everyday practice. Our analysis shows that while there may be no easy reconciliation between the demands for modesty that underlie tesettur and the spectacle of ever changing fashion, women accept this disjuncture and knowingly engage in a constant mediation between the two.
This paper reflects on the status of 'negativity' in contemporary social and geographical thought. Based on a panel discussion held at the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting 2021, each contributor discusses what negativity... more
This paper reflects on the status of 'negativity' in contemporary social and geographical thought. Based on a panel discussion held at the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting 2021, each contributor discusses what negativity means to them, and considers its various legacies and potential future trajectories. Along the way, the contributors offer ways of attending to negative spaces (voids, abysses, absences), affects (vulnerabilities, sad passions, incapacities, mortality) and politics (impasses, refusals, irreparabilities). However, rather than defining negativity narrowly, the paper stays with the diversity of work on negativity being undertaken by geographers and other scholars, discussing how varying perspectives expand or dismantle particular elements within spatial theory. Collectively, the contributors argue for paying attention to negativity as the faltering, failure or impossibility of relations between body and world, thus situating it in conversation with relational thought, vitalist philosophies and affirmative ethics.
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In this commentary, we respond to Derek Ruez and Daniel Cockayne's article 'Feeling Otherwise: Ambivalent Affects and the Politics of Critique in Geography'. We do so by picking up ambivalence-or more precisely, ambivalence about... more
In this commentary, we respond to Derek Ruez and Daniel Cockayne's article 'Feeling Otherwise: Ambivalent Affects and the Politics of Critique in Geography'. We do so by picking up ambivalence-or more precisely, ambivalence about ambivalence-as a tool with which Ruez and Cockayne leave us. We find this tool somewhat difficult to grasp, but we understand this as part of its design. Ambivalence undoes the subject's mastery. In doing so, we find that an airing of ambivalence gives other kinds of entangled, indeterminate, and unknowing relations room to breathe.
Joel Wainwright's (2008) Decolonizing Development: Colonial Power and the Maya is a carefully crafted history of development in Belize that seeks to explore why this is so. At bottom, Wainwright argues, it is the inevitable... more
Joel Wainwright's (2008) Decolonizing Development: Colonial Power and the Maya is a carefully crafted history of development in Belize that seeks to explore why this is so. At bottom, Wainwright argues, it is the inevitable complicity of the most high-minded practitioners of modern development with capitalism and the territorial state that makes bad things happen to good people. These practitioners include many of the targeted readers of the book, especially researchers and academics.
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Joel Wainwright's (2008) Decolonizing Development: Colonial Power and the Maya is a carefully crafted history of development in Belize that seeks to explore why this is so. At bottom, Wainwright argues, it is the inevitable... more
Joel Wainwright's (2008) Decolonizing Development: Colonial Power and the Maya is a carefully crafted history of development in Belize that seeks to explore why this is so. At bottom, Wainwright argues, it is the inevitable complicity of the most high-minded practitioners of modern development with capitalism and the territorial state that makes bad things happen to good people. These practitioners include many of the targeted readers of the book, especially researchers and academics.