Journeys of resilience: the emotional geographies of refugee women

This article considers the emotional geographies of a highly vulnerable demographic: refugee women. As a marginalised and ontologically fragile group, refugees have developed rich and perceptive insight on space and place, by developing a critical vigilance that reflects forward and back on their life journeys, real and metaphorical. Through participation in a psycho-educational course designed by the author, nine women produced their own images of resilience, in creative exercises that provided ‘landmarks’ of recognition for other participants. Via participation in this temporary ‘community of practice’, therefore, another journey was taken; this article will also consider the epistemology of that itinerary using interdisciplinary insights from geography, cultural studies, cognitive behavioural therapy and gender studies.     

Flirting in the field: shifting positionalities and power relations in innocuous sexualisations of research encounters

In the last few decades, an engaged and sophisticated discussion about the production of data and power relations has developed within feminist methodology. Positionality, i.e. the set of relations constituting informants' and researchers' subject positions, has been widely used as an analytical tool to account for the complicated ways in which data are co-constructed in fieldwork. Based on our own experience of fieldwork conducted in the city of Zurich, however, we argue that sexuality is underrepresented in this debate. First, reflexive writing on fieldwork has been reluctant to consider sexuality as a category in the same way, for instance, as gender or race. Second, even apparently innocuous sexualisations have a considerable effect on the constitution of data and are therefore worth including in the analysis. In this article, we examine how flirtation as a part of the participant–researcher relation has re-shaped the research encounters in our respective research projects. We discuss the complex navigations between conflicting rationales that it entailed for us as researchers, depict the minor and major shifts in positionalities that emerge from the flirtation and examine the reasons why we sometimes embraced flirtation and sometimes rejected it. The objective of the article is to further enrich feminist methodological writing, and to suggest to the reader the potential for including various shades of sexual performances, such as apparently harmless flirtation, into our reflections on data collection.     

Personal,Professional and Academic Journeys to WAC 8

Two PhD students due to attend WAC 8 reflect on what brought them to Kyoto and what they hope to gain from the encounter.     

Multiple Histories: Three Journeys through Academic Records,Medieval Yemen,and Current Anthropology's Encounters with the Past

This chapter sets out to reconsider the interrelation and non-identity between tribal and kinship relations in South-Western Arabia's history through three cumulative methodological steps that are in part inspired by renewed debates on kinship in anthropology, but also by the École des Annales and other historians such as David Sabaean. A first step identifies different legacies of interactions between history and anthropology in the Euro-American academic record after 1945, and specifies their relevance for today. In a next step, prevailing relations between tribal structures and kinship relations will be assessed through a long-distance comparison between the medieval constellations in the Zaydi highlands of Yemen and elsewhere in Asia for an eleventh century time horizon. Thirdly, the outcome of this comparative analysis should then provide some indicators for a fresh assessment of existing source materials through anthropological perspectives, with special emphasis on gender, kinship and hierarchies. The argument concludes with a discussion of “multiple histories”, and how to approach and write them.     

一部闪烁着爱国主义光辉的著作——聂士成与《东游纪程》

《东游纪程》是晚清名将聂士成的力作,书中对东北地区作了全面、科学的考察与记录,是一本颇具价值的军事、历史资料。本通过对此书的介绍,着重对聂士成的爱国主义思想及政治、军事、经济思想进行阐述,对聂士成的军事素养进行评价。     

Perilous Journeys: Visualising the Racialised “Refugee Crisis”

This article explores the benign and malignant power of the visual in the racialised framing of the ongoing “European refugee crisis”. Bringing together literatures on racial discourses, visuality, storytelling and decoloniality for the first time, this paper breaks new ground in our understandings of the political possibilities that visual storytelling offers in shifting “lines of sight” in an increasingly vitriolic anti‐refugee climate. It does this by analysing prominent graphic narratives created by the non‐profit organisation PositiveNegatives, animating the refugee experiences of Syrian men in Scandinavia. We consider the affective engagements that such progressive storytelling promotes and the decolonial potential invested in it, arguing that the modality and content of narratives of this genre offer important scope to provoke encounter and empathy. Contributing to geographies of race, migration, visuality and decoloniality, we suggest that these narratives allow new and gently radical ways of resisting the dehumanising impetus of mainstream media discourses.