MY COVID-19 DIARY

Written in weekly instalments, Michelle Munyikwa's Covid-19 diary reflects upon the experience of an unfolding pandemic from her dual role as a medical trainee and anthropologist living in the United States. Her observations centre on everyday encounters with scenes or objects that reflect the growing crisis, from the absence of masks outside patient rooms to emergent forms of care through telemedicine. The diary follows the author as she experiences grief, ambivalence and disorientation in the first weeks of the pandemic.     

Geographies of Responsibility

Abstract Issues of space, place and politics run deep. There is a long history of the entanglement of the conceptualisation of space and place with the framing of political positions. The injunction to think space relationally is a very general one and, as this collection indicates, can lead in many directions. The particular avenue to be explored in this paper concerns the relationship between identity and responsibility, and the potential geographies of both.     

Geographies of relatedness

This paper explores the analytic purchase and substantive concerns of what I am calling geographies of relatedness . Drawing on recent work in feminist anthropology which has reconsidered kinship as classificatory system and practice, and highlighting the attentiveness to sites, scales and contexts within this work, I suggest ways in which a focus on relatedness may shape approaches to established and emerging matters of concern in human geography. I consider first the foundational status but flexible meaning of 'blood' in kinship thinking, and the ways the flexibility of kinship can be curtailed and its foundational status reinstated in relation to the nation and the state. Second, I consider the geographies of relatedness that are constituted through and practised in the process of establishing degrees of biological connection, delimiting difference, mapping human 'diversity' and defining personal, collective and human origins at different scales and with different effects. A focus on geographies of relatedness, I argue, highlights the ways blood ties or similarly naturalized connections move between and connect categories of relatedness with different sizes, extents and configurations across space, as well as different temporalities. It suggests an alertness to new global mappings of human relatedness and difference and combines a critical attention to ideas of the 'nature' of human reproduction as foundational, original or primal in the natural order of the social, to ideas of 'place of origin': personal, national, ethnic, racialized, universal in their familiar and emergent forms.     

MY COVID-19 DIARY,PART 2

Written in weekly instalments, Michelle Munyikwa's Covid-19 diary reflects upon the experience of an unfolding pandemic from her dual role as a medical trainee and anthropologist living in the United States. In this second instalment of her diary Covid-19 dairy, the author reflects upon ethics, risk, pandemic futures and the murder of George Floyd as the crisis continues in the United States.     

Decolonizing Geographies of Whiteness

Engagement with the study of whiteness is slow within the discipline of geography despite repeated calls for it to be placed on the research agenda, and regardless of a strong heritage of critical “race” and postcolonial scholarship. This paper considers this reticence, and the problems inherent in Whiteness Studies more generally. It then offers examples from inner Sydney, Australia, that avoid some of the more pressing shortcomings of studying whiteness. By prizing open the essentializing bounds of hegemonic ethnicity, this paper identifies whiteness as context‐specific, processural and contestable.     

Geographies of Hardy's Wessex

The novels of Thomas Hardy represent a number of different “geographies”—the means by which their various characters and narrators explore places and come to know them. The “geographies” of the characters and narrators in Tess of the d'Urbervilles and The return of the native are examined in this essay. It shows that the “primal” geography of the youthful Tess, and of those who live on Egdon Heath, is represented as circular, and is constructed by more senses than the visual, while that of the reader is linear and wholly visual in its preoccupations with geology, cartography and the picturesque; and it examines the destruction of the “primal” geography in Tess, as she becomes an itinerant labourer. The task of the narrators, in their attempt to mediate between the two geographies, is considered, and it is suggested that this attempt is bound to fail, because the division between them is founded in an idea of history, as of a moment of primal unity and its subsequent differentiation, which is not perceived as open to question.     

Geographies of the camp

Facing the current growing global archipelago of encampments – including concentration, detention, transit, identification, refugee, military and training camps, this article is a geographical reflection on ‘the camp’, as a modern institution and as a spatial bio-political technology. In particular, it is about the past and present camp geographies and the apparatus of dispositifs that make them an ever-present spatial formation in the management of custody and care characterizing many authoritarian regimes as well as many contemporary democracies. I especially focus on the works of Paul Gilroy, Giorgio Agamben and Reviel Netz to discuss camp spatialities, the normalization of camp geographies, and related biopolitics. In doing so, I advance the argument to resist on present-day proliferating manifestations of camp and ‘camp thinking’, calling for the incorporation of ‘camp studies’ into the broader field of political geography to considering the geographies of the camp as constitutive hubs of much broader, modern geo-political economies.