Care as mundane politics: contested familial refugee lives in Finland

Refugees often find themselves in challenging positions regarding their familial relations while seeking asylum. Whereas transnational human rights agreements and institutions identify families as units of protection and sources of care with variable compositions, many immigration policies and humanitarian practices regard familial relations also problematic and interpret refugees’ rights to family life narrowly. This leaves refugees’ attempts to draw from and manage their transnational family lives poorly recognized and supported. In result, refugees may end up in paradoxical subject positions of having to give up and take responsibility for their families, with their own experiences and understanding of familial life remaining secondary. These contradictions are heightened when familial concerns are among the reasons for seeking asylum, involving caring and uncaring relations. In this article, we analyze familiality as a form of mundane care politics in refugee situations, based on our study with asylum seekers and refugees in Finland.     

Earth politics: Territory and the subterranean – Introduction to the special issue

The special issue Earth Politics: Territory and the Subterranean explores how and to what political and economic effects people have territorialized the underground. Through studies of a range of activities – from scientific exploration to 3-D geological modeling to laboratory analysis to recreational caving – authors in the issue challenge the idea that the subterranean is a world apart, detached from the sociopolitical worlds of the surface, and instead focus on the complicated relations and processes that remake and weave meaning into often unseen depths. In this introductory article, we situate the issue within expanding literatures on geological materiality, territorial politics, and vertical/volumetric space, and we discuss two overlapping themes running through the issue's articles: the politics of subterranean knowledge production and the politics of subterranean materialities. We conclude by reflecting on the meaning of ‘earth politics’, emphasizing the injustices that derive from – and are sedimented into – dominant modes of knowing and interacting with the matters of the subsurface.     

Toward a care ethical approach to access to health care in neoliberal times

In December 2017, the Republican-controlled US Congress closed its session by pushing through a comprehensive tax overhaul bill, HR 1. Additional provisions of the ‘must pass’ bill included a last-ditch effort to quash the Affordable Care Act (ACA), otherwise known as Obamacare. In this article, I unpack some of the immediate and long-term net-positive impacts that the ACA has had on access to health care for women, infants, and children in the US while also acknowledging the continued unevenness of health outcomes along race, gender, and income differences. I argue that if we take seriously the potential of a care ethical analysis to respond to neoliberal ethics, then there is a need for a more robust engagement with intersectional analysis in order to address interlocking oppressions that exacerbate ongoing inequalities. By extension, I show how HR 1 clearly highlights the racist, classist, and gendered neoliberal logics that permeate contemporary US political and legislative debates related to health care access, underscoring the uncaring nature of US democracy and making plain a need to ‘care with’ others. I end by posing a set of speculative possibilities, asking what might be possible if we take seriously care and caring relations as fundamental to imagining worlds-otherwise.     

The Abstraction of Care: What Work Counts?

Nurses provide essential health care labor, but their work, a mix of caregiving and clinical expertise, is often undervalued and unacknowledged by health care administrators and the policies and practices that govern health care more broadly. Based on interviews with nurses working in the New York metropolitan area and through pairing feminist political economy with literature on abstraction and politics of the possible, I show that the ways in which nurses’ work is measured creates a value hierarchy of tasks. Examining various tools of measurement, I argue that methods for measuring work are rooted in an historical and continuous hierarchy of what counts as work and what has value. For nurses, these processes obscure the essential care work they perform. I argue that bringing an explicit politics of social reproduction to the politics of measuring and accounting for work makes visible necessary and often‐obscured tasks, spaces, and social relations.     

Vegetal politics: belonging,practices and places

Cultural geography has a long and proud tradition of research into human–plant relations. However, until recently, that tradition has been somewhat disconnected from conceptual advances in the social sciences, even those to which cultural geographers have made significant contributions. With a number of important exceptions, plant studies have been less explicitly part of more-than-human geographies than have animal studies. This special issue aims to redress this gap, recognising plants and their multiple engagements with and beyond humans. Plants are not only fundamental to human survival, they play a key role in many of the most important environmental political issues of the century, including biofuels, carbon economies and food security. In this introduction, we explore themes of belonging, practices and places, as discussed in the contributing papers. Together, the papers suggest new kinds of ‘vegetal politics’, documenting both collaborative and conflictual relations between humans, plants and others. They open up new spaces of political action and subjectivity, challenging political frames that are confined to humans. The papers also raise methodological questions and challenges for future research. This special issue grew out of sessions we organised at the Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting in New York in 2012.     

War 2.0: an analytical framework

Media has always been a critical dimension of politics and of political violence. Information about violence and conflict is disseminated through the media. Media is also a mechanism through which the politics of violence is monitored, represented and interpreted. While the historical relationship between old media and political violence has long been the subject of research and debate, how this relationship is affected by the emergence of digital new media technology warrants further consideration. This development raises several important issues and questions for students of international relations, in particular with respect to how the reconfiguration of the role of media in conflict impacts more broadly on configurations of world politics. This article identifies four critical dimensions of world politics through which to explore this impact: the constitution of power, the configuration of agency, the nature and politics of representation, and the constitution of legitimacy. It argues that the concepts of power, agency, representation and legitimacy provide critical interfaces between media, conflict and world politics. In so doing, the article elucidates the conceptual framework that animates this special issue. Finally, it reflects on how these concepts are engaged in the articles to follow.     

The contested rescaling of economic governance in East Asia: a special issue

The special issue this article opens engages with an apparent conundrum that has often puzzled observers of East Asian politics—why, despite the region's considerable economic integration, multilateral economic governance institutions remain largely underdeveloped. The authors argue that this ‘regionalism problématique’ has led to the neglect of prior and more important questions pertaining to how patterns of economic governance, beyond the national scale, are emerging in East Asia and why. In this special issue, the contributors shift analytic focus onto social and political struggles over the scale and instruments of economic governance in East Asia. The contributions identify and explain the emergence of a wide variety of regional modes of economic governance often neglected by the scholarship or erroneously viewed as stepping stones towards ‘deeper’ multilateralism.     

MacIntyre and Nussbaum on Diversity,Liberalism, and Christianity

This article argues that the politics of difference has been unsuccessful in its attempt to liberate itself from the modern politics of universal dignity and self-determination. As a result, theorists who emphasize difference ultimately must find a way to balance a conception of diversity with that of a universal normative ethics. To make this case, I examine the virtue ethics of Alasdair MacIntyre and Martha Nussbaum as two different examples of this tension, one constructing a particularistic virtue ethics around specific traditions, while the other presents a universalistic virtue ethics around universal human experience, thus serving as an example for how the “right” and “left” engage with diversity. There is a common denominator to the virtue ethics of MacIntyre and Nussbaum in that they both go about this by reconstructing an ethics of character out of elements of Aristotle's ethics of virtue in his Nicomachean Ethics as the basis for a model of pluralism and do so within a modern liberal and hence rational–individualist framework. Both are critical of certain elements of Aristotle's thought, while attempting to recover the “true” essence of Aristotelianism. While those who identify with the different political extremes are diverse, one basic premise is that the former believes in the role of tradition and the values of slow change in dialogue with the past, while the latter advocates the good of all individuals within a state that is blind to differences notwithstanding the practices of the past. Each approach faces a significant weakness: tradition is often unable to recognize that social benefits have often been brought about by modern liberalism's rejection of tradition, while universal human experience tends to forget that universal thinking is not universal but is a liberalization of a particular Christian way of approaching the world.     

Feminist research in online spaces

The Internet is growing in popularity as a research site and is often framed as the next frontier in human subjects research. The opportunities the Internet provides for political organizing, making personal experiences more public, and creating spaces for a variety of voices makes it particularly relevant to feminist geographers and researchers such as ourselves. However, many qualitative researchers approach online research as though the Internet simply archives an abundance of data that is ‘there for the taking.’ Being trained in feminist research methods, we took issue with this approach, yet also encountered challenges when trying to apply feminist practices and ethical perspectives to online research environments. We explore these challenges through a collaborative reflection on our own independent online research experiences. Three themes emerge: (1) interpreting politics and visibility in online spaces, (2) researcher positionality across virtual and material study sites, and (3) subjectivity and power in online research ethics. Reflecting on these themes, we argue that the insights of feminist ethics and a feminist geographical lens are crucial for bringing much-needed reflexivity and reciprocity into online research. Simultaneously, online research opens up exciting new ways of conceptualizing central ideas within feminist research ethics, including politicization, positionality, and power.     

Cultural policies in cities of the ‘global South’: a multi-scalar approach

ABSTRACT

Building on the literature on global cities and on the worlding of cities, the articles in this special issue chart how cities outside Europe and North America try to reinvent and rescale themselves using culture. They suggest that the fabric of urban cultural policy is embedded in multi-scalar power dynamics. First, the contributions in this special issue reveal the importance of circulating standards across borders in structuring narratives about urban history, heritage and identity, in conjunction with local actors’ interests. Second, the diffusion of hegemonic cultural policy models such as the “creative city” leads to logics of exclusion, gentrification, and has been met with resistance, which suggest that these models can be to the detriment of local residents, despite the progressive values they are often claim to promote. Third, this special issue points to the need to rethink the politics of cultural policy mobility and offers conceptual tools such as vernacularization to make sense of the ways in which urban elites navigate, negotiate and take advantage of circulating cultural policy models.     

Australian Foreign Policy under the Abbott Government: Foreign Policy as Domestic Politics?

While foreign policy featured prominently on the Australian political agenda in late 2014, the manner of Australia's engagement with the world challenges the idea of a ‘pivot’ from domestic politics to foreign policy. In particular, the government demonstrated a tendency to prioritise domestic political considerations, in particular public opinion, in its dealings with the outside world. This was evident across a range of issue areas: from the ‘internationalist’ agenda of asylum, climate change and aid to more traditional concerns such as bilateral relations with Indonesia and international security. This article explores these dynamics and asks what implications this has for both Australian foreign policy and theoretical accounts of the role and desirability of public engagement with foreign policy in international relations thought.     

Hegemonic power relations in real practices of spatial planning: the case of Turkey

There is a wide gap between planning ideology and planning practice in some regimes. In planning practice, contextual differences and traditional practices affect urban spatial configurations and their related societal dimensions, and also influence the legislative and administrative systems that dictate the process and production of the built environment. This is linked to situations where hidden practices and power relations among key actors may limit democratic participation in the planning process and challenge ethical practice. This paper focuses on the emerging traditions of planning practice in Turkey. We argue that by understanding the role(s) of the key actors in the process and investigating approval processes in detail, it can become evident that planning ‘on the ground’ is often tokenistic and circumvented by hegemonic power relations and tactical actions. These latter in turn side-step a requirement for democratic participation and encourage a ‘loosening’ of planning ethics.     

Trafficking in women? Or multicultural family? The contextual difference of commodification of intimacy

This article attempts to link commercially arranged cross-border marriages to the discussion of the commodification of intimacy and to explore how a transnational phenomenon is contextualized in national politics. The question of commodification – what can or cannot be assigned economic value – has been a contentious area of intersection between economics and ethics, and intimacy has often been at the heart of the recent debate on commodification. Yet, commercially arranged cross-border marriages are perceived differently in Vietnam, a country that sends brides, and in Korea, a country that receives brides. In Vietnam, cross-border marriage has been portrayed negatively and is often associated with trafficking in women. Although a similar discourse exists in Korea, the official discourse on cross-border marriage has focused on supporting multicultural families. The difference in discourse with respect to the same phenomenon suggests that the tension around commodification is not necessarily shaped uniformly across the national border. In this article, I juxtapose the contrasted discourses and policies on commercially arranged cross-border marriages in both countries and discuss the contexts that may have contributed to the difference in discourse. By doing this, I show that the global trend of commodification of intimacy and the cultural meaning of this phenomenon cannot be divorced from national politics.     

Moving Towards Transformative Democratic Action Through Archaeology

Archaeologists have explored how politics affect the way we see the past. They have investigated how constructions of the past naturalize present political conditions, and have explored uses of the past in current politics. Few have examined how politics in archaeology can relate to the future. In this article I develop ideas on a transformational politics in archaeology that focuses on critiquing oppressive relations in the past and present, and works towards building more just relations for the future. I examine how we can achieve this through building more democratic relations in the places we work.     

Mapping contemporary Catholic politics in Italy

This editors’ introduction opens a special issue of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies on the topic of ‘Mapping Contemporary Catholic Politics in Italy’. It briefly identifies the political, sociological and ideational changes that have occurred in Catholic politics since the collapse of the Democrazia Cristiana party, and introduces the contributions to the special issue, highlighting the common threads and the important divergences in their analyses.     

International Accompaniment and Witnessing State Violence in the Philippines

Abstract: This paper is an examination of a fact‐finding mission by Canadian grassroots organizations to the Philippines in November 2006, focused on investigating the large number of extra‐judicial killings that have occurred since 2001. The mission accompanied KARAPATAN, a Philippines‐based human rights organization, with hopes that their international status would allow KARAPATAN access to militarized regions otherwise inaccessible to them, and that the international attention brought by Canadians would protect them from military violence. The paper tackles the ethics, politics and potentials of such international human rights solidarity, and both explores and unsettles conventional concerns about the power dynamics of international solidarity by considering the complexity of the positionings of the Canadian observers. These positionings both reproduce and disrupt static stable geographies of the global North/South. In Central Luzon, for instance, the politics and ethics of their status as outsiders was a persistent issue. In Southern Tagalog, however, the Canadian observers could not quite keep their distance, found that they were not as firmly located in their Canadian identities as they might have supposed, and not only observed but experienced the theatrics of state violence.     

Race and feminist care ethics: intersectionality as method

Gender has been the privileged optic through which care ethics has been theorised. However, a long line of theorists has argued that gender intersects with other vectors such as race, class and disability in the social world, including in caring practices. This paper contributes to the emergent literature on intersectionality and care ethics by focusing on how racialised difference affects care practices and therefore care ethics. It focuses on competence and alterity, and recognition and communication, as two elements that point to how racialised care is risky. It argues that slavery and colonialism have underpinned racial hierarchies marking contemporary racialised care encounters. As a result, racially marked people’s skills are often undervalued and their competency questioned even as race becomes an increasingly important difference between who cares and who receives care. Secondly, racial hierarchies in who gets care and what that care looks like can make care so distinctive as to be unrecognisable both to the care giver and those who need care. Lack of care is as productive of subjectivities as care so that care needs simply may not be articulated. Finally, given these differences in what care means, caring can become risky. The paper concludes by suggesting that thinking through intersectionality as method allows us to focus on moments and events where care can become unsettled. Care ethics should learn not only from its successes but also from instances when care has failed. We need a feminist care ethics that responds to the distance and difference that race brings to care. That is the promise of good care.     

Wounded cities: Memory-work and a place-based ethics of care

What would it mean to think about cities marked by past structures of violence and exclusion as wounded but also as environments that offer its residents care? My current book in progress, Wounded Cities, focuses on creative practices and politics in Bogotá, Cape Town, Berlin, Minneapolis, and Roanoke, cities in which settlement clearances have produced spaces so steeped in oppression that the geographies of displacement continue to structure urban social relations. Precisely in and through these ‘wounded cities’, residents, artists, educators, and activists reconsider the meanings of the ‘right to the city’ and to theorizing the city more broadly. Drawing upon ethnographic research and theories from postcolonial theory, social psychiatry, social ecology, feminist political theory, and art theory, I introduce my concepts of ‘wounded city’, ‘memory-work’, and a ‘place-based ethics of care’ to retheorize urban politics. Artists and residents in wounded cities encourage political forms of witnessing to respect those who have gone before, attend to past injustices that continue to haunt contemporary cities, and create experimental communities to imagine different urban futures. I argue that a deeper appreciation of the lived, place-based experiences of inhabitants of most cities would enable planners, policy makers, and urban theorists to consider more ethical and sustainable forms of urban change than those that continue to legitimate disciplinary forms of governmentality.     

From Enmity to Rivalry? Notes on National Identity Politics in Competition States

Abstract

This paper examines what it means to study national identity politics in an age during which state-to-state relations are being conceptualised increasingly in terms of economic rivalry and less in terms of political enmity. It is suggested that this transformation has not been sufficiently taken into account in the study of national identity politics that continues to operate on the basis of the friend-enemy distinction. It is also suggested that the ‘old school of national identity politics’ with its emphasis on territorial exclusion and geopolitical images of threat and enmity has done highly important work in deconstructing security discourses and it is noted how they are linked to a specific, realist understanding of the world. That is, they have disclosed how what Alexander Wendt calls the ‘Hobbesian culture of anarchy’ has motivated national identity politics. Further using Wendt's characterisation of the three cultures of anarchy, the paper suggests that in the practices of contemporary national identity politics the logic of economic competitiveness and the logic of political enmity continue to co-exist but that ‘state survival’ is being increasingly understood as a matter of economic competitiveness and decreasingly as that of military power. On this basis it is argued that the era of competition states begs an analysis of the conflictual and often contradictory articulations of the Self's relation with the Other. It is proposed that a fruitful road of enquiry would open up if national identity politics was examined within the framework of political struggles whereby the national survival and Self/Other relations are played out against the background of the global marketplace paradigm which resonates more with the Lockean than the Hobbesian culture of anarchy.     

The Guests' Guests: Palestinian Refugees,Lebanese Civilians,and the War of 2006

Abstract: In the war between Israel and Hizbullah in 2006, 10,000 displaced Lebanese citizens were granted shelter and hospitality by Palestinian refugees in the camps of southern Lebanon. For the duration of the war, the Palestinian guests became hosts to their own hosts, and this temporary reversal of the usual relations of refuge set the scene for the rebuilding and renegotiation of relations between Palestinian refugees and their host country and its citizens. This paper addresses these events through a focus on the nature, politics and ethics of Palestinian hospitality and argues that hospitality was not simply a selfless act of giving, but also an instrumental act that had the potential to transform Palestinian–Lebanese relations in lasting ways.