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.     

A disconnected journey

Driving is a dynamic human experience. The act of operating a vehicle, our movement across space and time, and the landscapes we pass afford rich sensory experiences. However, an increasingly controlled environment in the car and on roads is diminishing many sensuous encounters of orientation, sound, smell, touch, and even sight. The growing emphasis on transport infrastructure that prioritises speed, safety, comfort and convenience – dual carriageways, bypasses, ring roads, tunnels and sound barriers – is serving to disconnect us from our journeys as emplaced experiences. These changes are leading to starkly homogeneous journeys devoid of character that result in a loss of experience and place. In this paper we examine the sensory engagement and experiences of car journeys across landscapes, considering both urban and rural environments. Using case studies from different regions of Australia, we examine the bodily experiences of modern motoring. We suggest that there is no longer an immediate engagement with the landscape being traversed. With particular consideration of understanding places in an embodied way, we consider how modernised highways are disconnecting us from developing and maintaining meaning in our understanding of roads as a significant form of heritage, and as an important mechanism through which people experience heritage.     

Geography and the construction of difference

There is growing evidence of ‘horizontal hostilities’ among women: many women are affirming their identities along axes of class, race, sexuality, age and/or relationship to colonialism. Within recent feminist writing, geography—space, place and location—has been used as a vehicle for rethinking a feminist affinity that does not erase or undermine ‘difference’. We review contemporary uses of geographical metaphors and caution against an excessive emphasis on displacement as a metaphor for a critical feminist stance. We argue that geographies of placement must be held in tension with an ideal of displacement. We develop this point through a case study of women and work in contemporary Worcester, Massachusetts. Women in Worcester are very much rooted in place and this is a vehicle for the construction of differences across women. We argue that studies of the construction of feminine identities in particular places counteract the current tendency within feminism to rigidify differences among women and are an important means of rebuilding affinities among women.