Abstract:Both responsibility and care have much to offer in thinking through the relationalities that make up a postcolonial world. Although contemporary political systems often posit responsibility and care within the context of individuated and autonomous selves, geographers have done much to relocate responsibility and care within narratives of interdependency -spatially and temporally. They have argued that both terms offer a route for thinking about ethical geographical relations between myriad places. In this article we take this project further, by looking at how the nature and shape of these relationships might be construed in a postcolonial world. We suggest that, through a more critical engagement with postcolonial thinking, any exploration of existing practices of responsibility and care will not only reveal the enormous potential of imagining these geographies as forms of existing and evolving relationalities, but will also lead us to interrogate the deployments of these terms in the context of past and present inequalities. We show that routing care and responsibility through postcolonial geographies moves us towards a more pragmatic responsiveness, one that involves a ‗care-full' recognition of postcolonial interaction.
The theme for the chair's plenaries at the 2017 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) (RGS-IBG) Annual Conference is 'Decolonising geographical knowledges: opening geography out to the world'. This commentary explains why this pursuit of critical consciousness via decolonial thinking could do more harm than good. We show how the emphasis on decolonising geographical knowledges rather than structures, institutions and praxis reproduces coloniality, because it recentres non-Indigenous, white and otherwise privileged groups in the global architecture of knowledge production. It is argued that an effective decolonial movement within geography must recognise the intersectionality of indigeneity and race, and necessitates that the terms on which the discipline starts debates about decolonisation and decoloniality are determined by those racialised as Indigenous and non-white by coloniality.
Abstract:This paper responds to increasing discussions about responsibility within geography by exploring some of the spatialities imbued in thinking responsibly about internationalisation in the UK Higher Education system, and it uses the over-determined categorisation of the international student as a way in to this exploration. Although international students have been considered from the viewpoint of migration studies, global education studies and critical pedagogical studies, this paper attempts a postcolonial analysis of international students, to consider what forms of pedagogic responsibility are called forth through this framework.Building on bell hooks' call for an 'engaged pedagogy', this paper shows that routing care and responsibility through postcolonial geographies incites a more sharply demanding political praxis.
A short and direct introduction sets out the context for this special section. After a brief sketch of each of the commentary pieces and how they fit together, the key question will then be posed: how are geographers now inserting themselves into these ongoing dynamics, and which particular aspects of the present moment are geography academics well-placed to address?
Abstract:This paper contributes to debates about geographies of responsibility. In contrast to much of the previous literature in this field, which has concentrated on teasing out the intimate interconnections between different people, places and spaces, in this paper we highlight the limits to such connections, focusing on more unsettled versions of responsibility. Our critique draws on postcolonial readings to highlight two limitations of responsibility: its availability as an ethical gesture which can be ascribed even where it is not practised; and its imputed agency which makes it possible for responsible agency to be usurped by the global North. This starts to muddy the water of responsibility, showing how it may involve refusal, denial, withdrawal and contamination. More problematised enigmatic and risky versions of responsibility arise from these critiques. In particular, we argue that in considering responsibility as practice, a recognition of the provisional, contaminated and complex myriad of power relations involved may signal a move towards more ambivalent versions and visions that acknowledge the vulnerabilities and disconnections involved in geographies of responsibility.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.