A Research Agenda for Geographies of Slow Violence

Abstract

works primarily on issues of urban poverty as they affect children in low-income countries, bridging the gap between the concerns of child-focused agencies and the broader development agenda. She is co-editor of the journal Environment and Urbanization, International Institute for Environment and Development, London, and an associate at the Children's Environments Research Group at CUNY Graduate Center in New York.

Slowness as warfare: Towards a relational approach to political violence in the West Bank

“…Thinking along feminist geopolitics lines, Jenna Marie Christian and Lorraine Dowler argue for a more ‘relational’ approach to violence, enabling treatment of ‘fast and slow violence as a “single complex”’ (2019, p. 1067; see also Pain, 2015; for recent feminist elaborations of slow and chronic violence, see Cahill & Pain, 2019; O’Lear, 2021; Pain, 2021, 2022; Pain & Cahill, 2022). Returning to the theorization of continuities between different forms and modalities of violence (cultural, structural, direct), such an approach departs from the binarized framework implicitly inscribed in Nixon's formulation, offering ‘a vital pathway to address the representational challenge of slow violence's invisibility’ (Christian & Dowler, 2019, p. 1068).…”

Gaza and the Great March of Return: Enduring violence and spaces of wounding

“…Geographers have usefully employed the concept of slow violence to make sense of a variety of multi-scalar harms across many different contexts, with lively debates recently filling geography journal special issues and an edited collection (Cahill & Pain, 2019;O'Lear, 2021;Pain, 2021aPain, , 2021bPain & Cahill, 2022). These works do an excellent job of surveying geographical work on slow violence, so rather than reviewing the burgeoning literature, this section draws more narrowly on feminist and Black geographies scholarship to advance two critiques of slow violence in the spirit of making space for a concept of violence that pays specific attention to its enduring qualities.…”

“…The paper makes two contributions. First, it offers the concept of enduring violence as a supplement to feminist political geographical work on slow violence (Cahill & Pain, 2019; O'Lear, 2021; Pain & Cahill, 2022) and associated concepts such as ‘everyday’ (Cuomo, 1996; Mustafa et al, 2019), ‘banal’ (Christian et al, 2016; Katz, 2007; Koch & Paasi, 2016), and ‘chronic’ violence (Pain, 2019). Where this work has usefully distinguished between ‘acute’ and ‘chronic’ forms of violence (e.g., Pain, 2021a), it has also tended, conceptually and methodologically, to privilege the latter.…”

“…The paper makes two contributions. First, it offers the concept of enduring violence as a supplement to feminist political geographical work on slow violence (Cahill & Pain, 2019;O'Lear, 2021;Pain & Cahill, 2022) and associated concepts such as 'everyday' (Cuomo, 1996;Mustafa et al, 2019), 'banal' (Christian et al, 2016;Katz, 2007;Koch & Paasi, 2016), and 'chronic' violence (Pain, 2019).…”