Becoming minor

Secor, Anna; Linz, Jess

doi:10.1177/0263775817710075

Cited by 21 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…The anxious encounter with the un-asked for neighbor, a neighbor who is both unfathomable in their difference and frightening in their sameness, incites the desire to un-mix the concoction, to undo the problem of difference in the encounter by creating territorial and racialized enclosures that reassert a spatial logic in which there is a strict and recognizable difference between “us” and “them.” It is in this sense that geopolitics (re)generates in the impasse of untranslatable encounters. Our challenge is to refuse these racialized (re)territorializations of geopolitics and instead to learn how to inhabit this impasse (Secor and Linz, 2017), to remain proximate, and (if need be) to weather the anxiety of the encounter in order that we may become witness to what is impossible to hear: the pain of others. Attending to affect — to the production, circulation, and effects of “political feeling” — is not an exercise of turning globally writ geopolitics on its head.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Affective geopolitics: Anxiety, pain, and ethics in the encounter with Syrian refugees in Turkey

Gökarıksel

Secor

2018

Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space

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This paper explores the affective making of geopolitics through an analysis of how long-term residents of Turkey narrate their encounters with displaced people from Syria. Situating these narratives in relation to Turkey’s policies and practices concerning the Syrian war and Syrian refugees, our project asks: What are the affective dimensions of encountering Syrians in Turkey and how do these encounters unfold an embodied geopolitics on the street and in neighborhoods? Our analysis of focus group conversations (conducted between 2014 and 2016 in Istanbul, Konya, and Malatya) centers on three dimensions of the affective geopolitics of the Syrian refugee crisis in Turkey. First, we draw out feelings of threatening proximity, in which the denigration of Syrian bodies and lives converges with the desire for a spatial organization of bodies that would put literal boundaries between “us” and “them.” Second, we present how the Adalet and Kalkınma Partisi’s geopolitical orientation towards leadership in the Muslim Middle East and official rhetoric regarding Turkey’s obligation to the Syrians as part of Muslim unity do not preclude the anxiety citizens express about the embodied presence of displaced Syrians in their daily lives. And finally, we address the politics of pain and the problems of translation in the encounter with the other. Here, we argue that the imminent, embodied, and affective challenge posed by the arrival of more than three million Syrians in Turkey concerns the ethics of how to hear, understand, and respond to the pain of others.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Affective geopolitics: Anxiety, pain, and ethics in the encounter with Syrian refugees in Turkey

Gökarıksel

Secor

2018

Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space

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“…What is important here is not resolving tensions between affirmation and negativity. Retaining this tension, this ambivalence, allows us to sit closer to an impasse, in which ‘there is no certainty, no guarantee, no external point from which to anchor our politics’ (Secor and Linz, 2017: 571), and to acknowledge the undecidability in the worlds we research (Kern and McLean, 2017). We seek to inhabit this undecidable impasse while engaging with the difference and politics that already exists within affirmative and reparative projects, as well as with the productive tensions within varying approaches to affect (cf.…”

Section: Affects Of Critique In Geographical Thoughtmentioning

confidence: 99%

Feeling otherwise: Ambivalent affects and the politics of critique in geography

Ruez

Cockayne

2021

Dialogues in Human Geography

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Scholars across the social sciences and humanities have increasingly questioned the meaning and purpose of critique. Contributing to those conversations, some geographers have advocated for affirmative or reparative practices such as reading for difference or experimentation that seek to provoke more joyful, hopeful, or enchanting affects, as alternatives to what they perceive as a prevailing forms of ‘negative’ critique. In response, others have re-emphasized the centrality of negativity and revalued negative affects in the context of regimes of racialization, heteronormativity, and coloniality. Rather than taking sides in a debate thus framed, this article develops an ambivalent position that foregrounds multiple senses of difference that exist within affirmative and reparative projects. Drawing on feminist and queer geographic work, the explicitly political and difference-oriented writing of Sedgwick and Deleuze, and queer and postcolonial affect scholars, we argue for critique characterized by an ambivalent and pluralistic attitude toward feeling. Joining those arguing for a pluralization of the moods and modes of critical work, our readings suggest the necessity of a pluralism that refuses any escape from the ‘negativity’ of the social field in favor of an affectively ambivalent engagement with the inherent politics of critique in a plural and uneven world.

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“…We were all deeply engaged throughout the process of producing the visual items and reflecting on them during the elicitation meetings ( Rose, 2016 ). Our interaction was also anticipatory (rather than participatory) in the way our collaboration brought us together to explore a shared small space of “apathetic solidarities and no future” ( Secor and Linz, 2017 : 568) whose coordinates were personal but connected to other places and stories in ways that unfolded for us to reflect on a slow politics of violence through memories.…”

Section: Visual Research-creationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, they are exclusively gendered spaces of material, performative and stereotypical masculinity expressed in terms of physical power and brotherhood. Workers’ accounts of these sites as an ‘impasse’ (Secor and Linz, 2017: 568) and as a shared space of solidarity in the face of a bleak and potentially deadly future (Akyol, 2013) bring into focus the complex intimate geopolitics of the construction site for workers and passers-by.…”

Section: Travelling Fear: Visual Narratives Of Ordinary Violence In Imentioning

confidence: 99%

‘A Walk down the Shore’: A visual geography of ordinary violence in Istanbul

Duru

2019

Environ Plan D

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In this paper, I examine where violence appears and how it is made sense of in Istanbul’s everyday settings of construction and renewal. I develop a visual methodology and utilise ordinary violences as a framework to map fear and memories as extended human material. The discussion is based on a filmic iteration of audio-visual material on memories of violence interrogated through ways of doing and senses of belonging, security and use of space in Istanbul. I first discuss the differential routes to spatially exploring violence. Then, I present processes of visual research-creation in order to situate my argument on the emergent visibilities of violence. Next, I present textual layers of violence within immediate and networked settings of memory and emotions activated by Istanbul’s everyday settings. Conclusion summarises the main argument on the liminal, ‘barely visible’ geographies of ordinary violence and the role of critical visual research in projecting improbable visibilities of restricted movement, under/hyper-exposed places and muted bodies.

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Becoming minor

Cited by 21 publications

References 6 publications

Affective geopolitics: Anxiety, pain, and ethics in the encounter with Syrian refugees in Turkey

Affective geopolitics: Anxiety, pain, and ethics in the encounter with Syrian refugees in Turkey

Feeling otherwise: Ambivalent affects and the politics of critique in geography

‘A Walk down the Shore’: A visual geography of ordinary violence in Istanbul

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