Singularity. A manifesto for incomparable geographies

Abstract

This paper is a methodological response to the challenge of decolonizing geographical knowledge. It mobilizes post-and de-colonial critiques of geographical knowledge production and conceptual work, suggesting how such work unwittingly disfigures the precise contours of the places and socio-spatial formations on which geographers work, drawing them into implicit and reductive forms of comparison. Drawing on research and sources from South Asia, the paper moves instead toward more uncertain engagements with, and dispositions to, the production of geographical knowledge; ones attuned to the poetics of planetary difference. The paper speculates on five intellectual and methodological resources, or tactics, aimed toward producing geographical scholarship attuned to the tableaux of heterogeneous and incomparable singularities at large across the world: theory and reading; friction and fragments; translation/untranslatability; abiding by; and poetics.

Beyond Comparison in Urban Politics and Policy Analysis

“…Indeed, historical reflexive political science scholarship about comparative urban research (Keating 1991; Pickvance 1986; Walton 1990) provides a good foundation for this endeavor. Taken alongside recent interdisciplinary debates over the value and limits of global urbanisms (Jacobs 2012; Jazeel 2019; Nijman 2007; Peck 2015; Robinson 2016; Roy 2011; Sheppard, Leitner, and Maringanti 2013), this work can help us determine how the comparative project might fit into the agenda of urbanizing political and policy work more broadly. Through this dialogue, we can reflect on and interrogate what type of comparative strategies are appropriate to the contemporary moment as well as the analytical, methodological, and political effects of these choices (see also Hart 2018).…”

Making the provincial relevant? Embracing the provincialization of continental European geographies

“…-The provincial condition constitutes a subsystem within international geographies: a "core", "peripheral" interfaces and neo-colonial dependents that "provided French geography with a welcome exposure to the other, although from a secure power position". This subsystem also constitutes the field of most research; for example, 32 % of all PhDs submitted in France between 1990 and 1994 dealt with France and 44 % with former French colonies (Knafou, 1997).…”

A space between: Social work through the lens of a mobile tiny house encounter space

“…On the one hand, there is a clearly identified move to site-specific, area-based approaches in social practices (Atkinson and Kintrea, 2004). On the other hand, experimental approaches which carry the transformative potential for decolonising spatial practices towards the geographies of singularity (Jazeel, 2019) clash more or less overtly with the functionalist realities of the status quo. Having coordinated the journey of the Welcome Hut, it feels as if a practice that has been successful because of its uncompromising stance of non-efficiency through daydreaming was now asked to become a prototype for impact, transform into a hospitality product rather than practice and only simulate daydreaming, emancipation and utopia while actually governed by visitor numbers, not people's actual and qualitatively evaluated experience.…”

“…They exist, but in radically different epistemic domains. This is what makes them singular and incomparable in the concept world we inhabit’ (Jazeel, 2019: 9).…”