The intimate hybridity of roadkill: A Beckettian view of dismay and persistence

Intimate Bureaucracies: Roadkill, Policy, and Fieldwork on the Shoulder

“…Let us, then, pay attention to the singularity of the moment of impact: there is only the flattened squirrel with tail still aquiver, or the shattered body of a deer denting the hood of one's car, the adrenalin rush and fear in the driver as well as the animal. Lulka writes that “we connect with [roadkill] more deeply due to our shared propensity for mobilization (commonly synthesized as our evolutionary heritage) than because of the exact configuration of their face and body” (Lulka , 45). Here I disagree: these details matter, and often determine how we come to care.…”

“…This intersection of vectors is the entry point of geographer David Lulka's engagement with roadkill: the shared mobile nature of human and animal bodies that is so violently terminated by a collision. In his literary exploration of “dismay and persistence” engendered by viewing roadkill, Lulka focuses on “the relational situation of encountering roadkill, or better yet the ‘have‐not‐always‐been‐roadkill,’ for the shared penchant for movement creates a bond formed from commonality” (Lulka ). An affective charge is created in our bodies, Lulka contends, because the animal's movement has been disrupted, something to which we can physically relate.…”

For not limiting emotional and affectual geographies: a collective critique of Steve Pile’s ‘Emotions and affect in recent human geography’

“…Part of the problem here is that Pile is selective in what work he chooses to count as affectual geography. In the process, he ignores the depth of geographic work on affect spanning the realms of the critical and political (Curti 2008a; Gibson‐Graham 2006; Lim 2007; Ruddick 2008 2010) to the linguistic and textual (Curti 2009; Thrift 2007) to the familial and institutional (Aitken 2009; Curti and Moreno 2010; Moreno 2009) to the racial and postcolonial (Lim 2010; Nayak 2010; Tolia‐Kelly 2006) to the generally geographical (Bonta and Protevi 2004; Doel 1999 2000; Thrift 2007) to the more‐than‐human (Curti 2008b; Lulka 2004 2008) (see also Anderson and Harrison 2010, 24 n.13). So, too, is Pile’s engagement with emotional geographies lacking.…”

“…Others working on the spatiality of emotions have taken a more continuous, relational view to examine broader theoretical concerns, such as the untidy geographies of production and consumption or the spatialities of embeddedness and cohesion (Bosco 2006; Ettlinger 2004). Indeed, for many emotional and affectual geographers (including some feminists), relationality fundamentally differs from the relationality of psychotherapeutic models; it is much closer to Massey’s ideas about a relational politics of the spatial (Massey 2005) and her problematising of conventional notions of ‘nearness’ and ‘farness’ (Massey 2004), ideas that when viewed from the angle of emotional and affectual geographies combine to produce spatial and political implications that do not necessarily equate caring or intimacy with ‘proximity’ (see Bosco 2006 2007) or deem bodies relevant only within contexts of ‘the human’ (see Curti 2008b 2009; Lulka 2004 2008).…”