WITHDRAWN – Administrative Duplicate Publication: Critical political geographies of slow violence and resistance

Abstract

Engaging Rob Nixon’s conceptualization of slow violence, this special issue provides a critical framework for how we understand violence relevant to political geography. In this introduction, we highlight three key contributions of the collection that build upon and extend Nixon’s framing of slow violence. First, we attend to the spatialities of slow violence, revealing how the politics of disposability and racialized dispossession target particular people and places. Next, we foreground critical feminist and anti-racist perspectives that are largely absent in Nixon’s original account. And third, through engaging these approaches, the papers together employ an epistemological shift, uncovering hidden and multi-sited violences that prioritise the accounts of those who experience and are most affected by slow violence.

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.…”

“…Feminist and Black scholarship in geography on violence in general, and slow violence in particular, has done much to bring to light the everyday and banal forms of violence that animate military invasions and practices of war (Fluri, 2014;Hyndman, 2007Hyndman, , 2019, domestic and gender-based violence and trauma (Brickell, 2020;Pain, 2015;Pain & Cahill, 2022;Rezwana & Pain, 2021), displacement and asylum (Jennifer Hyndman, 2019;Mountz, 2020), and much more. These works have served as a vital corrective to dominant masculinist approaches to violence that for too long focused on the 'hot' or 'spectacular' moments of geopolitics (Christian et al, 2016) and which privileged the state and occluded the body as an actor and scale of analysis for approaching violence and war (Fluri & Piedalue, 2017;Hyndman, 2007).…”

“…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).…”

Lockdown and the list: Mexican refugees, asylum denial, and the feminist geopolitics of esperar (waiting/hoping)

“…A feminist political geographic approach offers vital guidance here. Feminist geographers Pain and Cahill (2021) examine the spatialities of slow violence and resistance, revealing hidden, connected and multi-sited violences, and always centering the grounded experiences of those most affected. Central here is an intimate-geopolitical approach to scale, one that understands macro, and often abstracted, geoeconomic and geopolitical processes, practices and outcomes as deeply embodied (Faria, 2017; Pain and Staeheli, 2014; Smith, 2012).…”

Encountering Berlant part one: Concepts otherwise

“…The publication of Cruel optimism sparked engagement with the multiple tendencies and latencies of Berlant's thought, finding in them resources for making sense of the dramas and tensions of relationality and vocabularies for everyday violences and harms in the crisis-prone present (see, for example, Anderson, 2022;Bissell, 2022;Brickell, 2020;Cockayne, 2016;Linz, 2021;Pain & Cahill, 2022;Wilkinson & Ortega-Alcazár, 2019). Berlant's is no simple affirmation of being-in-common as counterpoint to the ravages of neoliberal individuation, though.…”