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Rabach Theorizing Place and Covid 19

kaitlynrabach

Mishuana Goeman in Mark My Words talks about remapping as a way of rethinking space and temporality, so the future is driving the study of the past and the past is interrogated for the future.

Goeman uses the fiction of Native women to push forth the idea that words don’t only represent reality, arguing that by using narrative “in (re)mapping, we as Native people have the power to rethink the way we engage with territory, with our relationships to one another, and with other Native nations and settler nations” (38–39).

So imagining spatial encounters and relationships is actually a way of mapping alternative relationships

Massey’s understanding of space is the “product of interrelations,” “spheres of possibility,” “and always under construction or a simultaneity of stories-so-far” (6-7), so space is a meeting of histories.

What histories are meeting now? Maybe more importantly, whose histories are meeting? I think this is where scalar analysis can come in to complement Massey’s thinking about space.. to start to tease out a bit these entangled encounter or meeting space, knowing it will never fully be disentangled.

 

Also, when think about Massey’s line of space as a meeting place, something always in transit, I’m thinking specifically of encounters. And space/place as encounter. And stay at home orders rethink the way many of us are encountering each other, also in certain contexts, especially for those with the privilege of staying at home, change encounters are being lost. The sort of tranistness of space is being lost.

Rabach Theorizing Place and Covid 19

kaitlynrabach

I’ve been thinking a bit with Elizabeth Povinelli’s use of “abject” status (the excess, to cast away, the throw away) which she pulls from Judith Butler and spaces of liminality. The subjective experience of an abject status intersects so harshly with systems of power, the economy, national policy, etc. So, thinking about spaces of abjection. Who occupies this space during this time? How is it changed? How is it being embodied?

Gonzales, Roberto G., and Leo R. Chavez. 2012. “‘Awakening to a Nightmare’: Abjectivity and Illegality in the Lives of Undocumented 1.5-Generation Latino Immigrants in the United States.” Current Anthropology 53 (3): 255–81. https://doi.org/10.1086/665414.

Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2012. “BEYOND THE NAMES OF THE PEOPLE: Disinterring the Body Politic.”Cultural Studies 26 (2–3): 370–90. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2011.636206.

RabachK Theorizing Place and Covid 19

kaitlynrabach

In our group we had Dr. Jessica Sewell come speak to us a little while ago about her book Women and the Everyday City and we landed on the topic of “imaginaries of space” for a long time. And the visual politics of space- so how do we notice things? What do we notice? What seems out of place or in place. Thinking about how imaginaries make certain presences completely invisible (thinking here about gendered labor, black labor, and more). And how powerful imaginaries are, how they intersect with our construction of language. But also how resistance can work with these imaginaries.. thinking about women’s sort of take over of dept stores during the suffrage movement as an extension of their private space, a space for organizing. This is long winded way of trying to think through COVID-19 national models in the context of national imaginaries. What has been puzzling me is so many Americans’ response to the Swedish model of governing in Covid and how imaginaries of Sweden have been warped in such a way that there is a complete erasure of how xenophobic policies have gained traction in Sweden in recent years.  

Rabach_Theorizing Place and Covid 19

kaitlynrabach

Gendered Spaces – We keep seeing these headlines over and over  (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/15/world/coronavirus-women-leaders.html) and I think there’s a lot more analysis that needs to happen here.. But women leaders = success in governance in these reports and I think we should complicated this more. What does this look like from the scale of the body to national political offices?

 

Failed governance - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/07/michigan-lawmaker-armed-escort-rightwing-protest

^ For many this is failure, but for others the ability to have militarized weapons in the state capitol is a success. So how do we blur the boundaries between success/failure?

 

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xiaox

Ebola Response Anthropology Platform is anthropologists from all over the world to providing advice by email, calls and web-based dialogues by those working for NGOs, government and international agencies. The platform help to engage with socio-cultural and political dimensions of the Ebola outbreak and build locally-appropriate interventions. There are some resistances of local culture and external health system to control the Ebola outbreak. 

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xiaox
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The film portrayed the far-flung MSF experience offer people who suffered in Democratic Republic of Congo and post-conflict Liberia. They have to make decisions of who going to save because of the limited resource.  Besides, they have to balance and fixed their own mentality when watching amount people dying every-day. Kiara Lepora who was the Emergency Coordinator in the mission, have mentioned that Liberia is like a big car accident, but they might cannot do something for help the people. She thought she could do well before arriving, and she said was not in to aftermath.  I think they are all doing their best for helping people in the mission, and the problem is they are not as individual, they cannot stay there forever. They need to balance the thinking that they are work as a team as MSF, and it will keep going forward.

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xiaox
  • “the immigrant’s body was entirely legitimized through its functions as an instrument of production, the performance of which was interrupted by prefect, then inscribe in a ministerial circular ion the legalization of undocumented immigrants, and finally translated into the law on entry and residence of foreigners, is of course only one of many regulatory provisions covering the granting of permits.”
  • “Legal recognition of the suffering body had been established.”
  • “Because the allocation of a scarce commodity was locally managed, there were wide disparities in the treatment of applications and hence inequalities of access to a right from place to place. “