Geography

When we grieve during fieldwork, our grief forms new geographies of knowledge production and emotion. In this article, I use autoethnography to theorize my grief during fieldwork following the death of my sister. I examine grief’s methodological implications using the concept of ‘grief as method,’ an emotionally-inflected practice that accounts for the vulnerability produced by grief. By centering vulnerability, ‘grief as method’ also urges researchers to consider the practices and politics of ‘caring with’ our research subjects and caring for ourselves, raising larger questions about the role of care in research. Furthermore, this article demonstrates how grief’s geographical features—its mobility, its emergence in new sites and landscapes, and its manifestation as both proximity and distance—shape ‘grief as method’ profoundly. I examine grief’s spatial implications by building on Katz’s ‘topography’ to theorize a ‘topography of grief’ that stitches together the emotional geographies of researchers, blurring both spatial divisions (‘the field’ vs. ‘the not-field’) and methodological ones (the ‘researcher-self’ vs. the ‘personal-self’). If we see grief as having a topography, then the relationships between places darkened by grief come into focus. Moreover, by approaching grief methodologically, we can better understand how field encounters—relationships between people—are forged through grief. ‘Grief as method,’ in offering a spatial analysis of grief’s impact on fieldwork, envisions a broader definition of what engaged research looks like and where it takes place.

Academic work and care work are deeply entangled modes of labor. For parent-academics, these entanglements are particularly knotted during the postpartum period, when care work responsibilities intensify, increasingly under precarious labor conditions. Postpartum care work-whether conducted by oneself or by someone else-both encroaches upon and makes possible academic work, resulting in blurred spatiotemporal divisions between the two. This article draws on autoeth-nography and participant observation to map out a postpartum geography of care work and academic work in academia. It does so by examining three key sites in/of the university where care work and academic work intersect-bathrooms, campus daycare centers, and the internet-and by considering three kinds of work that happen there-milk-work, childcare work, and connection-work. In these three sites in particular, I argue, the intellectual work and the care work that sustain the university spill over into one another. Furthermore, each of these geographic sites can manifest as sites of care, access, labor, and surveillance, often simultaneously and always depending on the gendered, raced, classed, and dis/abled positionality of those moving in and through them. By advancing an understanding of (postpartum) reproductive rights as workers' rights, this paper also envisions more intersectional and coalitional feminist labor solidarities across campus.

2020. Mitchell-Eaton, E. Dying in Diaspora. Special feature: Networks of Solidarity During Crisis. EuropeNow. Council for European Studies, Columbia University.

This course note and syllabus is part of a special feature, Networks of Solidarity During Crisis. This is part of our Campus Spotlight on Bennington College. This submission can be found online at: https://www.europenowjournal.org/2020/10/11/explanatory-note-dying-in-diaspora/

This class, which I taught as a small upper-level seminar, examined geographies of death, dying, and mourning as experienced by migrants living in diaspora or exile. As I describe in the syllabus, the course "mapped out the multiple mobilities of grief and death-the circulation of emotions, cadavers, toxins, and cancers, and mourning relatives gathering to grieve-and the political factors that co-produce death and mobility." This course, as a human geography course informed by feminist theory and methods, aimed to help students understand "individual" grief as related to collective, large-scale trauma-as linked, multiscalar experiences-and to situate grief and death as political and unevenly distributed (rather than universal, as they are often framed).

[Online at: https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/no-island-is-an-island].  Since March 2020, COVID rates have decimated Marshall Islander communities in the US, while the US nuclear testing and longstanding military presence in the Marshall Islands created the conditions for this public health ‘crisis.’ This essay explores how discourses of islands as remote and races as discrete undergird US imperial practices that produce Marshall Islanders’ health and legal vulnerabilities. The COVID pandemic both reveals and deepens uneven topographies of exposure, risk, vulnerability, and abandonment across US empire.

In this paper, we argue that the confinement of people on island military bases, whether narrated as humanitarian rescue, migration management, refugee resettlement, or militarized border enforcement, is an imperial process of ruination that impairs human possibility and erodes access to rights. Further- more, the government’s categorization of mobile people – as refugees, displaced, detainees, or migrants – informs the naming of these spaces, the bureaucratic and legal processes that they are subjected to, and their treatment (by local communities, federal authorities, the media, and the law). Empirical material is drawn from qualitative research conducted on US migration control in the Caribbean and Pacific. We identify spatial patterns of militarization operating across these sites, wherein migration is inter- twined with enforcement, confinement, and militarization.

When we grieve during fieldwork, our grief forms new geographies of knowledge production and emotion. In this article, I use autoethnography to theorize my grief during fieldwork following the death of my sister. I examine grief's methodological implications using the concept of 'grief as method,' an emotionally-inflected practice that accounts for the vulnerability produced by grief. By centering vulnerability, 'grief as method' also urges researchers to consider the practices and politics of 'caring with' our research subjects and caring for ourselves, raising larger questions about the role of care in research. Furthermore, this article demonstrates how grief's geographical features-its mobility, its emergence in new sites and landscapes, and its manifestation as both proximity and distance-shape 'grief as method' profoundly. I examine grief's spatial implications by building on Katz's 'topography' to theorize a 'topography of grief' that stitches together the emotional geographies of researchers, blurring both spatial divisions ('the field' vs. 'the not-field') and methodological ones (the 'researcher-self' vs. the 'personal-self'). If we see grief as having a topography, then the relationships between places darkened by grief come into focus. Moreover, by approaching grief methodologically, we can better understand how field encounters-relationships between people-are forged through grief. 'Grief as method,' in offering a spatial analysis of grief's impact on fieldwork, envisions a broader definition of what engaged research looks like and where it takes place.

Sixty years after the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees attempted to negotiate the problematic political relationship between states and refugees highlighted b yHannah Arendt, shifting geopolitical, legal, and sovereign geographies have exacerbated the unevenness of refugees’ ability to claim the right to seek asylum. In this article, we employ a framework of embodied epistemologies to extend Arendt’s insights into the role of the stateless for sovereign logics. We argue that the ‘right to have rights’ as an embodied possibility is not only integral to the logics of sovereignty, but also to the creation of new political spaces. Our article draws on collaborative case studies in Guam/ Northern Marianas Islands, Lampedusa, and Christmas Island. We argue that while Arendt paid singular attention to the terrain of the sovereign, there exists a far more complex geography of the state that must be negotiated to claim rights. The ‘right to have rights’ is necessarily an embodied po...

This issue explores the historical production of infrastructures as places of resistance and world-building for workers, villagers, and migrants across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—a period when narratives about the role of infrastructure as a conduit for modernization, development, and the centralizing capacities of the state had broad purchase. Contributions invite consideration of two questions. First, what struggles do histories of infrastructural power reveal if infrastructures are delinked from master narratives tying them to state and state-backed centralization? While development, nation building, and extraction are often state-sponsored or state-backed projects, the articles here demonstrate that modern states are not the only wielders of infrastructural power. Second, how does this decentering of the state in infrastructural analyses transform the stakes of radical political activity and the work of radical historical actors? In highlighting a different, ...

In 1986 the Compact of Free Association marked the formal end of U.S. colonialism in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, while simultaneously re-entrenching imperial power dynamics between the two countries. The U.S.-RMI Compact at once enshrined exclusive U.S. military access to the islands and established the right of “visa-free” migration to the United States for Marshallese citizens, leading to a Marshallese diaspora whose largest population resettled in the seemingly unlikely destination of Springdale, Arkansas.

An “all-white town” by design for much of the twentieth century, Springdale, having nearly quadrupled in population since 1980, has been remade by Marshallese as well as Latinx immigration. Through ethnographic, policy-based, and archival research in Guåhan, Saipan, Hawai’i, Arkansas, and Washington, D.C., New Destinations of Empire tells the story of these place-based transformations, revealing how U.S. empire both causes and constrains mobility for its subjects, shaping migrants’ experiences of racialization, citizenship, and belonging in new destinations of empire.

In examining two spatial processes—imperialism and migration—together, Emily Mitchell-Eaton reveals connections and flows between presumably distant, “remote” sites like Arkansas and the Marshall Islands, showing them to be central to the United States’ most urgent political issues: immigration, racial justice, militarization, and decolonization.

An evaluation of the Brass childhood mortality estimates under conditions of declining mortality shows them to overestimate current mortality. Error increases as the rate of mortality decline increases, as the childhood age up to which cumulative mortality is being estimated increases, and as age at onset of childbearing decreases. We use the results to develop a method for correcting the Brass estimates for the effects of quasistability. The method requires an estimate of the rate of mortality decline within the population in addition to information on the pattern of childbearing in the population.