Geography and ethics I: Waiting and urgency

On the politics of waiting, 2021

This special section sheds light on the relationship between sovereignty and temporality through practices of waiting in the militarised Kurdish cities and border provinces of Turkey. It reveals different feelings, practices, discourses, and imaginations derived from the waiting experience of citizens and refugees living in the midst or aftermath of the states of exceptions at the margins of the sovereign states.

International Journal of Migration and Border Studies

In this article, we examine temporal techniques of border control including prolonged periods of waiting, stasis and indeterminacy that increasingly characterise the experience of refugees, asylum seekers and other irregular migrants. We argue that these temporal techniques are enhanced and legitimised by parallel efforts to improve accommodation for irregular migrants-a process we call the humanitarianisation of waiting. We focus on the Indonesian context, where growing numbers of refugees wait for resettlement elsewhere, whilst housed in non-custodial alternatives to detention. We show how the promotion of alternatives to detention as humane and pragmatic enables containment strategies pursued through migration management to persist under a cloak of benevolence. The result is a kind of 'luxury' limbo that refugees experience and through which it becomes harder to disentangle the managerial emphasis on migrant care from the more pernicious practices of border security. The paper's analytical distinction between spatial and temporal techniques of border control illuminates the vexed politics of humanitarianism with respect to human mobility in the Indonesian context and beyond.

Waiting Territories in the Americas, 2016

In this chapter, we approach the possible constitution of identities on waiting territories from a sociological perspective. Our epistemological framework is based on the notion that sociological accounts of social phenomena take ‘the tissue of interactions and social relationships’ ― or indeed ‘the social order’― as their ‘reference point’.

Progress in Human Geography, 2023

This report on geography and ethics focusses on the justification of normative evaluations. Justifying why actions are right or wrong often relies on appeals to high-order principles, such as the common good. But this is not always the case, as this report shows by identifying an ethics of anti-oppression that relies instead on struggles against individual and social harms and the conditions that generate them. Through resistance, ethics of anti-oppression also shift the terms of normative justification across a range of considerations within geography and beyond it, from refugees and asylum seekers to food production and blockades against extractive infrastructure.

Research in Ethical Issues in Globalisation, 2019

In this second report, I consider the relationship between emotion and morality from a geographical perspective. Though traditional and contemporary engagements in moral philosophy and psychology offer a diverse range of theories and approaches to emotions and morality, few of these explicitly consider or incorporate the role of space. I consider theories of embodiment and relationality as one means through which emotions become collective and institutionalized, with a focus on emotional geographies and care. I conclude by reflecting on political emotions as conflictive but insightful signals of societal shifts in our moral emotions, and suggest that incorporating emotions may also provide a different way of thinking about the problem of distant care.

The aim of this chapter is to draw out considerations on how ethical relations between humans and non-humans(and in this instance, animals) are deeply uneven, an on how this unevenness has distinct spatial dimensions which require a geographical sensibility within any study addressing them. As Casey (1998: ix) assets, ‘nothing we do is unplaced…How could we fail to recognise this primal fact?’. Human-nonhuman relations are inevitably embedded in the complex spatialities of the world. The myriad encounters which make up human-nonhuman relations shape and are shaped by this spatiality in an incredibly rich (in ontological terms) series of ‘spatial formations’. Any consideration of human-nonhuman relations has to confront this geography of the spaces and place of encounter. In particular my focus is on the ethical implications which may follow from looking at the world in this way. The chapter can be downloaded as a pdf (approx 14 mb)

In a recent review article, Jeff Popke (2006, p. 510) calls for a ‘more direct engagement with theories of ethics and responsibility’ on the part of human geographers, and for a reinscription of the social as a site of ethics and responsibility. This requires that we also continue to develop ways of thinking through our responsibilities toward unseen others—both unseen neighbours and distant others—and to cultivate a renewed sense of social interconnectedness. Popke suggests that a feminist-inspired ethic of care might be instrumental in developing this expanded, relational and collective vision of the social, which is particularly prescient given the contemporary economic downturn throughout the globe. Thus, as the ‘moral turn’ in geography continues to evolve, this special issue seeks to bring together geographers working within feminist or feminist-inspired frameworks, and with a shared interest in the changing geographies of ethics, responsibility and care. The collection of papers has its origins in conference sessions on Care-full Geographies, organised by the Guest Editors at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers in 2007. In this editorial we seek to position the papers within broader debates about care, responsibility and ethics that have emerged in geography and the wider social sciences in recent years, and to highlight the key issues that have framed these debates.