ORCID Profile
0000-0002-3368-1522
Current Organisation
University of Bristol
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Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 03-04-2022
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 17-11-2021
DOI: 10.1177/14744740211058080
Abstract: This paper reflects on the status of ‘negativity’ in contemporary social and geographical thought. Based on a panel discussion held at the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting 2021, each contributor discusses what negativity means to them, and considers its various legacies and potential future trajectories. Along the way, the contributors offer ways of attending to negative spaces (voids, abysses, absences), affects (vulnerabilities, sad passions, incapacities, mortality) and politics (impasses, refusals, irreparabilities). However, rather than defining negativity narrowly, the paper stays with the ersity of work on negativity being undertaken by geographers and other scholars, discussing how varying perspectives expand or dismantle particular elements within spatial theory. Collectively, the contributors argue for paying attention to negativity as the faltering, failure or impossibility of relations between body and world, thus situating it in conversation with relational thought, vitalist philosophies and affirmative ethics.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 23-11-2017
Abstract: This paper reconsiders the concept of the decision in geographical research on migration by refracting it through contemporary “mobilities” thinking. In doing so, I seek to develop an approach attentive to the way migrations take hold and persist in space and time. Whilst conceptualisations of the decision in migration have moved beyond their in idualist heritage, sovereign models of strong agency remain implicit, often unintentionally conflating intention, effectiveness, cause and outcome. In contrast, I elaborate a relational understanding of the decision to conceptualise a decision’s limited efficacy in generating and sustaining a migration over time. Underscoring the neglected importance of stasis to migration, I trace corollaries of the mobilities dialectic of movement and stasis on the relation between action and outcome, emphasising the finite relevancy of any moment of decision. Focussing empirically on the story of a single migrant worker’s return migration in rural China, I draw on alternative accounts of agency – habit, lateral agency, and the agency of assemblages – to rework the migration decision into an ongoing process of affecting and being affected. Thinking with this case, I reconfigure the relationship between migration, event, decision and place, and affirm the value of the under-used mobilities optic in migration research.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 03-07-2019
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 17-01-2023
DOI: 10.1177/20438206231151424
Abstract: Desire orients us to how attachments are dis/re/organised in lived time. This commentary responds to Anderson's article on attachments and promises by speculating on a version of attachment that starts from Berlant's writing on desire, supplementing the geography of promises that Anderson situates at the heart of attachment. By generating scrambled surfaces and mixed temporalities, attachment through desire emerges as something organised less by form and more by sensation, less by optimism and more by fantasy, less by endurance and more by excess. Desire unfolds heartlessly, without a centre. It doesn’t just recognise it misrecognises. Subject to desire, attachments don’t always add up. Instead, desire leaves a gap – a gap that is also its promise.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 18-04-2020
Abstract: Before attunement comes exposure, the necessary fact of being a body. This photo essay is a play on two meanings of the word exposure: corporeal exposure and photographic exposure. I offer the latter in order to stay with moments of the former, exposing multiple scenes of misattunement from fieldwork in a small country town in regional Australia. Picking up the classic distinction in information theory between signal and noise, this piece pauses at the moment of indeterminacy before an event might be affirmed as valuable signal or discarded as unwanted static, weaving stories and images from the field with excerpts from Michel Serres’ The Parasite, Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida and Paul Harrison’s essay on Corporeal Remains. Ultimately, this essay’s suggestion is that ‘attunement’ is not primarily about attunement. Instead, as a methodological principle, I offer that attunement initially – and sufficiently – gestures towards an attempt, a vulnerability and a commitment to the event of exposure.
Location: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
No related grants have been discovered for Vickie Zhang.