Hungry Translations: The World Through Radical Vulnerability

Abstract

The dominant landscape of knowledge and policy rests on a fundamental inequality: bodies who are seen as hungry are assumed to be available for the interventions of experts, but those experts often obliterate the ways that the hungry actively create politics and knowledge by living a dynamic vision of what is ethical and what makes the good life. Such living frequently involves a creative praxis of refusal against imposed frameworks. Learning from such refusals requires hungry translations that are open and flowing and that are embedded in embodied solidarities that require radical vulnerability. Such translations strive to converse across incommensurable landscapes of struggles and meanings in order to co‐agitate against universalised languages that erase the vocabularies and visions of those who are reduced to hungry bodies. In reconceptualising politics as a shared and unending labour on an uneven terrain that makes perfect translation or retelling impossible, hungry translation becomes a continuous collective praxis of troubling inherited meanings of the social, and of making our knowledges more alive to the creativity of socio‐political struggle. Such hungry translations must fearlessly move between worlds in search of poetic justice and social justice without defining an origin or destination and without compromising the singularities that constitute each community of struggle.

Making the provincial relevant? Embracing the provincialization of continental European geographies

“…As continental European geographers, our answers are to recognize that we largely retain the privilege of choosing our perspectives. Although case studies from continental Europe no longer carry the weight they used to, theories that appear to be legitimately global tend to stem from the West, be they inherited from the Enlightenment or French and emerging Italian theory (Minca, 2016). This is our privilege, and, especially in our teaching perhaps, we retain much latitude to have our local perspectives masquerade as global or universal.…”

Not just parenting in the field: Accompanied research and geographies of caring and responsibility

“…It enriches and diversifies the geographic stories we tell. It dovetails with scholarly critiques that question how academics do geography, determine what is publication-worthy, and decide what merits promotion (Cloke, 2002;Kitchin, 2005;Kobayashi, 1994;Nagar, 2019;Nagar & Ali, 2003;Raghuram & Madge, 2006;Schurr et al, 2020). Kitchin (2005) and Ergin and Alkan (2019), for example, point to the Anglo-American hegemony in which English remains the lingua franca, and that knowledge produced in the global north becomes the basis for purportedly universal theory while knowledge produced in the global south supplies 'data' for northern theory.…”

“…Encouragingly, a growing body of decolonial scholarship is dismantling this dominant idea (cf. Faria & Mollett, 2016; Kobayashi, 1994; Nagar, 2019). In imagining a method for postcolonial geography with a radically different world picturing, Raghuram and Madge (2006: 283) advocate for opening up research to ‘link our academic practices, ways of thinking and performing in the academy, with our way of being in the world’.…”

Permeability and Protest in Lane 49: Entangling Materialities of Place with Housing Activism in Shanghai

“…An empirical focus upon Lane 49 and the entanglement of the Lane’s materiality with activism also contributes more broadly to calls within radical geographies of protest to bring back “place” (Oslender 2004; Pile and Keith 1997; Routledge 2017), as well as to recognise the importance of materialities of place for protest (Routledge 2017). Utilising a feminist geography and feminist political ecology lens to theorise the permeability of materiality, the paper also builds upon literature of protest and place (Endres and Senda‐Cook 2011; Nagar 2019; Salmenkari 2009; Shin 2018) and particularly of Routledge (2017), contradicting popular notions that visible and accountable protest occur only in “public” space. Instead it highlights how public‐private boundaries and their inherent permeability can be utilised within protest to enact contention as safely as possible within high‐risk authoritarian regimes.…”