Researching Spaces of Violence Through Family

Abstract

This chapter uses families' spatial practices as a lens for exploring violence. Geographical understandings of violence and conflict often focus on international terrorism and domestic governance. This can create situations where certain contexts, often in the global South, are apprehended solely as spaces of death, destruction and demise. Far less attention is paid to the experiential and everyday dimensions of violence or the context that coconstitutes it. This chapter uses the family as a lens for exploring violence and lived experience. While the family can be a site of gendered and patriarchal violence, this chapter argues that family relations need to be understood in more complex ways. In particular, geographical practices of family can do other kinds of work that enable people to endure and resist violence and conflict. These arguments are given substance through a detailed exploration of Palestinians living through, resisting and enduring Israeli settler-colonial violence.