ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 

About: ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies is an academic journal. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Politics & Neoliberalism. Over the lifetime, 550 publications have been published receiving 9828 citations.

Reflexivity, Positionality and Participatory Ethics: Negotiating Fieldwork Dilemmas in International Research

Abstract: There are critical disjunctures between aspects of everyday behaviour in the field and the University’s institutional frameworks that aim to guide/enforce good ethical practice, as the conduct of fieldwork is always contextual, relational, embodied, and politicized. This paper argues that it is important to pay greater attention to issues of reflexivity, positionality and power relations in the field in order to undertake ethical and participatory research. Drawing from international fieldwork experience, the paper posits that such concerns are even more important in the context of multiple axes of difference, inequalities, and geopolitics, where the ethics and politics involved in research across boundaries and scales need to be heeded and negotiated in order to achieve more ethical research practices.

For Slow Scholarship: A Feminist Politics of Resistance through Collective Action in the Neoliberal University

Abstract: The neoliberal university requires high productivity in compressed time frames. Though the neoliberal transformation of the university is well documented, the isolating effects and embodied work conditions of such increasing demands are too rarely discussed. In this article, we develop a feminist ethics of care that challenges these working conditions. Our politics foreground collective action and the contention that good scholarship requires time: to think, write, read, research, analyze, edit, organize, and resist the growing administrative and professional demands that disrupt these crucial processes of intellectual growth and personal freedom. This collectively written article explores alternatives to the fast-paced, metric-oriented neoliberal university through a slow-moving conversation on ways to slow down and claim time for slow scholarship and collective action informed by feminist politics. We examine temporal regimes of the neoliberal university and their embodied effects. We then consider strategies for slowing scholarship with the objective of contributing to the slow scholarship movement. This slowing down represents both a commitment to good scholarship, teaching, and service and a collective feminist ethics of care that challenges the accelerated time and elitism of the neoliberal university. Above all, we argue in favor of the slow scholarship movement and contribute some resistance strategies that foreground collaborative, collective, communal ways forward.

An Introduction to Critical Cartography

Abstract: This paper provides a brief introduction to critical cartography. We define critical cartography as a one-two punch of new mapping practices and theoretical critique. Critical cartography challenges academic cartography by linking geographic knowledge with power, and thus is political. Although contemporary critical cartography rose to prominence in the 1990s, we argue that it can only be understood in the historical context of the development of the cartographic discipline more generally. We sketch some of the history of this development, and show that critiques have continually accompanied the discipline. In the post-war period cartography underwent a significant solidification as a science, while at the same time other mapping practices (particularly artistic experimentation with spatial representation) were occurring. Coupled with the resurgence of theoretical critiques during the 1990s, these developments serve to question the relevance of the discipline of cartography at a time when mapping is increasingly prevalent and vital.

On the Importance of a Date, or, Decolonizing the Anthropocene

Abstract: This article argues for the importance of including Indigenous knowledges into contemporary discussions of the Anthropocene. We argue that a start date coincident with colonization of the Americas would more adequately open up these conversations. In this, we draw upon multiple Indigenous scholars who argue that the Anthropocene is not a new event, but is rather the continuation of practices of dispossession and genocide, coupled with a literal transformation of the environment, that have been at work for the last five hundred years. Further, the Anthropocene continues a logic of the universal which is structured to sever the relations between mind, body, and land. In dating the Anthropocene from the time of colonialization, the historical and ideological links between the events would become obvious, providing a basis for the possibility of decolonization within this framework.

Empathy and identification: conceptual resources for feminist fieldwork

Abstract: This paper introduces psychoanalytic conceptualisations of identification and empathy as ways of thinking about fieldwork interactions. I argue that these ideas have considerable relevance for feminist geography as resources for reflecting on relationships between researchers and those they research, especially in relation to debates about power and positionality in qualitative fieldwork. Drawing on object relations psychoanalysis, I describe identification in terms of unconscious processes of introjection and projection, which operate as dynamic exchanges within all interpersonal relationships. I draw attention to the scope for confusion between self and other in the context of these exchanges. This leads to a discussion of the concept of empathy, which I describe psychoanalytically in terms of receiving, processing, and making available unconscious material transferred from one person to another. I argue that empathy can be thought of as entailing an oscillation between observation and participation which creates psychic space or room to manoeuvre, and that it provides a way of understanding other people’s experiences in the context of both similarities and differences between researchers and research subjects. I suggest that empathy is mobilised in many research relationships, and that its psychoanalytic conceptualisation provides a useful resource for understanding the dynamics of these relationships.