Introduction to Displacements

Abstract

In the first months of 2020, the call for papers for the 2022 Special Issue of the Annals of the American Association of Geographers was circulated. It invited papers that engage with multiple forms and meanings of displacements and their geographies: patterns of shifting, dislocation, or putting out of place; substitutions of one idea for another or the unconscious transfer of intense feelings or emotions; activities occurring outside their normal context; and replacements of one thing by another. The COVID-19 pandemic, declared by the World Health Organization shortly after, produced new displacements and intensified existing patterns of displacement and dispossession, including human and more-than-human mobilities and immobilities. At the same time, socionatural displacements—floods, fires, droughts, hurricanes, sea-level rise, species loss, and dislocation—were the backdrop to the displaced and deferred hopes of the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference. The twenty-seven articles in this special issue contend with how we as geographers conceptualize and theorize displacements; the range of sites, spaces, processes, affects, scales, and actors we study with to understand them; and what is at stake politically in how we research displacements. It is also a pandemic archive of academic labor, in which we find traces of displacements within and beyond our discipline.

2020年的前几个月, 美国地理学家协会发布了2022年特刊征稿通知。稿件涵盖迁移的多种形式和含义及其地理分布：移位、紊乱或移除的模式, 一种思想取代另一种思想、强烈情感或情绪的无意识转移, 异常行为, 以及一种物体替换另一种物体。世界卫生组织宣布2019新冠病毒流行之后不久, 出现了新的迁移、强化了迁移和剥夺的现有模式, 其中包括人类和超人类的流动性和不流动性。与此同时, 伴随着社会自然的迁移（洪涝、火灾、干旱、飓风、海平面上升、物种灭绝和紊乱）, 2021年联合国气候变化大会的愿望被迁移、被推迟。本期特刊的27篇文章, 讨论了作为地理学家我们应如何去理解迁移并对其进行理论化, 研究并试图去理解地点、空间、过程、影响、规模和作用体, 讨论了关乎如何开展迁移研究的政治利害关系。本特刊也是学术工作者的一个全球性档案, 从中能在地理学科内外去发现迁移的痕迹。

En los primeros meses del 2020 se hizo conocer la convocatoria por artículos para un número especial para el 2022 de Annals de la Asociación Americana de Geógrafos. Allí se invitaba a contribuir trabajos que abordaran las múltiples formas y significados de los desplazamientos y sus geografías: patrones de desviación, dislocación o de desarraigo; sustituciones de una idea por otra o la transferencia inconsciente de sentimientos o emociones intensos; actividades que ocurren fuera de su contexto normal; y el remplazo de una cosa por otra. La pandemia del COVID-19, declarada por la Organización Mundial de la Salud poco después, produjo nuevos desplazamientos e intensificó los patrones existentes de desplazamiento y desposesión, incluyendo movilidades e inmovilidades humanas y más-que-humanas. Al propio tiempo, los desplazamientos socionaturales –por inundaciones, incendios, sequías, huracanes, aumento del nivel del mar, extinción de especies y dislocación– fueron el telón de fondo de esperanzas desplazadas y aplazadas de la Conferencia de las Naciones Unidas sobre el Cambio Climático de 2021. Los veintisiete artículos de este número especial abordan el modo como los geógrafos conceptualizamos y teorizamos los desplazamientos; la gama de sitios, espacios, procesos, afectos, escalas y actores que estudiamos para poder entenderlos; y lo que está políticamente en juego sobre el modo como investigamos los desplazamientos. Es también un archivo pandémico del trabajo académico, en el que encontramos las huellas de los desplazamientos dentro y fuera de nuestra disciplina.

Key Words:

• climate change
• displacement
• infrastructure
• labor
• migration
• mobility
• urbanization

关键词:

• 气候变化
• 迁移
• 基础设施
• 工作者
• 移民
• 流动性
• 城市化。

Palabras clave:

• cambio climático
• desplazamiento
• infraestructura
• migración
• movilidad
• trabajo
• urbanización

The epigraph that launches Singh’s (2018) book, No Archive Will Restore You, is from Antonio Gramsci, quoted in Edward Said’s Orientalism: “The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is “knowing thyself” as a product of the historical processes to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory. … Therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory.” It is a stunningly intimate historical materialist methodology, in which embodied history (history in and on the body) is the disorderly wellspring of critical thought and, by extension, theory. The process of creating an inventory is what transforms the traces of historical processes, their imprints, into an archive that is generative of critical thought.

This promise is also what Singh skewered in her recollections of graduate school as an academic-in-training and a queer brown woman in a mostly white, mostly male critical theory program. She circles the idea of the archive, describing it from different vantage points, trying to bring into focus its relationships to time, place, and different registers of need and desire. In doing so, she suggests two ways to understand the emergence of a desire (for the archive) that also describe two ways of understanding displacement. One is through a moment, when something shifts or changes and creates a corresponding realignment in being, action, or thought. The second is through accrual, how over time and through repetition displacement solidifies as something enduring.

As Bloch (this issue) argues, experiencing displacement produces data that are stored in the body—an archive of the traces created by fast and slow processes of displacement and emplacement. But can displacement do justice to the sweep of those historical processes and related contemporary dynamics of injustice that might be better theorized (and politicized) as dispossession (Roy 2019, quoted in Valayden [this issue])? Valayden argues that displacement offers a lens for focusing on the relatively autonomous sphere of the political. Thus, as Bormpoudakis and Bourlessas (this issue) show, it can render legible both the militarization of nature when the state used islands as spaces of banishment after the Greek Civil War and embodied yet collective forms of emplacement through encounters with rocks, plants, and the sea. Displacement foregrounds the simultaneity of the macro- and microdimensions of the political while remaining relentlessly material. Thus, as Hardy et al. (this issue) demonstrate, displacement and dispossession are entangled in the structures and outcomes of racial capitalism and environmental racism that, for Gullah/Geechee people on Sapelo Island in the United States, involve a double dispossession of land that produces multiple forms and scales of material, cultural, and social displacement.

As these specific examples suggest, the articles in this special issue illustrate the generative ways that geography as a discipline allows for different kinds of inventories of the multiple, complex, and dynamic displacements shaping and reshaping our worlds. The special issue also represents one kind of archive of the displacements and replacements wrought by COVID-19. I finalized the call for papers (CFP) in January 2020, about six weeks before the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic on 11 March, my oldest son’s birthday. In that CFP I wrote, “Displacements, which have multiple forms and meanings, are deeply geographical: patterns of shifting, dislocation, or putting out of place; substitutions of one idea for another or the unconscious transfer of intense feelings or emotions; activities occurring outside their normal context; and replacements of one thing by another. Our world, at this moment, is rife with displacements.” Now, almost two years later, this archive offers the opportunity to go beyond what Roast et al. (this issue) call “the heuristic of displacement.” It is a starting point from which to critically situate these elaborations in relation to struggles for justice and geographies of hope that require us to grapple with the meaning of place, but also with the full span of times, scales, and relations of displacement.

An Inventory of Labor, Loss, and Gratitude

First, however, I want to displace the “acknowledgments” from their normal place at the end of the article, and, in doing so, reflect briefly on academic research and publishing in our current moment. The creation of this special issue entailed an enormous amount of labor; paid and unpaid, visible and invisible. Starting with abstracts: 171 were submitted in response to the CFP. An abstract is a commitment to future intellectual work, a physic investment. It was challenging to choose, and I want to acknowledge the work of all those who engaged with the CFP and submitted abstracts for consideration.

To help give shape to the special issue, I approached the Annals as one kind of archive of research and theory-building on displacement, refracted through the institutions of Anglo-American academia and their exclusions. Migration (and, more recently, immobilities), urbanization and gentrification, and postconflict and postdisaster displacements are the most common themes in this archive (see, inter alia, Schaffer and Smith 1986; Dahlman and Tuathail 2005; Hyndman 2007; Mitchneck, Mayorova, and Regulska 2009; Ritterbusch 2016; Safransky 2018; Shin 2018), which includes intellectual histories of displacement in different parts of the discipline (Piguet 2013). People and things become out-of-place; the consequences and implications, as Cresswell (1997) argued, relate to the “belief that place is one of the primary factors in the creation and maintenance of ideological values (what is good, just, and appropriate) and thus in the definition of appropriate and inappropriate actions and practices” (334). The radical turn in geography was reflected, for example, in the explicit shift from quantifying and describing migration and gentrification as displacement to theorizing these displacements as spatial manifestations of power dynamics that produce and reproduce sociospatial inequality and oppression (Roseman 1971; cf. Ritterbusch 2016). At the same time, displacement can be an important descriptor and framework for biophysical, biomechanical, and ecological processes that express the dynamism of diverse environments and landscapes (Phillips and Marion 2006) or magnitudes of human-induced change (Urban and Rhoads 2003). As a range of contributions to this special issue explore, evolving dynamics of displacement emerge from the relationships between these dimensions, and between political economies and political ecologies (see, e.g., Kennedy, this issue).

The opportunity represented by this special issue topic was to further broaden and deepen the engagement with, and representation of, geographies of displacement in the Annals, as well as to think with and critically assess the theorization and conceptualization of displacement as a geographical process. Doing research, writing up research, thinking, reading, and theorizing: each of these processes is underpinned by relational power geometries that involve labor and the capacity to labor, access to resources (including time and space for academic production), responsibilities for care and reproduction of the self and others, and relative security or precarity across these domains. The COVID-19 pandemic reinforced existing distributions of racialized, gendered, and classed precarity both within and beyond academic institutions, and between differently situated academic institutions. Schools and child-care facilities closed. Teaching moved online or, conversely, instructors were forced to teach in person whether they felt safe to do so or not, with the burdens of both approaches borne most heavily by student workers (graduate and undergraduate), nonpermanent faculty, and the staff who support them. Workloads increased, even as many of us also dealt with extremes of isolation or enforced togetherness that laid bare the ambivalence of the home as a space of refuge and recovery. Many thousands of people took to the streets demanding an end to white supremacy, colonialism, racial capitalism, misogyny, fascism, totalitarianism, and ethnonationalism. The displacement of hope—that the pandemic would end, that things would go “back to normal,” that things couldn’t go “back to normal” and would finally have to change—acquired new rhythms as ongoing waves of the pandemic continued to wash over us, never shifting the commitment of high-income economies and the minority world to hoard the vaccines and technologies that might slow them.

The labor required to write academic papers is never individual labor. The pandemic shone a light on the myth of the lone intellect, as it did on the disposability of mostly low-paid workers who continued to bag our groceries or deliver our food, care for our elders, and clean the offices and hallways of our institutions. Authors had to withdraw due to the lack of childcare, personal or family illness and loss, and the need to support extended kin of all kinds. Theirs are the missing traces, the absences in this pandemic archive. Research collaborators and participants, the communities with which we create knowledge, and the travel often needed to reach them, became accessible only (and unevenly) through screens. The displacement of especially qualitative methods, but also the in-person interactions that underpin truly collaborative research, has involved many dimensions of loss and grief, but could also be generative: As Muñoz et al. (this issue) write, being a researcher “displaced” by COVID-19 has involved challenges and failures but also ongoing and renewed commitments to integrity, reciprocity, and strong relationships of trust with communities.

Once papers came in, they had to go back out. Reviewing, the largely unrecognized and unrewarded work that keeps our current system of academic publishing (barely) afloat, is always additional to the other things we do, and became untenable for many as the largely fictional bulwark between “work” and “life” eroded further. I am enormously thankful for those who were able to review and who engaged carefully and generously with the papers they read and commented on, often multiple times. Every journal editor I have spoken with in the last two years has commented on the ways COVID-19 has upended the fragile and unequal peer review system; whether the ongoing impacts of the pandemic will finally displace the status quo in academic publishing remains to be seen and is a question for a different intervention.

For all of these reasons, I am extremely grateful for the labor of the Annals editorial board members who provided unflagging support and stepped up repeatedly when asked, and for the other Annals editors—Ling Bian, David Butler, Brian King, and Katie Meehan—who did the same. Again, and thankfully, no editor is an island. The expertise and professionalism of the Annals team—Jennifer Cassidento (Managing Editor), Dr. Stephen Hanna (AAG Cartographic Editor), and Lea Cutler (Production Editor at Taylor & Francis)—all made this special issue possible. If it is an archive of many traces of pandemic displacements, both written in its pages and glimpsed between them, this special issue is also an inventory of collective labor and collaboration.

Geographies of Displacement and Displacements of Geography

It is always difficult, in an introduction, to achieve a balance between contextualizing the articles in the special issue and summarizing their collective contribution, and simply listing their key interventions. With twenty-seven articles, early drafts of this piece read too much like an inventory. Taken together, however, the articles deepen and challenge geographies of displacement in at least three key ways: epistemologically, and in relation to knowledge production; empirically, in extending what we study as displacement and in using that expanded field to retune the concepts and theories we use to understand it; and politically, in the relationship between academic praxis and the struggles against displacement and with those displaced. These contributions are relational and overlapping, also connecting different subdisciplines (e.g., political, urban, feminist, climate and conservation geographies) and topical and thematic foci (refugees and migrants, racial capitalism, gentrification, colonialism, infrastructure). Butler and Roberts (this issue), for example, both disrupt the assumption that displacement means putting or being out-of-place by exploring displacement-in-place in Black women’s counternarratives. They describe pedagogical praxis to “invite more interdisciplinary pedagogy and public scholarship around counternarratives centering Black land, homeplaces, emotion, and joy.” The articles are also connected by explorations of methodology that link questions of displacement to the politics and practices of research, before and during the pandemic.

Roast et al. (this issue) propose an epistemology of displacement that avoids “an essentialist narrative of coherent and authentic place that precedes the displacements of modernity, but rather embed[s] the negotiated, learned, and improvised nature of place in our methods” through attention to choice, value, and infrastructure. Their article links approaches to displacement in urban and migration studies, foregrounding “intersubdisciplinary learning,” in ways that parallel Wahab and Ashutosh’s (this issue) connection of refugee settlement and urbanization across three South Asian contexts (see also Leitner et al., this issue). Likewise, Kelley et al. (this issue) highlight problematic binaries of mobility and stasis in research on climate displacement that are both spatial and temporal, suggesting instead the concept of cumulative socionatural displacement. These approaches productively blur the lines between fast and slow displacement (as do Ehrkamp et al., this issue, on the temporality of trauma), between displacement from place and displacement in place (what Ranjbar [this issue] also calls in-situ displacement), and between displacement as either unidirectional or diffuse. In the latter sense, Lynch et al. (this issue) propose that the automation of care labor signals the need to go beyond the critical focus on places and times of displacement through a “micropolitical perspective [that] recenters geographies of displacement toward questions of embodiment, encounter, and affect” (see also Seitz [this issue] on the relationships between geopolitical and affective displacements in contemporary politics of migration).

This expanded epistemological terrain is reinforced by the range of sites, spaces, actors, processes, scales, and times of displacement represented by the articles of this special issue (e.g., Weeden et al. on urban flight and rural displacement; Sareen et al. on energy transition displacements; and Bier on the displacement of politics in the digitalization of shipping logistics infrastructures)—many of which build on but also extend and challenge the Annals displacement archive. Several contributions focus explicitly on the entanglement of political, sociomaterial, and ecological relations in climate-induced displacements. These encompass migrations and mobilities of species including, but not limited to, humans. Matthew et al. (this issue) explore how displacement-related conservation discourses relate to “anthropocentric geographical imaginations around mobility,” with implications for displacement and replacement. Lunstrum and Bose (this issue) argue for attention to Anthropocene displacements drivers that include, but are not limited to, climate change, in which colonialism is the thread that sutures together political conflict and environmental change. Ammerman (this issue) also draws out this thread to connect historical displacements and exchanges between and within Chile and California to contemporary displacements wrought by wildfires, which require that traditional ecological knowledges (TEK) again replace commercial-scientific approaches to fire management that are themselves part of the displacement logics of colonialism.

This broadening also includes new sociospatial dimensions of urbanization that exceed surface-level and horizontal displacements and replacements: Woon and Dodds (this issue) explore the politics and materialities of subterranean urban displacement as a project of both urbanization and state power in Singapore, and Lauermann (this issue) examines how supergentrification requires the displacement of “empty” vertical space to guarantee ongoing urban accumulation. The direct involvement of the state and capital in displacement through property and other legal regimes that legitimize and normalize the right to place, and determine the temporality of those rights, is illustrated by Gergan and McCreary (this issue) in relation to large-scale infrastructure projects in Canada and India, and by Jacobsen (this issue) in her analysis of incremental legal displacement of the right to refuge. Thus, although the discourse and politics of rights are often the bases of responses to displacement, these legal geographies draw our attention to the question of whose rights our systems protect, and whose rights are continually displaced in the reproduction of the state and its borders.

Finally, several articles focus directly on the implications of how, and to what ends, we research displacement. Derickson (this issue) reflects on what is at stake in academic–community relationships that aim to be productive of both knowledge and politics, asking these questions: To what end do we pull the “tantalizing thread[s]” that reveal new insights into the processes and relations that create vulnerability to displacement? Toward whose political goals, or visions of social change, do we produce knowledge that underpins the production of academic theory? What is the politics of the translation of that coproduced knowledge into kinds of theory that make it into the pages of the Annals? The articles in this special issue offer multiple entry points for reflecting on the answers to these questions, in the context of a pandemic that has deepened political, social, economic, and environmental fault lines and exacerbated inequities within and beyond academia. They also reflect the challenges of displacing academic business as usual. Displacements and replacements of geography remain both a collective project and an open question.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kendra Strauss

KENDRA STRAUSS is a Professor in the Labour Studies Program and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC V5A 1S6, Canada. E-mail: [email protected]. She is also an Associate Member in the Department of Geography. She is a feminist economic and labor geographer with research interests that include paid and unpaid work, precarity, social reproduction, and social infrastructures.