Stories of relocation to the Waikato: Spaces of emotion and affect in the 2010/2011 Canterbury earthquakes, Aotearoa New Zealand

Emotion and affect are enmeshed in the lives of relocated Cantabrians. A project on the lived geographies of relocation disrupts the predominance of model based approaches in hazards and disaster literature. The previously taken-for-granted aspects of how people relate to one another and are in turn shaped by those relationships are of central concern. The research brings together the stories of people from 19 households who moved to the Waikato region of New Zealand as a result of the Canterbury earthquakes and aftershocks. It is argued that exploring relocation through the lens of emotion and affect can give rise to an understanding of the collective aspects of non-conscious, embodied and emotional life-worlds of relocatees. Semi-structured interviews, spontaneous focus groups and follow-up interviews were used to access emotional and affectual geographies and participants’ life experiences. Three main themes are addressed in relation to disasters: 1) bodies which are proximate and connected to other bodies; 2) sub-conscious and psychosocial aspects of relocation, especially ambivalence; and 3) the co-mingling of materials (buildings, architecture) with an emotional and affective sense of self. To explain each of these themes in turn, attention is paid to what bodies do to illustrate that proximity and connection are both present and desired by respondents in post-disaster and relocated spaces. The second theme of sub-conscious and psychosocial impacts explores how ambivalence exposes complexity and contradiction, which are tightly bound to the experience of relocation. The third theme of materiality is used to make clear how bodies and buildings are co-constituted. Homes, churches and other city buildings can become containers of memory inspiring feelings of dread, loss, and grief but also, comfort, belonging and identity. Emotion and affect, then, are critical to understanding the impacts of the earthquakes and relocation on people and communities, they are a call to think about complexity and are considered to be a large component of the human experience of surviving a disaster

Challenging the masculinist framing of disaster research

As a touchstone for feminist research, the personal is political sits at the heart of my PhD thesis. The research project began in October 2011, as communities in and around Christchurch (Canterbury) were coping with the impact of both a 7.1 magnitude earthquake 4 September 2010 and a more devastating (to life and architecture) 6.3 magnitude earthquake on 22 February 2011, including thousands of aftershocks (see Wilson 2013). Although I had initially planned to go to Christchurch to research how such a devastating event affected individual households, my feminist politics told me that I should not go. I was not comfortable flying into Christchurch ‘from the outside’ with no direct personal connection to the city nor the disaster. Thus I shifted the focus of the research away from communities in Canterbury toward households relocated to an area where I live, the Waikato region of the North island of Aotearoa New Zealand. Scholars are slowly beginning to acknowledge the powerful politics of (not) seeing disasters as an opportune research possibility (Brun 2009; Gaillard and Gomez 2015; Lund 2012), and I consider this a core strength of a feminist project

Buildings as dangerous spaces: mobilities of emotion and affect in disaster relocation

Disasters are something Mimi Sheller has been recently working with, e.g. her keynote at the last Mobilities Symposium was entitled mobility in a disconnected world, moving people, information and aid after disasters. Disasters imply multitudes of varying mobilities and assemblages at different scales. Earthquakes also disrupt moorings, such as: pipes, roads, bridges, telephone and power cables, sewerage, gas lines and so on as well as buildings. Earthquakes roll and buckle the earth creating lasting and momentary upheavals, in turn causing inanimate objects, such as buildings to: jump, shudder, roll, collapse, lean, sway, bend, break and crack. This paper is linked to my PhD project on people who relocated out of Christchurch to Hamilton following the devastating 2010/2011 earthquakes and aftershocks In Christchurch, not only the ground moved through seismic motion, but people moved through internal/external migration (relocation) and they told moving stories imbued with emotion. I consider today the recentring of the corporeal body as an affective vehicle through which place and movement are sensed, particularly paying attention to embodied vibrations and how these are experienced at different times and in different space

Feminist geographies in Aotearoa New Zealand: cultural, social and political moments

Aotearoa New Zealand is a nation of promise, potential and enigma: it was the first country in the world where women gained the vote in 1893 and now boasts the youngest woman world leader in 2017. It is also a postcolonial nation where structural racism, homophobia, and sexism persist, yet it has also given legal personhood to a river. Our Country Report foregrounds Aotearoa New Zealand feminist geographic scholarship that responds to, reflects, and sometimes resists such contrasts and contradictions at the national scale. We employ the lens of the 2017 national election to critically engage with current gendered and indigenous politics in the country. Analyzing these politics through three ‘feminist moments,’ our paper highlights the breadth and scope of current Aotearoa New Zealand feminist geographic scholarship and directions

Art that moves and re imagines place: a case-study on Tron Rocks

This workshop and presentation pushes into public art spaces and mobilities by drawing attention to place, environmental exploration, movement and the politics of care and kindness. Ideas loop back to, and are inspired by Peter Young’s 2015 documentary The Art of Recovery and the Lost and Found Project’s (2012) crafts of kindness in Christchurch post-disaster cityscapes. Here I present an autobiographical account of engaging with Waikato spaces and art through Hamilton’s Tron Rock group. The Tron, the colloquial name for Hamilton, is one of the country’s major nexus for painting and hiding rocks in and around urban spaces, public gardens, parks, lakes and the university campus. By painting rocks and ‘releasing them into the wild,’ participants use the online platform Facebook to facilitate a game of treasure hunting. The core politics that facilitate the ‘game’ is environmental respect, gifting and sharing art. Art is mobilised, it literally and emotionally moves, with shared journeys documented on Tron Rock sites. The thrill of discovery and sharing has mobilised groups of children and adults, as artists who reconfigure places by hiding rocks. I argue that geography and mobilites are crucial to think about how Tron Rocks has dynamically changed people-place engagements, as well as the breakdown of the categorisation of art as site-specific. Art literally travels. Rocks continue, may return or may never be seen again, it is all part of the game. I invite participants to this workshop to create their own rock and either keep it, set it free during the Symposium or hide elsewhere

Voices in the margins of recovery: relocated Cantabrians in Waikato

No two disasters are the same. Accordingly, sociocultural geographers are aptly positioned to include the place-based and temporal aspects of disasters in their analyses. By examining the experiences of 19 Cantabrian families who have relocated to the Waikato region, this paper offers stories from the margins of ‘traditional’ disaster research. Often researchers know a great deal about the population at the site of the disaster, but little about the people who move away. Further, by investigating relocation, the insider/outsider dichotomy is challenged, as participants in this research are simultaneously inside and outside the earthquake events and their ongoing impacts. ‘Ownership’ of the disaster narratives, including research, lays open ideas of who can speak for whom. What and who is inside and/or outside a disaster event also allows a finer distinction of how place attachment filters experience and ideas of recovery, which are not diminished under internal migration