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

Transient geographies: 50:50 sharemilking in the Waikato

Spacings of mobile farming in New Zealand: Assemblages of cows, bodies, farms and the weather Weather changes moods – Nirvana, “In bloom” (1991) Cresswell (2011) broadens mobility studies to include non-human objects and structures, but rarely, non-human animals and the weather. I add here both livestock and the more literal atmospheric conditions of sun, wind and rain which are largely missing from mobilities studies. Weather is ubiquitous, yet hard to ignore – it impacts on both researcher and the researched. I visited farms and was: jumped-up-on by dogs, rode on 4-wheel bikes, got licked by calves [happy/sunny], felt hot, got covered in dust [tired/sweltering], stood still in the milking-shed [tension/cold], and was blasted by freezing winds and slopped through thick mud [depression/winter wet]. For Ash (2013a, 35) “the body is a kind of living or somatic memory, which is composed of various retentional apparatuses”, which become ignited by alignment of senses. In this paper I argue for attention to be paid to sharemilking and the materiality of atmospheres to draw attention to the ‘centrifugal’ forces of mobile rural dwelling. Sharemilking is a largely unique agrarian practice in New Zealand which is embedded in the notion of mobility. Sharemilkers typically own the livestock and machinery, but not the land and enter into contract with landowners on a share profit basis. Contracts are finished and new ones are taken up on a set day, the 1st June which is often termed colloquially as ‘Gypsy-day’. The contract nature of sharemilking stimulates a cascade of mobilities and enabling infrastructures (assemblages) as farmers move on a stuttering schedule of contract renewals. The frequent upheaval of hundreds of large animals and sheer amount of equipment moved, which is needed to run a sharemilking operation, does warrant further consideration

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

Strategies for teaching gender in geography

One hour session presented in Auckland at the Women Gender Geography Research Network (WGGRN) Symposium. We discuss: What does geography add to gender? Affect in the classroom. Personal politics; the personal is political

Gendered geographies of resistance, resilience and reworking in Aotearoa feminist geography scholarship

Aotearoa New Zealand feminist geographies involve alliances of connected and vibrant researchers who pay close attention to the politics of knowledge production, power, intersectionality and decolonisation. Safe spaces to speak and write together have been nurtured over time ‘down under’ due to a collective politics of care and mentoring. This special issue demonstrates the strength of collective thinking on resistance, resilience and reworking contemporary geographical practice in Aotearoa. The four empirically based and theoretically informed articles develop new thinking about resistance to colonialism, patriarchy, racism, metricisation and oppression. These critical articles contribute to feminist geographical knowledges both locally and globally

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

Research tropospheres: assemblages of cows, sharemilkers and researcher in Aotearoa New Zealand

Cresswell (2011) broadens mobility studies to include non-human objects and structures, but rarely, non-human animals and the weather. I add here both livestock and the more literal atmospheric conditions of sun, wind and rain which are largely missing from mobilities studies. Weather is ubiquitous, yet hard to ignore – it impacts on both researcher and the researched. I visited farms and was: jumped-up-on by dogs, rode on 4-wheel bikes, got licked by calves [happy/sunny], felt hot, got covered in dust [tired/sweltering], stood still in the milking-shed [tension/cold], and was blasted by freezing winds and slopped through thick mud [depression/winter wet]. For Ash (2013a, 35) "the body is a kind of living or somatic memory, which is composed of various retentional apparatuses", which become ignited by alignment of senses. In this paper I argue for attention to be paid to sharemilking and the materiality of atmospheres to draw attention to the 'centrifugal' forces of mobile rural dwelling. Sharemilking is a largely unique agrarian practice in New Zealand which is embedded in the notion of mobility. Sharemilkers typically own the livestock and machinery, but not the land and enter into contract with landowners on a share profit basis. Contracts are finished and new ones are taken up on a set day, the 1st June which is often termed colloquially as 'Gypsy-day'. The contract nature of sharemilking stimulates a cascade of mobilities and enabling infrastructures (assemblages) as farmers move on a stuttering schedule of contract renewals

Embodied vibrations: Disastrous mobilities in relocation from the Christchurch earthquakes, Aotearoa New Zealand

This article contributes to debates that consider things (buildings) that have previously been assumed to be bounded and fixed. When thinking about how literally anything can become mobile, this article addresses how buildings "live on" through the bodies of participants. The notion of material affects is advanced to draw together a complex set of ideas on vibrant materialities. Material affects, then, entangle the earth, forces, embodiment, and micro mobilities to expose the vibrant matter of buildings. Empirical material is drawn from semistructured interviews with people who relocated out of Christchurch following the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes and aftershocks. In relocation, acute spatial awareness and sensitivity to movement and vibration-that is, the minute shudders and flexes of buildings-colonized the bodies of participants. Material affects are able to challenge the distinction between vital energy (life) forces and materialit