Introduction: Lockdown and the intimate

The lockdowns imposed upon cities, regions, and countries as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic are extraordinary state-sanctioned spatial interventions, both in terms of scale and scope. However, rather than a time-delimited event nor an exceptional circumstance of a temporary crisis, the pandemic lockdown was entangled with long-standing and on-going intimate and embodied histories of political violence, upheaval, militarization, displacement and dispossession. Be it as a result of war, terrorism, natural disaster, or pandemic – lockdown is more than an intervention in physical space and infrastructure alone. It is also an intervention that mobilizes, and often relies on, the sphere of the intimate along different and often unequal geographies of vulnerability. In this Theme Issue, we build on feminist geopolitics and feminist political geography to examine the intimacies of lockdown, seen through the experiences of refugees, migrants, low-income residents, as well as within the contexts of war and terrorism. Here, the politics of embodiment, domesticity and affectivity is central for understanding how lockdowns actively shape and are shaped by intimate geographies, thus advancing the theorization of the lockdown more broadly. The contributions to this Theme Issue gather around the following questions: how does the spatial politics of lockdown mobilize the sphere of the intimate? More broadly, how does the intimate help forge possibilities and places of counter-narratives of solidarity, shared vulnerabilities and care in contrast to renewed militarization, rising authoritarianism, violence, and the expanding spatialities of confinement in everyday life

The Geopolitics Of Daily Life In Mostar, Bosnia And Herzegovina

Nearly twenty years after the brutal conflict that occurred in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), ethnosectarian ideology continues to permeate all structures and institutions of Bosnian society, from political and educational institutions to religious and cultural ones; most of all, it is significantly embodied in the everyday life of people in Bosnia. It is these everyday practices that I investigate in order to unravel how ethnicity is (re)produced, performed and experienced through mundane practices of moving through space. Specifically, this dissertation asks: What socio-spatial practices and emotional experiences are involved in the processes of solidifying, as well as dissolving, ethnic identity in BiH? The study is a primarily qualitative investigation of daily life, based on deployment of multiple methods such as participant observation, interviews and a photography project. The site of the study is the town of Mostar in southwestern BiH. It has been formally and informally divided between "Croat/Catholic" west Mostar and "Bosniak/Muslim" east Mostar for over 15 years. The findings point to the ways identity and space emerge as performative effects of practice, as well as how different processes of bordering (between "us" and "them"; between "our" and "their" side) are materialized through different affective intensities

Geopolitics of affect and emotions in a post-conflict city

This paper aims to advance our knowledge of the relationships between emotions, affect, and geopolitics. For, among several criticisms of affect’s non-representational theories, is the claim that it has not been used to understand problems of real social and political importance. What is crucially lacking in this important body of work on the nexus between affect and politics is empirically grounded research that examines these processes, especially in situations of geopolitical instability and conflict. In this paper, I seek to address this gap by attending to the geopolitical role of feelings in the volatile political climate of a post-conflict city. Specifically, my work examines the emotional and affective landscapes of daily life in the city of Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina which, twenty years after the war officially ended, continues to experience divisions between its Croat/Catholic and Bosniak/Muslim populations

Ispitivanje eksplicitnih i implicitnih etničkih predrasuda

Cilj ovog istraživanja je bio utvrditi odnos između eksplicitnih i implicitnih etničkih predrasuda na uzorku studenata hrvatske nacionalnosti Filozofskog fakulteta u Zagrebu. Vodeći se teorijama dualnog procesa koji razdvajaju automatske (implicitne, nesvjesne i nenamjerne) i kontrolirane (eksplicitne, svjesne i namjerne) procese u podlozi ljudskog procesiranja informacija, u ovom radu se ispituje razlika između automatskih i kontroliranih procesa na način na koji se oni primjenjuju na procese stereotipiziranja i stvaranja predrasuda. Koristeći se subliminalnim udešavanjem osobnim imenima Hrvata i Bošnjaka muslimanske vjeroispovijesti, nastojali smo ispitati predrasude i stereotipe prema ovim etničkim skupinama na automatskoj razini, odnosno pri smanjenom utjecaju kontroliranih procesa. Implicitne predrasude su definirane kao stupanj negativnosti izražen prema osobi opisanoj u dvosmislenoj priči koja je uslijedila kao zadatak stvaranja dojma. Rezultati su pokazali da osobe bez i sa izraženim eksplicitnim predrasudama prema Bošnjacimamuslimanima (definiranih preko upitnika samoprocjene socijalne distance prema toj etničkoj skupini) se također razlikuju i na mjeri implicitnih predrasuda i to tako da osobe s izraženim predrasudama više iskazuju favoriziranje vlastite grupe (Hrvati) u odnosu na osobe bez predrasuda. Zaključeno je da su automatske stereotipne asocijacije osoba donekle sukladne sa njihovim kontroliranim odgovorima. Uz to, ispitivane su spolne razlike u implicitnim (i eksplicitnim) predrasudama i nađeno je da muškarci pokazuju manje negativne implicitne predrasude prema Bošnjacima u odnosu na žene, dok na eksplicitnim predrasudama razlike u spolu nije bilo

Youth as geopolitical subjects: the case of Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina

From the mundane legacy of imperialism to more spectacular accounts of violence, geopolitical contestations permeate in numerous ways the landscapes of people’s everyday life. In a world dominated by geopolitical conflicts and tensions, what is the role of youth in these relations of force? How are youth geopolitically positioned? Are they simply victims of larger geopolitical struggles, or are they perhaps actively involved in them? This chapter addresses the question of the politics of childhood and youth through geopolitical lenses. Specifically, it aims to understand the ways young people become important geopolitical subjects when struggles over identity, territory, and domination are being waged. In order to do so, the chapter turns to the feminist geopolitics literature, as it provides a useful route to rethinking and reconceptualizing the notions of public and private, as well as the hierarchical scalar thinking that permeates many discussions of children and youth politics. The youth and geopolitics nexus is explored through young people’s notion of identity and belonging with particular attention being given to schools as geopolitical sites. These theoretical discussions are followed by some empirical examples of the geopolitics of identity in the high schools of the post-conflict city of Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Discomforts in the academy: from ‘academic burnout’ to collective mobilisation

As part of a set of interventions on discomfort feminism, this article addresses how the politics of discomfort informs boundary work in the neoliberalized academic workplace in Switzerland. Departing from the authors’ engagements in a series of workshops on new forms of stress and pressure in academia and the effects of the deteriorating conditions of labor at their department, this article explores multiple and unevenly distributed emotions of discomfort generated by and through the workshops. We discuss discomfort as an affective orienting device that betrays the normative social space and the crossing of the personal-professional boundary in the academic workplace. This article explores the potentials and pitfalls of ‘staying with’ discomfort, rather than attempting to return within a comfort zone. We argue such affective politics can inform change in the neoliberalized workplace by reworking normative boundaries and helping mobilize different academic collectivities, ones based on care and shared vulnerability

The ‘magic of the mall’ revisited: Malls and the embodied politics of life

This article reviews recent literature on shopping malls that reaffirms their importance for human geography. Taking Goss’s seminal work on the ‘magic of the mall’ as a starting point, we trace how recent works attuned to emotion and affect have updated and inspired a re-conceptualization of this potential ‘magic’. Synthesizing the linkages between consumer architecture with spatial politics and emotional and affective sensibilities in those spaces, the article seeks to help set the agenda for further research in this field by emphasizing how social difference infuses the retail atmosphere and the way it reveals the workings of geopolitics

Special Section: Experiential Landscapes of Terror

International audienceThis special section addresses how the spatiality of terrorism and security responses mobilize and impact the realm of experience. The articles presented here expose how terrorism is encountered as a felt experience by urban residents in Europe through an analysis that encompasses several realms including the body, the intimate, the domestic, and the urban public space. These works develop existing scholarship on the European urban geographies of terrorism, by looking beyond established approaches to normative range of actors and infrastructures that underlie terrorism and counter-terror security responses, and by exploring the fine-grained connections between felt experience, urban space, and global politics. Moreover, in focusing on the experiential landscapes of terror, we start exploring geographies where healing, trust, and societal reconnection can be imagined in the wake of terror