Link to Session Platform

Chairs(s):

Emma Gaalaas Mullaney, Michigan State University

; Vanessa Massaro, Bucknell University

Description:

This session seeks to bring together scholars and organizers who are working to address absence and disappearance. The naming of disappearance is not in any way a neutral act, but rather a profoundly political one. Myths of certain lives and places as always in the inevitable process of “disappearing” can reinforce violent colonial power dynamics, reproducing marginalized humans, nonhuman species, and ecosystems as expendable on the way toward a given vision of modernity (Farbotko 2010). And yet, that makes critical grappling with the politics, logistics, imaginaries, and material messiness of disappearance all the more necessary.

Geographers have tackled the missing and the disappeared from many analytical angles, and several methodological stages. Melissa Wright, following online crowd-mapping of disappearances across Mexico (see Viñas 2013), emphasizes the importance of international and interdisciplinary collaboration: “as activists call for expertise to create maps of the disappeared and to publicize the landscape of disappearance, there is an urgent need for the honing of techniques for visualizing absence—for tracing the cell phones that suddenly are shut off, for tracking the GPS that comes to a permanent halt, for graphing the migration from the visible to the invisible,” (Wright 2017: 266). Missing data leaves us unable to recognize patterns of disappearing people (Sorensen and Huttunen 2020), nonhuman species (Mathur 2015), and landscapes (Braun and Bezada 2013). Disappearance in geography centers on both the epistemic, through attention to data and method, and the ontological, by attending to humans and environments that disappear.

References:
Baldacchino, G. 2016. Going missing: Islands, incarceration and disappearance. Political Geography. 51: 97-9.
Braun, C., & Bezada, M. 2013. The History and Disappearance of Glaciers in Venezuela. Journal of Latin American Geography 12(2), 85-124.
Farbotko, C. 2010. Wishful sinking: Disappearing islands, climate refugees and cosmopolitan experimentation. Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 51(1): 47–60.
Mathur, N. 2015. “It’s a conspiracy theory and climate change”: Of beastly encounters and cervine disappearances in Himalayan India. Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. 5 (1): 87–111.
Sorensen, N. and Huttunen, L. 2020. Missing Migrants and the Politics of Disappearance in Armed Conflicts and Migratory Contexts. Ethnos, DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2019.1697333
Wright, M. 2017. Epistemological Ignorances and Fighting for the Disappeared: Lessons from Mexico. Antipode. 49(1): 249-69.
Viñas S. 2013. Crowdmapping Mexico’s disappeared. Global Voices 16 August. https://globalvoices.org/2013/08/16/crowdmapping-mexicos-disappeared/

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda