4th International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Emotional Geographies
1-3 July 2013 at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Session Summary
Session Title
Emotional Geographies of Occupied Territories and Emergency Zones
(Session 1)
Session Abstract
While both fields – geographies of emergency and occupation zones, on the one hand, and
of emotional geographies, on the other hand – are on the rise, their combination is still
waiting for realization. Emergency zones studies, from the Occupied Palestinian Territories
to natural disasters, tend to emphasize power relations and deny human emotions and
perceptions, whereas emotional geographies (such as represented in psychoanalytic,
phenomenological, non-representational) tend to neglect power and power geometrics. We
assume deep connections between these two domains, which are relevant to study for
scholarly, moral and political reasons. The aim of this interdisciplinary session is to
investigate the impact of violence, uncertainty and differentiated power relations on human
emotions, social and personal spatialities and place making.
We invite papers exploring the different dimensions of the emotional geographies of
emergency and occupied zones. Those contributions include, but are not limited to:
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Keywords
Spatial-emotional ethnographies of emergency and occupation zones
Geographies of fear and hope
Sense of place and displacement
Violence, uncertainty and emotions
The role of the senses in creating, analyzing and representing emergency and
occupation zones.
Gendered experiences of emergency and occupation zones
Theoretical and conceptual contributions to the coupling of power relations and
emotional geographies
"occupied territories"; "emergency zones"; "power relations"; "violence"
Presentations
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Title
Author Name
1
Soundscapes and Touchscapes in the Occupied Palestinian
Territories: Chronic Uncertainty, Bodily Vulnerability and the Nonrepresentational Condition
Ariel Handel
2
Toward an Emotional Archaeology of Displacement, Internment, and
Abandonment in Post-Conflict Northern Uganda
John D. Giblin
3
The banality of occupation: the suburbanization of Israel’s settlement
policy
Marco Allegra
Session Convenors and Chair
Session Convenor Name
Affiliation
Ariel Handel
Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the
Advancement of Peace, The Hebrew
University of Jerusalem
Session Chair name
Affiliation
Ariel Handel
Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the
Advancement of Peace, The Hebrew
University of Jerusalem
Session presentation details
Presentation 1
Title
Soundscapes and Touchscapes in the Occupied Palestinian Territories:
Chronic Uncertainty, Bodily Vulnerability and the Non-representational
Condition
Abstract
The paper will explore the sensual and emotional geographies of the Palestinians in the OPT.
The argument will be threefold: (1) the Israeli occupation creates, deliberately, a condition of
chronic uncertainty, which infiltrates to all life levels; (2) an important part of that uncertainty
is due to basic asymmetry in what might be termed (following Jacques Ranciere) the
distribution of the sensible, namely who can see, hear and touch the other and under what
conditions; (3) this has an impact on the bodily vulnerability and therefore, creates
soundscapes and touchscapes that, although un-mappable, still have major impact on the
lives and on the spatial organization and daily activities of the occupied. By adding violence
and power relations to the discourse, the paper will attempt to contribute theoretically to the
domains of emotional and non-representational geography.
Author name
Author affiliation
Ariel Handel
Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace, The Hebrew University
of Jerusalem
Presentation 2
Title
Toward an Emotional Archaeology of Displacement, Internment, and
Abandonment in Post-Conflict Northern Uganda
Abstract
This paper describes the beginnings of a research project that aims to explore the
construction and flow of emotions in the post-conflict trauma-scape of northern Uganda.
The conflict relates to the civil war between the Government of Uganda (GoU) and the
Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), and its antecedents, from 1986 to c. 2006. During this war,
estimates suggest, tens of thousands were killed, tens of thousands more were enslaved, and
millions of people were displaced, the latter partly resulting from government policies, which
forced hundreds of thousands of people into Internally Displaced Person (IDP) camps. The
displacement was ostensibly to protect the population from theLRA but effectively interned
and controlled northern residents in open prisons. Since the end of the Northern War, as the
fight against the LRA has moved to neighboring countries, the IDP camps have been
forcibly abandoned in the name of post-conflict normalization and development. However,
over twenty years these places of internment became the homes of many hundreds of
thousands of people who are now being displaced again, a process which is leading to the
construction of more emotional trauma and the call formemorialization of the tangible and
intangible traces of the camps and the surrounding massacres and abductions. In this postconflict trauma-scape the relationship between emotion and place is heightened as lived
experience amongst the material remains of conflict, and the threat of loss and/or
destruction of those remains, affect the construction of a complex range of conflict
memories and post-conflict emotions and actions. Thus, this paper outlines the case of
PabboIDP camp, which once held 70,000 people in a 2 x 2 km area, and resident emotional
attachment to its material remains, as it seeks to develop a method of engagement with the
emotional geography of post-conflict northern Uganda.
Author name
Author affiliation
John D. Giblin
School of Social Sciences and Psychology | University of Western Sydney
Presentation 1
Title
The banality of occupation: the suburbanization of Israel’s settlement policy
Abstract
The presence of Jewish settlements in the West Bank is one of the most controversial issues
in the conflict in Israel/Palestine.
Still, most of the academic and media discourse on the topic tends to focus on the immediate
humanitarian, territorial and legal implications of the establishment of settlements, and on
the national-religious, hard-line component of the settler world. On the other side, the role
of large suburban settlements in the transformation of the material and symbolic landscape
of the metropolitan area has been consistently overlooked, and the dynamics of single
settlements over time largely ignored.
My paper will present a case study on the settlement of Ma’ale Adummim, a bedroom
community of 40,000 residents located in the eastern periphery of Jerusalem. The paper –
mainly based on contextual and historical data and in-depth interviews with residents of the
community – will focus on place attachment, personal geographies, and the relation between
the latter and the production of space.
The underlying argument of the paper is that the presence of large, suburban and depoliticized settlements has constituted a “quiet revolution” in the Israeli-Palestinian relations
in the area of Jerusalem, and a fundamental component in the transformation of the social,
political and symbolic landscape of the metropolitan space.
The day-by-day dimension of suburban life has been paramount in creating a new sociospatial definition of what Jerusalem is – which represents today the one of the most
significant realities in the conflict.
Author name
Marco Allegra
Author affiliation
Research Fellow (CIES- University of Lisbon)
Short biographical notes of session organisers and presenters
Marco Allegra
Marco Allegra [BA, MA International relations (University of Torino), MA Near and Middle
Eastern Studies (SOAS – University of London), PhD Political Science (University of
Torino)] is research fellow at the Centro de Investigação e Estudos de Sociologia (CIES),
Instituto Superior de Ciencias do Trabalho e da Empresa - Instituto Universitàrio de Lisboa
(ISCTE-IUL). His research interests focus on Middle East politics, the theory of citizenship,
planning and urban studies. His publications include articles in Citizenship Studies, IsraelPalestine Journal, Mediterranean Politics, The Geography Compass, Environment and Planning and
various Italian academic journals, and a book on the history of the Palestinian people. His
recent research work focuses on the Israeli settlement policy in the metropolitan area of
Jerusalem.
Ariel Handel
Postdoctoral fellow at the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of
Peace, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a research fellow at the Minerva Humanities
Center, Tel Aviv University. His research interests are human movement in the Occupied
Palestinian Territories, mapping and spatial representations, and the political philosophy of
geography. He is the head of the "Space and Power: A Political Lexicon" research group at
the Minerva Humanities Center. His publications include Protest: A Political Lexicon (co-ed,
2012), Geographies of Occupation (forthcoming) and several journal papers and book chapters.
John D. Giblin
John D. Giblin is a lecturer in heritage and tourism at the Institute for Culture and Society
and the School of Social Science and Psychology, University of Western Sydney, Australia.
Before taking up his current position, John completed his PhD, Reconstructing the Past in PostGenocide Rwanda: An Archaeological Contribution, at the Institute of Archaeology, University
College London, following which he undertook a post-doctoral fellowship concerning PostConflict Heritage in Western Great Lakes Africa at the School of Global Studies, University of
Gothenburg. John is currently also a scientific committee member of the Association of
Critical Heritage Studies.