Hope is not singular or fixed; instead hopes take multiple forms that constitute precarity. Drawing on interviews with white women ‘on benefits’ in the North East of England, in a period before ...Brexit, I explore different kinds of hope that surfaced in relation with neoliberal forces of, and beyond, austerity. (1) Multiplied hopes, hedging bets and holding several possibilities together; (2) Conflicted hopes, pulls towards paradoxical attachments; (3) Suspended hopes, framed by the limits of the now; (4) Negative hopes, invested in promises that despair could be pushed onto others; (5) Hopes for the absence of optimism, a mode of being present in the present, staying with mutual contingency and withdrawing from the cruelty of unknown futures, a strategy increasingly denied to women who were more than ‘left-behind’. By exploring the different forms that hopes take, we can better understand what hopes do. I argue that hopes in decline were not lost, nor orientated towards upward progress, but invested instead in maintaining a position. They were both sustaining and debilitating through situations of loss and uncertainty, and as such constituted a stretched-out present, tensed with decline.
This paper examines uses of theatre for practice-based, collaborative, research. It brings a review of existing work and reflections on my own practice into dialogue with participatory geographies, ...studies of affect and geographies of bodily difference. This demonstrates in-depth and well-justified relationships between forms of practice and the spatial ways of knowing they engage; the surfacing of otherwise background conditions for critique and intervention; and relations between doing and thinking, as well as collaborating partners, that can open a field of possibilities. This is significant for the broader development and assessment of ‘creative’ or ‘artful’ collaborations in human geography, as I summarise in conclusion.
A group of women in the North East of England; women getting on and getting by amidst austerity. But what does austerity become for these women? How does it surface and register in their everyday ...lives through a series of fragmented encounters? Together, we developed a fictional play to explore how austerity acted in the midst of other things. Effects ranged from the un-dramatic to the intense – from an empty flowerbed at the end of the street to service closure and a loss of support. How then to ‘evoke’ austerity in this article and through the narrative form of a play? Does austerity become atmospheric like smog – something cold and wet settled over the place? Like a coercive character making demands she cannot meet? Or a particular pattern of relations between event and effect: a plot that falls apart? Our attempts at dramatisation revealed austerity’s fracturing and dissonance. Austerity sapped women’s energy to flourish through existing attachments to one another, to family life and to other forms of unpaid care; it made promises it couldn’t keep; it disorientated. As austerity differently met and co-constituted the lives of women, it disrupted opportunity for collective experience so that even austerity was not commonly encountered. In that context, I work through the play and the process in its development to explore what we held together and what continued to fall apart. Story then works hard in this article. It becomes a promise of momentum towards resolution, an affective mechanism that organises lives in the chaos after financial crisis, a longed-for form for a coproduced play and a theory that might make some sense of why anti-austerity imaginaries were not coherently attached to at least by women in this process.
This Introduction to the special issue on "Creative Endings" thinks across intensities and temporalities to consider the force of "endings" in the contemporary political moment: the multiple ...timespaces within them, endings as temporalities in their own right, experienced forcefully, unequally, and as generative of dynamic emotional resonances. Whilst often stated, endings remain under-theorised in the discipline. Yet endings are a central form through which the assemblage of representations, materialities, structures and the more-than representational are organised in the orchestration and deliverance of political work. This introduction, and the various papers that follow, begin to address the gap in thinking, by introducing intensities and temporalities as ways to work with both the representational and more-than-representational forces of endings, drawing upon examples from contemporary politics. From here, we propose the creative arts, in occupying the threshold of the representational/more-than-representations, as well placed to intervene on endings. We think the creative arts can help us to know, represent, and intervene in various ends within the current political moment, through their attunement, specifically, to liveness, form and feeling.
Research encounters, like other encounters, differently facilitate the coconstitution of the subject, and incite more or less intense processes of change. But how to understand that change in a ...context of ongoing difference? To explore this question I draw on a series of theatre workshops developed with unemployed and precariously employed UK women who worked together to share experiences of austerity and coproduce a fictional play. A number of women suggested that "something felt different" as a result of or in the moment of theatre participation. Reflecting on this I consider how games and exercises enmeshed and resettled the strange and the familiar; this intensified the volatility of habit and opened new possibilities for connection and relation between women. Therefore in this article I (1) explore recent ontological theorizations of habit in cultural geography to conceive volatile habit in and as multiple processes of (de)composition, and (2) think this through our own theatre activity as well as Boal's approach to "demechanization to highlight the importance of the method for geographical research. This emphasizes the significance of micro-intensity changes. It expands potentiality of collaborative theatre making beyond the service of instrumental or ideological functions and it blurs binaries between activity and passivity, theatre and everyday life.
This Policy and Practice (P&P) originated from the round table discussion held in the UK and Ireland Planning Research Conference at Queens University Belfast from 11 to 13 September 2017. Its aim is ...to explore the representational and performative role of spatial imaginaries in both describing identities and ascribing them to places and thus influencing spatial relations and planning practices. The P&P consists of four contributions which reflect on and respond to the editor’s opening essay by focusing on a number of key questions that are pivotal in understanding spatial imaginaries and their role in planning thoughts and practices, such as: how do spatial imaginaries come about? Which mechanisms and tools are drawn upon to construct, circulate and galvanise them? How and why do certain spatial imaginaries become dominant in planning? And what is the role of planning in generating, uncovering, enacting or resisting certain imaginaries?
A group of women in the North East of England; all mothers, all out of paid work or in low waged temporary employment; women getting on and getting by amidst austerity. But what does austerity become ...for these women? How does it surface and register in their everyday lives through a series of fragmented encounters? Together, we developed a fictional play to explore what austerity becomes in the midst of other things. Encounters ranged from the un-dramatic to the almost intense and evental, from an empty flowerbed at the end of the street to service closure and a loss of support. In our play we tried to make a story of austerity through these and other disparate encounters, but the plot kept falling apart. Our attempts to dramatize austerity using theatre-as-method revealed its multiplicity and incoherence. As austerity differently met and co-constituted the lives of women in a supposedly shared demographic, it disrupted opportunity for collective experience, so that even austerity was not related to or lived as a common object. Although moments of stubborn conviviality continued in and between the lives of women, austerity became present as an intensification of existing processes of precaritisation that engendered forms of fracturing and dissonance. This disrupted women’s energy and opportunity to flourish through existing forms of attachment to one another, to family life and to other forms of unpaid care. The thesis, like our play, tells a story of how for these women fragments of austerity act in the midst of other things, and of how encounters with austerity move between the dramatic and the ordinary, the personal and the generic, the situation and the event. And in that context, the thesis and the play explore what, for these women, holds together and what falls apart.
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