Geographies of Coloniality and Everyday Violence Research Group (GOCEP)

HOMCRI; ERC Consolidator Grant 2023-2028; PI: Mikko Joronen

This project elaborates ways of making home among those dwelling in societies facing prolonged crises. It traverses through various landscapes to look at ways in which people make home in spaces that are familiar, yet repelling, incapacitating and altogether negating in nature. Such landscapes, notably in Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza, reflect various forms of crises engendered around economic collapse, infrastructural shortage, protracted conflict-situation, colonial presence, and/or continuation of war by other means. These crises force us to pose a key question on what it means to stay, and make a home, in spaces that constantly expose life to disruptions, incapacitations, and material negations? How does one dwell in crisis?

HOMCRI project responds to this research challenge on three fronts. Firstly, it generates empirical knowledge on what it takes to dwell in crisis and conflict areas, and with the political conditions they establish, by focusing on spaces that violently separate, distance, and amputate people from their familiar everyday spaces through affective disruptions, material deprivations, and conditions of incapacitation. Secondly, it does so by developing negativity as a methodological tool for approaching dwelling as a tension between ‘home-making’ and ‘spaces of exposure’. Thirdly, it offers a novel conceptual elaboration of negativity as a worldly condition, which challenges the paradigmatic notions of materiality, affect and dwelling in current posthuman thought. The project hence rethinks the negative foundations of human-world relationship by focusing on ways in which negative material and affective bindings align with incapacitating political conditions in prolonged crisis, conflict and colonial situations.

Affect, Spatial Mobility, and the Politicization of Therapy and Lifestyle Movements in Post-2019 Lebanon (Dalia Zein)
I set out to explore the ways in which individual-centered initiatives have been gradually shifting toward more politically engaged conversations amid crisis hit post-2019 Lebanon. Through multi-sited ethnography, I look at the intertwined political and affective dimensions of these said initiatives amid continuous nation-wide turmoil (be it the Beirut Port Blast of 2020, the exacerbating economic crisis and infrastructural collapse of 2021, the Israeli war on Gaza expanding to South Lebanon in 2023, and the intensification of the Israeli war on Lebanon in 2024). First, I wish to advance a study of movements via a focus on the embodied and affective experiences of local (and global) sociopolitical change by asking the following questions: how is the politicization of a lifestyle movement and its transformation to a more intersectional cause propelled forward not via an optimistic vision of a country’s future, but rather through “events of rupture, exhaustion, interruption, hesitancy, and loss” (Maddrell 2021, 119)? And what does it mean to feel at home in a cause amid collective political despair? Furthermore, studying the extent of politicization of mental health enterprises in Lebanon, I seek to understand the following: how is the emotional weight of dwelling in war and crisis negotiated between mental health workers and patients when the issue at hand is a collectively shared struggle? This examination ultimately aims to unpack how affect and emotional connectedness are conceived through these politically situated encounters. The project equally looks at the significant role that spatiality and spatial mobility play in both ethnographic cases with the goal of deepening the understanding of the desired and lived shifts that these actors aim for in a rapidly ever-shifting society.  
 

Kone Foundation, 2023-2027; PI: Tiina Järvi

In the past decade, Lebanon has witnessed an accelerating number of crises that have showcased the malfunctioning of the state and its structures. Waste crisis, water crisis, electricity crisis, multiple political crises, dollar crisis, petroleum crisis, hyperinflation, and several shortages, are but examples of the grievances faced by those living in Lebanon. The covid pandemic, the port explosion in 2020 with its political aftermath and the bread shortage created by the war in Ukraine have increased discontent, but they are by no means its starting point. In fact, since the civil war (1975–1990) there have been little significant changes in Lebanon’s political priorities (Arsan 2018, Salloukh 2015), no concentration on the welfare of ordinary citizens. By 2022, media, international actors and Lebanese civil society were describing Lebanon as collapsed, failing, or already failed state. This research explores the situation in Lebanon by elaborating the concept of failure to ask what it means to live and act in a failing state. By combining ground-up ethnographic fieldwork practice with analysis of policy papers on and political and social responses to the current situation on Lebanon, the research project provides a novel approach to state failure. This is achieved by going beyond the idea of a failed state as a security threat, by rather allowing the voices of those who act amid it to be heard.

The research project draws from geographical and anthropological literature on failure (Amin 2016, Musallam 2020, Osborne 2019, Perrons and Posocco 2009, Smith and Woodcraft 2020), and connects them to the emerging literature on ‘geographies of negative’ (Bissel et al 2021). The focus is on the notion of limit, in particular, as it allows to acknowledge agency as constrained. I am interested in what happens if we see failure not as something that can be left behind and learned from (Carroll et al 2017: 3), but as something that exposes the limits of doing. This approach enables taking seriously the rupturing aspects of failure, to see it as something that continues to curtail and destroy capacities (Philo 2017) rather than as something that allows creativity and innovations to emerge (Lewis 2014).

Present-futures in/of Palestine (Academy of Finland, 2019-2023, PI: Mikko Joronen)

This project examines the future anticipations, expectations, and prospect behind the present realities and ongoing developments in the occupied Palestine. It focuses on the spatialisation of what is called the ‘present-futures’ at several key West Bank sites in order to unfold Palestinian futures through the ongoing practices on the ground. It aims analyses what kind of Palestinian futures these ongoing realities rely on, and how the indefinite nature of the future operates as a source for different, even opposing contemporary acts and hopes. A manifold picture of the present-futures is thus painted, a one that asks what kind of future events the present acts engender, while also acknowledging the ways in which the anticipated future-events deeply affect the ongoing practices of governing and everyday life in the occupied territories. By looking at spatially embedded explication of present-futures it aims offer a reality-grounded lens for what the Palestinian futures might look like.

Power of precarity: everyday governing and resistance in the occupied West Bank (Academy of Finland, 2017-2022; PI: Mikko Joronen)

This project focuses on the politics of precarity as it emerges in the matrix of everyday life in the occupied Palestinian territories. It looks at the manifold ways in which precarity operates as a technique of government that Israel uses to advance its settler colonial aims, but also as a condition that engenders new political and social forms of everyday life, action and solidarity. It problematises the notions of power, governing and violence in particular, asking how they are related to the vulnerability of acting and living. By doing so, the project shows how the idea of precarity affords a useful starting point for analyzing the structures of the occupation, but also for understanding the practices of everyday resistance.