Speakers: Peter McGowan, Rosa Heimer and Ivana Belivaqua (Department of Geography, King's College London)

Hear from three first-year PhD students from the Department of Geography about their research. 

The seminar will be followed by a drinks reception.

About the speakers:

Rosa Heimer
The Coloniality of Violence: Latin American immigrant women at the crossroads of violence and resistance in London

Violence against women has now for long been considered to be a worldwide women’s rights and public health problem, global estimates showing that 1 in 3 women will have experienced physical and/or sexual violence throughout their lifetime give us a broad dimension of the issue but also risks overshadowing its nuances. Black feminist scholars have significantly contributed to a proliferation of research investigating the specific ways in which violence against women operates intersectionally across systems of oppression, however, there is still a lack of understanding of how colonial legacies underpin violence against racialized immigrant women in postcolonial Western contexts. Through a decolonial feminist approach, this research enquires about the coloniality of violence against Latin American immigrant women in London and aims to unveil the ways in which coloniality is being reproduced and embodied across multi-scalar spatialities and temporalities. 

Peter McGowran
Assemblage Theory and Disaster Risk Management: Politics and vulnerability in Kalimpong, India

West Bengal’s newest district is embroiled in a century-long political struggle, known more recently as the Gorkhaland movement. The British colonial powers set the stage for environmental degradation, class-struggle and political conflict to be the dominant issues facing the Darjeeling hills. This means that landslides in Kalimpong are an assemblage of monsoon rains, silty Himalayan slopes, earthquake tremors, drainage systems built by the colonial powers, tea gardens, an agglomeration of multi-storey concrete buildings in built in ‘risky’ places, and a bitterly divided and increasingly unaccountable political system. With 2 local authorities, at least 4 political parties, an influential lobby of tea-garden owners and the spectre of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections; it is worth asking – Who is managing, or not managing, these landslide assemblages? What is the disaster risk management assemblage of Kalimpong?’

Ivana Bevilacqua
Grounding Verticalities: The Infrastructure of Israeli Settler Colonialism

Nowadays war and trade are both nurtured by the networked architecture and infrastructure of supply chain – they are managed by it and take its form. In this process of international recasting of labour, state and market, at stake is not solely the militarisation of corporate supply chain or the privatisation of warfare. Logistics are productive of new forms of discipline, new interpretations of law, new organisations of the common, new mapping of the world, and new paradigms of security. Analysing the issue in the context of Israeli occupation of Palestine, I aim to unveil what infrastructure can tell us about the nature of settler colonialism and capitalist forms of neoliberal development. Firstly, I will look at the ways in which historically necessities of military supply chain in warfare fostered the development of roadscapes. Secondly, I will discuss the theoretical debates in the field of critical urban geography in regard of vertical and volumetric analyses towards Israeli built environments. And finally, I will discuss the impact of Israel’s ‘Judaization’ policy in the Galilee on native communities.