Making space: relational ethnography and emergent resistance

Engaging with recent work in Geography that suggests approaching resistance in emergent, non-intentional, material, and non-human forms, this chapter explores how the enactment and use of space in extra-regional ways can be understood as resistance to settler colonial spatial practices. While the need for researchers to unsettle conventional Western spatial models is well-established, alternative spatialities, such as embodied and mobile forms, are often difficult to recognise using established research methodologies. As such, it is not always obvious how to conduct research that is able to recognise spaces enacted outside the domain of conventional spatial practices. Reflecting on our own fieldwork, we will address the following questions: What can resistance to dominant spatial models look like? What methodological approaches help research be more open to them? Using empirical examples drawn from our work on borders and gang territories, we discuss the ways new materialist methodologies helped us encounter elusive spatial practices and forms. In particular, we propose that applying a new materialist methodology to gang territories brings visibility to the bodies - both human and non-human - enacting spaces that have otherwise been obscured and devalued through conventional Western understandings of space. Through this approach the embodied and mobile characteristics of territory come into view. Using the examples of gang tattoos and dial-a-dealing - the use of cell phones to conduct drug transactions - we show how reframing these as practices of gang space brings to light the mobile and embodied dimensions of territory. We will conclude with a discussion of the political implications of this approach. We posit that adopting a methodological approach to research that counters dominant spatial models is in itself a form of resistance, and furthermore, makes the identification of emergent forms of resistance possible. We reflect on how resisting assumptions about predetermined forms of geography or spatial categories opens possibilities for alternate ways of thinking resistance to come into view.