Geographies of slow violence: an introduction

Abstract

This chapter provides an introduction to the concept of slow violence as indirect and slowly unfolding harm. This kind of violence is often built into the physical and social structures of society and becomes evident in its impacts on groups of people or ecosystems over time. The chapter presents geography as a field of study well-suited to making slow violence visible through a variety of research frameworks, foci and methods. Geographers have studied violence in different forms, and the chapter describes critical geopolitics and feminist geopolitics as two particularly valuable approaches to the study of indirect, latent harm. Geographers are also uniquely positioned to investigate slow violence that emerges in human-environment interactions. An overview of the chapters in this volume lays out the range of topics from social to environmental contexts, uses of fieldwork and spatial technology methods, and a variety of internationally focused research projects that aim to make slow violence visible.