Relational spaces and relational care: Campus sexual violence, intimate geopolitics and topological polis

Abstract

Critical care ethics argues that care's political potential lies in its relationality. Geographic scholarship on relationality can provide an avenue for unpacking the politics of care. This paper explores how a spatial relational care approach illuminates how caring agencies occurring in particular places have political reach to people and places well beyond those initial sites. A spatial relational care approach seeks to bring visibility to the diversity of caring and non‐caring relationalities that occur between multiple people, places, events, times and structural underpinnings. Such geographic relational scholarship on care brings attention to the ways that people and places are non‐autonomous through caring relations. This paper suggests that the frameworks of topological polis and intimate geopolitics can extend our relational understandings of care and offer insights into aspects of social life that care research has yet to explore. Empirically, this paper draws on a high‐profile campus sexual assault case to argue that the spaces of care need to be understood beyond where the initial care act took place, that responding to care creates relational poleis and that the site of the body is relationally bound with care and violence.