“The state kills, we kill, everyone kills”: Cracking and framing the field with humor

Abstract

This special issue is the product of efforts by scholars to theorize, contextualize, and conceptualize the everyday political life of humor among ordinary and vulnerable bodies. In this introduction, we revisit scholarship on humor in geography and identify some of the main themes explored by the featured authors. This selection of articles builds on work in critical geopolitics and political geography, feminist geopolitics, and emotional geographies to think about the banal ways that humor operates as a coping device, a tool to destabilize popular geopolitical narratives, a form of resistance, a tactic of survival amid adversity, and mechanism of engagement within research. This special issue presents some of these key conversations to encourage geographers to more critically engage with the methodological and theoretical possibilities of humor.