Staff Profile

Publication details for Professor Rachel Pain

Pain, R. Globalized fear? Towards an emotional geopolitics. Progress in Human Geography. 2009;33:466-486.

• Publication type: Journal papers: academic
• ISSN/ISBN: 0309-1325, 1477-0288
• DOI: 10.1177/0309132508104994
• Keywords: Conscientization, Emotion, Fear, Feminism, Geopolitics.
• View online: Online version
• Durham research online: DRO record

Author(s) from Durham

• Professor Rachel Pain

Abstract

This paper questions the recent recasting of fear within critical geopolitics. It identifies a widespread metanarrative, `globalized fear', analysis of which lacks grounding and is remote, disembodied and curiously unemotional. A hierarchical scaling of emotions, politics and place overlooks agency, resistance and action. Drawing on feminist scholarship, I call for an emotional geopolitics of fear which connects political processes and everyday emotional topographies in a less hierarchical, more enabling relationship. I employ conscientization as a tool to inform the reconceptualization of global fears within critical geopolitics, and to move forward epistemological practice and our relationship as scholars with social change.