Introduction. Marking Places

This chapter is an introduction to the book and sets out a framing for thinking about categories, fixities and fluidities through engaging with salient contemporary issues. A main argument is that there is a particularity to the current set of contradictions that modern societies face which lies in processes of dismantling fixities, on the one hand, but also tendencies towards their entrenchment and reproduction, on the other. It is argued that this is part of the mechanism for dealing with crises at different levels, denoting a central bifurcation in modern neo-liberal democracies. The chapter points to the mutual co-existence and indeed co-dependency between the twin poles of de-ordering and re-ordering. Such processes are expressed particularly around the boundaries of categorisations and the concrete social relations involved, around race, ethnicity and nation, migration, rights, sexuality, gender and class and at their intersections. It argues for an approach that considers categories around difference as modes of power which also inform people’s sense of belonging as well as relating to processes of differential inclusion and resource allocation. It provides an account of the notion of translocational belonging, with its focus on spatialised temporalities, beginning the process of presenting a translocational intersectional lens which is developed more fully later in the book.

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