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Dive into the research topics where Christopher Harker is active.

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Featured researches published by Christopher Harker.


Environment and Planning A | 2012

Familial Relations: Spaces, Subjects, and Politics

Christopher Harker; Lauren Martin

`̀Families matter. Irresponsibility. Selfishness. Behaving as if your choices have no consequences. Children without fathers. Schools without discipline. Reward without effort. Crime without punishment. Rights without responsibilities. Communities without control. ... But I repeat today, as I have on many occasions these last few years, that the reason I am in politics is to build a bigger, stronger society. Stronger families. Stronger communities. A stronger society. ... [I]f we want to have any hope of mending our broken society, family and parenting is where weve got to start. David Cameron, Monday 15 August 2011(1)


Environment and Planning A | 2012

Precariousness, Precarity, and Family: Notes from Palestine

Christopher Harker

Geographical studies which have engaged the family have generally done so by critiquing the patriarchal, heternormative, family. However, this paper argues that families are enmeshed in a plurality of political and ethical spacings that exceed this singular focus—a claim advanced by reviewing recent studies of Palestinian families. These studies reveal ways in which Palestinian families have been constituted by colonialism and nationalism, and are also the means through which colonisation and violence have been resisted. I then put these studies into conversation with the recent work of Judith Butler to argue for the importance of studying families at the intersections of different spatial, political, and ethical practices and discourses. Butler argues for a social ontology of precariousness—the ways in which ones life is dependent on the lives of others—and a concomitant ethics of precarity, a means to challenge the ways in which certain subjects and populations are put at greater risk of death and suffering than others. I employ studies of Palestinian family spaces to read Butlers arguments spatially. A spatially attentive reading of Butlers ideas helps in turn to conceptualise the different ways in which families do political and ethical work. In particular, I focus on family spatial practices which reduce or alleviate heightened exposure to violence—some of which can be understood as a source of ethical responsiveness. This leads to a call for more geographically, politically, and ethically nuanced approaches to apprehending family spaces.


Environment and Planning A | 2010

On (not) forgetting families: family spaces and spacings in Birzeit, Palestine

Christopher Harker

This paper is a response to Valentines recent suggestion that the family is an absent presence within geography. Persuaded by her argument, I explore other disciplinary approaches to theorizing families, and, in particular, how discursive appropriations of ‘the family’ and theories of family practices can enlarge our understandings of what families are and how they are done. I then argue that geographers can contribute to such studies by exploring the spaces and spacings that coconstitute family subjectivities. I put these ideas to work in the context of Birzeit, Palestine, where, I argue, particular family spaces and spacings offer more nuanced understandings of this place which challenge limited discursive constructions of the ‘Arab family’ and the ‘Western family’. I situate these theoretical maneuvers within broader geographies of intimacies, while arguing that there is still a great deal of work to be done to further spatialize our understandings of families.


International Journal of Urban and Regional Research | 2014

The Only Way Is Up? Ordinary Topologies of Ramallah

Christopher Harker

This article seeks to conceptualize and value some of the quotidian geographies responsible for contemporary forms of urban change. The starting point for the argument is an attempt to account for recent urban change in the Palestinian city of Ramallah, particularly the proliferation of apartment buildings, using emerging work on verticality. It is argued that work on verticality focuses empirically on prominent cities and spaces of violent conflict, invokes the vertical as politically suspect and offers a theorization of space that is topographical in nature. Consequently, accounts of verticality have produced narratives that obscure topological spatial relations. This article seeks to make space for such topologies, which it is argued are crucial to producing urban and political life itself in many contexts. The concept of ordinary topologies is proposed as a means of attending to the complex and undervalued practices that are thought to be normal (but not static) and common within and across intensive or qualitative spatio-temporal relations. This approach is fleshed out through a discussion of changing topographic–topological landscapes in Ramallah. In particular, it is argued that the increasingly verticalized landscape of the city, embodied in rapidly proliferating apartment buildings, must be understood in relation to frequent journeys to other places and changing family relations.


Environment and Planning D-society & Space | 2017

Debt Space: Topologies, Ecologies and Ramallah, Palestine

Christopher Harker

Debt is widely conceived as temporal – present consumption bought with future labour. This paper advances conceptualisations of debt by incorporating the active role space plays in creating, maintaining and undermining debt relations. Debts are topological binds – a particular kind of spatial connection, which are entangled with topographic spaces to produce debt ecologies. This argument is developed by tracing the creation, maintenance and/or destruction of spatial connections between different people, communities, institutions and sites in the Palestinian conurbation of Ramallah – Al Bireh. Attending to the spatiality of debt offers a better understanding of debt itself, and extends relational approaches to finance that deploy network imaginaries, which cannot account for topological spacings that fold or dissolve distance and divisions. The extensive range of time-spaces that co-constitute specific debt ecologies also reveal a more-than-economic geography, which in the context of Ramallah enfolds family and geopolitics. These entanglements emerge from a methodological approach that uses ethnography to move beyond statistical representations of debt. Thinking debt topologically also responds to postcolonial concerns about the locatedness of theory.


Geopolitics | 2011

Different (Hi)stories, Different Gazas

Christopher Harker

At the time of writing — June 2010 — the Gaza Strip is being blockaded by Israel and Egypt, with the support of many other states. This blockade began in earnest in 2006, and has been largely ignored by mainstream Western media. The impetus for these same media organizations to (finally) attend to this dire situation was the attack by Israeli armed forces on a convoy of aid ships seeking to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza, which resulted in the deaths of nine Turkish nationals. While this has currently led to a heightened visibility of the blockade within Western diplomatic and media spheres, the ongoing occupation of the Gaza Strip that began in 1948 is simultaneously made less visible. Given this broader occlusion, the publication of Joe Sacco’s (2009) Footnotes in Gaza, and Nathan Shachar’s (2010) The Gaza Strip: Its History and Politics, books that do focus on a broader and ongoing history of life under occupation, is therefore both timely and welcome. Both of these books are not strictly speaking academic texts, but rather efforts by foreign journalists to account for and situate contemporary Gazan experiences


Geoforum | 2011

Geopolitics and family in Palestine

Christopher Harker


Geoforum | 2018

The gender of debt and space: Notes from Ramallah-Al Bireh, Palestine

Christopher Harker; Dareen Sayyad; Reema Shebeitah


International Journal of Urban and Regional Research | 2017

Stephen Graham 2016: Vertical: The City from Satellites to Bunkers. London: Verso.

Christopher Harker


Jerusalem Quarterly , 58 pp. 7-12. (2014) | 2014

Ghosts of Jerusalem: Ramallah's Haunted Landscapes

Christopher Harker; R Shebeitah; D Sayyad

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Jessica Dempsey

University of British Columbia

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Juanita Sundberg

University of British Columbia

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Lucy Jarosz

University of Washington

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