This session desires first, to create a collective space for critical reflection on the violent spatialities unfolding through the current multiple and overlapping wars and genocides. Second, it wishes to contest the sensorial, emotional, visual field of violence by bringing feminist and decolonial translocal solidarities to the forefront. While war zones and genocidal violence multiplied in the African continent, the Middle East, Europe and beyond, spaces have emerged as embodied forms of resistance to militarization, colonialism, racism, and gendered violence. If emotions and embodied sensations are constitutive of war (Åhäll & Gregory 2015), the study of their multiscalar manifestations is an open and emerging field of inquiry in peace/war geographies.

This session sits at the intersection of Embodied and Emotional Geographies and Critical and Feminist War Studies contributions to the theorization of spatiality of violence and structural oppression (Dijkema et al. 2024; Murray 2016; du Bray et al. 2017; Olivius & Hedström 2021). It wishes to counter-narrate and counter-map the current multiples crises, genocides and wars unfolding globally by proposing spatial and emotional forms of resistances.

In doing so, the session explores and complexifies the links between spatio-temporalities, embodied-emotional processes and wars (Dijkema et al. 2024). It brings attention to sounds, touches, and feeling of war zones at multiples scales – bodies, intimate, geopolitical, local and global – which convey critical reflections on gendered wars such as feminicides, climate wars, racialization of space, and genocidal violence. Following Murrey (2016), the session therefore focuses on how “an attention to emotional geographies illuminates meaningful aspects of experiences of violence”. By doing so, it centers on emotions and embodiment as pivotal epistemological standpoints for the inquiry into spatial dynamics of war and the resistance formed in its wake and against its logics.

Contributions to this session might delve – among other topics – into critical feminist GIS, emotional geographies, war/peace geographies, decolonial cuerpo-territorio (Gómez Grijalva 2012), spatial feminist ethnographies, landscapes and soundscapes of war (Talebzadeh 2023), spatial militarization, embodied contestations to war in/out war zones or translocal solidarities (Lüvo 2024).