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Using intimacy-geopolitics as its framework, this paper examines multi-sited violences enabled by digital technologies as interwoven forms of remote warfare. As political geographers have highlighted the ‘trickling down’ of digital weapons technologies from military to police practice, this analysis has tended to stop at the scale of the state. We extend this work by examining technology-enabled coercive control (TECC) within the context of domestic violence through the lens of remote warfare. TECC includes the way abusers use digital technologies to surveil, track, monitor, harass and terrorise their intimate partners. In examining TECC through the lens of remote warfare, this paper contributes to geographic literature by illustrating the common tools and tactics that the military, police and domestic violence abusers use to engage in political violence across sites and scales. We also emphasise the way survivors feel and experience TECC in order to illustrate the intimate emotional dynamics of political violence enabled by digital technologies. We argue that centring intimacy in this way helps to expose how control and domination work within remote warfare – at all scales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on a community-based participatory action research project located in Seattle - before and during the COVID-19 pandemic - to examine the unanticipated impact that the pandemic has had on reducing barriers for survivors of domestic violence seeking protection through the legal system. We draw on interviews with survivors and victim advocates, along with autoethnographic participant observation during Domestic Violence Protection Order (DVPO) hearings, to trace survivors' experiences navigating the DVPO process before and after its transition from an analogue to digital system. We situate this research at the intersection of legal and digital geographic scholarship to analyze how the law and digital technologies reinforce the spatial operation of power and exclusion, while they simultaneously provide emancipatory potential for women's experiences of security, legal subjectivity and emotional personhood. By focusing on how the courts' transition to a digital system affects the emotional personhood and legal subjectivity of domestic violence survivors, this paper advances feminist calls within legal and digital geographies scholarship that encourage more sustained engagement with feminist thought to understand the varied effects of the law and digital technologies – respectively – on gendered bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For most of United States' history, the state did not intervene in violence perpetrated within the home or intimate relationships. Women experiencing intimate partner violence had little recourse from state institutions for security or legal justice. This article's inquiry centers on two policing practices – preferred arrest and evidence-based prosecution – that emerged in the 1980s to redress the state's long history of ignoring intimate partner violence. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, this article examines how these two policing practices affect the experience of citizenship for intimate partner violence survivors by showing how the state creates a distinction between 'cooperative' victims who support the arrest and incarceration of their abusers and 'uncooperative' who do not. To develop this argument, I conceptualize the policing and prosecution response to intimate partner violence as a social contract of rights and responsibilities that mediates the relationship between the state and women who experience intimate partner violence. By illustrating how the state discursively constructs 'uncooperative' victims as irrational, this article utilizes a feminist geographic analytic to examine the everyday discursive and material technologies that the state employs to reregulate responsible citizenship in a neoliberal era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork that I conducted in the 'safe space' of an exchange and visitation center, this article examines center staffs' experiences of vicarious abuse. Vicarious abuse refers to the emotional effects that occur when someone – other than the victim in the relationship – experiences or witnesses the coercively controlling tactics of a domestic violence abuser. This article examines the limitations of safe space that fails to consider the physical and emotional security needs of all who utilize the space. By tracing the fears of staff who interact with abusers, this article also frames domestic violence as a public safety concern with implications beyond the intimate. With recognition that staff experiences of vicarious abuse differ from the embodied experiences of victims in abusive relationships, this article applies a feminist geographic analytic to examine how the 'safe space' of an exchange and visitation center enables fear and normalizes vicarious abuse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past 20 years, feminist geographers have gone to great lengths to complicate notions of ‘the field’ and make clear that the field is not an easily bounded space. This body of work has demonstrated the complexity of field spaces, explored ways to destabilize boundaries, and traced the power relations between researchers and participants. Ultimately, this work takes the breaking down of boundaries as an inherent good in field research, and, subsequently, little work has focused explicitly on the utility of physical and emotional boundaries that develop in field research. Our experiences as feminist geographers who reside in our fields show there is much left to understand and subsequently disrupt regarding the boundaries of ‘the field.’ In this article, we build on the concept of ‘intimate insiders’ to discuss the complex negotiation of doing research in the places where we have created personal lives and our sense of community. We often found ourselves struggling to define the physical and emotional boundaries of ‘the field’ on the outside for the sake of our participants and ourselves. In this article, we reflect on boundary-making as a specific feminist methodological practice for addressing the complexity of fieldwork. We discuss the techniques and strategies we used for conducting research in the communities in which we are long-term community residents. In the tradition of feminist methodology, we draw from our research experiences in State College and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to reconsider how producing distance through boundary-making has the potential to benefit our participants, our projects, and ourselves. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The aim of this Viewpoint is to suggest a feminist intervention into the Sandusky scandal at Penn State University as a radical alternative to rethinking institutional violence at places of higher learning. Jerry Sandusky, former Penn State assistant football coach, was found guilty on 45 charges related to child sexual abuse. The horrific nature of the crimes shocked the community, but the unanswered questions surrounding the involvement of Penn State's most prominent administrators in a cover-up have implications for the pervasiveness of institutional violence within higher education. We contend if places of higher learning strive to be the embodiment of intellectual transformation, a feminist ethics of care and responsibility is necessary to negate the day-to-day feelings of fear and vulnerability that institutional violence supports. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper builds upon feminist critiques of security interventions in the name of ‘protecting women’ to link United States municipal policing practices for intimate partner violence with global security interventions. Policing intervention into intimate partner violence emerged in the last twenty-five years; however as I argue, these policing practices are situated within narrow conceptions of masculinist security that often fail to address victims' multiple security needs. While not dismissing the importance of arresting intimate partner violence abusers, this paper examines the ways that policing can create additional and different embodied fears and insecurities for victims. Using the tools of emotional geopolitics, this paper traces victims’ fears following the arrest of their abuser to understand the temporal and spatial moments of fear in relation to security interventions. This methodological approach examines the limitations of masculinist protection while reimagining security to consider the emotional security needs and fears of those being protected. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]