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Abstract: Recent critical thinking on anthropogenic climate change has mourned cinema's ability to capture the slow violence of large-scale environmental degradation and foresee a future of environmental disaster that is unchecked because it remains invisible to aesthetic representation. This essay argues that the rise of slow cinema aesthetics, particularly the affective mode of anxiety that it cultivates through the chronic violence of the long take, is one aesthetic approach within contemporary cinema to mediate slow violence. This argument is developed through a close reading of Tsai Ming-liang's film, I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (2006), paying particular attention to the representations of ambient toxicity, the exhausting forms of reproductive labor on display, and the queer forms of intimacy that are cultivated throughout.

In this article we seek to expand on the developing interest in Slow Violence and how it relates to immigration and asylum, by exploring how such violence is resisted. Following Foucault's insight that in order to better understand power, it helps to study resistance to it, we draw on original research into acts of protest by refugees and asylum seekers in Scotland, and connect this to existing research on experiences of and resistance to the UK asylum system. In so doing we offer 'Slow Resistance' as a potentially useful concept with which to understand resistance not just to a particular configuration of power relations, but to a particular form of violence. The conceptual utility of Slow Resistance lies in its ability to illuminate: the particular operations of power/violence in the UK asylum system; the multiple forms of resistance to this violence/power; how these forms of resistance may be connected (thus discouraging the 'silo-ing' of analysing different forms of resistance); and how time is creatively engaged with by such forms of resistance. If, as has been argued, a particular challenge of slow violence is representational – how to devise arresting images and stories adequate to this form of violence – then resistance has the potential to focus our attention on it, and to gradually prepare the ground for meaningful change. While developed here in relation to the UK asylum system, slow resistance is a concept that we think can be useful in a wide range of contexts in which slow violence operates.

Human trafficking is predominantly framed as a criminal justice issue with sensationalised, highly visible violence. Stereotypical figures of young women in danger, passively poised to be rescued by figures of the state or vigilante justice, animate public discourse and policy. Yet the reality of trafficking is often far more complex than the linear narratives presented in the mainstream. In this article, I argue that human trafficking is more readily accessible as slow violence, the accumulation and accretion of the consequences of systematic oppression over time. I use Nixon's Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor to articulate a stance against the flash of trafficking's 'master narratives'. Slow violence offers three key elements for theorising human trafficking, i.e. that the harms are so gradual or delayed they: become imperceptible; compound over protracted durations of time; and may be so mundane and unspectacular to not even register as 'violence' in our vernacular. Aligned with a critical trafficking studies approach that draws attention to power dynamics and imbalances, slow violence focuses on the forms of exploitation and precarity that are taken for granted or assumed to be static. I use a collection of artifacts and examples from dominant anti-trafficking organisations and media to demonstrate the urgency required to both rethink trafficking against these flattening overgeneralisations and recommit to a transformative practice that makes more lives liveable. In the tradition of feminist anti-violence scholarship, I conclude by shifting from the micro-level examples of trafficking that fuel misinformation campaigns to the systems that perpetuate violence, exploitation and extraction – and must be eradicated if we are committed to ending human trafficking locally and globally.

Dieses Open-Access-Buch beschäftigt sich mit Umweltproblemen, die selbst im Kontext der heutigen globalen ökologischen Krise weitgehend gesellschaftlich unsichtbar bleiben, da sie ihre oftmals schwerwiegenden sozial-ökologischen Auswirkungen allmählich, schleichend und über längere Zeiträume hinweg in Form einer slow violence (Rob Nixon) entfalten. Am Beispiel der toxischen Industrieabfälle (Tailings) der chilenischen Bergbauindustrie werden in der Untersuchung anhand von drei Fallstudien die zentralen Gründe und Dimensionen dieser Unsichtbarkeit dargestellt und ihr Zusammenspiel analysiert.

Engaging Rob Nixon's conceptualisation of slow violence, this special issue provides a critical framework for how we understand violence relevant to political geography. In this introduction, we highlight three key contributions of the collection that build upon and extend Nixon's framing of slow violence. First, we attend to the spatialities of slow violence, revealing how the politics of disposability and racialised dispossession target particular people and places. Next, we foreground critical feminist and anti-racist perspectives that are largely absent in Nixon's original account. And third, through engaging these approaches, the papers together employ an epistemological shift, uncovering hidden and multi-sited violences that prioritise the accounts of those who experience and are most affected by slow violence.

Einleitung -- Theoretischer Rahmen, zentrale Begriffe und Forschungsstand -- Fragestellung und Forschungsheuristik -- Methodische Grundlagen und Forschungsdesign -- Forschungsgegenstand: Der chilenische Bergbau und die schleichende Gewalt seiner Hinterlassenschaften -- Schleichende Gewalt - der Fall Pabellón -- Die Macht der Bergbauunternehmen – der Fall Tierra Amarilla -- Die Unsichtbarkeit des Offensichtlichen– der Fall Chañaral -- Zusammenfassung und Auswertung der Forschungsergebnisse -- Fazit: Die Hürden auf dem Weg zur gesamtgesellschaftlichen Sichtbarkeit der Tailings.

"Impoverishment and Asylum argues that a shift has taken place in recent decades from construing asylum as primarily a political and/or humanitarian phenomenon, to construing it as primarily an economic phenomenon, and that this shift has had led to the purposeful impoverishment, by the state, of people seeking asylum in the UK. This shift has had far reaching consequences for people seeking asylum, who have been systematically impoverished as part of the effort to strip out any possibility of an economic 'pull factor' leading to more arrivals, but also for those administering their support system, and for civil society organisations and groups who seek to ameliorate the worst effects of the resulting asylum regimes. This book argues that within this context asylum support policies in the UK which are meant to help and protect, in fact do serious harm to their recipients. It argues that the shift from construing asylum seekers as economically, rather than politically, motivated migrants across the West, is part of a much broader set of historical and philosophical worldviews than has previously been articulated. The book offers a rigorously researched and richly theorised analysis drawing on postcolonial and decolonial perspectives in making sense of the purposeful impoverishment by the state of a particular group of people, and why this continues to be tolerated in the fourth richest country in the world"--