From necrolocution to meaningful dialogues

Abstract

Lydia Gibson’s article ‘Ant Logic and Necrolocutors’ challenges geographers and other scholars in cognate disciplines working on environmental research or on Indigenous communities to transcend the ant logic and gaze by recognising power, knowledge, and death as important immaterial actors. If this is not done, there is a danger of engaging in research and analysis that reproduces colonialism and coloniality in terms of recommendations which confer on people conditions in which they are the living dead. In researching marginalised communities such as the racialised, gendered, and black bodies on whom death is wrought, inter alia, it is important to pay attention not only to what they say but also its meaning. It is through grasping the meaning of what subaltern communities say and mean that it can be claimed that our analysis of the social realities and worlds of people is relevant.