Lost and abandoned: spatial precarity and displacement in Dhaka, Bangladesh

Gardner, Katy ORCID: 0000-0002-5608-7585 (2022) Lost and abandoned: spatial precarity and displacement in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Ethnos. ISSN 0014-1844

Text (Gardner_lost-and-abandoned--published) - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives. Download (1MB)

• Author
• Scopus publication

Abstract

This article builds upon work which aims to ‘de-exceptionalise’ displacement [Cabot and Ramsey, 2021. Deexceptionalizing Displacement: An Introduction. Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, 12(3):286–299] by describing two hitherto unresearched examples of ‘unexceptional’ displacement. Both involve abandonment and going missing, and both throw light on the ways in which gender, space and emplacement work together to produce particular vulnerabilities via what I have called ‘spatial precarity’. In the first, lost or abandoned girls are held in a government-run Safe House on the outskirts of the city. In the second, women are displaced from their marriages when their husbands go missing. The context is a rapidly changing urban environment in which the rapacious development of property and infrastructure has led to a cityscape that is never stable. This environment, and the socio-political relations that are constitutive of it, have helped to create the conditions in which certain people get lost and others go missing, leading to highly gendered forms of displacement.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/retn20
Additional Information:	© 2022 The Author
Divisions:	Anthropology
Subjects:	G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GN Anthropology
Date Deposited:	21 Mar 2022 16:33
Last Modified:	12 Dec 2024 02:55
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/114420

Actions (login required)

View Item