The politics of volunteering in loss and at a loss: autobiographical reflections on grief, vulnerability, and (in)action

Maddrell, A. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2941-498X (2021) The politics of volunteering in loss and at a loss: autobiographical reflections on grief, vulnerability, and (in)action. In: Bissell, D., Rose, M. and Harrison, P. (eds.) Negative Geographies: Exploring the Politics of Limits. Nebraska UP, Nebraska. ISBN 9781496226785

Abstract/Summary

Moving between questions of grievability (Butler 2009), intimacy, vulnerability and autobiography (Moss 2017), this chapter deploys a feminist approach to inhabiting research. The chapter argues that bereavement can induce a disabling sense of impotence, reflecting an inability to articulate, act or to change such a monumental loss. However, such personal emotional-affective vulnerability and inaction can also catalyse, and even compel, new forms of agency. Centering on an autobiographical account of stillbirth and related bereavement-inspired volunteer work, the relationality of grief and oscillations between the passivity of inaction and the mobilities of being in-action are explored. The chapter explores ways in which volunteering can be understood as an everyday embodied politics of gifting, collectivity, advocacy and activism, whereby volunteering-in-grief might generate new/renewed forms of politics in-action, and volunteering as a practice be seen as part of the democratic micropolitics of ‘quiet’ implicit/ explicit activism.

Item Type	Book or Report Section
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/103095
Refereed	No
Divisions	Science > School of Archaeology, Geography and Environmental Science > Department of Geography and Environmental Science
Uncontrolled Keywords	Grief stillbirth inaction agency mobilities volunteering activism
Publisher	Nebraska UP
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