For a spatial politics of dignity

Katrin Grossmann and Elena Trubina (2022) invite urban geographers to join in a dialogue on dignity. What might be gained, they ask, by theorizing and taking up the normative position of dignity over more common orientations like equity, social cohesion, sustainability, justice, and tolerance, to name a few?

Their essay, ‘Dignity in Urban Geography: Starting a Conversation’, begins with a provocation: urban indignities have been the focus of much urban geographical scholarship, for example, work on violence, oppression, shame, dependence, and marginality. Fewer studies, however, have focused on dignity or empowerment. When dignity does appear in research, it shows up tacitly, as a moral category and category of practice – for instance, in studies of social movements – but has generally been left undertheorized.

Following Eve Tuck's (2009, 2010) call for desire-centered research (over damage-focused), Grossman and Trubina argue for a similar shift from indignity- to dignity-focused research. I appreciate this call. As Tuck writes, desire directs attention to ‘not only the painful elements of social and psychic realities, but also the textured acumen and hope’ (Tuck, 2010: 644). Dignity – as Grossman and Trubina argue – might yet do the same. But first, they suggest, scholars would need to shift their attention from violence and domination to respect and recognition, or instead of focusing on dependence and paternalism, scholars would attend to self-determination and autonomy. The latter categories are proxies for dignity. If I am understanding Grossman and Trubina, their point is not that geographers should stop studying violence. Or that studying violence less would mean a net increase in research on dignity. It's rather a shift in intention and attention. By attending to dignity, one necessarily addresses indignity, though, the same cannot be said the other way around.

It's worth pausing for a moment here to consider the meaning of dignity. If you look up the term in the dictionary, it will tell you that dignity is the state or quality of being worthy or being worthy of something. It will also tell you that dignity can mean an honorable ranking or position or estimation of one's honor, for example, an action that is beneath one's dignity (OED, 2021). Grossman and Trubina invoke these meanings, but they also extend them in ways that I found useful. Drawing on dignity scholarship in applied philosophy, legal studies, Indigenous studies, and critical race studies, they illuminate a central paradox: that ironically dignity discourses themselves often inhibit dignity.

By way of a brief historical account of the legal deployment of dignity, which begins in the early twentieth century and peaks with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, their paper illuminates this paradox. For me, this is one of the real strengths of their piece. In calling for scholars and activists to embrace dignity beyond rights-based and liberal democratic frameworks, they argue that even before its legal deployment, invocations of dignity have generally assumed a universalist humanism perspective – ‘from the Bible and the Talmud through Cicero, Augustine, Pico della Mirandola, Kant and Mill to contemporary philosophers, legal scholars and theologists’ (Grossman and Trubina, 2022).

This universalist humanist perspective is problematic not least because dignity is ‘both deeply grounded in everyday human spatial sensibilities and in the discourses that prevent citizens from gaining social and political recognition’ (Grossman and Trubina, 2022). The Black Lives Matter movement makes this tension abundantly clear. Put simply, the ability to claim dignity has always been constrained by the intersection of regimes – racial, patriarchal, ableist – that order systems of worth and value. This ‘difference-informed understanding’, as they write, ‘challenges the idea that dignity can be defined from a neutral, universal perspective’ (Grossman and Trubina, 2022).

One way out of the trap of liberalism's mythic universality can be found in Vincent Lloyd's approach. A political theologian and African American religious studies scholar, Lloyd argues for studying ‘dignity as it appears in this world—not in some pure form imagined in a world redeemed’ (Lloyd, 2018: 84). Grossman and Trubina build on this idea by arguing for attention to dignity's relationality. Their emphasis on relationality is capacious – it centers on how dignity emerges in interpersonal relationships, how it depends on contexts, and how it is not simply about relieving people's material needs but shifting entire structures rooted in exclusion and abandonment. For these reasons we need, as they write, following legal studies scholar Jonathan Simon (2021), an ‘abolitionist understanding of dignity’.

In addition to relationality, studying dignity as it actually exists, according to Grossman and Trubina, entails taking seriously dignity's affectivity, and, in particular, the interweaving of affect and spatiality. Here, they briefly engage property law scholar Bernadette Atuahene's important work on the dual framework of ‘dignity taking’ and ‘dignity restoration’. Atuahene's work is useful to revisit beyond what Grossman and Trubina cite because it brings to the surface what I see as one of the most important points in their essay – their call for attention to the ‘spatial politics of dignity’.

Atuahene, who has studied the case of the South African Land Claims Commission, usefully defines ‘dignity taking’ as occurring ‘when a state directly or indirectly destroys property or confiscates various property rights from owners or occupiers and the intentional or unintentional outcome is dehumanization or infantilization’ (Atuahene, 2016a: 817). The state, as she points out, is also culpable for dignity takings when it fails to offer protection.

Dignity restoration, by contrast, according to Atuahene (2016b), occurs via life-affirming compensation that addresses both material dispossession and economic harms as well as psychosocial impacts. It can take numerous forms, for example, restitution and redistribution aimed at wealth reallocation, reparations that provide compensation for material deprivation, and restoration that focuses on processes aimed at remedying the affective side of dignity takings (dehumanization, trauma, and community destruction), such as truth and reconciliation. In short, Atuahene's scholarship illuminates how the deprivation of dignity and attempts to restore it are experienced affectively and are inherently spatial.

Critical geographical theory, I believe, has much to offer to these conversations about the spatial politics of dignity. Let's return for a moment to Lloyd's essay ‘Black Dignity’, cited earlier. Within Black political thought, as Lloyd argues, the concept of dignity is not attributed to rank. Nor is it seen as a universal feature of humanity. Rather dignity is about people's relationship to domination. Those who struggle against domination have dignity. Those who fail to lack it (Lloyd, 2018: 81).

This way of ascribing dignity (and its absence) draws attention to its intimacy with resisting (or upholding) spatial relations produced under domination (e.g., colonialism, slavery, racial capitalism, patriarchy, ableism). Here we might recall Ruth Wilson Gilmore's oft-quoted line that a ‘geographical imperative lies at the heart of every struggle for social justice’ and consider the geographical imperative at the heart of dignity. As Gilmore writes, ‘if justice [or dignity] is embodied, it is then therefore always spatial, which is to say, part of a process of making a place’ (2002: 16).

If we take this premise seriously, then it's not just that dignity has something to offer urban geography but also that critical urban (and nonurban) geographical scholarship, particularly that emerging from Black, Indigenous, and Latinx geographies, theorizations of racial capitalism, abolition geographies, decolonial geographies, and feminist geographies, has much to offer to a dialogue about dignity. Scholars working in these subfields can help us think in nuanced ways about the formations that constrain dignity, not least of which is the role that geography has played therein (Curley and Smith, 2020; Eaves, 2020; Faria and Mollett, 2020; Gieseking, 2020; Heynen, 2020; Oswin, 2020; Roy, 2020a). They offer insights into how people organize at ‘novel resolutions’ (Gilmore, 2008: 36), shedding light on the importance of alternative spatial imaginaries and epistemologies to praxes of liberation. They invite us to practice dignity by transforming the places where we live and work (Ramírez, 2017).

In so doing, they make clear that if urban geography is to meaningfully engage dignity, it must, in short, make room for ‘an other geography’ (Oswin, 2020). This is to say, it must take seriously – in theory and practice – long-standing efforts by critical geographers to imagine a more dignified geography and learn from their efforts to chart ‘[c]onstellations … in formation all around us, re-envisioning and re-embodying a politics of place by interweaving spatial practices of resistance, refusal, and liberation’, as Michelle Daigle and Margaret Marietta Ramírez write (2019: 82).

Conversation is at its best an event. It draws out ideas yet to be articulated, ideas that reverberate and alter the field of consciousness. When I was invited to respond to Grossman and Trubina's essay, it was year two of the pandemic. I found their call to give dignity its due vital and urgent. As COVID-19's death-dealing blows along race and class lines brought systemic inequities into stark relief, dignity had emerged as a sort of keyword of the times. Globally, demands had grown for dignified housing, dignified work, dignified care, and, poignantly, the right to die a dignified death. As many doctors, nurses, and healthcare providers have pointed out, to die alone – absent family, their hugs, kisses, and touch – is a double indignity: not only do the dying lack accompaniment but the dying's loved ones are also denied the rituals that provide closure and dignity in life. Insomuch as keywords record historical and cultural shifts, we might then ask what these demands for dignity reveal about our times?

A quote from the writer and political activist Arundhati Roy that went viral at the outset of the pandemic reveals the stakes of this question. ‘Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different’, she writes. ‘It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it’ (Roy, 2020b, sec. 4, para. 14).

If pandemics are powerful because they force societies, as Roy argues, to break from the past and imagine worlds anew, then deepening conversations about dignity – in particular, conversations about the spatial politics of dignity – may yet illuminate the portals in our midst and what it takes to walk lightly through them, again and again, as a matter of daily practice.