Keywords for Feminist Conjunctural Analysis

ABSTRACT

Geography's engagement with conjunctural analysis is resurging as scholars attempt to sharpen our shared analytical tools to make sense of our contemporary interregnum. Conjunctural analysis (CA) is not, however, merely about better apprehending a crisis; it should be understood as knowing a given crisis and conjuncture for politics. Many strands of feminist scholarship have long had similar ambitions, and in this piece, we highlight feminist concepts and approaches that can inform conjunctural analysis and push scholars to integrate the political ambitions of CA with the analysis itself. Drawing on Black feminist thought, feminist political economy and feminist epistemology, we develop the concept of solidaristic articulation as a goal of feminist conjunctural analysis (FCA). Because knowledge projects reproduce archival absence, epistemic backgrounding and geographical erasure, FCA must contend with what it cannot know: the opacities, intramural socialities and effaced traces that dominant frameworks render illegible. We offer a provisional set of keywords—gender, material, crisis, lived experience, abstraction, archive and indeterminacy—as feminist provocations for developing an explicitly political approach to conjunctural analysis, one that can foment solidarities and resource a war of position in the current interregnum.