Introduction to Displacements

In the first months of 2020, the call for papers for the 2022 Special Issue of the Annals of the American Association of Geographers was circulated. It invited papers that engage with multiple forms and meanings of displacements and their geographies: patterns of shifting, dislocation, or putting out of place; substitutions of one idea for another or the unconscious transfer of intense feelings or emotions; activities occurring outside their normal context; and replacements of one thing by another. The COVID-19 pandemic, declared by the World Health Organization shortly after, produced new displacements and intensified existing patterns of displacement and dispossession, including human and more-than-human mobilities and immobilities. At the same time, socionatural displacements—floods, fires, droughts, hurricanes, sea-level rise, species loss, and dislocation—were the backdrop to the displaced and deferred hopes of the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference. The twenty-seven articles in this special issue contend with how we as geographers conceptualize and theorize displacements; the range of sites, spaces, processes, affects, scales, and actors we study with to understand them; and what is at stake politically in how we research displacements. It is also a pandemic archive of academic labor, in which we find traces of displacements within and beyond our discipline.