2015/03/16 by Richardson-Ngweny, Pamela
Social Sciences · #Anthropological Studies and Insights #Caribbean sugar #Geographies of human-animal interactions #Tourism, Volunteerism, and Development #encounter #ethics #inter-personal interactions #participatory video #spatio-temporal distances
paper · doi:10.14288/acme.v11i2.933
openalex publication_date 2015/03/16 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/01
This paper develops a geographical understanding of ethics by drawing from the author’s experiences during a participatory video (PV) project in Barbados. This project framed and informed a partial understanding of the ethical geographies of Caribbean sugar at large (Richardson-Ngwenya, 2009). Taking inspiration from interactions with sugar workers in Barbados, I engage here with ethics at the level of the inter-personal. Dealing with a key question that emerges from a geographical or embedded approach to ethics (Meskell and Pels, 2005), the paper addresses how we can understand ethics through inter-personal interactions. I conclude by reflecting on the apparent problem of translating the singularity of encounters into more general ethical statements (cf. Barnett, 2005). Instead of treating this as a problem, I argue that inter-personal ethics of encounter are not, in actuality, singular events but are inter-connected and mediated events within a network of wider interactions, both transpersonal and transnational. I explore how, in this case of participatory video, ethical relations are affective, not only in the proximate spaces of group interaction but also across great spatio-temporal distances.