As an illustrative example, scholar of Indigenous rhetorics, Andrea Riley Mukavetz, points out that highways are situated within histories of gathering people, tearing down neighborhoods they run through, and remaking and shaping, in sometimes violent ways, how individuals relate to space as they bisect communities. 

Doreen Massey uses the phrase geographies of responsibility to call into conversation the idea that constructions of space are never ethically neutral but instead are echoes of histories, possibilities, and harms that took shape through the building of a space.

Geographies of Responsibility

Riley Mukavetz, Andrea. 2022. "Rejections of Kairos as Colonial Orientation: Three Manifestos on Temporal Self-Determination." Presented at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, online, March 9-12, 2022.

Rejections of Kairos as Colonial Orientation: Three Manifestos on Temporal Self-Determination

Example of Geographies of Responsibility: Highways

Price points out that, in understanding space as political-relational, space is inseparable from time and relations. Price also notes that this inseparability relates to materialist rhetorics and the idea that space is relational if we are not centering humans or animals as the only beings with animacy and agency.

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