ABSTRACT
Bringing this long research narrative to an end, the epilogue focuses on the spatial relations and movements that have intimately shaped the study. As the epilogue argues, this study has been in many ways an engagement in negotiating and making sense of the “in-betweens”: on the one hand, the space between proximity and distance in the research relationships, and on the other hand, the relation between material lives and abstract theory in the writing of the academic text. These spatial relations of research, of course, cannot be romanticized, nor the imbalances of power ignored and glossed over. As the epilogue argues, thinking of space relationally also leads us to think of ethics relationally. This situates ethical action within relationships. It is a question of how to “inhabit the distance between us” (Sara Ahmed, “This Other and the Other Others,” 2002), which in this book has meant bringing to the forefront the interactional processes in which knowledge is produced. In presenting this spatial history of the women who fought in Mozambique’s liberation struggle in the northern province of Niassa, this book thus seeks to represent the DFs in a way that does not fix, stabilize, or essentialize them but brings into focus their shifting and multilayered negotiations for personal space and belonging.
