Abstract

This paper develops a cultural geographical account of detachment in response to longstanding theoretical engagements with attachment in human geography. While theories of habit, care ethics, and performativity have each emphasised how socio-spatial attachments form and persist, much less attention has been paid to how detachment occurs. We take up this question by developing the concept of a ‘scene of detachment’, building on Anderson’s (2023) spatial-phenomenological theorisation of attachment. Our empirical focus is on a specific socio-spatial transformation intensified by the Covid-19 pandemic: the shift to fully-remote work amongst knowledge workers. Drawing on interviews with managers and employees in Australia conducted between 2022 and 2024, we analyse how concerns around worker detachment surfaced as organisational anxieties tied to value production and affective investment in the workplace. In doing so, we expand the concept of a ‘scene of detachment’ to account for the subtle, partial, and affectively complex ways that detachment is lived and laboured through. Rather than aligning with more totalising calls for detachment often found in post-work Marxist theory, we foreground how these situated detachments reveal the mutability of attachments to work—cracks in dominant narratives that gesture toward new, politically hopeful horizons of possibility.