A vagabond, as is well known, moves from place to place without a fixed home. However, vagabondage insinuates a little dissolution—an unsettled, irresponsible, and disreputable life, which indeed can be said of the globalization of capitalist production. This paper reframes the discussion on globalization through a materialist focus on social reproduction. By looking at the material social practices through which people reproduce themselves on a daily and generational basis and through which the social relations and material bases of capitalism are renewed—and the havoc wreaked on them by a putatively placeless capitalism—we can better expose both the costs of globalization and the connections between vastly different sites of production. Focusing on social reproduction allows us to address questions of the making, maintenance, and exploitation of a fluidly differentiated labor force, the productions (and destructions) of nature, and the means to create alternative geographies of opposition to globalized capitalism. I will draw on examples from the “First” and “Third Worlds” to argue that any politics that effectively counters capitalism's global imperative must confront the shifts in social reproduction that have accompanied and enabled it. Looking at the political-economic, political-ecological, and cultural aspects of social reproduction, I argue that there has been a rescaling of childhood and suggest a practical response that focuses on specific geographies of social reproduction. Reconnecting these geographies with those of production, both translocally and across geographic scale, begins to redress the losses suffered in the realm of social reproduction as a result of globalized capitalist production.

The paper develops the notion of “topography” as a means of examining the intersecting effects and material consequences of globalized capitalist production. “Topography” offers a political logic that both recognizes the materiality of cultural and social difference and can help mobilize transnational and internationalist solidarities to counter the imperatives of globalization.

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Vagabond Capitalism and the Necessity of Social Reproduction

lobalization is nothing new. Global trade has been going on for millennia-though what constitutes the "globe" has expanded dramatically in that time. And trade is nothing if not cultural exchange, the narrow distinctions between the economic and the cultural having long been rendered obsolete. Moreover, our forbears, like us, were great "miscegenators." If here I gloss the racialized and gendered violence often associated with miscegenation, I do so strategically to note that all recourse to purity, indigeneity, or aboriginalityhowever useful strategicallyshould be subject to at least as much scrutiny as the easy romance with hybridity (see Mitchell 1997). Globalization has been the signature dish of capitalism-a system of social relations of production and reproduction nourished by uneven development across a range of spatial scales, from the local or regional to the national or supranational, the ambitions of which have always been global since its birth in Europe more than five centuries ago. European-born mercantile capitalism early on was driven by a real expansion for markets and the goods to trade across them. This was nothing new, particularly, until the agents of capital began to assemble an empire and deployed the physical and symbolic violence intended to redirect toward European interests the globe Europeans were "discovering." With

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On the grounds of globalization: a topography for feminist political engagement.

Engaging with a figure that came to operate as a powerful cultural signifier of otherness in debates over migrant/Muslim integration across the West, the ‘veiled woman’; the paper questions the idea of agency that inheres in the contemporary feminist discourses on Muslim veil. After showing the shortcomings and adverse effects of two dominant readings of the Muslim veil, as a symbol of women's subordination to men, or as an act of resistance to Western hegemony, it explores an alternative avenue drawing on both the poststructuralist critique of the humanist subject and feminist intersectional theorising to answer the question of what kind of conception of agency can help us to think about the agency of the veiled woman without binding a priori the meaning of her veiling to the teleology of emancipation, whether feminist or anti-imperialist.

Beyond Subordination vs. Resistance: An Intersectional Approach to the Agency of Veiled Muslim Women

This paper explores the contribution that geographers can make to debates about the nature and utility of participatory approaches It argues for a constructive reconciliation between these approaches and the growing poststructural critique of participation Through an examination of the similarities and entanglements between power and empowerment it highlights the centrality of geographical issues to understanding how participation works and how its resources might be distanciated beyond the arenas of participatory projects to produce empowering effects elsewhere

http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/projects/autonomousgeographies/kesby_2007.pdf

Spatialising Participatory Approaches: The Contribution of Geography to a Mature Debate

The author examines the advantages and challenges of using Black feminist theory and critical race feminist theory to study the lives of Black women and families in family studies. The author addresses the ways in which these per spectives, both of which are intentional in their analyses of intersectionality and the politics of location, are also distinct. She provides empirical examples from how family researchers have used Black feminist theory or a critical race fem inist lens to examine the lives of Black women and families, and suggests ways for colleagues to embrace an explicit integration of Black consciousness and critical race feminist perspectives in family studies.

Integrating Black Consciousness and Critical Race Feminism Into Family Studies Research

Feminist and antiracist struggles in the 1990s face some of the same urgent questions encountered in the 1970s. After two decades of engagement in feminist political activism and scholarship in a variety of sociopolitical and geographical locations, questions of difference (sex, race, class, nation), experience, and history remain at the center of feminist analysis. Only, at least in the US academy, feminists no longer have to contend as they did in the 1970s with phallocentric denials of the legitimacy of gender as a category of analysis. Instead, the crucial questions in the 1990s concern the construction, examination, and, most significantly, the institutionalization of difference within feminist discourses. It is this institutionalization of difference that concerns me here. Specifically, I ask the following question: how does the politics of location in the contemporary United States determine and produce experience and difference as analytical and political categories in feminist “cross-cultural” work? By the term “politics of location” I refer to the historical, geographical, cultural, psychic, and imaginative boundaries which provide the ground for political definition and self-definition for contemporary US feminists. Since the 1970s, there have been key paradigm shifts in Western feminist theory. These shifts can be traced to political, historical, methodological, and philosophical developments in our understanding of questions of power, struggle, and social transformation. Feminists have drawn on decolonization movements around the world, on movements for racial equality, on peasant struggles, and on gay and lesbian movements, as well as on the methodologies of Marxism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and poststructuralism to situate our thinking in the 1990s.

Chandra Talpade Mohanty

Papers

Social Postmodernism: Feminist encounters: locating the politics of experience