Showing papers in "Antipode in 2003"

Urban Political Ecology, Justice and the Politics of Scale

Abstract: This and the subsequent papers in this special issue set out the contours of Marxian urban political ecology and call for greater research attention to a neglected field of critical research that, given its political importance, requires urgent attention Notwithstanding the important contributions of other critical perspectives on urban ecology, Marxist urban political ecology provides an integrated and relational approach that helps untangle the interconnected economic, political, social and ecological processes that together go to form highly uneven and deeply unjust urban landscapes Because the power-laden socioecological relations that shape the formation of urban environments constantly shift between groups of actors and scales, historical-geographical insights into these ever-changing urban configurations are necessary for the sake of considering the future of radical political-ecological urban strategies The social production of urban environments is gaining recognition within radical and historical-materialist geography The political programme, then, of urban political ecology is to enhance the democratic content of socioenvironmental construction by identifying the strategies through which a more equitable distribution of social power and a more inclusive mode of environmental production can be achieved

“Brain Abuse”, or the Devaluation of Immigrant Labour in Canada

Abstract: Many professional and skilled Canadian immigrants suffer from de-skilling and the nonrecognition of their foreign credentials. Consequently, they are underrepresented in the upper segments of the Canadian labour market. Rather than accepting this devaluation of immigrant labour as a naturally occurring adjustment period, I suggest that regulatory institutions actively exclude immigrants from the upper segments of the labour market. In particular, professional associations and employers give preference to Canadian-born and educated workers and deny immigrants access to the most highly desired occupations. Pierre Bourdieu's notion of institutionalised cultural capital and his views of the educational system as a site of social reproduction provide the entry point for my theoretical argument. I find that the nonrecognition of foreign credentials and dismissal of foreign work experience systematically excludes immigrant workers from the upper segments of the labour market. This finding is based on data from interviews with institutional administrators and employers in Greater Vancouver who service or employ immigrants from South Asia and the former Yugoslavia.

The Scalar Production of Injustice within the Urban Forest

Abstract: Research has recently argued, quite successfully, for a more dialectic appreciation of urban nature/society relations. Despite this progress, there is still the need to recognize that the social production of urban environments explicitly leads to uneven urban environments and environmental injustice. Environmental inequalities clearly exist within cities; when taking into account how environmental externalities play out at different scales, the degree to which something is unjust becomes less clear. This paper discusses how the scales at which socially produced urban forest externalities play out pose difficulties for considering environmental injustice. This issue, while interesting from the point of view of considering scalar nature/social dialects, also makes policy considerations for urban reforestation problematic as a result of the ways in which urban forests contribute to local/global ecological scenarios.

The Politics of Aging: Globalization and the Restructuring of Youth and Childhood

Abstract: This paper explores the ways that constitutive elements of globalization—including a celebration of risk, reduction in state funding for social reproduction in developed nations and pressures to modernize in underdeveloped ones—are being “smuggled in” in the guise of new discourses around youth and childhood. Far from being a byproduct of capitalism in its various phases, youth and childhood can be located at its literal and figurative core. In a crude characterization of the global map as it has emerged in over the past twenty years, one would find a world drawn roughly into three parts—and in each of these parts, youth and childhood is being restructured in a distinct way. These divisions look suspiciously like the earlier global models of developed, developing and underdeveloped nations, but the nature of the exclusions that sustain them spell particularly bad news for the world's young people. Modern ideals of youth and childhood that became hegemonic in the West over the past century are being exported to non-Western contexts in which resources to adequately reproduce these forms are sadly lacking. At the same time, in Western settings over the past two decades, such resources have been eroded for children and young people, and celebrated aspects of “youthfulness” have been displaced to adults to justify lifelong learning and the increasing assumption of risk by older workers. The paper urges a move away from the study of behaviors of “children and adults” as static categories and towards an exploration of shifting norms and forms of “childhood and aging” as dynamic processes that both help to constitute and are constituted by a new political economy.

Constructing Scarcity and Sensationalising Water Politics: 170 Days That Shook Athens

Abstract: This paper examines the drought that hit Athens between 1989 and 1991 and analyses the role of this natural phenomenon as the “ferment” for ongoing political-economic transformations in the direction of liberalisation and privatisation of water management and allocation in Greece. The paper analyses how the drought was marshalled as an effective discursive vehicle to facilitate and expedite the state-led neoliberal political-economic agenda. It shows how the social consensus around a number of “emergency measures” that the state adopted to deal with a “natural” crisis was grounded in a particular discourse on water and in the political-economic “positioning” of “nature” as a source of crisis. In turn, this change in the “discursive” production of nature fused with the rhetoric and practice of market-led development and privatisation and, ultimately, facilitated important transformations in the social and political-economic (material) production of nature.

Human Smuggling, the Transnational Imaginary, and Everyday Geographies of the Nation-State

Abstract: This essay outlines a conceptual approach to everyday geographies of the nation-state. The case study analyzed is the cross-institutional response to human smuggling in Canada. The essay draws on qualitative research with government and nongovernment actors who responded to the arrival of four boats carrying migrants smuggled from Fujian, China to British Columbia in 1999. Findings regarding the everyday institutional contexts of work in the field of immigration prompt deconstruction of the conceptual boundaries that surround governance in more abstract epistemologies of the state. This poststructural approach to geographies of the nation-state pays particular attention to the role of identity and language in the categorization of im/migrants and provokes contemplation of the transnational imaginary of the nation-state from the standpoint of policing international borders.

Environmental Justice and American Indian Tribal Sovereignty: Case Study of a Land–Use Conflict in Skull Valley, Utah

Abstract: This paper examines environmental justice in the context of questions of American–Indian tribal sovereignty through an analysis of a land–use dispute over the Skull Valley Band of Goshute Indians’ decision to host a high–level radioactive waste facility on their reservation in Tooele County, Utah. The case study entails a far more intricate story than that presented in the majority of existing literature, which is dominated by analytical frameworks of environmental racism and distributive environmental justice. By elucidating the historical geography of Skull Valley and politics of tribal sovereignty, I argue that a prolonged process of historical colonialism has produced a landscape of injustice in which the tribe's choices have been structurally limited. The historical colonialism, intertwining with the capitalist political economy, has geopolitically isolated the tribe to suffer procedural environmental injustice. At the same time, the tribe has struggled to pursue self–determination through the retention of sovereignty and Goshute identity in the arenas of tribal environmental management and the environmental–justice movement. Conflict over the definition and practice of tribal sovereignty at different geographical scales reveals the social, historical, and political–economic complexity of environmental justice.

Breaking the Convention: Researching the “Illegal” Migration of Refugees to Europe

Abstract: The study of refugees by geographers and other social scientists is, almost by definition, framed around a series of legal categories, which provide us with more or less neat categories of types of involuntary migrants. Yet the process of migration emerges in relation to legal categories and is not simply dictated by them. Thus, as legislation on migration in general and the interpretation of the 1951 Geneva Convention in particular have become more restrictive, patterns of migration have increasingly emerged that manipulate, circumvent or simply break existing legislation.

Women, NGOs and the Contradictions of Empowerment and Disempowerment: A Conversation

Abstract: For the last few years, both of us have grappled with difficult andcomplex issues of empowerment and disempowerment in relation toour respective research projects on women’s grassroots organizationsin several states of India, including Rajasthan, Gujarat, Uttar Pradeshand Uttaranchal. As we exchanged notes over time, we noticed somerecurring themes in our concerns—for example: the ways in which co-option of feminist and empowerment discourse(s) by the main-stream forces have become increasingly vexed questions for thewomen’s movement in India; the problematics associated with “doing”empowerment on the ground at a time when “Southern” women’snongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are becoming increasinglyprofessionalized and globalized; the entanglement of empowermentand disempowerment in poor women’s lives; and the politicalcomplexities associated with engaging in critiques of NGOs that aretrying to empower marginalized women.We thought it would be productive to co-author a paper on theseissues, largely because of the striking silence in academic circles onthese questions at a time when they are being felt and discussed sourgently within women’s NGO networks. However, as we began to putour thoughts on paper, we were struck by the enormous contra-dictions these projects are fraught with, as well as by the ways in whichour own sociopolitical locations as researchers and our ethical andpolitical commitments to different kinds of groups made it impossible

Domesticating Birth in the Hospital: “Family‐Centered” Birth and the Emergence of “Homelike” Birthing Rooms

Abstract: Childbirth is both an embodied and symbolic process, and the home and the hospital have been the shifting and contested sites of childbirth in contemporary discourses of birth in the United States. I argue that the economic and cultural imperatives of deregulation and downsizing of US health-care produce new spaces of domesticity and birthing bodies. Through an examination of the relatively recent transformations of hospital space into “homelike” birthing rooms, I propose a more nuanced understanding of how discursive and material shifts in the practices and sites of birth create new spatialities and subjectivities. The emergence of the “homelike” hospital room situates the production of birth spaces at the nexus of debates around domesticity, the body, the politics of reproduction, and the economics of health care in the United States.

The Lawn‐Chemical Economy and Its Discontents

Abstract: The daily geographies of consumption represent some of the most ecologically important and economically complex frontiers for critical research. Among these, the turfgrass lawn is perhaps the most overlooked, owing to its very ordinariness. Despite the serious risks posed to human health and ecosystem viability by high-input lawn systems, little critical scholarship has engaged the lawn, especially as a structured economic phenomenon. This paper explores the forces and political economic conditions under which the lawn is produced, promulgated, and resisted in North America. In the process, we draw attention to the deeply structured economic impetus behind the direct sale of potentially toxic chemicals to urban dwellers. Based on survey research and a review of the industry, we argue (1) that chemical demand is driven by urban growth and classed aesthetics, (2) that direct and aggressive sales of chemicals to consumers are spurred by crises in the chemical-formulator industry, (3) that the search for consumer-lawn markets is driven by declining margins in the worldwide chemical trade, and (4) that counterinstitutional struggles against high-input lawns represent a salvo against otherwise abstract and daunting cultural-economic hegemony.

Culture, class and urban policy: Reconsidering equality

Abstract: This paper considers the emerging policy agenda for urban–social renewal in relation to academic debates about equality and difference Signalling problems with prevailing political and geographical approaches to class, the possibilities offered by a poststructuralist engagement with issues of equality are discussed Policies for social regeneration and inclusion are analysed with regard to their approach to working–class cultures and are argued to be reductive and contradictory in core respects More progressive and integrated understandings of class–cultural relations, such as those presented in the work of Nancy Fraser and Pierre Bourdieu, are identified as necessary to a meaningful concept of social justice for contemporary urban social policy

A Forest of Contradictions: Producing the Landscapes of the Scottish Highlands

Abstract: While total global forest cover is decreasing, in many parts of the world forests are on the rebound. Uncritical examinations of this phenomenon credit the benign diffusion of capitalist development for this “forest transition.” More critical readings of this question—including green Marxian and poststructuralist approaches—might conclude something very different, however. In this paper, we explore the question of expanding forest cover, using the case of the Scottish Highlands, where forestland has tripled since the 1920s, in an attempt to critically explain regional land-cover change. Drawing upon historical sources and Scottish Executive and Forestry Commission data, we examine the specific environments currently forming in the Highlands under conditions of economic change. We conclude that two divergent forestry practices and ecologies have been formed in the wake of economic restructuring: those geared towards industrial production and those targeted at consumption through ecotourism. We conclude, therefore, that capitalism’s spatial fix to declining industrial power in the region is an inherently ecological one that takes the form of “schizophrenic forestry,” in which forest expansion leads to the rise of degraded monocultures alongside “pristine” sites of conservation.

Indigenous Professionalization: Transnational Social Reproduction in the Andes

Abstract: Indigenous professionalization is occurring throughout Latin America at an increasing pace as new careers open up in social development. Under what is heralded as socially inclusive neoliberalism, a “development with identity” paradigm is producing new university courses focused on indigenous issues. Influenced by discourses of social and human capital and addressing intersections of multiculturalism and development, these courses mobilize and help shape definitions of indigeneity; they also create spaces where donors and indigenous activists contest and debate understandings of development. Operating in a range of institutions, indigenous professionalization courses are led by a small elite group of academics and practitioners who move between programs and countries. Students also move transnationally. We argue that these courses, their classrooms and their curricula are intent on understanding intercultural situations transnationally, galvanizing international funding and support from bilateral and multilateral agencies as well as local and state actors. The social reproduction of indigenous professionalization is therefore transnational, yet grounded. At times, indigenous professionalization is socially reproduced by jumping scale; at other times, it works through established social and spatial hierarchies. This essay examines how indigenous professionalization is socially reproduced as a contested process through which notions of “good” and “culturally appropriate” development are constituted and consolidated.

Toque una Ranchera, Por Favor

Abstract: This paper explores the literal spaces of transnational social reproduction for Latinos and Latinas in central North Carolina and the US South. Examining these spaces and circuits of social reproduction can enhance our understanding of globalization by making globalization processes at once less abstract and less indisputable. Attention to social reproduction is important for understanding and theorizing globalization and, more significantly, for imagining and constructing alternative forms of globalization. Inspired to pursue certain freedoms and immediate goals, transnational migrants live and breath alternative models of globalization in their everyday activities. Responding less to neo-liberal and more to human-centered values, transnational migrants demonstrate that different principles can guide the construction of contemporary globalizations. Ethnographic evidence from Mexican transnational migrants suggests that the intimate and distant social connections that constitute Latinos' translocal way of living help to facilitate the very same globalizing labor markets that entice and propel migrants to seek “greener pastures” in the US South.

Moving Mountains: Community and Resistance in the Isle of Harris, Scotland, and Cape Breton, Canada

Abstract: Drawing on poststructuralist political ecology, the narratives of two struggles about siting a superquarry are examined to elucidate the complex articulations of community, nature, resistance and identity in play in public debates. Focusing on the discursive formulations of the quarry in the expert language, as well as in the arguments of both local proponents and opponents of the quarries, shows the importance of ontological categories in “environmental” siting disputes. In Harris, these themes rearticulate the histories of dispossession, crofting and religion, as well as complex layers of geographical identity in the various claims to community. In Cape Breton, the rethinking of aboriginal Mi'kmaq identity was stimulated by revived interest in the religious traditions linked to the sacred site near the proposed quarry. In light of these findings, the complexity and active rearticulation of local “community” as political resistance are emphasised and the difficulties of thinking about sustainability highlighted.

Rethinking Overdetermination, Structural Power, and Social Change: A Critique of Gibson‐Graham, Resnick, and Wolff

Abstract: Working in the wake of theoretical tendencies that became prominent within geography during the 1980s, many studies of resistance have either bracketed or ignored structural power, with some versions of poststructuralism simply denying that structural power is a useful concept in a world where power is putatively highly fluid and dispersed. These sorts of approaches, exemplified by the recent works of J K Gibson-Graham, Stephen A Resnick, and Richard D Wolff (GGRW), limit the ability of studies of resistance to articulate the conditions under which political and social struggles might transcend resistance and succeed in liberating groups of humans from the oppressive conditions against which they struggle. In this paper, I discuss issues surrounding analysis of structural power in the wake of poststructuralist critiques of “structural Marxism,” presenting an alternative to GGRW's interpretation of Louis Althusser's concept of “overdetermination.” Overdetermination is a crucial concept, because it is rightly seen as the key to a noneconomistic Marxism and has been championed as such by GGRW. I re-examine the roots of Althusser's concept in the writings of Lenin and Mao, arguing for a way of reading overdetermination that is both noneconomistic and compatible with a notion of structural power.

Adolescent Latina Bodyspaces: Making Homegirls, Homebodies and Homeplaces

Abstract: This essay examines the local, everyday practices of heteropatriarchal power—dominating and resisting power, through which young Latina women negotiate teenage, sexual and gender subjectivity and spatial ordering of young heterosexual bodies. Their negotiations are shaped by and give shape to the material, discursive and representational social spaces of Los Angeles, worsening “landscapes of neglect” attributable to the changing geographies of private and public investment. Their narratives convey and construct a visceral experience of being tied, materially and discursively, to homely spaces as young carers, and their struggle to untie their competencies to the private, domestic sphere, or “inside,” and their vulnerabilities to the public sphere, or “outside.” In their struggle, the young Latinas variously reproduce, rework and resist the dominant norms and materiality of local places and their dispositionality in bodily terms.

Valuing Childcare: Troubles in Suburbia

Abstract: I unravel a complex weave of practices in metropolitan Vancouver that lead to the persistent devaluation of childcare. These include the assumptions that women alone are responsible for paying for childcare, the difficulty that parents have determining how skills and educational qualifications relate to high-quality childcare and the tendency to insert childcare workers into various familial scenarios that cheapen the costs of their own social reproduction. I look closely at outer suburbs, because this is where wages for childcare are lowest and parents experience the most difficulty in arranging dependable care. Although various women doing paid domestic work are positioned differently, they share with each other the effects of gendered assumptions about domestic work.

Youth, Racism, and Place in the Tony Martin Affair

Abstract: This paper provides an analysis of media discourse surrounding the arrest, trial, and conviction of Norfolk farmer Tony Martin for the murder of 16-year old Fred Barras, a Traveller from Newark, Nottinghamshire. The paper argues that discourses about Travellers (re)constructed in the media during the Martin affair showed evidence of both older, stereotypical representations of Travellers and newer ways of locating them in relation to contemporary societal anxieties about “dangerous youth”, the “underclass”, and “social exclusion”. The coverage was often emblematic of political discourses in Britain, which too often emphasise the moral failings of the “excluded” without any significant discussion of the sources of inequalities.

Mapping the European Urban Left: The Barcelona Experience

Abstract: This paper explores the transition in Barcelona's city council's urban policy during 20 years of uninterrupted political control. It focuses particularly on several trends within Pasqual Maragall's period in office (1982-1997) and argues that issues of leadership, extramunicipal policy and electoral rationality are fundamental to understanding the full complexity of this transition. The paper seeks to locate the Barcelona experience in a comparative context and calls for a greater sensitivity to the contemporary political geography of the European urban left.