Contribution to 'On Being Outside " the Project " : A Symposium in honor of Susan Christopherson'... more Contribution to 'On Being Outside " the Project " : A Symposium in honor of Susan Christopherson' On Rocking " the Project " : The Beat Goes On
A contribution to an Antipode symposium in honor of Susan Christopherson, "On Being 'Outside the ... more A contribution to an Antipode symposium in honor of Susan Christopherson, "On Being 'Outside the Project."
Contemporary capitalism is in the throes of crises precipitated by over-accumulation and the effe... more Contemporary capitalism is in the throes of crises precipitated by over-accumulation and the effects of decades of privatization, commodification, and financialization, each sieved through the other. The angel of geography is conjured to mark these crises on the grounds of everyday life. Their profound and uneven consequences for the present and future, seen in the shifting discourses and material social practices around children and childhood, call for redress. This piece builds upon my ongoing project, ‘childhood as spectacle’, to examine what is at stake in the accomplishment of social reproduction – and its failures – in turbulent times and heterogeneous spaces. Looking closely at the ways aspirations for the future are defined, managed, reached, and deferred in and through the family and schools, I take stock of contemporary social reproduction and its anxieties. Drawing on three popular and contradictory cultural productions, the films Race to Nowhere and Waiting for Superman, and the best-selling book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua, I will address some of the ways the lives and wellbeing of some children--middle-class and wealthier children –have been fetishized while others – the vast majority of children – suffer the consequences of a disinvested public sphere and a radically reduced social wage. As the sense of precariousness stemming from the financial crises of the past decade widens and infiltrates everyday life more deeply, this situation becomes more acute. In this context, aspiration and its management can be framed as a cultural politics ripe for unpacking; a structure of feeling whose drives and effects may illuminate the present as a political moment.
This paper explores the systemic disruptions of social reproduction, including the ways children ... more This paper explores the systemic disruptions of social reproduction, including the ways children do not acquire the knowledge and skills necessary for the worlds in which they will come of age, in two sites deeply affected by global economic restructuring and environmental change--rural Sudan and New York City. The paper calls for rethinking debates about the nature of global change from a perspective that emphasizes childhood and children's experiences, understandings, and futures. A notion of diverse and interconnected 'ecologies of childhood,' as both constellations of ideas and sets of material circumstances that frame locally specific and globally inflected relations between children and the environment, allows the theorization of various erosions of children's worlds, and the development of a child-focused perspective of what might be meant by 'sustainable development.'
This special issue of Antipode addresses the ways in which people
produce value in all domains o... more This special issue of Antipode addresses the ways in which people
produce value in all domains of their lives. We are particularly interested
in the relationship between the production of value “at work”
and the social reproduction of labor-power along with the conditions
that enable its deployment.
Field research produces all kinds of knowledge, only some of which makes it into our texts. Rich ... more Field research produces all kinds of knowledge, only some of which makes it into our texts. Rich troves of data are mined over many years, but some materials get stuck, constituted as marginal, imagined as private musings, anecdotes, mere ‘stories’ told over dinner but never part of the formal narrative. During a year of often-arduous field research in rural Sudan, I kept a comic book journal where I secreted my crankiness, recorded my amusements and amazements, and kept myself afloat. Like most journals, it was private, reflective, and therapeutic. It was a way to laugh at what can be so maddening or painful in doing research, all the more so—as will be readily apparent—because I have no idea how to draw, but in years of traveling, making comics had become a way to get away from being away, to spend time inside my head. Over the years I realized that my comics were also ‘fieldnotes,’ and that sharing them could, at the very least, comfort someone else doing field research, but more so that they recorded important ‘findings’ in and of themselves. This ‘graphic essay’ brings these findings in from the margins as it meditates on the politics of knowledge and its representations.
Contribution to 'On Being Outside " the Project " : A Symposium in honor of Susan Christopherson'... more Contribution to 'On Being Outside " the Project " : A Symposium in honor of Susan Christopherson' On Rocking " the Project " : The Beat Goes On
A contribution to an Antipode symposium in honor of Susan Christopherson, "On Being 'Outside the ... more A contribution to an Antipode symposium in honor of Susan Christopherson, "On Being 'Outside the Project."
Contemporary capitalism is in the throes of crises precipitated by over-accumulation and the effe... more Contemporary capitalism is in the throes of crises precipitated by over-accumulation and the effects of decades of privatization, commodification, and financialization, each sieved through the other. The angel of geography is conjured to mark these crises on the grounds of everyday life. Their profound and uneven consequences for the present and future, seen in the shifting discourses and material social practices around children and childhood, call for redress. This piece builds upon my ongoing project, ‘childhood as spectacle’, to examine what is at stake in the accomplishment of social reproduction – and its failures – in turbulent times and heterogeneous spaces. Looking closely at the ways aspirations for the future are defined, managed, reached, and deferred in and through the family and schools, I take stock of contemporary social reproduction and its anxieties. Drawing on three popular and contradictory cultural productions, the films Race to Nowhere and Waiting for Superman, and the best-selling book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua, I will address some of the ways the lives and wellbeing of some children--middle-class and wealthier children –have been fetishized while others – the vast majority of children – suffer the consequences of a disinvested public sphere and a radically reduced social wage. As the sense of precariousness stemming from the financial crises of the past decade widens and infiltrates everyday life more deeply, this situation becomes more acute. In this context, aspiration and its management can be framed as a cultural politics ripe for unpacking; a structure of feeling whose drives and effects may illuminate the present as a political moment.
This paper explores the systemic disruptions of social reproduction, including the ways children ... more This paper explores the systemic disruptions of social reproduction, including the ways children do not acquire the knowledge and skills necessary for the worlds in which they will come of age, in two sites deeply affected by global economic restructuring and environmental change--rural Sudan and New York City. The paper calls for rethinking debates about the nature of global change from a perspective that emphasizes childhood and children's experiences, understandings, and futures. A notion of diverse and interconnected 'ecologies of childhood,' as both constellations of ideas and sets of material circumstances that frame locally specific and globally inflected relations between children and the environment, allows the theorization of various erosions of children's worlds, and the development of a child-focused perspective of what might be meant by 'sustainable development.'
This special issue of Antipode addresses the ways in which people
produce value in all domains o... more This special issue of Antipode addresses the ways in which people
produce value in all domains of their lives. We are particularly interested
in the relationship between the production of value “at work”
and the social reproduction of labor-power along with the conditions
that enable its deployment.
Field research produces all kinds of knowledge, only some of which makes it into our texts. Rich ... more Field research produces all kinds of knowledge, only some of which makes it into our texts. Rich troves of data are mined over many years, but some materials get stuck, constituted as marginal, imagined as private musings, anecdotes, mere ‘stories’ told over dinner but never part of the formal narrative. During a year of often-arduous field research in rural Sudan, I kept a comic book journal where I secreted my crankiness, recorded my amusements and amazements, and kept myself afloat. Like most journals, it was private, reflective, and therapeutic. It was a way to laugh at what can be so maddening or painful in doing research, all the more so—as will be readily apparent—because I have no idea how to draw, but in years of traveling, making comics had become a way to get away from being away, to spend time inside my head. Over the years I realized that my comics were also ‘fieldnotes,’ and that sharing them could, at the very least, comfort someone else doing field research, but more so that they recorded important ‘findings’ in and of themselves. This ‘graphic essay’ brings these findings in from the margins as it meditates on the politics of knowledge and its representations.
Spatial Histories of Radical Geography: North America and Beyond, Edited by Trevor Barnes and Eric Sheppard, 2019
A reflection on the Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute, which was a project of activis... more A reflection on the Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute, which was a project of activist geography in the 1960s.
Keywords in Radical Geography: Antipode at 50, First Edition, 2019
Children and childhood are not terms that spring to mind when thinking about radical geography, b... more Children and childhood are not terms that spring to mind when thinking about radical geography, but what could be more radical than imagining and making a future in which childhood was a central consideration and the creation of liveable futures was the beating heart of radical praxis? There is a pat and clich ed way that invoking "the child" calls forth futurity and insists on a healthy present, but "the child" is not children who breathe and run and think (cf. Edelman 2004). Invoking that figure is all too often bait for an aspirational future that does not reveal its narrow gauge-Eurocentric, white, middle class, heteronormative-luring people to imagine something good while enduring and creating environments that are toxic in every way. Toxic political-ecologically-think lead in the drinking water in cities like Flint, Michigan, or Newark, New Jersey; or the labour of children in the ship scrapping industries of Asia; or the polluted air of urban China; and toxic political-economically-think of the state violence in South and Central America, South Sudan, Syria or so many elsewheres that propels children on dangerous journeys to unknown places imagined as havens even as they so often are not; or the racialised state violence that kills, maims, and incarcerates young people of colour at staggeringly disproportionate rates in the US, Canada, and elsewhere; or the wars raging in many parts of the world that enlist child soldiers; or the inadequacy of social infrastructure such as basic healthcare, decent schools, and sanitation in so many places around the world, including the wealthiest (e.g. Bartlett 2018; Horton and Kraftl 2017). The list goes on and on and recognising its global sprawl and intimate effects really ought to galvanise radical geographers and spur vibrant radical geographies. Thinking about children and childhoods connects us to social reproduction and thus to the ways knowledge and skills are produced and shared, not just to make a differentiated labour force daily and over the long haul, but to shift its grounds and find ways to create and maintain a social formation in which difference is less a means of division than a flowering of possibilities. And thinking about social reproduction, especially for geographers, calls for attention to its political ecolo-gies-the range of settings in which it takes place, such as the household, the school, the courthouse, the public environment, and the workplace, and the sorts of material social practices through which knowledge is produced, shared, and exchanged. During childhood the practices around sharing knowledge are particularly important as children acquire and internalise the working knowledge of their communities in all of its unevenness and quirkiness-pernicious and delicious. This knowledge is not just taught directly but learned in a community
Keywords in Radical Geography: Antipode at 50, First Edition, 2019
Children and childhood are not terms that spring to mind when thinking about radical geography, b... more Children and childhood are not terms that spring to mind when thinking about radical geography, but what could be more radical than imagining and making a future in which childhood was a central consideration and the creation of liveable futures was the beating heart of radical praxis? There is a pat and clich ed way that invoking "the child" calls forth futurity and insists on a healthy present, but "the child" is not children who breathe and run and think (cf. Edelman 2004). Invoking that figure is all too often bait for an aspirational future that does not reveal its narrow gauge-Eurocentric, white, middle class, heteronormative-luring people to imagine something good while enduring and creating environments that are toxic in every way. Toxic political-ecologically-think lead in the drinking water in cities like Flint, Michigan, or Newark, New Jersey; or the labour of children in the ship scrapping industries of Asia; or the polluted air of urban China; and toxic political-economically-think of the state violence in South and Central America, South Sudan, Syria or so many elsewheres that propels children on dangerous journeys to unknown places imagined as havens even as they so often are not; or the racialised state violence that kills, maims, and incarcerates young people of colour at staggeringly disproportionate rates in the US, Canada, and elsewhere; or the wars raging in many parts of the world that enlist child soldiers; or the inadequacy of social infrastructure such as basic healthcare, decent schools, and sanitation in so many places around the world, including the wealthiest (e.g. Bartlett 2018; Horton and Kraftl 2017). The list goes on and on and recognising its global sprawl and intimate effects really ought to galvanise radical geographers and spur vibrant radical geographies. Thinking about children and childhoods connects us to social reproduction and thus to the ways knowledge and skills are produced and shared, not just to make a differentiated labour force daily and over the long haul, but to shift its grounds and find ways to create and maintain a social formation in which difference is less a means of division than a flowering of possibilities. And thinking about social reproduction, especially for geographers, calls for attention to its political ecolo-gies-the range of settings in which it takes place, such as the household, the school, the courthouse, the public environment, and the workplace, and the sorts of material social practices through which knowledge is produced, shared, and exchanged. During childhood the practices around sharing knowledge are particularly important as children acquire and internalise the working knowledge of their communities in all of its unevenness and quirkiness-pernicious and delicious. This knowledge is not just taught directly but learned in a community
An exchange among Angelika Bammer, Minrose Gwin, Cindi Katz, and Elizabeth Meese on locating narr... more An exchange among Angelika Bammer, Minrose Gwin, Cindi Katz, and Elizabeth Meese on locating narrative and material spaces of resistance. Through the exchange the co-authors/letter writers address language, interdisciplinarity, methodology, the practices of writing and reading.
In Remaking Reality: Nature at the Millennium edited by Bruce Braun and Noel Castree. Routledge ... more In Remaking Reality: Nature at the Millennium edited by Bruce Braun and Noel Castree. Routledge 1998
Indefensible Space: The Architecture of the National Insecurity State. Routledge. (2008): 305-23.... more Indefensible Space: The Architecture of the National Insecurity State. Routledge. (2008): 305-23. Michael Sorkin, Editor.
In A. Callari, C. Biewener, and S. Cullenberg (Eds.) Marxism in the Postmodern Age: Confronting t... more In A. Callari, C. Biewener, and S. Cullenberg (Eds.) Marxism in the Postmodern Age: Confronting the New World Order. Guilford (1994): 274-82.
Chapter from "David Harvey: A Critical Reader" edited by Noel Castree and Derek Gregory.
The chap... more Chapter from "David Harvey: A Critical Reader" edited by Noel Castree and Derek Gregory. The chapter offers a critical feminist engagement with Harvey's work.
... T. Abebe. Uitgever, NTNU. ISBN, 978-82-471-6731-1. Faculteit, Faculteit der Maatschappij-en G... more ... T. Abebe. Uitgever, NTNU. ISBN, 978-82-471-6731-1. Faculteit, Faculteit der Maatschappij-en Gedragswetenschappen. Instituut/afd. FMG: Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR). Soort document, Boekbespreking. Document finder, UvA-Linker. Gebruik dit adres ...
To the good earth and all things green and growing This means acknowledging our kinship with the ... more To the good earth and all things green and growing This means acknowledging our kinship with the rest of the biosphere. If we do not feel perfectly at home here, that may after all have something to do with the way in which we have treated the place. Any home can be made ...
Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift - Norwegian Journal of Geography, 2008
This thesis explores two aspects of contemporary childhoods orphanhood and children's w... more This thesis explores two aspects of contemporary childhoods orphanhood and children's work in Ethiopia. By drawing on case studies from Gedeo (rural) and Addis Ababa (urban), I discuss how children and young people negotiate their lives in respect of changing ...
My riff on my book in the context of midcentury kitchen cabinets salvaged from Spring Valley/Deat... more My riff on my book in the context of midcentury kitchen cabinets salvaged from Spring Valley/Death Valley, the birthplace of US chemical weapons of mass destruction.
This book review symposium for Shiloh Krupar's Hot Spotter's Report includes an introduction by m... more This book review symposium for Shiloh Krupar's Hot Spotter's Report includes an introduction by myself, reviews from Julie Sze, Ryan Griffis, and Cindi Katz, and a response by Shiloh Krupar
Full Circles describes the very different lives and expectations of women in post-industrial and ... more Full Circles describes the very different lives and expectations of women in post-industrial and developing countries from childhood to old age. Analysing how class, ethnicity, nationality and individual values intersect with the experience of the life course, the book explores the futures open to women in diverse and changing locations.
AbdouMaliq Simone’s (2010) thoughtful piece conjures new publics and possibilities for urban poli... more AbdouMaliq Simone’s (2010) thoughtful piece conjures new publics and possibilities for urban politics. Drawing on his work with the Urban Poor Consortium in Jakarta, Simone excavates a number of practices through which poor residents “hang on,” find new opportunities, and come up with strategies to remake their circumstances or somehow make their shifting and often precarious circumstances work. He develops the fascinating and provocative notion of “anticipation” as a political practice that can make collective life more resilient and inventive but at the same time has the potential to splay people’s activities in directions that make things more precarious. The paper illustrates the practices of anticipation in two districts in northern Jakarta and reflects on them as “a temporality of intersection” offering opportunities for new alliances and operations. My remarks are concentrated around three interrelated themes raised in the piece: the notion of intersection and its entailments as metaphor; the claustrophobic nature of the mimetic relations of anticipation as presented here and how they might be understood otherwise; and the possibilities of anticipation as politics that recasts it as a practice of resilience rather than resistance. As a prelude to addressing these issues, I note a couple of minor quarrels I had with the piece because they connect to concerns at the heart of urban geography. Simone mentions the Urban Poor Consortium, the Indonesia-based NGO with which he worked, and indicates that this research arose in the course of his work with it; but he does not convey much of a sense of how this consortium of community-based organizations works or what their teams of residents have researched and to what effect. There is an exciting history in urban geography of community-based action research, the most storied of which were the Geographical Expeditions in Detroit, Vancouver, and Toronto, but there is also a great deal of participatory action research currently under way in cities all over the world and it would be useful to situate the work of the UPC (and by extension Simone) in relation to these engagements to better understand both its accomplishments and limitations, as well as how the Consortium worked as a mediating institution. The last point raises another concern. Throughout the piece, Simone makes much of the lack of mediating institutions and the rise of “networks” in contemporary urban life, but I am not convinced that either one is the case. While state institutions may be in retreat or hollowed out, many others abide or have arisen in recent years to shape and mediate urban social relations. What about religious organizations, neighborhood alliances, unions, or
Interdisciplinarity and interdisciplinary studies have been receiv-ing a lot of attention these d... more Interdisciplinarity and interdisciplinary studies have been receiv-ing a lot of attention these days. This phenomenon may simply be part of the incessant stocktaking that turn-of-the-century shifts seem to call forth. But the stocktaking also appears to be the prod-uct of something ...
Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, Nov 1, 1991
To the good earth and all things green and growing This means acknowledging our kinship with the ... more To the good earth and all things green and growing This means acknowledging our kinship with the rest of the biosphere. If we do not feel perfectly at home here, that may after all have something to do with the way in which we have treated the place. Any home can be made ...
On 11 September 2001 ‘a screaming came across the sky’.1 The events of that horrific day laced in... more On 11 September 2001 ‘a screaming came across the sky’.1 The events of that horrific day laced into the United States’s insular presumptions of security, and the ongoing responses to the attacks and what they signified in the US imaginary have made clear the imperial privilege and xenophobic rancour upon which that security is built. I have been resistant to talking about 11 September in part because so much of my intellectual project has been to draw links between the lives of children and the prospects for young people in rural Sudan and racialized working-class New York City, and these events seemed to collapse that connection into a fatal arc that at the moment of their occurrence reminded me of the phrase Thomas Pynchon used to describe the parabolic arc of Germany’s V2 rockets in World War II, ‘gravity’s rainbow’. Given my commitments to young people in New York and Sudan and the sorts of connections I have spent my career drawing between them — which I have come to call ‘countertopographies’ — I feel compelled to address the dangers of the reductionism that enables the binaries of ‘us’ and ‘them’ when the construction of otherness — and similarity or connection — is so much more complicated and potentially productive than that. This endeavour is loaded with a different kind of ‘gravity’: the gravity of living in the shards of capitalist modernity. It is the gravity of this situation that links young people in New York and Sudan, among many other places.
Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift-norwegian Journal of Geography, May 24, 2000
Mer enn bare landskap!’ (‘More than just landscape’). One of Lien Hanssen’s findings is that thou... more Mer enn bare landskap!’ (‘More than just landscape’). One of Lien Hanssen’s findings is that though the state authorized the Central Committee to take a broad measure of cultural, social and physical factors into consideration when evaluating cultural landscape, the persona actually engaged in the project were, by-andlarge, people whose authority derives from the natural sciences, particularly botany. The result is, as Lien Hanssen is able to show, that significant social and aesthetic dimensions of the study remain unexamined and are thus taken for granted. The end result is thus a study whose findings are open to question, and whose recommendations are likely to be inadequate, because they tend to reflect the unexamined landscape values of evaluators who are inclined toward a particular approach to landscape – in this case that of the natural sciences. Lien Hanssen’s book makes a significant contribution to the study of landscape and landscape management that should be of considerable interest both to scholars and practitioners. By exposing the silences in the dominant discourse on cultural landscape planning in Norway today she raises important questions which ought to be addressed before such exercises in landscape evaluation are applied to planning. Through her close examination of a particular body of texts she has both paved the way for, and left the way open for, further studies that can give voice to the cultural values – local, national and international – which are expressed in the landscape.
Full Circles describes the very different lives and expectations of women in post-industrial and ... more Full Circles describes the very different lives and expectations of women in post-industrial and developing countries from childhood to old age. Analysing how class, ethnicity, nationality and individual values intersect with the experience of the life course, the book explores the futures open to women in diverse and changing locations.
... xi Notes on contributors xii Acknowledgements xv 1 Children's geographies and the new so... more ... xi Notes on contributors xii Acknowledgements xv 1 Children's geographies and the new social studies of childhood 1 SARAH L. HOLLOWAY ... as thirdspace'HUGH MATTHEWS, MELANIE LIMB AND MARK TAYLOR 54 5 'Nothing to do, nowhere to go?': teenage girls and 'public ...
Chapter 13 Partners in Crime? Neoliberalism and the Production of New Political Subjectivities Ci... more Chapter 13 Partners in Crime? Neoliberalism and the Production of New Political Subjectivities Cindi Katz The contributions in this publication individually and collectively address the contradictions and possibilities of political activism and its professionalization under the conditions of ...
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and its anxieties. Drawing on three popular and contradictory cultural productions, the films Race to Nowhere and Waiting for Superman, and the best-selling book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua, I will address some of the ways the lives and wellbeing of some children--middle-class and wealthier children –have been fetishized while others – the vast majority of children – suffer the consequences of a disinvested
public sphere and a radically reduced social wage. As the sense of precariousness stemming from the financial crises of the past decade widens and infiltrates everyday life more deeply, this situation becomes more acute. In this context, aspiration and its management can be framed as a cultural politics ripe for unpacking; a structure of feeling whose drives and effects may illuminate the present as a political moment.
produce value in all domains of their lives. We are particularly interested
in the relationship between the production of value “at work”
and the social reproduction of labor-power along with the conditions
that enable its deployment.
and its anxieties. Drawing on three popular and contradictory cultural productions, the films Race to Nowhere and Waiting for Superman, and the best-selling book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua, I will address some of the ways the lives and wellbeing of some children--middle-class and wealthier children –have been fetishized while others – the vast majority of children – suffer the consequences of a disinvested
public sphere and a radically reduced social wage. As the sense of precariousness stemming from the financial crises of the past decade widens and infiltrates everyday life more deeply, this situation becomes more acute. In this context, aspiration and its management can be framed as a cultural politics ripe for unpacking; a structure of feeling whose drives and effects may illuminate the present as a political moment.
produce value in all domains of their lives. We are particularly interested
in the relationship between the production of value “at work”
and the social reproduction of labor-power along with the conditions
that enable its deployment.
The chapter offers a critical feminist engagement with Harvey's work.