Engendering Gramsci: Gender,the Philosophy of Praxis,and Spaces of Encounter in the Climate Caravan,Bangladesh

This paper examines the gendered politics of national and international networking amongst peasant farmers' movements in South Asia. In particular the paper provides an ethnographic account, based upon the author's critical engagement with the Bangladesh Krishok (farmer) Federation and the Bangladesh Kishani Sabha (Women Farmers' Association), of the Climate Change, Gender and Food Sovereignty Caravan that was organised in Bangladesh in 2011. The paper draws upon Antonio Gramsci's theory of the philosophy of praxis and feminist research on social reproduction, dispossession and materiality to interrogate the spaces of encounter and solidarity‐building practices of the Caravan between different communities in the country and between different social movement actors. The paper examines how processes of political organisation and consciousness‐raising within and between social movements are problematised by gendered power relations. The paper concludes with suggestions concerning how the philosophy of praxis in Bangladesh might be “engendered” to incorporate a politics of social reproduction.     

Not About Land,Not Quite a Grab: Dispersed Dispossession in Rural Russia

In most literature in geography and agrarian studies, rural dispossession is neatly related to land rights or access, a trend that increased with debates about the recent wave of farmland investments worldwide. Drawing on long‐term fieldwork in rural Russia, this paper critiques that focus and the assumed nexus between rural dispossession and farmland, as is prevents an understanding of more dispersed stakes, modes and temporalities of dispossession. I introduce the concept of dispersed dispossession which advances our understanding of social and relational objects of dispossession beyond natural resources (such as sustaining institutions and infrastructures), and the tangled, complex, often slow and silent modes and temporalities of dispossession beyond spectacular events. I show how the concept sheds new light on current agrarian change in Russia, and how it contributes to debates on (rural) dispossession and “land grabs” more generally.     

Capitalist Formations of Enclosure: Space and the Extinction of the Commons

Despite their theoretical and political potential, recent debates on enclosure usually lack an effective consideration of how space is mobilized in the process of dispossession. This article connects the analysis of enclosure's general spatial rationality to a range of illustrations of its particular formations and procedures. Enclosure is understood as one of capitalism's “universal territorial equivalents”, a polymorphous technique with variegated expressions in time but also with a consistent logic that uses the spatial erosion of the commons to subsume non‐commodified, self‐managed social spaces. In response to the ever‐changing nature of commoning, successive regimes of enclosure reshape the morphologies of deprivation and their articulation to other state and market apparatuses in order to meet shifting strategies of capital accumulation and social reproduction. Through a spatially nuanced account of these phenomena, I outline a tentative genealogy of enclosure formations that allows tracking diverse geographies of dispossession across different scales and regulatory contexts in various historical stages of capitalist development.     

Ordinary Geographies: Care,Violence, and Agrarian Extractivism in “Post-Conflict” Colombia

In Colombia’s agrarian spaces, war and extractivism are deeply entangled. Almost four years after the peace accords signed between the national government and the FARC guerrilla, post-conflict geographies are best characterised by the ongoing dispossession of local populations related to the entrenchment of extractivism. Drawing from ethnographic work carried out in the Colombian Caribbean on the ordinary practices and spaces of social reproduction, the ordinary geographies, this article explores gendered practices of care and their role in both sustaining and disrupting paramilitary violence and agrarian extractivism. The focus not just on the gendered effects of war and extractivism, but on gender’s constitutive role in the configuration of these processes and dynamics, allows us to contribute to recent literature on extractivism, dispossession and violence from a feminist standpoint.     

Nature,Capital and Neighborhoods: “Dispossession without Accumulation”?

Abstract: The ongoing economic crisis, which originated in the USA and has since spread rapidly to capital markets worldwide, is massive, complex, and many times contradictory. One could say the same for responses to the crisis as governments, firms and multi‐national institutions struggle to grasp the full magnitude of the event. This article interrogates the key commodities involved—land, labor and money—and the always‐uneasy relations between spaces of social reproduction and capital. Such ambivalence is critical to understanding how new economic realities are formed in light of retreating neoliberalism as markets become destabilized. The analysis provided suggests the commodities involved in the housing crisis are the basis for a countermovement against dispossession.     

Social Reproduction,Ecological Dispossession and Dependency: Life Beside the Río Santiago in Mexico

This article uses an integrated social reproduction theory (SRT) framework to highlight the interrelation between all non-wage forms of survival, such as debt, community and the environment. The analysis demonstrates how Mexico's unregulated industrialization and social housing policies have created new forms of poverty and market dependency. The article relies on a comprehensive literature review and extensive fieldwork carried out in El Salto, one of Mexico's industrial peripheries, and shows how vulnerable populations become trapped, in this case on the banks of the Río Santiago, one of Mexico's most contaminated rivers. Parallel developments of industrial and housing policies contextualize the conditions unfolding throughout Mexico where populations are relocated to areas without adequate water and where drinking water is supplied by bottled water companies. This contribution highlights why an expanded SRT framework is valuable for understanding the relationship between ecological dispossession and the forced reliance on markets and debt.     

The Politics of the Evicted: Redevelopment,Subjectivity, and Difference in Mumbai's Slum Frontier

In recent years cities around the world have undergone mass slum clearances for redevelopment. This study of Mumbai offers an alternative interpretation of urban capital accumulation by investigating the differentiated political subjectivities of displaced slum residents. I argue that Mumbai's redevelopment entails not uniform class‐based dispossessions but a process of accumulation by differentiated displacement whereby uneven displacement politics are central to the social production of land markets. Two ethnographic cases reveal that groups negotiate redevelopment in contradictory ways, supporting or contesting projects in varying moments. Redevelopmental subjectivities are influenced at key conjunctures by market‐oriented resettlement, ideologies of belonging, desires for improved housing, and participation in non‐governmental groups. This articulated assemblage of power‐laden practices reflects and reworks class, gender, and ethno‐religious relations, profoundly shaping evictees' experience and political engagement. The paper concludes that focusing on differentiated subjectivities may usefully guide both analysis and social justice practice aimed at countering dispossession.     

Settlers,Workers, and the Logic of Accumulation by Dispossession

This article offers a critique of the Wolfe-an model, which has become so dominant within contemporary Settler Colonial Studies (SCS). It focuses particularly on the central claim made by Patrick Wolfe, and others after him, that settler colonialism is categorically differentiated from other forms of colonialism by its drive to “eliminate the native”, instead of exploiting them. This paper builds on the literature that shows how settler colonies have used elimination as well as exploitation in their relations with indigenous peoples—even transitioning from one to the other. Instead, the paper argues that focusing on accumulation by dispossession allows for an analysis of the specificity of settler social relations to emerge. It highlights the specific ways in which settlers collectively expropriate indigenous peoples and struggle amongst different settler classes over the distribution of the colonial loot.     

Beyond The Limits to Growth: Ecology and the Neoliberal Counterrevolution

This paper brings autonomist Marxist analyses of post‐Fordist transition together with the geographical literature on ecosystem services to argue that the rise of the ecosystem service economy was central to what Paolo Virno has called the neoliberal counterrevolution. By analyzing the discourse of environmental crisis in the 1960s and 1970s, I demonstrate that early efforts to account for the value of environmental functions were a response to the instabilities faced by globalized capital in the postwar era. The rise of the ecosystem service economy is central to what autonomist Marxists describe as a post‐Fordist mode of production in which the activities of social (and, I argue, ecological) reproduction become direct sources of value. The paper suggests the need to revise the autonomist analysis to account for both the ecological dimensions of Fordist crisis, and the importance of the ecosystem service economy as a means whereby the counterrevolution was accomplished.     

Vagabond Capitalism and the Necessity of Social Reproduction

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.     

Gender and Global Labour Migrations: Incorporating Skilled Workers

Female labour migration has increased in the past two decades, and has become more complex and interconnected, attracting considerable attention from researchers and policy makers. Earlier debates on the relationship between production and reproduction have resurfaced in a period of changing configurations of welfare states; contemporary theorisations of global labour migration are now paying attention to the role of women in the reproductive sector. However, much of the literature has focused on migrants who enter the lesser‐skilled sectors, in particular domestic labour. In this paper we argue that the migration of women into skilled sectors of the labour market, especially in health, alters our understanding of the role of migrant women in social reproduction. Migrant women are present in multiple sites and spheres of reproduction beyond the household and recognising the different ways in which they are incorporated into globalised labour markets challenges simplistic representations of migrant women and draws out a fuller appreciation of their contribution to social reproduction and welfare in the First World.     

Rethinking Livelihood Impacts of Biofuel Land Deals in Ghana

During the last decade, debates about the livelihood impacts of large‐scale biofuel projects have focused mainly on either employment creation or on land dispossession. The mediating role of social institutions and communal reciprocity in resource‐access manoeuvring processes have rarely been considered. This comparative study of two biofuel projects in Ghana shows that households affected by land dispossession quickly obtained new productive land areas by switching to fallow farmland or through long‐term reciprocal social networks. The livelihoods of households with members employed by the projects improved in terms of increased income and access to cultivation on project land. Not everyone, however, had the resources and ability to use social networks for job‐seeking and land access negotiation, particularly those considered to be migrants. The authors argue that a context‐specific focus on, and processual examination of, the abilities of individuals and groups to utilize social institutions to sustain their livelihoods during a project's lifetime, are crucial in analysing the impacts of biofuels land deals. Such an approach explores the various forms and uses of livelihood capitals, and shows how new configurations of social and economic relations emerging from land commercialization can reinforce local inequalities.     

Dispossession by Accumulation? Mining,Water and the Nature of Enclosure on the Bolivian Altiplano

Abstract: This paper examines processes of primitive accumulation and livelihood dispossession on the Bolivian Altiplano. Through empirical examination of the social and environmental effects of mining waste, the paper demonstrates that indigenous campesino community members are experiencing livelihood dispossession by way of three interrelated forms of accumulation: accumulation of toxic sediments on agricultural fields; accumulation of water and water rights by mining firms; and accumulation of territory by mining operations. In the case under examination, full proletarianization is not taking place, and processes of dispossession are not a “fix” for an overaccumulation crisis. The paper argues for greater attention to the contingent role of nature's materiality in processes of dispossession and accumulation.     

Contesting the Settler City: Indigenous Self‐Determination,New Urban Reserves,and the Neoliberalization of Colonialism

In settler colonial contexts the historical and ongoing dispossession and displacement of Indigenous peoples is foundational to understanding the production of urban space. What does it mean that cities in what is now known as Canada are Indigenous places and premised on the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples? What roles do new urban reserves play in subverting or reinforcing the colonial‐capitalist sociospatial order? This paper examines these questions in relation to new urban reserves in Canada. Most common in the Prairie provinces, new urban reserves are satellite land holdings of First Nation communities located outside of the city. While the settler state narrowly confines new urban reserves to neoliberal agendas, First Nations are successfully advancing reserve creation to generate economic self‐sufficiency, exercise self‐determination, and subvert settler state boundaries. I argue that new urban reserves are contradictory spaces, as products and vehicles of settler‐colonial state power and Indigenous resistance and place‐making.     

The Micropolitics of Dispossession and Resistance: Case Study of a Proposed Dam in Central India

This article presents a study of the micropolitics of dispossession for a proposed medium‐sized irrigation project in an Adivasi region of Central India. The article explores the complex micropolitics of dispossession and collective action in the project planning stage, long before the formal processes of land acquisition actually begin. It highlights the importance of training the researchers’ gaze on the functioning of the local state in the pre‐acquisition phase. It shows how the local state uses various powers of exclusion to fracture emerging cross‐class, multi‐caste alliances, while maintaining formal compliance with a range of social safeguard policies aimed at protecting vulnerable groups and fragile landscapes. The ‘everyday’ decisions of local state actors during the project planning stage produce site‐specific, differentiated and shifting matrices of risks and opportunities for the local people, who are already divided along class and caste lines. This, in turn, is likely to inform their political responses at the actual moment of enclosure. Thus the durability and success of anti‐dispossession collective action is likely to vary depending on the dynamic interactions of local state and non‐state actors, mediated by regional electoral politics and the overall safeguard policy regime governing land acquisition.     

Territorial (In) Coherence: Labour and Special Economic Zones in Laos's Border Manufacturing

This article engages literature on special economic zones and territory in global development. I suggest a focus on labour's spatial class composition as constitutive of territorial coherence provides insights into how the Savan‐Seno Special Economic Zone in Lao PDR operates as an economic border territory bridging Laos to the regional and global economies. The distanciated global connections which special economic zones aim to create are predicated on zones gaining internal coherence for capital accumulation. I suggest zones’ internal coherence depends on zone firms reworking the local class composition of labour, itself constituted by workers’ spatial practices. In the Savan‐Seno zone this occurred through immobilising a mobile labour force and taking advantage of its continuing embeddedness within a subsistence rice‐producing village economy. The argument aims to illustrate how zones producing for global markets act as territories of complex spatiality which span and connect multiple spaces of production and workers’ social reproduction.     

Emergent Geographies of International Education and Social Exclusion

This paper explores the socio‐spatial implications of recent developments in the internationalisation of education, which includes the growth in numbers of foreign students and the establishment of offshore schools. It demonstrates the relationship between emergent geographies of international education in the “West” and social reproduction in both student “sending” and “receiving” societies. Drawing on fieldwork in Hong Kong and Canada, it argues that international education is transforming the spatial scales over which social reproduction is achieved: on the one hand, upper‐middle‐class populations in East Asia are able to secure their social status through the acquisition of a “Western education”, thereby creating new geographies of social exclusion within “student‐sending” societies. On the other hand, primary and secondary schools in Canada are able to harness the benefits of internationalisation in order to offset the negative effects of neoliberal educational reform, thereby facilitating local social reproduction.     

Substituting for Families? Schools and Social Reproduction in AIDS‐affected Lesotho

Abstract: Families, the state and employers all have a broad if differentiated interest in securing the daily and generational reproduction of society. Whereas in Western countries, the past two decades have witnessed a progressive displacement of responsibility for social reproduction from the state to families, in southern Africa, day‐to‐day social reproduction has always remained overwhelmingly the preserve of families. Today, however, the AIDS pandemic is radically transforming family life for many children, and prompting concerns (arguably a moral panic) about the potential breakdown of social reproduction. Even in Africa, schools have long supplemented families in delivering generational reproduction, albeit geared around the transfer of “factual” knowledge and with a narrow focus on preparing new generations of workers. In light of the AIDS pandemic, a number of commentators have suggested ways in which schools could further substitute for the diminishing capacities of families. Based on interviews with decision‐makers and analysis of policy documents, I explore a number of interventions being enacted in Lesotho's schools. I argue that such initiatives remain small in scale and often justified in relation to retaining children in school. In practice both government and employers remain more interested in the generational reproduction of workers than in daily reproduction. If the welfare needs of AIDS‐affected children are to be met through schooling, there is a need for the education sector's role to be understood in relation to an ethics of care, rather than the functionalist production of a future workforce.     

Conceptualising European Privatisation Processes After the Great Recession

A wave of privatisation is unfolding in Europe in the wake of the financial crisis, but it has yet to receive serious scholarly attention. This paper examines the case of Ireland, where an austerity strategy and European Union International Monetary Fund bailout conditionality have given impetus to the transfer of public assets to the private sector. Theoretically, the paper explains the roots of the phenomenon with reference to a reformulated concept of “accumulation by dispossession” whose usefulness lies in emphasising the politico‐economic drivers of privatisation, which have been neglected in the mainstream literature. A typology is presented that argues that accumulation by dispossession manifests itself, in practice, through four main processes: (1) private repossession of assets nationalised during the financial crisis; (2) restructuring of state‐owned enterprises; (3) commodification of assets and services hitherto located outside the market; and (4) privatised stimulus through public–private partnerships. The paper's framework should be useful to conceptualise ongoing privatisation processes in other European countries.     

Labour Migration,Capitalist Accumulation,and Feudal Reproduction: A Historical Analysis from the Eastern Gangetic Plains

This paper engages with the long‐running debate on the transition from farm‐based livelihoods to capitalism in the context of labour migration. Tracing the historic evolution of modes of production in the peripheral Mithilanchal region of the Eastern Gangetic Plains, it notes how the economic processes which are today driving the peasantry into the labour force through migration are not directly connected to the process of capitalist accumulation in the diverse locales where labour is employed, as is somtimes implied in the research on classic situations of “accumulation by dispossession”. The entry of the peasantry into the surplus labour pool is instead linked firstly, with a complex convergence of internal changes within a non‐capitalist feudal mode of production on an economic, cultural and political level, and secondly, with the stresses brought about in the wake of expanding capitalist markets. The paper notes however that migrant labour still generates substantial profits for capitalism with a sharing of surplus between the latter, and landlord‐money lenders. It argues that the relationship between modes of production in this context, is neither functional nor coincidental, and is linked instead with larger – at times opportunistic – class alliances which have evolved to fit the current political‐economic conjuncture.