Outlaw Capital: Accumulation by Transgression on the Paraguay–Brazil Border

Outlaw economies are a key, but under-appreciated, feature of late capitalism. With an ethnography of what one journalist called “the largest illicit economy in the Western Hemisphere” on the Paraguay–Brazil border, this article contributes empirical findings about the production of space for extralegal economies. Contributing to debates about geographies of the illicit, I theorise outlaw capital, a form of capital that negotiates profits and distributes rents through situated forms of deals, bribes, and schemes. Outlaw capital zones particular places as sites of useful transgression. Powerful spatial imaginaries then cast them out of thought, despite their connections to spaces of authorised economic practice. Outlaw capital’s diverse, flexible spatio-economic forms benefit from explicit and tacit state support. As an example of theory building from the South, outlaw capital can help us think broadly about the power and politics of accumulation by transgression as a key logic of outlaw capital.     

“(S)he Conquers Who Endures”: Theodora DeWolf Colt and the Birth of a New Cultural Elite

This essay explores the intersection of gender and class in the making of the new “high brow” culture of the late nineteenth century, represented by the matriarch of Bristol, Rhode Island, Theodora Goujaud DeWolf Colt. Through her poetry and salons, Theodora, like other wealthy women of the time, helped fashion a new bourgeois culture, which, though centered in New York and Boston, radiated outward to the smaller cities of the U.S., such as Bristol. Although the gendered norms and practices of the time excluded her from participation in much of public life, Theodora represented a new model of autonomy for upper-class women, for she was unmarried, not dependent on a man, and an independent intellectual. Her work also demonstrated the gendered tensions inherent in the formation of this new culture, as she developed a distinctive literary perspective that subtly criticized the paternalism and bourgeois values of that era.     

Unconsented Sterilisation,Participatory Story‐Telling,and Digital Counter‐Memory in Peru

This article aims to prompt reflection on the ways in which digital research methods can support or undermine participatory research. Building on our experiences of working on the Quipu Project ( quipu‐project.com ), an interactive, multimedia documentary on unconsented sterilisation in Peru, it explores the ways in which digital technologies can enable participatory knowledge production across geographic, social and linguistic divides. It also considers the new forms of engagement between knowledge‐producers and audiences that digital methods can encourage. Digital technologies can, we contend, help build new spaces for, and modes of engagement with, participatory research, even in contexts such as the Peruvian Andes where digital technologies are not well established or commonly used. Doing so, we argue, entails responding sensitively to the social, linguistic and digital inequalities that shape specific research contexts, and centring the human relationships that are easily sacrificed at the altar of technological innovation.