The Gender,Place and Culture Jan Monk Distinguished Annual Lecture: Gentrification,assassination and forgetting in Mexico: a feminist Marxist tale

In this article, I employ feminist and Marxist tools to expose the struggles over the constant plunder and expansion of global capitalism along Mexico's northern border, specifically in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. In particular, I examine how an official politics – promoted by the Mexican and US governments – for forgetting the economic and social devastation of a transcontinental drug war contributes to the mechanisms for further exploiting the working poor. By combining a feminist focus on the daily struggle of social reproduction with a Marxist emphasis on accumulation by dispossession, I show how this official ‘forgetting’ segues with an international gentrification plan in downtown Ciudad Juárez that seeks to expand the rent gap by denying place, legitimacy and legal status to the working women and their families who have made this border city famous as a hub of global manufacturing. As such, I argue that the social struggles against the official forgetting are struggles against a violent political economy that generates value via a devaluation of the spaces of the working poor, even of the spaces of their literal existence.     

Political geography and geopolitics

This essay discusses the key contributions of Canadian political geographers to the remarkable growth of the subfield in the past two decades. I focus on two burgeoning strands of work: first, the transformation of state power, and second, the current phase of war, militarization and surveillance globally. My goal is not to review the field of political geography. Rather, I use the two themes to foreground prominent strands of recent work and delineate some lines of inquiry that require more attention and are likely to grow in importance. In particular, I underscore the need for closer attention to human agency—that is, capacity to act—in political geography and geopolitics.     

Living with the fence: militarization and military spaces on Guahan/Guam

The landscape of Guahan/Guam, an organized unincorporated territory of the USA and the largest and southernmost island of the Mariana Islands archipelago, is visibly marked by chain link fences that enclose land taken for use by the US military. This US military presence on Guam is evidence of a long military colonial history that has stressed, particularly under US rule, the importance of the island's strategic location. The ‘fence,’ a frequently used but rarely defined expression, refers to a multiplicity of lines, most of which recreate a dichotomous view of military/local relations, and help to make invisible the complex web of identities that go through, over, and beyond its real and imagined spaces. Working from an understanding that theory must be grounded in experience, this article draws on interviews to explore the multiple meanings of the fence. It focuses on the ways the colonized, militarized, and gendered spaces of the fence promote US values, interests, and security concerns but also mark points of resistance to militarization and colonization. Exploring the ways colonization and militarization are played out on the bodies of those who live and work on the island, the article concludes that tearing down the ‘fence’ must include both demilitarization and decolonization, but in ways that transcend, rather than reproduce its present gendered and dichotomous spaces.     

Wages of War: Manufacturing Nationalism During World War II

Abstract: During World War II the state created a new and deeper set of relationships with defense contractors. These contractors manufactured the vast majority of war materials and relied extensively on the state for financing. These same contractors also encouraged workers and civilians to understand their every minute action as contributing to the war effort. In order to fully integrate workers’ and civilians’ lives into the war effort, the state and industry created and distributed a war wage—a sense of contribution, national belonging, and sacrifice. In this paper I analyze the wartime records of the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company in order to understand how the state and industry created the war wage alongside the military–industrial complex. With the help of the war wage, the state and industry radically expanded the production of war materials and enlisted a more compliant population of workers and civilians into the war effort.     

Convergence in Cold War Physics: Coinventing the Maser in the Postwar Soviet Union

At the height of the Cold War, in the 1950s, the process of parallel invention of masers and lasers took place on the opposing sides of the Iron Curtain. While the American part of the story has been investigated by historians in much penetrating detail, comparable Soviet developments were described more superficially. This study aims at, to some extent, repairing this discrepancy by analyzing the Soviet path towards the maser from a comparative angle. It identifies, on the one hand, significant differences between the two projects regarding their heuristics, the relationship between theory and experiment, grounding in different academic cultures, and the resulting conceptualization of the maser principle. At the same time, the case also illustrates more fundamental transformations in the practices of postwar research that can be characterized as a convergence between the Soviet and the American science of the period.     

Homeland Heroes: Migrants and Soldiers in the Neoliberal Era

This paper examines the dynamic relationship between neoliberalism and nationalism through the counterintuitive comparison of journeys travelled by US citizens as they enlist in the military and by unauthorized Central Americans as they migrate to the United States. We argue that, however different the context and content of their decisions and their lives, Central American migrants and US soldiers are both connected within a larger political economy. We complicate the idea of migrants and soldiers as purely rational economic actors, but we also reject the idea, imputed onto migrants and soldiers by neoliberal states, that they are naturally nationalistic actors. Migrants and soldiers embody a neoliberal subjectivity produced through processes of violence, capital accumulation and militarization. Yet, as we examine throughout this paper, their construction as homeland heroes within the national imaginary masks the ways their labor and their mobility serve the institutionalization of neoliberal statecraft.     

A microdynamics approach to geographies of violence: Mapping the kill chain in militarized conservation areas

Within segments of the overlapping fields of political ecology and political geography, there is an emerging consensus that direct physical violence is over-studied, and that it cannot be analytically separated from other forms of violence. This article argues the opposite, namely, that direct physical violence remains understudied, and that analyzing it separately is warranted to grasp its specificities. To corroborate this argument, the article examines the study of green militarization and green violence. Whereas a substantial part of this literature discusses direct physical violence, most studies focus on broader conditions and discourses of violence, without empirically demonstrating how they feed into the production of direct physical violence. Consequently, these studies do not accurately map the entire “kill chain”. A case study of violence in Virunga National Park, in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, demonstrates the analytical merits of studying direct physical violence through a “microdynamics” approach, implying the detailed study of specific acts of violence and how they were committed. Far from distracting from broader conditions, structures and histories of violence, a microdynamics approach provides an entry point for understanding how these dimensions feed into the production of direct physical violence, and how this violence interacts with other forms of violence. In addition, it allows for a more accurate understanding of how the kill chain is constituted in time and space. The article concludes that acknowledging the particularities of different modalities of violence, instead of conflating them, will significantly advance the study of geographies of violence.     

EXEMPLIFYING ACCUMULATION BY DISPOSSESSION: MINING AND INDIGENOUS PEOPLES IN THE PHILIPPINES

Using a case study from the Philippines, this article applies David Harvey's theory of accumulation by dispossession to show how neoliberal policies enable mining corporations to locate, lay claim to, and develop mineral resources in formerly inaccessible areas, which for centuries have provided safe haven for indigenous peoples and their cultures. It explains why these factors are leading to an increase in armed conflict between military forces and guerrilla groups, which recruit their members from displaced indigenous people. The article concludes that the theory of accumulation by dispossession offers an appropriate analytical tool for understanding these processes.     

Autoconstruction 2.0: Social Media Contestations of Racialized Violence in Complexo do Alemão

Activists and journalists in Complexo do Alemão, Rio de Janeiro are using social media to intervene in the violence that shapes their communities. In this article I draw on critical urban and digital media theory to understand how militarized policing, the spatialization of race, and discourses of criminalization influence favela populations. I examine how these discursive and material violences are motivating residents to autoconstruct new digital communities. Through digital autoconstruction, journalists and activists are using social media technologies to safely direct mobility, to witness police violence, and to unsettle socio‐spatial imaginaries of endemic crime. As such, they are deploying digital practices to disrupt material, epistemological, and discursive mechanisms of social control. These actions show that digital technologies are always‐already embodied and take shape through material histories, such as those of racialized state violence. Journalists and activists in Complexo do Alemão ultimately demonstrate that targets of violence are not simply victims of digital and violent surveillance, but are active in creating new digital relationships of care across diverse scales, transforming these technologies in the process.     

The Ethics of Gender and Globalization: Military Madness and Ecological Stress

Abstract

Globalization has an impact on gender relations in complex and contradictory ways. The consequences are neither solely detrimental nor the same everywhere. Globalization may offer new opportunities to women, but overall globalization from above has exacerbated gender inequality. Globalization disperses local and national decision-making powers. Flexible labor laws weaken worker protections and job security. All of these threaten advancement in women's interests. The oft-accompanying environmental degradation directly affects women responsible for domestic necessities and caring labor, which is the situation of most women within the Pacific Rim. Military activities around the Pacific Rim continually erode women's rights. This paper discusses the ethics of globalization, adopting micro, macro and global categories.