Cindi Katz

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 capitalisms 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.

All the World is Staged: Intellectuals and the Projects of Ethnography

Feminism, decolonization, and ‘new social movements’ have decentered the geopolitical power of the ‘First World’ and ruptured the relations of exploitation, domination, and imperialism that undergird it and the authority of the white, male, ruling class, Western subject. The tensions and reorientations in the macrological sphere resonate in social and cultural discourse where feminist theory, poststructuralism, and subaltern studies have called into question the subject positions associated with these relations of power. Rather than making clear that all observers and commentators stand someplace, this ‘sea change’ left many intellectuals adrift, flirting with disabling relativism. Given the projects of representing how others stand and understanding the ground on which they stand, ethnographers have been late to recognize their complicity in masking their own positions as they construct the objects of their inquiry. As intellectuals operating in a postcolonial world, we must take seriously Spivaks admonition about representation as a staging of the world in a political context and begin to connect the ‘micrological textures of power’ with larger political-economic relations. In this expanded field, we can no longer valorize the concrete experience of oppressed peoples while remaining uncritical of our role as intellectuals. Neither can we presume to speak for or about peoples and nations as if they were outside of the contemporary world system, refusing to recognize that our ability to construct them as such is rooted in a larger system of domination. In this paper the author develops these themes by offering a critique of familiar modes and practices of representation and draws on ethnographic research in New York City and rural Sudan to argue that by interrogating the subject positions of ourselves as intellectuals as well as the objects of our inquiry we can excavate a ‘space of betweenness’ wherein the multiple determinations of a decentered world are connected. Appropriating this knowledge we may develop enabling analyses of power and difference to find collective paths toward change.

Cultural Geographies lecture

As the 21st century picks up speed and settles into place, childhood has become a spectacle — a site of accumulation, commodification, and desire — in whose name much is done. In this article, I argue that the spectacle of childhood is associated with the rise of ontological insecurity provoked by anxieties around the political—economic, geopolitical, and environmental futures. I address how this spectacle is produced and made sensible, and lay out three configurations of the child — as accumulation strategy, ornament, and waste — that it calls forth. I suggest some of the consequences of these material social practices for actual children and the cultural geographies of their everyday lives. In exploring what is accomplished politically and socially by these cultural forms and material social practices, I draw out their connections with commodification, essence, distraction, and panic.

Towards Minor Theory

In this essay I develop the notion of ‘minor theory’ following the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari on Kafkas ‘minor literature’ as a way of reconfiguring the production of knowledge in geography. I will explore the politics of producing theory that is, for example, interstitial with empirical research and social location; of scholarship that self-reflexively interpolates the theories and practices of everyday historical subjects—including, but not restricted to, scholars; and of work that reworks marginality by decomposing the major. I will discuss the ways that by consciously refusing ‘mastery’ in both the academy and its research practices, ‘minor’ research strives to change theory and practice simultaneously, and I will suggest that these practices can be conjoined with the critical and transformative concerns of Marxism, feminism, antiracism, and queer theory to pry apart conventional geographies and produce renegade cartographies of change.

In the Nature of Things: The Environment and Everyday Life

This paper addresses the silence that surrounds nature within social science, the discipline of geography included. We begin by connecting the modernist project to the domination of nature, using the example of Scotts race to the South Pole. In addition, we show the way in which the externalization of nature is built into our concepts of science. In the third part of the paper, we begin to deal with the resuscitation of society-nature links. In particular, we examine those linkages within everyday life, where a place for nature is revealed to be most crucial. We explore this theme via the example of natural simulacra notably parks, in both wilderness areas and cities. We argue that by comprehending nature, we reassert our power to reconstitute social nature, a power that is immanent in the practices of everyday life.

Bad elements: Katrina and the scoured landscape of social reproduction

Hurricane Katrina scoured the political economic landscape of New Orleans revealing the toll of decades of disinvestment in and ‘hostile privatism’ toward social reproduction in a city with corrosive inequalities around class, race, and gender. This piece addresses the failures of the state and capital around issues of social reproduction in the wake of Katrina, and gestures toward the sorts of activism these failures have called forth. Organized around five elements of social reproduction, including the environment and relief infrastructure, health care, education, housing, and social justice, the essay argues that the absence of these elements of the social wage both created conditions that made Katrina a disaster and thwarted response to the storms social, economic, and physical destruction in New Orleans. The costs can be seen most obviously in the unevenness of neighborhood and infrastructural recovery, the difficulty of establishing a stable workforce of residents because of the lack of support for workers and their families which especially affects women and lone parents, and the deepening of various neoliberal tendencies toward privatization in education, health care, and housing. Examining the classed, gendered, and racialized nature of these issues, I will look at community based social movements working to redress this situation, and interrogate the underlying politics and policies – explicit and implicit – that have produced this situation.

Growing Girls/Closing Circles: Limits on the Spaces of Knowing in Rural Sudan and United States Cities

Social power is reflected in and exercised through the production and control of space. These socio-spatial relations are gendered and vary across the life course, riddled by differences associated with class, ethnicity, race, and nationality. From “dad’s chair” to occupied national territories, the spatial forms of control are charged with and interpenetrated by political-economic power, cultural meaning, and personal significance. These conjunctures are neither stable over time nor distributed evenly across space. This chapter explores their form and significance at particular periods and transitions in the life course of females emphasizing the shifts from childhood to youth and womanhood in two divergent settings—rural Sudan and urban United States.

The Terrors of Hypervigilance: Security and the Compromised Spaces of Contemporary Childhood

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.

Playing with fieldwork

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.

The Angel of Geography: Superman, Tiger Mother, aspiration management, and the child as waste*

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.