Victoria Lawson

Geographies of Care and Responsibility

Abstract Across the decades geographers have been concerned with questions of our ethical responsibilities to care. It would seem that care is nothing new in geography. I argue however, that contemporary societal shifts are extending market relations into caring realms of our lives and that we are witnessing reductions in public provision of social supports. These twin trends have made care a more pressing concern and have simultaneously marginalized care from view. Geographers are well positioned to draw attention to these trends and I urge us to think about our responsibility to care about these issues, and the geographies that they make. I ask us all to think about our responsibilities as geographers to pose questions in the face of (i) market extensions, (ii) currently pervasive discourses of personal responsibility (for poverty, inner city decline, unemployment, etc.), and (iii) the withdrawal of public support from many crucial arenas. Care ethics focuses our attention on the social and how it is constructed through unequal power relationships, but it also moves us beyond critique and toward the construction of new forms of relationships, institutions, and action that enhance mutuality and well-being. I consider how our research, teaching, and professional practices might shift in conversation with care ethics. Care ethics suggests that we build spatially extensive connections of interdependence and mutuality, that we attend to the ways in which historical and institutional relationships produce the need for care (extension of market relations; famine, unnatural disasters, environmental and cultural destruction), and that we take up social responsibility in our professional practices. Nearly all of us care, because we ourselves know what it means to have our hearts cut away by life… —(Kingsolver 2002)

Locating Globalization: Feminist (Re)readings of the Subjects and Spaces of Globalization

Abstract The literatures on economic globalization and feminist understandings of global processes have largely remained separate. In this article, our goal is to bring them into productive conversation so that research on globalization can benefit from feminist engagements with globalization. In the first section, which focuses on the conceptual challenges of bringing the economic globalization literature into conversation with feminist analysis, we identify several key exclusions in that literature and propose parallel inclusions that a feminist reading of globalization suggests. Our suggested inclusions relate to the spaces, scales, subjects, and forms of work that research on economic globalization has largely neglected. The second section takes up several key themes in the large body of feminist research on global economic processes, which is also largely absent from the economic globalization literature: the gendering of work, gender and structural adjustment programs, and mobility and diaspora. In the final section, we address the implications of feminist epistemologies and methodologies for research on economic globalization. Here we argue for grounded, collaborative studies that incorporate perspectives of the south as well as the north and that construct understandings of place and the local, as well as space and general global processes; we point to the coconstitution of different geographic scales and highlight the need for studies that cut across them. The article demonstrates how a feminist analysis of globalization entails far more than recognizing the importance of gender; it requires substantial rethinking of how to conceptualize, study, and act in relation to economic globalization.

Hierarchical households and gendered migration in Latin America: feminist extensions to migration research.

In this review essay, I argue that migration theory can be advanced by analysing gender differences in migration processes. I bring together feminist empirical work from diverse settings within Latin America in order to illustrate and discuss theoretical extensions to migration research. In particular, the discussion focuses on the centrality of intrahousehold power relations and dynamics for understanding who migrates, and with what consequences. I further argue that these theoretical understandings emerge from the culturally and historically specific operation of processes in particular places within Latin America.

“Sophisticated People Versus Rednecks”: Economic Restructuring and Class Difference in America’s West

In this paper, we argue for the importance of constructing a human geography of white class difference. More particularly, we present a theoretical framework for understanding the cultural politics of class and whiteness in the context of rural restructuring. We theorize these politics through an examination of the national discourse of redneck that has emerged in the US. We analyze the term “redneck” as one of several rhetorical categories that refer to rural white poor people. We argue that while various terms are employed in geographically specific ways and cannot be used interchangeably, they nonetheless function similarly in positioning the white rural poor. Our examination of redneck discourse exemplifies these processes and points up the need for a broader analysis of representational strategies that reinforce class difference among whites. Drawing upon three case studies of white rural poverty, we deconstruct these imagined rural spaces by situating discourses about white rural poor people in the context of geographically specific political economies of power and social relations in Kentucky, Florida, and Washington. These case studies, as well as the national discourse of redneck, represent rural poverty as a lifestyle choice and as an individualized cultural trait. Abstract rural spaces are construed as poor, underdeveloped, and wild; rural, white poor people are represented as lazy, dirty, obsolescent, conservative, or alternative. A focus upon the political economy of community resource relationships and the construction and reproduction of redneck discourses reveals how exploitative material processes are justified by naming others and blaming the persistence of rural poverty upon the poor themselves.

Care of the body: spaces of practice

Care—concept, emotion, practice, politics, moral exhortation—is a starting point for a range of critical geographies. Care affords geographers a richness of possibilities through which to engage critically with a range of politically charged discourses. This special issue offers a suite of ‘think’ pieces on geographies of care which provoke further examination of three challenges. First, we need conceptual strategies to explore the connections of care across different spatialities and temporalities. Secondly, biases within current research on care help make invisible the multiple sites through which our practices are shaped. Thirdly, certain concepts within the care lexicon have gone unchallenged such as dependency and vulnerability. We contemplate the potential of imagining care both as relation and as flow. The nodal characteristic of a relational care shapes how care flows through those nodes to focus on the spatial and temporal unevenness and inequalities in care, the processes eroding situated traditions of care, and the spaces and practices facilitating care of the body.

Recentring care: interrogating the commodification of care

We trace how the category of care comes to be constituted historically and in social theory in ways that privilege the autonomous individual as economic agent and, in the process, renders care a problematic residual to social order and social theory. We investigate how theoretical categories, social relations, institutional orders and discursive practices separate care and economy in ways that constitute those in need (including the impoverished) as less valuable, subordinate and a drain on society. We then highlight a global trend towards the commodification of care within market logics of choice, even as the particular expression of these processes is worked out in and through the histories and cultures of places. We further argue that this repositioning of care within market relations of exchange obscures the fundamental interrelatedness of all humans and obscures the possibility of thinking more inclusive and less hierarchical forms of sociality.

Beyond the Firm: Restructuring Gender Divisions of Labor in Quito's Garment Industry under Austerity

In this study I investigate social adjustments emerging under neoliberal austerity policies in Ecuador. In particular, I focus on the processes of informalization and feminization of garment manufacture as Ecuadorian producers attempt to remain viable in a radically opened economy. A central premise of this study is that gendered labor supplies in places are significant to the form that industry restructuring assumes. The analysis draws on extensive fieldwork and builds a political economy of industrial development, debt crisis, and austerity to uncover those forces which have combined in place to restructure gender divisions of labor in paid work and households in the early 1990s. This is coupled with analysis of in-depth interviews with women informal garment workers in order to understand the diverse constructions of informal work, gender divisions of labor, and daily life that are emerging under austerity. This involves an examination of the ways in which gender roles and relations are being reworked for these women and their families through informal wage-earning activity. This moves the analysis beyond representations of women as uniformly subordinated by industrial capitalism and towards an appreciation of the mutual reworkings of employment relations and gender identities.

A controlled trial of intravenous immunoglobulin in multifocal motor neuropathy.

Intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG) has become the standard treatment for multifocal motor neuropathy (MMN) based on limited data. To critically assess the efficacy, safety, and tolerability of 10% liquid IVIG (IVIG), 44 adults with MMN were randomized 1 : 1 to either double‐blind treatment of IVIG followed by placebo for 12 weeks each or the reverse. Open‐label IVIG was administered for 12 weeks at the beginning and end of the study for clinical stabilization, and between double‐blinded periods to prevent a carry‐over effect. To avoid potential worsening, switching to open‐label IVIG was permitted if deterioration occurred during blinded treatment. Mean maximal grip strength of the more affected hand declined 31.38% during placebo and increased 3.75% during IVIG (p = 0.005). In 35.7% of participants, Guys Neurological Disability scores for upper limbs worsened during placebo and not during IVIG, whereas the converse was true in 11.9% (p = 0.021). Sixty‐nine percent (69.0%) switched prematurely from placebo to open‐label IVIG and 2.4% switched from blinded to open‐label IVIG (p < 0.001). One serious adverse reaction (pulmonary embolism) and 100 non‐serious reactions (69 mild, 20 moderate, and 11 severe) to IVIG occurred. IVIG was effective in improving disability and muscle strength, and was safe and well tolerated in adults with MMN.

Reshaping Economic Geography? Producing Spaces of Inclusive Development

abstract The World Development Report 2009 discusses a crucial development challenge—that of understanding spatially uneven development. The report lays out a series of policy responses to spatial unevenness that are intended to mobilize the growth-enhancing advantages of unbalanced development while ensuring inclusive development. However, the report mobilizes a narrow view of economic development that is disconnected from place, politics, and society. In geography, which lends its name to the report, economies are theorized as embedded—as produced in and through space, rather than merely on it. Geography and spatial patterns are constitutive coproducers of political-economic processes, not just outcomes. I elaborate how a critical geographic understanding of an “everywhere embedded economy” (Peck 2005) highlights the inseparability of economic processes from the social, political, historical, and geographic contexts which give them meaning. I connect the idea of embedded economy to a consideration of centrality of care to a humane and inclusive development. I argue that the report’s emphasis on labor mobility as a key mechanism for enhancing development ignores the global division of care work that is itself built on the invisibility and undervaluation of care in mainstream versions of economic development. I conclude that “thinning borders” will not resolve questions of inequality but rather will allow those who are more powerful to exploit the resultant power differentials expressed in migration and care deficits across the globe.

Articulations of Place, Poverty, and Race: Dumping Grounds and Unseen Grounds in the Rural American Northwest

This project extends poverty research by addressing the lack of knowledge about place and race differences in poverty processes (Blank 2005). Rural places experience a range of modes of articulation within the global division of rural labor and we observe three distinct modes of articulation in the American Northwest: “playgrounds,” “dumping grounds,” and “unseen grounds.” We attend to the recursive relations between political-economic restructuring and the discursive production of social difference across class and race lines. Poverty is produced in the reciprocal relations among local historical, ecological, and social processes and the articulation of those places with new rounds of capital accumulation under neoliberal restructuring. Our empirical investigation focuses on white and Latino poverty across nonmetropolitan counties of the American Northwest (Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana). We first map county-level patterns of white and Latino poverty in relation to county-level economic restructuring during the 1990s across the region. We then employ in-depth comparative case study research to explore the intersections of specific forms of neoliberal restructuring with place-based historical, ecological, and social processes to understand rural white and Latino poverty in the region.