Cindi Katz | Graduate Center of the City University of New York (original) (raw)
Papers by Cindi Katz
MERIP reports, Sep 1, 1985
Dialogues in Human Geography, 2020
Feminist Dilemmas in Fieldwork (edited by Diane L. Wolf), 1996
disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory, 1997
Katz discussed how changes jn urban built environments, particularly the privatization of urban p... more Katz discussed how changes jn urban built environments, particularly the privatization of urban public space, negatively affected New York City children. Privatization, she argued, not only serves a 'child hating' mentality prevalent in our society, but fosters, among other things, the sociospatial deskilling of children. We conducted an " "
Studies in Modern Childhood, 2005
On 11 September 2001 ‘a screaming came across the sky’.1 The events of that horrific day laced in... more 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.
Children's Geographies, 2004
Children's Environments Quarterly, 1986
CHILDREN AND THE ENVIRONMENT: WORK, PLAY AND LEARNING IN RURAL SUDAN Cindi Katz Environmental Psy... more CHILDREN AND THE ENVIRONMENT: WORK, PLAY AND LEARNING IN RURAL SUDAN Cindi Katz Environmental Psychology Program Graduate School and University Center, CUNY New York, NY Introduction In agricultural economies, environmental learning and the use of ...
The range of children's knowledge of plants and their uses in an agricultural village in Sudan is... more The range of children's knowledge of plants and their uses in an agricultural village in Sudan is presented in a context of ecological and economic change. Children participated in procurement of vegetation for food, fodder and fuel needs. In some areas, knowledge of plants was gender and task-specific. Participant-observation and ethnosemantic interview techniques were used to elicit knowledge and construct a children's taxonomy of plant material.
Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 2006
Work pervades my home, often aggravatingly so, but also in comfortable ways. It's always nice to ... more Work pervades my home, often aggravatingly so, but also in comfortable ways. It's always nice to escape the office some days. According to the editors of the compilation Life's Work: Geographies of Social Reproduction, this intimate situation is a condition of modernity and of neoliberal capitalism. The work and home spheres snarl, but in such everyday, banal, and what they deem ''commonsense'' ways, that the modern subject simply internalizes the norm of homework. Indeed, the editors and chapter authors insist that this harkens a wholly new neoliberal subjectivity. Work (waged and not) constitutes subjects; subjects are workers. The editors' goal in compiling these nine chapters is to argue that reproductive work is as founding a process for capitalism and capitalist subjectivity as is wage labor. This argument is not new of course; generations of feminist Marxists have likewise maintained that labors of love, what are often considered reproductive ''nonwork'' to those focusing too sharply on production, are central to capitalist economies. Indeed, feminists have shown that social reproduction is conceptually bound to, but not separate from, production. What editors Mitchell, Marston, and Katz seek to add is that the binary of the two forms (i.e., work and nonwork) are indistinguishable in our times (p. 3). The spatial and subjective classifications of work/nonwork are merged into ''life's work.'' This contention raises the need, as the editors show, of reconceptualizing the subjectivity of workers, of social re/producers. For certainly worker-subjects must themselves remake the murky overlays of identities and their spaces. The editors emphasize the issue of subjectivity and highlight the importance of theorizing interspatiality and practice. With subjectivity, the editors also insist a coterminous condition of state and economic devolution: the state and employers have each lessened their responsibilities to the worker. The result? A constant worker who accepts this identity, and who seems to accept as well the devolution of the state and economic regime. This devolution, the editors suggest, has become ''the accepted norm through time as it infiltrates and articulates with other commonsense understandings in society'' (p. 4). The chapter contributors flesh out the details and scenarios of the editors' framing in their more empirically based chapters; the studies are predominantly qualitative. As with most edited collections, the chapters are
Spatial Histories of Radical Geography
A reflection on the Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute, which was a project of activis... more A reflection on the Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute, which was a project of activist geography in the 1960s.
Establishing Geographies of Children and Young People, 2019
Surveillance and Security, 2006
York. Her work concerns social reproduction and the production of space, place, and nature. She h... more York. Her work concerns social reproduction and the production of space, place, and nature. She has published widely on these themes as well as on social theory and the politics of knowledge. She is the editor (with Janice Monk) of Full Circles: Geographies of Gender over the Life Course (Routledge, I 993) and recently completed Disintegrating Developments: Global Economic Restructuring and Children's Everyday Lives. She is currently working on a project called Retheorizing Childhood and another on the social wage.
Building on-rather than trying to overcome the unique characteristics of early adolescence, Vermo... more Building on-rather than trying to overcome the unique characteristics of early adolescence, Vermont' s 21st Century Community Learning Centers are using the "five Rs of program design" to improve middle school-ers' attendance and youth development outcomes. By emphasizing work-based learning, youth programs can not only meet their youth development goals but also prepare young people for success in the knowledge economy of the 21st century. A program that teaches middle-school Latinas to program their own computer games seeks ways of overcoming the growing shortfall of both Latinos and women in IT education and careers.
Keywords in Radical Geography: Antipode at 50, 2019
Dialogues in Human Geography, 2021
In this dialogue, we chat about the metaphors circulating in Bagelman and Gitome’s article ‘Birth... more In this dialogue, we chat about the metaphors circulating in Bagelman and Gitome’s article ‘Birthing Across Borders’ (contraction, casting light) and think through the potential of other ones (pregnancy, midwives). We also ask questions about the use of the term Indigeneity, appreciate and draw out the rich geographies of place in the article, and puzzle over the meaning and potential of the concept of non-participatory research
MERIP reports, Sep 1, 1985
Dialogues in Human Geography, 2020
Feminist Dilemmas in Fieldwork (edited by Diane L. Wolf), 1996
disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory, 1997
Katz discussed how changes jn urban built environments, particularly the privatization of urban p... more Katz discussed how changes jn urban built environments, particularly the privatization of urban public space, negatively affected New York City children. Privatization, she argued, not only serves a 'child hating' mentality prevalent in our society, but fosters, among other things, the sociospatial deskilling of children. We conducted an " "
Studies in Modern Childhood, 2005
On 11 September 2001 ‘a screaming came across the sky’.1 The events of that horrific day laced in... more 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.
Children's Geographies, 2004
Children's Environments Quarterly, 1986
CHILDREN AND THE ENVIRONMENT: WORK, PLAY AND LEARNING IN RURAL SUDAN Cindi Katz Environmental Psy... more CHILDREN AND THE ENVIRONMENT: WORK, PLAY AND LEARNING IN RURAL SUDAN Cindi Katz Environmental Psychology Program Graduate School and University Center, CUNY New York, NY Introduction In agricultural economies, environmental learning and the use of ...
The range of children's knowledge of plants and their uses in an agricultural village in Sudan is... more The range of children's knowledge of plants and their uses in an agricultural village in Sudan is presented in a context of ecological and economic change. Children participated in procurement of vegetation for food, fodder and fuel needs. In some areas, knowledge of plants was gender and task-specific. Participant-observation and ethnosemantic interview techniques were used to elicit knowledge and construct a children's taxonomy of plant material.
Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 2006
Work pervades my home, often aggravatingly so, but also in comfortable ways. It's always nice to ... more Work pervades my home, often aggravatingly so, but also in comfortable ways. It's always nice to escape the office some days. According to the editors of the compilation Life's Work: Geographies of Social Reproduction, this intimate situation is a condition of modernity and of neoliberal capitalism. The work and home spheres snarl, but in such everyday, banal, and what they deem ''commonsense'' ways, that the modern subject simply internalizes the norm of homework. Indeed, the editors and chapter authors insist that this harkens a wholly new neoliberal subjectivity. Work (waged and not) constitutes subjects; subjects are workers. The editors' goal in compiling these nine chapters is to argue that reproductive work is as founding a process for capitalism and capitalist subjectivity as is wage labor. This argument is not new of course; generations of feminist Marxists have likewise maintained that labors of love, what are often considered reproductive ''nonwork'' to those focusing too sharply on production, are central to capitalist economies. Indeed, feminists have shown that social reproduction is conceptually bound to, but not separate from, production. What editors Mitchell, Marston, and Katz seek to add is that the binary of the two forms (i.e., work and nonwork) are indistinguishable in our times (p. 3). The spatial and subjective classifications of work/nonwork are merged into ''life's work.'' This contention raises the need, as the editors show, of reconceptualizing the subjectivity of workers, of social re/producers. For certainly worker-subjects must themselves remake the murky overlays of identities and their spaces. The editors emphasize the issue of subjectivity and highlight the importance of theorizing interspatiality and practice. With subjectivity, the editors also insist a coterminous condition of state and economic devolution: the state and employers have each lessened their responsibilities to the worker. The result? A constant worker who accepts this identity, and who seems to accept as well the devolution of the state and economic regime. This devolution, the editors suggest, has become ''the accepted norm through time as it infiltrates and articulates with other commonsense understandings in society'' (p. 4). The chapter contributors flesh out the details and scenarios of the editors' framing in their more empirically based chapters; the studies are predominantly qualitative. As with most edited collections, the chapters are
Spatial Histories of Radical Geography
A reflection on the Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute, which was a project of activis... more A reflection on the Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute, which was a project of activist geography in the 1960s.
Establishing Geographies of Children and Young People, 2019
Surveillance and Security, 2006
York. Her work concerns social reproduction and the production of space, place, and nature. She h... more York. Her work concerns social reproduction and the production of space, place, and nature. She has published widely on these themes as well as on social theory and the politics of knowledge. She is the editor (with Janice Monk) of Full Circles: Geographies of Gender over the Life Course (Routledge, I 993) and recently completed Disintegrating Developments: Global Economic Restructuring and Children's Everyday Lives. She is currently working on a project called Retheorizing Childhood and another on the social wage.
Building on-rather than trying to overcome the unique characteristics of early adolescence, Vermo... more Building on-rather than trying to overcome the unique characteristics of early adolescence, Vermont' s 21st Century Community Learning Centers are using the "five Rs of program design" to improve middle school-ers' attendance and youth development outcomes. By emphasizing work-based learning, youth programs can not only meet their youth development goals but also prepare young people for success in the knowledge economy of the 21st century. A program that teaches middle-school Latinas to program their own computer games seeks ways of overcoming the growing shortfall of both Latinos and women in IT education and careers.
Keywords in Radical Geography: Antipode at 50, 2019
Dialogues in Human Geography, 2021
In this dialogue, we chat about the metaphors circulating in Bagelman and Gitome’s article ‘Birth... more In this dialogue, we chat about the metaphors circulating in Bagelman and Gitome’s article ‘Birthing Across Borders’ (contraction, casting light) and think through the potential of other ones (pregnancy, midwives). We also ask questions about the use of the term Indigeneity, appreciate and draw out the rich geographies of place in the article, and puzzle over the meaning and potential of the concept of non-participatory research
This piece grows out of my on-going project, ‘Childhood as Spectacle’, and my enduring concern wi... more This piece grows out of my on-going project, ‘Childhood as Spectacle’, and my enduring concern with social reproduction and what it does for and to Marxist and other critical political-economic analyses. After more than 30 years of Marxist-feminist
interventions around these issues, symptomatic silences around social reproduction remain all too common in analyses of capitalism. Working through these issues and their occlusion, I offer what I hope is a useful and vibrant theoretical framework for
examining geographies of children, youth, and families. Building this framework calls into play three overlapping issues; neoliberal capitalism in crisis and David Harvey’s notion of accumulation by dispossession, my ideas around childhood as spectacle, as a cultural formation associated with contemporary political economic crisis and its figuration of the child as waste, and how this figuration might be turned around to find libratory potential in and from the site of children’s play and time.
Key words: childhood; play; risk; crisis; capitalism.
Field research produces all kinds of knowledge, only some of which makes it into our texts. Rich ... more 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.
Key words: fieldwork, comics, politics of knowledge.
Hurricane Katrina scoured the political economic landscape of New Orleans revealing the toll of d... more 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 storm’s
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.
Keywords: social reproduction; hurricane Katrina; New Orleans; activism; neoliberalism
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
In this essay I develop the notion of 'minor theory* following the work of Gillcs Deleuze and Fel... more In this essay I develop the notion of 'minor theory* following the work of Gillcs Deleuze and Felix Guattari on Kafka's 'minor literature1 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 sclf-rcflcxtvcly 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.
Antipode, 2003
This special issue of Antipode addresses the ways in which people produce value in all domains of... more This special issue of Antipode addresses the ways in which people produce value in all domains of their lives. We are particularly interested in the relationship between the production of value "at work" and the social reproduction of labor-power along with the conditions that enable its deployment. Consider these three vignettes of contemporary life:
Environment and Planning A, 2008
Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 1998
... Political and Intellectual Passions: Engagements with David Harvey's Justice, Nature and... more ... Political and Intellectual Passions: Engagements with David Harvey's Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Cindi Katz. Article first published online: 5 NOV 2004. ... More content like this. Find more content: like this article. Find more content written by: Cindi Katz. ...
Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 1991
Antipode, 2005
The contributions in this publication individually and collectively address the contradictions an... more The contributions in this publication individually and collectively address the contradictions and possibilities of political activism and its professionalization under the conditions of contemporary neoliberal capitalism. Each piece deals differently with the making of appropriate professional subjects and the contradictory ways they are placed in relation to an evolving neoliberalism. The authors show the skill-enhancing and effectiveness-increasing aspects of professionalization, but also the ways that this process-over a differentiated and shifting neoliberal context-also reins in, if not outright contains, its new subjects. This focus raises several interesting and disturbing questions for understanding the social, political and economic rela
Antipode, 1993
... more than Pynchon, offering far more than a freeway map ontology of LA If Pynchon is his ... ... more ... more than Pynchon, offering far more than a freeway map ontology of LA If Pynchon is his ... real strength of the chapter was not that it mirrored my concerns, but that it was a ... Because of this intimacy and its unspeakable horrors, "The Hammer and Rock" was the most depressing ...
Documents d'anàlisi geogràfica, 2006
A partir de estudios anteriores que vincularon las geografías de los niños y las niñas con un aná... more A partir de estudios anteriores que vincularon las geografías de los niños y las niñas con un análisis de los efectos de la reestructuración de la economía global en la reproducción social, este artículo examina las nuevas espacialidades de la niñez en Estados Unidos. Sostengo que los espacios contemporáneos de la infancia, en todas las escalas, desde las del cuerpo hasta las globales, han transigido frente a la seguridad y al avance de la privatización. Recurro al lenguaje del «terror» para indagar estos efectos y sus consecuencias en la vida cotidiana de los niños y las niñas en un entorno público crecientemente privatizado y en un medio privado siempre más expuesto. A partir de aquí, examinaré la inseguridad que emerge de la pérdida de protagonismo de la asistencia social, tanto por parte del estado como de los capitalistas. Sostengo que gran parte de la hipervigilancia mundana que ha pasado a caracterizar la vida cotidiana de los Estados Unidos se vincula a las inseguridades derivadas de la «globalización» y del deterioro de la asistencia social. El trabajo describe algunas de las nuevas tecnologías de vigilancia que se observan en el hogar, como las cámaras para monitorear las niñeras o para vigilar a los niños y niñas. Afirmo que éstos son medios para negociar el paisaje de la alteridad de la reproducción social, las desigualdades asociadas a la reestructuración de la economía global y para mantener las divisiones de género laborales. Sugiero que estas medidas privatizadoras omiten y, a la vez, mistifican las fuentes reales de la inseguridad; de esta manera no se logra corregirlas. Mi postura es que las geografías contemporáneas de la niñez están altamente afectadas por el retroceso generalizado experimentado por la asistencia social, facilitado por la globalización de la producción capitalista y por el ascenso del neoliberalismo. Éstos son los temas que requieren nuestra atención. Palabras clave: geografía de los niños y niñas, protección de los niños y niñas, seguridad doméstica, globalización, vida cotidiana.
Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 1995
(and generally undercited) work of Michael Watts, but then he calls off the search. Yet I can thi... more (and generally undercited) work of Michael Watts, but then he calls off the search. Yet I can think of so many other geographers who are taking up Gregory's challenge to find ways of comprehending those other worlds-including our relations with them and our responsibilities toward them-...
Childhood, 1994
Page 1. http://chd.sagepub.com/ Childhood http://chd.sagepub.com/content/2/1-2/103 The online ver... more Page 1. http://chd.sagepub.com/ Childhood http://chd.sagepub.com/content/2/1-2/103 The online version of this article can be found at: DOI: 10.1177/ 090756829400200108 1994 2: 103 Childhood C. Katz Textures of global ...
City <html_ent glyph="@amp;" ascii="&"/> Society, 1998
Cultural Geographies, 2008
As the 21st century picks up speed and settles into place, childhood has become a spectacle -a si... more 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.
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 1992
Abstract. Feminism, decolonization, and 'new social movements' have decentered the geop... more Abstract. 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 ...
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2003
Introduction This interview with Edward Said took place on 8 September 2000 in New York City. Thr... more Introduction This interview with Edward Said took place on 8 September 2000 in New York City. Three years later, on 25 September 2003, Edward Said died of a rare form of leukemia that he had struggled with since 1991. On 28 September 2000, just weeks after our interview, ...
Acme an International E Journal For Critical Geographies, 2004
On the Fault Line is an innovative, insightful, and important book. In attempting to come to term... more On the Fault Line is an innovative, insightful, and important book. In attempting to come to terms with the political force and cultural appeal of right wing movements, Carole Gallaher takes on a crucial set of concerns. It is a daunting task in many respects. Studying and working closely with those with whom we differ and disagree remains rare-in part because it is so disagreeable in many ways, and in part because it is so difficult. And yet, Gallaher has been able to do this with respect and verve. That she was able to maintain and convey a deeply critical stance to the politics of those with whom she worked without either disrespecting them for holding these beliefs or reducing them to cartoons, demonstrates not only great sensitivity but a rare coupling of methodological rigor and compassionate critical intelligence. These are the hallmarks of a gifted ethnographer and scholar.
Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift-norwegian Journal of Geography, 2008
This thesis explores two aspects of contemporary childhoods orphanhood and children's w... more This thesis explores two aspects of contemporary childhoods orphanhood and children's work in Ethiopia. By drawing on case studies from Gedeo (rural) and Addis Ababa (urban), I discuss how children and young people negotiate their lives in respect of changing ...
Norwegian Journal of Geography- …, 2008
... T. Abebe. Uitgever, NTNU. ISBN, 978-82-471-6731-1. Faculteit, Faculteit der Maatschappij-en G... more ... T. Abebe. Uitgever, NTNU. ISBN, 978-82-471-6731-1. Faculteit, Faculteit der Maatschappij-en Gedragswetenschappen. Instituut/afd. FMG: Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR). Soort document, Boekbespreking. Document finder, UvA-Linker. Gebruik dit adres ...
The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 1991
To the good earth and all things green and growing This means acknowledging our kinship with the ... more To the good earth and all things green and growing This means acknowledging our kinship with the rest of the biosphere. If we do not feel perfectly at home here, that may after all have something to do with the way in which we have treated the place. Any home can be made ...
Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift - Norwegian Journal of Geography, 2000
Social & Cultural Geography, 2010
A situated critique of David Harvey's work that focuses on other relations of difference than cla... more A situated critique of David Harvey's work that focuses on other relations of difference than class and other scales of analysis than the urban, national, and global.
Fear, panic, and the performance of security in the public and private environment.
In M. Bourdillon and G. Spittler (Eds.) African Children at Work. Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2012.
In R. Heiman, C. Freeman, and M. Liechty (Eds.) The Global Middle Classes: Theorizing Through Eth... more In R. Heiman, C. Freeman, and M. Liechty (Eds.) The Global Middle Classes: Theorizing Through Ethnography, Santa Fe: SAR Press. (2012)
In The Politics of Public Space, edited by Setha Low and Neil Smith, Routledge 2006.
In K. Strauss and K. Meehan eds., Precarious Worlds: Contested Geographies of Social Reproduction, University of Georgia Press, 174-188.
Full circles: Geographies of women over the life course, 1993
Keywords in Radical Geography: Antipode at 50, First Edition, 2019
Children and childhood are not terms that spring to mind when thinking about radical geography, b... more Children and childhood are not terms that spring to mind when thinking about radical geography, but what could be more radical than imagining and making a future in which childhood was a central consideration and the creation of liveable futures was the beating heart of radical praxis? There is a pat and clichéd way that invoking "the child" calls forth futurity and insists on a healthy present, but "the child" is not children who breathe and run and think (cf. Edelman 2004). Invoking that figure is all too often bait for an aspirational future that does not reveal its narrow gauge--Eurocentric, white, middle class, heteronormative--luring people to imagine something good while enduring and creating environments that are toxic in every way. Toxic political-ecologically--think lead in the drinking water in cities like Flint, Michigan, or Newark, New Jersey; or the labour of children in the ship scrapping industries of Asia; or the polluted air of urban China; and toxic political-economically--think of the state violence in South and Central America, South Sudan, Syria, or so many elsewheres that propels children on dangerous journeys to unknown places imagined as havens even as they so often are not; or the racialised state violence that kills, maims, and incarcerates young people of colour at staggeringly disproportionate rates in the US, Canada, and elsewhere; or the wars raging in many parts of the world that enlist child soldiers; or the inadequacy of social infrastructure such as basic healthcare, decent schools, and sanitation in so many places around the world, including the wealthiest (e.g. Bartlett 2018; Horton and Kraftl 2017). The list goes on and on and recognising its global sprawl and intimate effects really ought to galvanise radical geographers and spur vibrant radical geographies. Thinking about children and childhoods connects us to social reproduction and thus to the ways knowledge and skills are produced and shared, not just to make a differentiated labour force daily and over the long haul, but to shift its grounds and find ways to create and maintain a social formation in which difference is less a means of division than a flowering of possibilities. And thinking about social reproduction, especially for geographers, calls for attention to its political ecolo-gies-the range of settings in which it takes place, such as the household, the school, the courthouse, the public environment, and the workplace, and the sorts of material social practices through which knowledge is produced, shared, and exchanged. During childhood the practices around sharing knowledge are particularly important as children acquire and internalise the working knowledge of their communities in all of its unevenness and quirkiness-pernicious and delicious. This knowledge is not just taught directly but learned in a community