Genevieve Ritchie | Western Sydney University (original) (raw)

Books by Genevieve Ritchie

Marxism and Migration , 2022

The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this p... more The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.

Papers by Genevieve Ritchie

Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, 2022

Labor History, 2021

Young adult refugees from the Middle East and North Africa are at the center of a development age... more Young adult refugees from the Middle East and North Africa are at the center of a development agenda that seeks to reconstitute displacement as development and grow the region's digital economy. Working from an internationalist standpoint, this article thinks through the contradictory forms of consciousness that arise as displacement is transitioned into development. The analysis interrogates the ideological forms of knowledge that delink capitalist development in the region from the conditions that incited youth uprisings and led to their displacement. The reader is invited to think through the ways in which migration is a generative, contradictory, and contingent force within global capitalism, which is to say a manifestation of class struggle.

Young people migrating to Canada under conditions of economic insecurity and/or displacement due ... more Young people migrating to Canada under conditions of economic insecurity and/or displacement due to war face important challenges. Often migrating alone, without family support or infrastructure, they must rely upon broader community and agency supports while trying to navigate unfamiliar government systems, competitive labor markets, and market-based systems of housing and health care as well as attempting to gain access to and be successful in post-secondary education. This panel draws from three ongoing research projects to examine the conditions and experiences of struggle and resistance by displaced young adults in Canada and offers perspectives on systems and policy change to better support resettlement.

Youth as/in Crisis, 2017

The category “youth” appears as a stage in the natural progression of an individual’s life. There... more The category “youth” appears as a stage in the natural progression of an individual’s life. There is, however, deep and expansive politics that give meaning to the category youth. Within contemporary debates, the struggle to define youth has positioned young adults at the centre of policy frameworks, state-led initiatives, and international development discussions, which are concretizing various distinctions between “emerging” and established adults in terms of a range of characteristics, including their civic and economic participation.

The no borders movement has been an important site of anti-imperialist resistance, and as such it... more The no borders movement has been an important site of anti-imperialist resistance, and as such it provides a valuable point of entry into problematizing the contradictions that constitute the relations of consciousness, praxis and ideology. By tracing the recent history of no borders activism in relation to the intensification of neoliberalism, and the prevalence of diffuse models of power, the analysis illustrates the ways in which critical praxis has been limited by the current milieu. Working from an anti-racist feminist perspective I utilize examples drawn from no borders activism to demonstrate the very real limits of informal and incidental learning in social movements. The analysis argues against the supplanting of consciousness with subjectivity as a way to avoid the problems associated with structuralist analysis. Instead, I have suggested that critical education for social action requires a dialectical engagement with the social relations that we live in, contest and trans...

Historical Materialism, 2017

The edited collectionMarxism and Feminismtraces both the conceptual divides and political affinit... more The edited collectionMarxism and Feminismtraces both the conceptual divides and political affinities between feminism and Marxism. Utilising a keywords-, or core-concepts approach, the book fleshes out the tensions and contradictions that organise and orient Marxist and feminist theories and practices of social transformation. The concepts discussed inMarxism and Feminismdo not try to bridge divergent theories of exploitation or oppression; rather the tensions between feminism and Marxism are used to generate new terrains of investigation. Although the topics discussed vary widely, the book is held together by a commitment to dialectical-materialist investigation and revolutionary social transformation.

Adult Education Quarterly, 2017

Almost 20 years ago Griff Foley (1999) theorized consciousness-raising as a form of informal lear... more Almost 20 years ago Griff Foley (1999) theorized consciousness-raising as a form of informal learning. Responding to the invisibility of gender and race in Foley's account, feminists pointed out that informal learning occurs within the social relations of exploitation, patriarchy, and racialization. Indeed, the notion of an industrial (read White male) working class has painted an incomplete picture of how and where resistance transpires. Although Unfree Labour does not theorize learning per se, the chapters illustrate the ways in which workers confront the social conditions constituting racialization, gendered labor, and super-exploitation. As Choudry and Smith note, the book engages with immigrant and migrant worker organizing for the purpose of social transformation. The penultimate chapter, for example, investigates social transformation through a dialogue with activist organizations and fleshes out the tensions that arise across various struggles. Thus, Unfree Labour is firmly situated within the radical tradition of adult education, which understands social struggle and dialogical learning as sites of knowledge. Each of the chapters, authored by scholar-activists, builds from the premise that immigrant/migrant workers face conditions of "unfreedom." The concept of unfree labor draws from the dialectical relation of freedom and necessity articulated by Marx. As Choudry and Smith explicate, the concept of unfree labor captures the way in which legal instruments compel workers to sell their labor-power. Hence, immigration status undergirds the super-exploitation of noncitizen workers. Free and unfree labor, however, should not be conceptualized as binary opposites. Rather, as Thomas' chapter argues, forced, unfree, and free labor coexist. The relations constituting unfreedom, moreover, are not localized, and as such they reflect historical processes of uneven capitalist development. Chapters by Ramsaroop, and Calugay, Malhaire, and Shragge echo this point by illustrating racism within unions, and by revealing the transnational conditions that underpin labor migration. A second concept gestured to in the Introduction and developed by Paz Ramirez and Chun's chapter is the notion of global labor apartheid. The central claim is that immigration and labor policies create two parallel yet unequal categories of workers. Drawing on historical and contemporary accounts of worker organizing in British Columbia, they suggest that ostensibly race-neutral policies actually reproduce forms of racialized exclusion, or labor apartheid. Read against the chapter by Ladd and Singh, and Mirchandani and Poster's (2016) analysis of transnational labor, the extent to which the notion of labor apartheid can form the basis of social transformation needs careful consideration. Ladd and Singh argue that cuts to welfare, minimum wage freezes, and restricted access to citizenship created precarious conditions for workers in general. In contradistinction to Ladd and Singh's analysis, investigations of transnational call centers demonstrate that workers deported from the United States

Socialist Studies/Études Socialistes, 2013

This paper takes up the theorization of the dialectical relationships between consciousness, prax... more This paper takes up the theorization of the dialectical relationships between consciousness, praxis, and contradiction by drawing primarily on the work of critical feminist and anti-racist scholars Roxana Ng and Paula Allman. Beginning with the important Marxist theorizations of the lives of immigrant women, the state, and community services made by Roxana Ng, we move forward with asserting that Roxana’s commitment to making social relations of power and exploitation ‘knowable’ and ‘transformable’ is based on a complex and revolutionary articulation of the relationship between thinking and being. This dialectical conceptualization of praxis is necessary for any potentially coherent revolutionary feminist anti-racist project. The challenge posed by Roxana is two-fold: not only how best to ‘know’ the world, but how to teach this analysis and generate revolutionary practice.

Canadian Woman Studies, 2013

REVOLUTIONARY WOMANHOOD: FEMINISM, MODERNITY AND THE STATE IN NASSER'S EGPYT Laura Bier Stanf... more REVOLUTIONARY WOMANHOOD: FEMINISM, MODERNITY AND THE STATE IN NASSER'S EGPYT Laura Bier Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011 "The woman question" in its various articulations and cultural expressions has historically been bound up with notions of national identity and nationalism. Through developing and unpacking the concept of state feminism Laura Bier grappled with the complex and contradictory discourses that shaped hegemonic notions of womanhood in the Nasser era. Drawing upon policy studies, political speeches, women's press, film, and literature the study was grounded in a cultural history, and fleshed out the connections between the construction of national womanhood and the conceptual framing of revolution. In short, the primary focus of the study was the relation between the construction of feminine identity and the modern nation-state. State feminism is the central point of analysis, which was then explored through a descriptive problematizing of fou...

International Journal of Lifelong Education

Globalisation, Societies and Education

This article is an exploration in the mode of thinking of refugee youth on the relations of 'demo... more This article is an exploration in the mode of thinking of refugee youth on the relations of 'democracy' and 'dictatorship.' Tracing the geopolitical relations of authoritarian and democratic forms of governing we demonstrate the manner in which these political forms are sociohistorically interdependent yet appear as politically distinct, which we understand as an ideological form of consciousness. Expanding out from interviews and focus groups conducted with refugee youth from the Middle East and North Africa who arrived in Canada to resettle, our analysis attempts to go deeper than that simply creating space for the voices of refugee youth. Instead, we want to theorise from the data to reconceptualise the social and economic projects that have been named as democratisation or youth at-risk. The conscious reproduction of democracy and dictatorship as distinct political forms requires that refugee youth learn to live in and act upon their world through an ideological mode of consciousness that furthers the relations of global capitalism and encourages young people to align their aspirations with neoliberalism. We, therefore, aim to reorient theorisations of democracy and dictatorship, and in doing so, challenge the forms of consciousness and praxis that arise from the bourgeois regime of political rights.