Labour geography 1 Strauss, Kendra
Progress in human geography,
08/2018, Letnik:
42, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This progress report examines the relationship between continued growth in the sub-field of labour geography, especially in research on migration, and the concept of precarity. An increasingly ...dominant frame in critical studies of labour and the employment relation, and resonant in the political sphere within (and now beyond) Europe, precarity has seen slower uptake by geographers. However, research on migrant labour and emerging work on technological change, flexibilization, restructuring and insecurity is employing precarity as a multi-dimensional conceptual framework. In this sense, I argue that the distinction between notions of precarity grounded in political economy and those grounded in political philosophy is increasingly – and productively – blurred. As I illustrate, this blurring is apparent in labour geography’s ongoing and deepening engagement with precarity, yet our distinctive contribution to a spatialized theorization of precarity remains, I argue, an open question.
This final report highlights the increasing attention to precarity, including academic precarity, within geography. After briefly discussing the implications for approaches to agency, I argue for ...attention to debates about racialized and racial capitalism from labour geographers. I suggest that theorizations of racial capitalism emerge from particular standpoints, and that geographers are well placed to explore racial capitalisms in a plural sense if we are willing to grapple with the standpoints from which we theorize in labour geography itself. I draw on the ‘infrastructural turn’ to illustrate how labour geographers can start to think with relational approaches to racial capitalism.
Crises of seniors’ care in countries like the UK and Canada, further highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic, have been connected to processes of privatization and financialization. In this paper I ...argue that rent theory is important for disaggregating mechanisms, including of accumulation by dispossession, the devaluation of labour, and assetization, that underpin the process of financialization in the sector. Work on rents often divides between critical approaches, especially to land rent, and mainstream institutionalist and public choice approaches to rent-seeking. Critical rent theory is evolving beyond this divide to understand a broader range of types of rent. Yet, despite attention to the increasing importance of economic rents and forms of rentierism, labour and social reproduction are often excluded from the analysis of how rent relations arise. This paper demonstrates the problems with these exclusions. The argument is illustrated through an analysis of the restructuring of eldercare in British Columbia, Canada, in the last two decades, and employs a feminist political economy approach to examine the social production of rent relations.
This report builds on an examination of different approaches to labour precarity and precarious employment to argue for the need for labour geographers to examine the foundations of our approaches to ...agency. The debate about agency has become the terrain on which many labour geographers meet, but the dominant epistemology of agency has an (implicit or explicit) grounding in debates about labour’s spatial fix. This grounding rests on assumptions about the activities and sites that ‘count’ in analyses of labour, with implications for theory-building and the politics of knowledge production in labour geography.
Pensions constitute an important link, in many welfare regimes, between processes of social categorisation and labour market segmentation over the life-course. Pensions also reveal how socio-economic ...rights are defined in relation to normative and ideological categories (such as gender, class and race), how (and for whom) the state prioritises their distribution, and what these processes reveal about notions of equality and their political and legal institutionalisation. In this paper, I argue that pensions, especially but not only occupational pensions, therefore fall within the ambit of a broad conception of labour law; they should be of interest to feminist legal scholars not solely because of their linkages to paid employment, however, but because of their relationship with the organisation of both production and social reproduction – and the evolution of norms of equality across these domains.
Introduction to Displacements Strauss, Kendra
Annals of the American Association of Geographers,
03/2022, Letnik:
112, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
In the first months of 2020, the call for papers for the 2022 Special Issue of the Annals of the American Association of Geographers was circulated. It invited papers that engage with multiple forms ...and meanings of displacements and their geographies: patterns of shifting, dislocation, or putting out of place; substitutions of one idea for another or the unconscious transfer of intense feelings or emotions; activities occurring outside their normal context; and replacements of one thing by another. The COVID-19 pandemic, declared by the World Health Organization shortly after, produced new displacements and intensified existing patterns of displacement and dispossession, including human and more-than-human mobilities and immobilities. At the same time, socionatural displacements-floods, fires, droughts, hurricanes, sea-level rise, species loss, and dislocation-were the backdrop to the displaced and deferred hopes of the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference. The twenty-seven articles in this special issue contend with how we as geographers conceptualize and theorize displacements; the range of sites, spaces, processes, affects, scales, and actors we study with to understand them; and what is at stake politically in how we research displacements. It is also a pandemic archive of academic labor, in which we find traces of displacements within and beyond our discipline.
In this paper, we discuss a number of recent efforts to critique, dismantle and problematize the categorical ontologies of ‘the urban’ and articulate an overarching epistemological framework for ...urban theory. Our intervention in these debates, which to date have focused primarily on Henri Lefebvre’s hypothesis regarding ‘planetary urbanization’, highlights the absence of an engagement with the long legacy within feminist urban scholarship of confronting and dismantling the categories of the ‘urban’ and ‘rural’. We argue that attending to this legacy foregrounds two conceptual and intellectual challenges that Lefebvre sets for us in his writings on the urban phenomenon. The first relates to Lefebvre’s arguments about the central role that a focus on difference and everyday life must play in understanding late capitalist urbanization and the urban condition. The second relates to Lefebvre’s articulation of the simultaneous problem and imperative of epistemological plurality within urban theory, including the role he ascribed to intellectual cooperation on the study of the urban phenomenon. We conclude by offering some thoughts on the importance Lefebvre attached to residual forms of difference – both lived and epistemological – in urban research and action, and by extension, probe some of the limits of Lefebvrian frameworks for understanding the contemporary urban condition.
Understanding the ways in which people save for their retirement is an urgent issue. So much has changed in the last 10 to 15 years, especially in the area of the provision of pensions and retirement ...income. Around the world, greater and greater responsibility is being allocated to individuals while governments discount their contributions to social security and employers retreat from the provision of supplementary retirement income. This book explores the behavioral revolution and its implications for understanding financial decision-making and saving for the future. Recognizing the profound implications of this research program, it goes beyond issues of risk aversion, framing, and decision-making to consider how social identity and the resources due to people by virtue of their place in society figure in savings behavior. It gives considerable attention to the context of the environment in which people make financial decisions, arguing that this allows a better understanding of the coexistence of sophistication and naivety apparent in patterns of retirement saving. Utilizing databases from the UK, the book provides an empirical foundation to its theoretical arguments, demonstrating how an integrated approach to individual financial decision-making is necessary if we are to address the apparent shortfall in many people's planning for the future. The book concludes by setting the agenda for the design, governance, and regulation of pension savings schemes consistent with delivering cost-effective solutions to pension adequacy. In these ways, it sets forth a strategy for rethinking individual behavior as well as the design of retirement income systems.
Sorting victims from workers Strauss, Kendra
Progress in human geography,
04/2017, Letnik:
41, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This paper builds on work on forced labour and human trafficking to argue for the value of geographical approaches to legal scale, and for more geographical research on the process of jurisdiction. ...Vulnerability to forced labour and human trafficking is related to processes of social and political categorization and legal characterization. Yet territorial understandings of jurisdiction, and those which conceptualize jurisdiction as a process of sorting, often imply a relatively straightforward correspondence between legal scales and legal subjects. I propose an approach to legal scale that builds on feminist analyses in labour law and human geography.
This commentary briefly develops Birch and Ward's argument that research on the ‘new asset geographies’ can make important contributions to understanding new and evolving geographies of social ...reproduction. I argue that processes and mechanisms of assetization connect not only to the making of markets but also of investor subjects, and are empirically and conceptually connected to multi-dimensional precarity in and beyond paid work. The latter signals the potential for more dialogue between researchers working to understand geographies of precarity and the new asset geographies.
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