Sara Smith
I am a feminist and political geographer working to understand the relationship between intimate life, politics, and territory. I have worked on these issues through the politics of love and babies in the Ladakh region of India's Jammu and Kashmir State. I am currently furthering these interests through research on the everyday experiences and cosmopolitan practices of marginalized Himalayan youth attending university in urban India. In addition, I am beginning to explore how the relationship between population, bodies, and territory is tied to race, biopolitics, and visions of the future.
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Papers by Sara Smith
Despite the persistence of Malthusian arguments that human population will grow to outstrip the Earth’s capacity and resources, current demography actually foretells the impending end of growth in the next half century. We are approaching a global baby bust. What does this mean for global political labor economies, regional resource economics, and local struggles over gender and power? This paper concludes, through a survey of current research, that geographers already have the conceptual equipment to answer these enormously important questions. We further argue that the fundamental underpinnings of much contemporary economic and social theory, having been developed in times of rapid population growth and labor surplus, must be reconsidered as we enter a period of different material conditions. Reviewing recent developments in population geography and feminist geopolitics, global geographies of labor and aging, and emerging patterns of resource intensification and disintensification, we suggest that – if infused with an explicit political economy – attending to the baby bust can show the way forward to help revitalize our understanding of bodies and materiality in critical and human geography.
geopolitical strategies materialize in seemingly unlikely venues. In the Leh District of India’s Jammu and Kashmir State, political conflict between Buddhists and Muslims has been articulated in part through women’s bodies. Buddhists and Muslims are
producing an embodied religious boundary through the prevention of inter-religious marriages. While in this case love has the potential to challenge political narratives, any transgressive force is blunted by the separation of intermarrying couples or their expulsion from the territory of Leh District. Drawing on interviews, survey data and participatory oral histories in Leh District, this article seeks to destabilize and complicate the global geopolitical gaze by bringing the corporeal, desiring and desired
body to the center of analysis with an examination of how women cope with, resist or actively participate in embodied geopolitical strategy.
Despite the persistence of Malthusian arguments that human population will grow to outstrip the Earth’s capacity and resources, current demography actually foretells the impending end of growth in the next half century. We are approaching a global baby bust. What does this mean for global political labor economies, regional resource economics, and local struggles over gender and power? This paper concludes, through a survey of current research, that geographers already have the conceptual equipment to answer these enormously important questions. We further argue that the fundamental underpinnings of much contemporary economic and social theory, having been developed in times of rapid population growth and labor surplus, must be reconsidered as we enter a period of different material conditions. Reviewing recent developments in population geography and feminist geopolitics, global geographies of labor and aging, and emerging patterns of resource intensification and disintensification, we suggest that – if infused with an explicit political economy – attending to the baby bust can show the way forward to help revitalize our understanding of bodies and materiality in critical and human geography.
geopolitical strategies materialize in seemingly unlikely venues. In the Leh District of India’s Jammu and Kashmir State, political conflict between Buddhists and Muslims has been articulated in part through women’s bodies. Buddhists and Muslims are
producing an embodied religious boundary through the prevention of inter-religious marriages. While in this case love has the potential to challenge political narratives, any transgressive force is blunted by the separation of intermarrying couples or their expulsion from the territory of Leh District. Drawing on interviews, survey data and participatory oral histories in Leh District, this article seeks to destabilize and complicate the global geopolitical gaze by bringing the corporeal, desiring and desired
body to the center of analysis with an examination of how women cope with, resist or actively participate in embodied geopolitical strategy.
ecological and political change heightens these concerns. In recent events, we find young people at the heart of a reorientation between India and its Himalayan margins: activism against state hydropower projects, becoming a locus of intergenerational concern within their communities, and drawing media attention to their position as outsiders.