Environment And Planning D: Society And Space, Mar 19, 2020
There is little geographic work on beauty. Yet beauty offers important insights into spatial, geo... more There is little geographic work on beauty. Yet beauty offers important insights into spatial, geopolitical, and geoeconomic processes. In this article, we attend to the powerful role of beauty labor, norms, and practices in national development. We center the Miss Tourism Uganda beauty pageant, held annually since 2011, and the centerpiece of tourism-based development in Uganda. Designed to attract foreign visitors and investors and to promote a sense of nationalist pride among Ugandans, the pageant-as-development strategy is increasingly mirrored across the neoliberalized Global South. This approach relies on young women’s beauty labor: the work of self-improvement via intimate beauty technologies, and the intellectual work of learning and showcasing a beautiful, idealized, national imaginary. This labor is physically, emotionally, and financially demanding, and is largely unremunerated. Yet, it is lucratively exploited to promote local and international corporate brands, generate tourism revenue, and attract foreign investment. Despite this, pageant participants and organizers find creative and collaborative strategies to navigate these demands. As part of our efforts to fashion a “geographies of beauty”, this article argues that the power of beauty, and specifically the labor of beauty, is central to understanding contemporary tourism-centered development efforts.
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Sep 1, 2020
In this paper we develop a feminist political ecology of disaster colonialism. To do so, we focus... more In this paper we develop a feminist political ecology of disaster colonialism. To do so, we focus on a series of fires that devastated Park Yard Market in Kampala, Uganda, one of the largest retail spaces in East Africa. Officially accidental, rumours suggest the fires were deliberately set to displace traders and make way for the lucrative (re)development of the city‐centre land. Concerned less with the veracity of these rumours and more with their political ecologies, we show how narratives of Park Yard forwarded by the state and private interests indeed readied it for disaster. Here, we trace how colonial narratives of urban planning in the city, driven by technocratic imperatives of improvement, modernisation, and safety echo in the contemporary devaluation of Park Yard and its women traders. Against this, we show how the caring labour and investment by those traders was central to the formation and maintenance of the market. Over time they created an economically viable space, even as their work was devalued and legally unrecognised. Our analysis interrogates the colonial past‐presents and the gendered‐racialised logics of neoliberal urban development. This framing understands spectacular disaster, a series of highly destructive fires, as inextricably connected to historically produced systems of precarious urban marginality. It demonstrates the uneven impacts, and in particular the deeply deleterious impacts for low‐income Ugandan women; the relationship between fire disaster, vulnerability, and the labour of social reproduction; and the varied ways female traders resisted, adapted, and struggled to defend their economic space in the city. Specifically, a feminist political ecology also helps us understand the embodied nature of this relationship. That is, it is always produced through emotion‐laden, material, and corporeal gendered, racialised and classed power and both relies on and violates particular kinds of idealised or disposable urban subjectivities.
This article builds on and extends geographic calls for creative methodologies and critical geogr... more This article builds on and extends geographic calls for creative methodologies and critical geographic pedagogies, by tracing the formation of the zine, “Across the Street: An Environmental Justice Zine about Kids, Industry, and Health”. Central to a study of toxic poisoning in the East Cesar Chavez neighborhood of Austin, Texas, one of five historic neighborhoods of color in the city, we demonstrate ways to think about, produce and engage with zines as both an instructive geographic method and a form of critical pedagogy. Reflecting on the process of this zine’s production, we argue that zines can be both instructive in the analysis of research and a compelling way to engage students in difficult dialogs in and beyond the classroom. Both practices are central to producing feminist geographical work that is committed to accessible, disruptive, transformative and decolonial knowledge.
In this article, we respond to Oswin’s ‘An other geography’ from a feminist postcolonial geograph... more In this article, we respond to Oswin’s ‘An other geography’ from a feminist postcolonial geographic perspective. We make three interventions. First, we decenter Euro-American Anglo geography spatially, insisting that we situate it in place, and are attentive to spatial, temporal, relational, and overlapping margins and centers. Second, we call for a more embodied account, recognizing the intimate is a lens onto and a site for the reproduction of spatial oppression and resistance. Last, we call for a reckoning with whiteness, a more sustained interrogation of its work both in spaces of domination and at the margins. A feminist postcolonial geographic assertion gives us perspective. It makes visible the situated and varied experiences of elided scholar-subjects in the Global South, and those otherwise marginal to the hegemonies of both Euro-American Anglo geography and its critics. And, in doing so, it forges new contours of connection, offering us more inclusive, complex, and disruptive opportunities for solidarity.
Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Dec 6, 2019
Courtroom ethnographies are very rare in English-, German-, and Spanish-language legal geography.... more Courtroom ethnographies are very rare in English-, German-, and Spanish-language legal geography. Yet courtrooms are dense spaces through which legal subjects, spaces, and instruments are performed, created, disciplined, and managed. In this article, we develop a feminist geographic ethnography of the court. This approach attends to the affective, intimate, and bodily politics of courtroom subjects, spaces, and moments, connecting these with wider structural processes of legal, sociocultural, political, and economic life. To develop this approach, we draw collaboratively on our work on immigrant detention hearings, corporate fraud, antiterrorist trials, and our conversations and reflections together as feminist geographers. We use four embodied exhibits—the file cabinet, the legal pad, the cloakroom ticket, and the cell phone—to make manifest four elements of our feminist methodology. These integrate grounded data sets, embodied transcriptions, global intimate analyses of legal power, and antithetical-activist scholarship. We assert that feminist courtroom ethnographies offer vital and deeply geographical insights into the spatial work of power in and through the legal system, connecting everyday legal goings-on and the transscalar structural machinations of state violence. Key Words: courtroom ethnography, feminist geography, feminist methodology, legal geography, political geography.
Between 2018 and 2020, dramatic changes in US-Mexico policy transformed experiences of asylum on ... more Between 2018 and 2020, dramatic changes in US-Mexico policy transformed experiences of asylum on the border. Quotas on applications at ports of entry (known as "metering"), the “Remain in Mexico” policy, and the deployment of the pandemic era “lockdown” through Title 42, each severely limited asylum opportunities. In response, a host of informal waiting lists emerged, developed and were utilized by a binational network of non-governmental and government agencies, shelters, cartels, and individuals. In this article we use a feminist geographic lens to examine the intimate geopolitics of esperar created by these lists. Via in-depth oral histories with Mexican asylum-seekers, shelter staff, legal advocates, and the wider border bureaucracy, we examine their formation, everyday management, the slow violences and immediate threats they posed, and their work as an informal technology of state control. Our analysis demonstrates how the lists operated as informal tactics of divers...
In this article, we build on the vital insights of feminist thought in economic geography, extend... more In this article, we build on the vital insights of feminist thought in economic geography, extending this body of work via a global Black feminist geographic lens. To do so, we center two moments of the Ugandan bridal industry: the international trade of imported dresses and their design and refashioning there. Via the journeys of these dresses, we make visible how connected racial-gendered and classed power relations structure, drive, and manifest global trade networks. We provide geographically contextualized accounts of the gendered-racialization of economies, while always tracing the ties between varied forms of that racialization across place and through history. And we demonstrate the agency and crucial economic worldmaking of African women who labor within and fashion economic geographies. More broadly, we use dress, and the act of dressing up, in two ways. First, via a global Black feminist lens, we show how dress can be a deeply instructive material object that tells us much about the geographies of economies. Second, we use dress as a metaphor for urgent and playful connection, helping us to refashion the subfield of economic geography as feminist, antiracist, and critically transformative.
Environment And Planning D: Society And Space, Mar 19, 2020
There is little geographic work on beauty. Yet beauty offers important insights into spatial, geo... more There is little geographic work on beauty. Yet beauty offers important insights into spatial, geopolitical, and geoeconomic processes. In this article, we attend to the powerful role of beauty labor, norms, and practices in national development. We center the Miss Tourism Uganda beauty pageant, held annually since 2011, and the centerpiece of tourism-based development in Uganda. Designed to attract foreign visitors and investors and to promote a sense of nationalist pride among Ugandans, the pageant-as-development strategy is increasingly mirrored across the neoliberalized Global South. This approach relies on young women’s beauty labor: the work of self-improvement via intimate beauty technologies, and the intellectual work of learning and showcasing a beautiful, idealized, national imaginary. This labor is physically, emotionally, and financially demanding, and is largely unremunerated. Yet, it is lucratively exploited to promote local and international corporate brands, generate tourism revenue, and attract foreign investment. Despite this, pageant participants and organizers find creative and collaborative strategies to navigate these demands. As part of our efforts to fashion a “geographies of beauty”, this article argues that the power of beauty, and specifically the labor of beauty, is central to understanding contemporary tourism-centered development efforts.
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Sep 1, 2020
In this paper we develop a feminist political ecology of disaster colonialism. To do so, we focus... more In this paper we develop a feminist political ecology of disaster colonialism. To do so, we focus on a series of fires that devastated Park Yard Market in Kampala, Uganda, one of the largest retail spaces in East Africa. Officially accidental, rumours suggest the fires were deliberately set to displace traders and make way for the lucrative (re)development of the city‐centre land. Concerned less with the veracity of these rumours and more with their political ecologies, we show how narratives of Park Yard forwarded by the state and private interests indeed readied it for disaster. Here, we trace how colonial narratives of urban planning in the city, driven by technocratic imperatives of improvement, modernisation, and safety echo in the contemporary devaluation of Park Yard and its women traders. Against this, we show how the caring labour and investment by those traders was central to the formation and maintenance of the market. Over time they created an economically viable space, even as their work was devalued and legally unrecognised. Our analysis interrogates the colonial past‐presents and the gendered‐racialised logics of neoliberal urban development. This framing understands spectacular disaster, a series of highly destructive fires, as inextricably connected to historically produced systems of precarious urban marginality. It demonstrates the uneven impacts, and in particular the deeply deleterious impacts for low‐income Ugandan women; the relationship between fire disaster, vulnerability, and the labour of social reproduction; and the varied ways female traders resisted, adapted, and struggled to defend their economic space in the city. Specifically, a feminist political ecology also helps us understand the embodied nature of this relationship. That is, it is always produced through emotion‐laden, material, and corporeal gendered, racialised and classed power and both relies on and violates particular kinds of idealised or disposable urban subjectivities.
This article builds on and extends geographic calls for creative methodologies and critical geogr... more This article builds on and extends geographic calls for creative methodologies and critical geographic pedagogies, by tracing the formation of the zine, “Across the Street: An Environmental Justice Zine about Kids, Industry, and Health”. Central to a study of toxic poisoning in the East Cesar Chavez neighborhood of Austin, Texas, one of five historic neighborhoods of color in the city, we demonstrate ways to think about, produce and engage with zines as both an instructive geographic method and a form of critical pedagogy. Reflecting on the process of this zine’s production, we argue that zines can be both instructive in the analysis of research and a compelling way to engage students in difficult dialogs in and beyond the classroom. Both practices are central to producing feminist geographical work that is committed to accessible, disruptive, transformative and decolonial knowledge.
In this article, we respond to Oswin’s ‘An other geography’ from a feminist postcolonial geograph... more In this article, we respond to Oswin’s ‘An other geography’ from a feminist postcolonial geographic perspective. We make three interventions. First, we decenter Euro-American Anglo geography spatially, insisting that we situate it in place, and are attentive to spatial, temporal, relational, and overlapping margins and centers. Second, we call for a more embodied account, recognizing the intimate is a lens onto and a site for the reproduction of spatial oppression and resistance. Last, we call for a reckoning with whiteness, a more sustained interrogation of its work both in spaces of domination and at the margins. A feminist postcolonial geographic assertion gives us perspective. It makes visible the situated and varied experiences of elided scholar-subjects in the Global South, and those otherwise marginal to the hegemonies of both Euro-American Anglo geography and its critics. And, in doing so, it forges new contours of connection, offering us more inclusive, complex, and disruptive opportunities for solidarity.
Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Dec 6, 2019
Courtroom ethnographies are very rare in English-, German-, and Spanish-language legal geography.... more Courtroom ethnographies are very rare in English-, German-, and Spanish-language legal geography. Yet courtrooms are dense spaces through which legal subjects, spaces, and instruments are performed, created, disciplined, and managed. In this article, we develop a feminist geographic ethnography of the court. This approach attends to the affective, intimate, and bodily politics of courtroom subjects, spaces, and moments, connecting these with wider structural processes of legal, sociocultural, political, and economic life. To develop this approach, we draw collaboratively on our work on immigrant detention hearings, corporate fraud, antiterrorist trials, and our conversations and reflections together as feminist geographers. We use four embodied exhibits—the file cabinet, the legal pad, the cloakroom ticket, and the cell phone—to make manifest four elements of our feminist methodology. These integrate grounded data sets, embodied transcriptions, global intimate analyses of legal power, and antithetical-activist scholarship. We assert that feminist courtroom ethnographies offer vital and deeply geographical insights into the spatial work of power in and through the legal system, connecting everyday legal goings-on and the transscalar structural machinations of state violence. Key Words: courtroom ethnography, feminist geography, feminist methodology, legal geography, political geography.
Between 2018 and 2020, dramatic changes in US-Mexico policy transformed experiences of asylum on ... more Between 2018 and 2020, dramatic changes in US-Mexico policy transformed experiences of asylum on the border. Quotas on applications at ports of entry (known as "metering"), the “Remain in Mexico” policy, and the deployment of the pandemic era “lockdown” through Title 42, each severely limited asylum opportunities. In response, a host of informal waiting lists emerged, developed and were utilized by a binational network of non-governmental and government agencies, shelters, cartels, and individuals. In this article we use a feminist geographic lens to examine the intimate geopolitics of esperar created by these lists. Via in-depth oral histories with Mexican asylum-seekers, shelter staff, legal advocates, and the wider border bureaucracy, we examine their formation, everyday management, the slow violences and immediate threats they posed, and their work as an informal technology of state control. Our analysis demonstrates how the lists operated as informal tactics of divers...
In this article, we build on the vital insights of feminist thought in economic geography, extend... more In this article, we build on the vital insights of feminist thought in economic geography, extending this body of work via a global Black feminist geographic lens. To do so, we center two moments of the Ugandan bridal industry: the international trade of imported dresses and their design and refashioning there. Via the journeys of these dresses, we make visible how connected racial-gendered and classed power relations structure, drive, and manifest global trade networks. We provide geographically contextualized accounts of the gendered-racialization of economies, while always tracing the ties between varied forms of that racialization across place and through history. And we demonstrate the agency and crucial economic worldmaking of African women who labor within and fashion economic geographies. More broadly, we use dress, and the act of dressing up, in two ways. First, via a global Black feminist lens, we show how dress can be a deeply instructive material object that tells us much about the geographies of economies. Second, we use dress as a metaphor for urgent and playful connection, helping us to refashion the subfield of economic geography as feminist, antiracist, and critically transformative.
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Papers by Caroline Faria