Link to Session Platform

Chairs(s):

Nina Ebner, University of Texas-Austin

; ,

Description:

Recent scholarship in geography, and cognate disciplines, brings capitalism ‘back in’ as an overdetermined system and complex totality, animated through a matrix of spatial and social difference. This is expressed in (re-)engagements with questions of uneven and combined development (e.g. Kasmir & Gill, 2018; Omstedt, 2021; Peck, 2019), racial capitalism (e.g. Bhattacharyya, 2018; Bledsoe & Wright, 2019; De Lara, 2018), social reproduction (e.g. Bakker and Gill, 2019; Ebner, 2021; Fraser, 2016) and coloniality (e.g. Werner, 2016). What unites this set of inquiries is an essential framing of capitalism as a highly differentiated and relational political economic system, always-incomplete in its formations. Yet, in many cases, scholarly conversations on the spatial and social differences at the core of capitalism’s uneven development are disparate, occurring within particular disciplinary silos.

These sessions posit that there is much to be gained by bridging such conceptions of capitalism. If capitalism is reproduced through logics, discourses and practices which create, and marshal, socio-spatial difference into its categories of value, then we need theoretical and methodological frameworks which help us to understand how these differences are produced, circulated and contested. And if, as Smith (1984) argued long ago, capitalism’s uneven development results from its contradictory tendencies towards equalization and differentiation, this process is best understood in raced and gendered, as well as geographical, terms. These sessions recognize the potential for a sustained engagement with the entanglements of uneven development and social difference throughout capitalism’s historical geography; building on the crucial recognition of such co-production in recent work on uneven racialized development (Wright, 2020), variegated social reproduction (Bakker & Gill, 2019), the coloniality of global accumulation (Werner, 2016), and the uneven and combined origins of capitalism (Anievas & Nişancıoğlu, 2015).

The purpose of these sessions, therefore, is twofold: 1) to gather contributions which grapple with how the methodological and theoretical tools of racial capitalism, social reproduction, coloniality and uneven development together can help us to better understand capitalism, as a complex global political economic system; and 2) to bring together geographers and non-geographers in order to productively capture the rich, and ongoing, interdisciplinary dialogue across geography,
anthropology, historical sociology, international political economy, development studies, etc. Far from subsuming the diverse extant literatures on racial capitalism, social reproduction, and coloniality under the rubric of uneven development, we hope to use this opportunity to explore the methodological and theoretical affinities, and differences, between (and within) these frameworks, as part of our existing toolkit for studying an overdetermined capitalism.

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda