Feminist Political Economies of Displacement
The session recording will be archived on the site until June 25th, 2023
This session was streamed but not recorded
Date: 3/23/2023
Time: 10:20 AM - 11:40 AM
Room: Gold, Sheraton, I.M. Pei Tower, Mezzanine Level
Type: Paper,
Theme:
Curated Track: Economic Geography Specialty Group Highlights and Feminist and Digital Economic Geographies
Sponsor Group(s):
Economic Geography Specialty Group, Feminist Geographies Specialty Group
Organizer(s):
Banu Gökarıksel University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
Georgina Ramsay University of Delaware
Chair(s):
Shae Frydenlund Indiana University Bloomington
Description:
Feminist Political Economies of Displacement
Migration crises do political work: as protections for migrants evaporate, state powers amplify and extend (Hyndman 2000, Mountz 2010, 2020, Loyd and Mountz 2018) and new gender, class, and racial subjectivities take shape (Gökarıksel and Secor 2020, Mountz 2010). Concurrently, displacement underpins new political economies that pivot on dispossession. Displaced people are robbed of time and imagined futures (Ramsay 2021) and ensnared in precarious jobs in sectors ranging from meatpacking to service (Coddington 2020, Frydenlund and Dunn 2021, Saltsman 2022, Soederberg 2021). Dispossession also extends beyond the wage: as some migrants are exploited as precarious workers, others’ captivity and nonproductivity is the source of surplus value for various private and public sectors (Coddington 2021).
This dispossession is acutely gendered. Displaced women are recruited into low-wage, feminized jobs (Bhagat 2022, Soederberg 2021) and social reproduction labor is multiplied and stretched as displaced women are tasked with making up shortfalls in household income (Frydenlund 2020). Seen from the perspective of time, labor, and social reproduction, the “death of asylum” (Mountz 2020) looks more like a dialectic than a death. Indeed, disappearing protections sprout unlikely new gender relations, labor subjectivities, and circuits of value.
This session broadly asks: what gendered political economies emerge in tandem with the management of displacement? How do political economies of displacement reshape social reproduction and gendered subjectivities? What kinds of value are produced and circulated in and through the management of displaced women?
Papers may engage with some of the following themes:
- Theorizing feminist political economies of displacement
- Displacement and social reproduction
- Displaced women’s detention and unfree labor
- Affect and displaced labor subjectivities
Works cited
Bhagat, A. (2022). Governing refugees in raced markets: displacement and disposability from Europe’s frontier to the streets of Paris. Review of International Political Economy, 29(3), 955-978.
Coddington, Kate, Deirdre Conlon, and Lauren L. Martin. "Destitution economies: Circuits of value in asylum, refugee, and migration control." Annals of the American Association of Geographers 110, no. 5 (2020): 1425-1444.
Frydenlund, Shae, and Elizabeth Cullen Dunn. "Refugees and racial capitalism: Meatpacking and the primitive accumulation of labor." Political Geography 95 (2022): 102575.
Frydenlund, Shae. "Support from the South: How Refugee Labor Reproduces Cities." PhD diss., University of Colorado at Boulder, 2020.
Gökarıksel, Banu, and Anna J. Secor. "Affective geopolitics: Anxiety, pain, and ethics in the encounter with Syrian refugees in Turkey." Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 38, no. 7-8 (2020): 1237-1255.
Hyndman, Jennifer. Managing displacement: Refugees and the politics of humanitarianism (Vol. 16). U of Minnesota Press, 2000.
Loyd, Jenna M., and Alison Mountz. Boats, borders, and bases: Race, the cold war, and the rise of migration detention in the United States. U of California Press, 2018.
Mountz, Alison. The death of asylum: Hidden geographies of the enforcement archipelago. U of Minnesota Press, 2020.
Mountz, A. (2010). Seeking asylum: Human smuggling and bureaucracy at the border. U of Minnesota Press.
Ramsay, Georgina. "Time and the other in crisis: How anthropology makes its displaced object." Anthropological Theory 20, no. 4 (2020): 385-413.
Saltsman, Adam. Border Humanitarians: Gendered Order and Insecurity on the Thai-Burmese Frontier. Syracuse University Press, 2022.
Soederberg, Susanne. Urban displacements: Governing surplus and survival in global capitalism. London: Routledge, 2020.
Presentations (if applicable) and Session Agenda:
Christopher Courtheyn, Boise State University |
Intersectional resistance to displacement amid Colombia’s turn to the Left: Capitalism, socialism, and migration in Twenty-first Century South America |
Adam Saltsman, Worcester State University |
Humanitarian Assistance for the Encamped, Social Services for the Resettled: Exploring the Political Economy of Aid for Burmese Migrants in Thailand and the US |
Masaya Llavaneras Blanco, Western University |
The weaponization of the intimate-mobility entanglement as border policy: notes on the political economy of survival in the Dominican borderlands |
Bronwyn Bragg, York University |
Family Matters: Navigating the intentional precarity of racialized migrant and refugee workers in Canadian meatpacking |
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Feminist Political Economies of Displacement
Description
Type: Paper,
Date: 3/23/2023
Time: 10:20 AM - 11:40 AM
Room: Gold, Sheraton, I.M. Pei Tower, Mezzanine Level
Contact the Primary Organizer
Banu Gökarıksel University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
banug@email.unc.edu