Link to Session Platform

Chairs(s):

Emily Rosenman, Penn State University

; ,

Description:

This panel explores the politics of researching and theorizing the economy in a discipline and wider society that has often prioritized a tradition of masculinist (and white) theories and definitions of the economy over embodied experiences of people living their everyday lives. Inspired by Mitchell’s (2008) problematization of “the economy” as a contested domain, as well as how COVID-19 has demanded uneven sacrifices of public health, well-being, and life in the name of “keeping the economy open,” we seek to critically deconstruct the seemingly singular unit of “the” economy and who is allowed to define it as such. The institutional barriers faced by structurally marginalized communities to prove “merit” and find success by mainstream academic standards (Priya 2020) should be an impetus both to diversify our discipline, and to look elsewhere for lived and rigorous expertise on the workings of the economy.

We ask: What would economic geography look like if it were to engage more deeply with everyday economic actors – workers, protestors, Indigenous communities, all kinds of ordinary people – not just as objects of study, but as interlocutors of equal knowledge-building status who articulate their own understanding the economy as it is and, even more crucially, as it should be? How can economic geography attempt “boundary crossings” (Pollard et al 2009) not just with other disciplines, but with non-academics articulating the economy? How can we enable them, too, to cross over into academic discourse? What would need to change about economic geography as a field and academia as a structure to enable a public economic geography that engages meaningfully with the politics of knowledge production, expertise, authorship, and citation?

We envision a panel of academics and non-academics discussing these and other questions around a “more public” economic geography. Please send expressions of interest of no more than 250 words to priti.narayan@ubc.ca and ekr5260@psu.edu by October 14, 2021. We will respond by October 18, 2021. We welcome submissions by graduate students and early career scholars and those who work outside the usual bounds of “economic geography.”

References

Mitchell, T., 2008. Rethinking economy. Geoforum, 39(3), pp.1116-1121.

Pollard, J., McEwan, C., Laurie, N. and Stenning, A., 2009. Economic geography under postcolonial scrutiny. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 34(2), pp.137-142.

Priya, A., 2020. For a Bahujan Economics: A Personal Statement. The India Forum, Accessed at https://www.theindiaforum.in/article/bahujan-economics

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda