summary of class discussion - Session 5 (Rashmi and Krupa)

In this session we read geographers who looked at globalization of capitalism and have contributed to the corpus broadly classified as globalization studies. The purpose of the readings was to understand what ‘spatializing’ means to geographers. The readings in this session do not fetishize space as a fixed category; instead they open up discussions around materialization of space. While each of the writers comes from a different tradition they are all rooted in a materialist perspective.

There was a quantitative revolution in Geography in the 1960s with the aim to look at and derive patterns. The 1970s were the decade of Marxist geography, starting with David Harvey and others, who situated space in the material actions of people. As an interpreter of Marx, Harvey writes more like a philosopher and does not strictly confine himself to his discipline. While he spatializes Marx, he appears to have generally accepted the inescapability of the capitalist system as the dominant framework. However he would like us look at alternative constructs of space-time within this dominant framework and builds on Munn’s notion of short term and long term cycles (domains).

For him, time is not separate from place and both place and space are not purely containers - they are dynamic and very much co-constitutive of the practices of people. He also doesn’t agree with the separation of space and place ... for example in architecture space is considered negative and place making positive because the place making process gives identity to the space and makes a place (by meeting utilitarian needs and expectations) out of it.

Katz also doesn’t separate place and space. However her approach is clearly political and not purely analytical; she takes a position and defends it. She also writes from a feminist geography position but in the process questions feminist standpoint theory as not being robust enough to make connections between the spheres of production (economic / wage labour) and social reproduction (non wage labour, usually undertaken by marginalised communities) and suggests a research strategy (of Topographies and Countertopographies) to link various place specific resistances to globalisation’s impact - space-time compression which leads to inequalities and generally impacts the social reproduction sphere in a particular domain more.

Hart also differentiates global and local but advocates a nuanced approach and undertakes ethnographic work to illustrate how different space-time constructions articulate with each other.  She incorporates insights from agrarian studies into her efforts to understand globalization and considers it morally wrong to create value by reducing it elsewhere and advocates a middle ground between economism on one hand and voluntarism on the other. She is also unhappy with the caricaturing of Marx and suggests looking at political economy, culture and geography in a more robust way.

Hart and Roberts suggest that there are strong racial, class and cultural biases to dispossession and one cannot just blame economics (gloablisation?) although capitalism does sustain primitive accumulation as an ongoing process.  All the writers critique the Neo-liberal discourse of man as an economically rational human being as they feel it leads to dilution and ultimately loss of value systems.