Browsing by Subject "Land"
Now showing 1 - 20 of 77
- Results Per Page
- Sort Options
Item ‘Açúcar nem Sempre Doce’: Reinvestment, Land, and Gendered Labor in a ‘New’ Mozambique(2017-12) Lazzarini, Alicia“'Açucar nem Sempre Doce': Reinvestment, Land, and Gendered Labor in a 'New' Mozambique” analyzes contemporary investment in Mozambique, Southern Africa. Capitalizing on the idea of the continent as ‘rising’ and a ‘last frontier’ of investment, after 16 years of civil conflict Mozambique has sought international financing to rehabilitate the nation’s sugar industry. The Xinavane Sugar Mill, a former colonial estate and today’s largest sugar producer, has played a crucial role in this effort. While lauded for its reinvestment success, the dissertation asks what the ‘re’ in Xinavane’s rehabilitation signifies, and its importance to understanding the contemporary nation. Utilizing multi-sited ethnographic and archival research, the dissertation interrogates codifications of social difference through land dispossession, forced labor migrations, and spatial divisions of raced and gendered labor in the production of ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ space. Enrolling Xinavane as an entry point to explore colonial legacy in the increasingly investment oriented nation, the dissertation argues that sugar’s rehabilitation draws centrally on, and reformulates, violent forms of colonial industry and rule. Ultimately, the dissertation investigates how space and place are produced in African historical specificity, and how social inequality is reconfigured in active relationship to it.Item Before the Sun Rises: Contesting Power and Cultivating Nations in the Colorado Beet Fields(2017-06) Pérez, BernadetteThis dissertation analyzes how Colorado’s sugar beet industry, one of the most important agricultural industries in the American West before World War II, was built through the expansion of an exclusionary, settler colonial American nation-state and the racialization and criminalization of migrant workers. It does not look only to elites to tell this story. Through multi-sited research in U.S. and Mexican archives, it privileges the perspectives of diverse agricultural working communities. Beet workers contested and creatively appropriated hegemonic and colonial visions of nation, land, industrial modernity, gender, labor, indigeneity, and race. From rural Colorado, they shaped the improvisational nature of state power and American capitalism.Item Chattel Land: Legal and Labor Histories of Reclamation in Singapore(2020-07) Fok, BeverlyAfter fifty years of aggressive augmentation, reclaimed land now makes up a quarter of Singapore’s total landmass. Cut out of sea, this artificial land aspires to cut the chain of causality: to self-found and so give law to itself (auto-nomos). How to analytically capture that gesture of self-authoring? From what vantage point does one study an object like reclamation whose structure is that of recursion? This is the challenge—at once methodological and theoretical—to which my dissertation responds. I proceed first by asking: what exactly is being reclaimed in reclamation? Why should the creation of “new” land need to be enacted in the idiom of a “re,” that is, as a re-taking, a retrieval, or a return? Though reclamation purports to create land “from sea,” key to this land-making is not saltwater but sand and labor, both of which Singapore imports in vast quantities from its South, East, and Southeast Asian neighbors. Harnessing those flows, reclamation would appear to put the very ground itself in motion. Foreign coastlines are dismantled, ferried piecemeal, then reassembled into new land in Singapore by migrant workers on barges. In the process, land paradoxically becomes chattel. What then becomes of chattel—including certain forms of labor? A tentative answer might be obtained, I argue, by looking to the legal and labor histories that inform this present-day fabrication of mobile land. Thus the dissertation rehabilitates a link between today’s migrant labor and its earlier prefiguration, colonial convict labor, which was first tasked with creating new land in the island’s interior. Just as today’s reclaimed land needs labor’s upkeep to fend off the tides, interior land needed constant servicing to prevent its return to the jungle. Where convict labor’s lot was “imprisonment in transportation, beyond sea, for life,” reclamation workers, confined in vessels, trace an unending circuit between dredge sites at sea and fill sites near land. By situating reclamation within those longer-standing political economies of extraction, I show that mobile land—made here to be eternally remade against rising seas—is not “new” and cannot be claimed, but rather must always be re-claimed, even in the very first instance.Item Essays in Spatial Economics(2020-07) Sood, AradhyaChapter 1 examines how land market frictions can hinder the growth of manufacturing firms in developing economies. Land market frictions are the result of increased land fragmentation, poor land records, and restrictive land use policies. Using manufacturing census from India with unique land data, I document that in regions with smaller land parcel size, firms acquire many small parcels slowly over time, expand building with 4% lower probability, and are 22% smaller in size. I build a dynamic structural model that flexibly captures firm land adjustment costs which vary with the size of adjustment and region. I find that land frictions reduce lifetime producer profits by 6.5%. In some regions, firms pay 119% in additional land aggregation costs over and above the dollar value of land. My results are also consistent with the hypothesis that government-affiliated firms face lower land frictions. I find that private firms pay three times more for land aggregation than government-affiliated firms. I use the model to analyze the effects of a proposed government land-pooling policy on producer profits, firm growth, and land misallocation; and to quantify the expected losses to firms from the 2015 eminent domain restrictions. In Chapter 2, William Speagle, Kevin Ehrman-Solberg and I study racial covenants which were clauses in property deeds that prohibited the sale or renting of a property to specific religious and ethnic minorities. This paper studies the effect of racially-restrictive covenants, prevalent during the early-to-mid 20th century, on present-day socioeconomic outcomes such as house prices and racial segregation. Using a newly created geographic data on over 120,000 historical property deeds with information on racial covenant use from Hennepin County, Minnesota, we exploit the unanticipated 1948 Supreme Court ruling that made racially-restrictive covenants unenforceable. We employ a regression discontinuity around the ruling to document the causal and time-persistent effects of racial covenants on present-day socioeconomic geography of Minneapolis. In particular, we document that houses that were covenanted have on average 15% higher present-day house values compared to properties which were not covenanted. We also find a 1% increase in covenanted houses in a census blocks reduces black residents by 14% and reduces black home ownership by 19%.Item Minutes: Board of Regents Meeting and Regents Committee Meetings: April 10-11, 1980(University of Minnesota, 1980) University of Minnesota Board of RegentsItem Minutes: Board of Regents Meeting and Regents Committee Meetings: April 10-11, 1986(University of Minnesota, 1986) University of Minnesota Board of RegentsItem Minutes: Board of Regents Meeting and Regents Committee Meetings: April 11-12, 1985(University of Minnesota, 1985) University of Minnesota Board of RegentsItem Minutes: Board of Regents Meeting and Regents Committee Meetings: April 12-13, 1984(University of Minnesota, 1984) University of Minnesota Board of RegentsItem Minutes: Board of Regents Meeting and Regents Committee Meetings: April 15-16, 1982(University of Minnesota, 1982) University of Minnesota Board of RegentsItem Minutes: Board of Regents Meeting and Regents Committee Meetings: April 4-5, 1990(University of Minnesota, 1990) University of Minnesota Board of RegentsItem Minutes: Board of Regents Meeting and Regents Committee Meetings: April 7-8, 1988(University of Minnesota, 1988) University of Minnesota Board of RegentsItem Minutes: Board of Regents Meeting and Regents Committee Meetings: August 9-10, 1985(University of Minnesota, 1985) University of Minnesota Board of RegentsItem Minutes: Board of Regents Meeting and Regents Committee Meetings: December 10-11, 1981(University of Minnesota, 1981) University of Minnesota Board of RegentsItem Minutes: Board of Regents Meeting and Regents Committee Meetings: December 11-12, 1986(University of Minnesota, 1986) University of Minnesota Board of RegentsItem Minutes: Board of Regents Meeting and Regents Committee Meetings: December 12-13, 1985(University of Minnesota, 1985) University of Minnesota Board of RegentsItem Minutes: Board of Regents Meeting and Regents Committee Meetings: December 13-14, 1984(University of Minnesota, 1984) University of Minnesota Board of RegentsItem Minutes: Board of Regents Meeting and Regents Committee Meetings: December 7-8, 1989(University of Minnesota, 1989) University of Minnesota Board of RegentsItem Minutes: Board of Regents Meeting and Regents Committee Meetings: December 8-9, 1988(University of Minnesota, 1988) University of Minnesota Board of RegentsItem Minutes: Board of Regents Meeting and Regents Committee Meetings: February 10-11, 1983(University of Minnesota, 1983) University of Minnesota Board of RegentsItem Minutes: Board of Regents Meeting and Regents Committee Meetings: February 13-14, 1986(University of Minnesota, 1986) University of Minnesota Board of Regents