Browsing by Subject "Political economy"
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Item Global displacements : geographies of work and industrial restructuring in the Dominican Republic.(2010-02) Traub-Werner, MarionMany accounts of the globalization of production in the late 20th and early 21st centuries focus on the boom of new foreign direct investment in so-called global factories in the global South. Global Displacements shifts the focus of academic inquiry to an equally pervasive moment of transnational capitalist production: the collapse of labourintensive employment strategies and the restructuring of spatial and social divisions of labour in their wake. Drawing on ethnographic methods and historical accounts of economic change in the Dominican Republic’s northern Cibao region, I consider the restructuring of the country’s export apparel industry, the most long-standing and successful in the circum-Caribbean. Over the past decade, facing increased competition for US market share and a new regime of trade regulation without global quotas, garment firms in the Dominican Republic undertook a process of restructuring, including the retrenchment of the majority of the country’s garment workforce. I explore this process from the perspective of four sociospatial locations: Dominican firms integrated into transnational production assemblages, the embodied labour geographies of former garment workers, the layered histories of accumulation and disinvestment of the Cibao region and its border with Haiti, and my own position as a researcher. Bringing the insights of deconstruction and Marxist and feminist theory to bare on a critical ethnography of industrial restructuring, I examine geographies of production as constituted by displacements: that is, the complex mechanism of inclusion in and exclusion from circuits of capital accumulation that reproduce subjects and places with difference. My study of displacements in the Dominican Republic illustrates how accumulation proceeds through the reproduction of hierarchies of labour, premised upon reworking the violent abstractions of race, gender and nation along existing and new spatial contours of profit-making and disinvestment. Geographies of work and industrial restructuring in the Dominican Republic reveal problematic assumptions that lie behind much contemporary analysis of industrial change. Many accounts frame global industrial restructuring since the 1970s as a process of outward capitalist expansion, incorporating new places and new subjects into transnational labour processes. Such a framing reduces complex, nonlinear experiences of industrial transformation to a teleological sequence, where industrialization serves a marker of “development,” signifying a measure of one’s closeness or distance from Eurocentric modernity. By decentering teleological assumptions of industrialization, the geography of displacements presented in the following pages demonstrates industrial restructuring to be an on-going reworking of industrial and deindustrial processes irreducible to fixed and sequential categories of the postindustrial, newly industrializing, or so-called developing worlds.Item Neoliberal environments: Crisis, counterrevolution, and the nature of value(2017-06) Nelson, SaraThis dissertation develops a genealogy of the environment as an object of politics through the period of neoliberal transition, roughly the late 1960s to the early 1990s. Through a series of case-studies highlighting critical moments in the modern history of the environment, I use archival research, literature analysis, and key informant interviews to show how our current understanding of the environment has co-evolved with some of the forms of governance we have come to associate most closely with neoliberalism. In contrast to existing scholarship, I show that the environment is not simply an object to which neoliberal policies have been applied, but a political problem that entails ongoing negotiations over the legitimacy of market rule, the role of the state in relation to the market, and the value of ecological stewardship. In this way the project challenges the conventional understanding of the relation between neoliberalism and the environment in geographical literature, as well as accounts of neoliberalism that marginalize or ignore environmental governance. In contrast, I show that the problem of nature’s value has been central to neoliberalism from its inception, and remains a key site of politics in the present.Item On our own: flight attendant labor and the family values economy.(2010-12) Murphy, Ryan PatrickThis dissertation historically analyzes the working lives and activism of flight attendants in the U.S. airline industry since 1970. During that period, I trace the emergence of what I call the "family values economy." Given three decades of neoliberal reforms, working people have been less able to count on living-wage jobs or on the state for material support. Traditional family relationships have had to make up for such austerity, with fathers, mothers, and children turning the household into a space to pool the resources of multiple low-paying service jobs. Since flight attendants' work schedules keep them away from home for weeks at a time, and because of involvement in feminist and LGBT movements long critical of "family values" agendas, I argue that flight attendants are uniquely positioned to challenge the reorganization of the economy around traditional family. Flight attendants have thus demanded and won new resources for the alternative arrangements in which they live: as single people, as unmarried parents, as same-sex couples, and as cohabitating friends. The dissertation therefore contributes to labor, gender, and sexuality studies by showing how politicizing family has sustained flight attendants' vigorous push to contest economic inequality.Item Rock brand: the political and cultural economy of live rock performance(2011-11) Weglarz, KristineThis dissertation addresses the political economy of live rock performance and touring, both as they stand currently and their evolution via legislation, deregulation, and corporate conglomeration. Additionally, I examine the intertwined relationship between institutional arrangements and constructions of authenticity within rock culture, resulting in shifts as to how artists and audiences can perform "authenticity." Live performance is now at the center of value judgments of economic and cultural capital, overtaking the role of recordings. This shift, along with reduced options and limited promotional control over touring, produces consequences for artists, fans, and media scholars. These structural and fiscal changes dramatically alter how rock artists tour, maintain authenticity among fans, and - in the case of protest artists - speak on political issues with conviction, through a new relationship between the live, the political and the authentic, where "economic authenticity" and "keeping it real" fiscally is both more important for genre standards and more difficult for artists to achieve.