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Finance and Land: Assembling Markets in the Global South AAG 2018 Paper Session Organizer: W. Nathan Green (University of Wisconsin-Madison) This paper session will explore the relationship between financial markets and rural land in the Global South. After the 2008 financial crisis, many investors and nation-states went in search of agricultural land for food production, asset accumulation, and speculation (Ouma 2014). Scholars have usefully identified this wave of land investments as a kind of spatial fix to the problem of capital overaccumulation (Fairbairn 2014). Building upon this assessment as well as more diverse theoretical work on finance capital within economic geography (Christophers et al. 2017; French et al. 2011; Hall 2011), scholars have begun to investigate the various actors, technologies, and political processes that create financial markets in land in order to better understand the spatially uneven effects of finance capital upon people and places (Daniel 2012; Ducastel and Anseeuw 2017; Ouma 2016). This session seeks to contribute to this broader theoretical work by investigating how land itself becomes incorporated into financial markets through a variety of empirical case studies from different regions in the Global South. Land does not come ready made for financial investment, but rather it must be assembled through an array of technological, legal, and material processes to be legible for investment (Li 2014). And contrary to geographic imaginaries of finance capital flowing like circuits through an international system (Lee and LiPuma 2002), land can be both a conduit and obstacle for the flow of capital in ways that contribute to spaces of uneven geographic development (Harvey 1982). Issues of state territoriality and land access, for instance, affect how finance capital travels (Fairbairn 2015). Moreover, the relationship between people and land—in terms of material production, social reproduction, and experiences of place—is a central feature of investigation to understand how finance capital is reproduced in our everyday lives (Langley 2008). Given these different ways that land and finance are connected, this session will address topics and themes including: - What new technologies and knowledge networks are required to assemble land for financial investment? - How do property regimes affect, and in turn become reshaped by, financial markets? - What role does state territoriality play in producing uneven geographies of financial capital? - How does infrastructure hinder and/or facilitate financial investment in land? - How do financial markets differentially affect people’s access to land across gender, ethnicity, age, and class lines? - How do financial markets in land affect the household in terms of mobility, social reproduction, and intergenerational relationships? - What does the financialization of land do to people’s material and experiential relationship with land? If you would like to participate in this paper session, please send a 250 word abstract by October 1, 2017 to W. Nathan Green at [log in to unmask] References Christophers, Brett, Andrew Leyshon, and Geoff Mann. 2017. Money and Finance after the Crisis: Critical Thinking for Uncertain Times. Antipode Book Series. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Daniel, Shepard. 2012. “Situating Private Equity Capital in the Land Grab Debate.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 39 (3–4): 703–29. Ducastel, Antoine, and Ward Anseeuw. 2017. “Agriculture as an Asset Class: Reshaping the South African Farming Sector.” Agriculture and Human Values 34 (1): 199–209. Fairbairn, Madeleine. 2014. “‘Like Gold with Yield’: Evolving Intersections between Farmland and Finance.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 41 (5): 777–95. ———. 2015. “Foreignization, Financialization and Land Grab Regulation.” Journal of Agrarian Change 15 (4): 581–91. French, Shaun, Andrew Leyshon, and Thomas Wainwright. 2011. “Financializing Space, Spacing Financialization.” Progress in Human Geography 35 (6): 798–819. Hall, Sarah. 2011. “Geographies of Money and Finance I: Cultural Economy, Politics and Place.” Progress in Human Geography 35 (2): 234–45. Harvey, David. 1982. The Limits to Capital. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Langley, Paul. 2008. The Everyday Life of Global Finance: Saving and Borrowing in Anglo-America. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press. Lee, Benjamin, and Edward LiPuma. 2002. “Cultures of Circulation: The Imaginations of Modernity.” Public Culture 14 (1): 191. Li, Tania Murray. 2014. “What Is Land? Assembling a Resource for Global Investment.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 39 (4): 589–602. Ouma, Stefan. 2014. “Situating Global Finance in the Land Rush Debate: A Critical Review.” Geoforum 57 (November): 162–66. ———. 2016. “From Financialization to Operations of Capital: Historicizing and Disentangling the Finance–farmland-Nexus.” Geoforum.