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CfP for the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting April 10 – 14, 2018, New Orleans, LA

Researching dis/articulations of Globalized Production

Organizers: Siobhan McGrath (University of Durham), Stefan Ouma (University of Frankfurt), Marion Werner (SUNY-Buffalo)

Please send name, affiliation and abstracts to Stefan Ouma ([log in to unmask]) by October 15th.

Originally coined as a critical approach to analyze the incorporation of labor and commodities into far-flung organizational structures for the production and redistribution of surplus value in world-historical perspective (Wallerstein and Hopkins 1986), global commodity chains have morphed into something else. They have become “value chains,” a tool of market-oriented development policy used to foster the market integration of firms, farms and labor in the Global South (Werner, Bair & Fernandez 2014; Neilson 2014; McMichael 2013).

The enthusiastic uptake of the value chain approach among development researchers and practitioners has tended to be blind to the distributional injustices, experiences of exploitation, environmental destruction and multiple producer risks that come along with integration into global markets, as well as the coloniality of power and being that sustains these. Such dark sides of globalized production have recently been given a more prominent role in the literature by invoking the concept of disarticulations (Bair/Werner 2011; Bair et al. 2013; Argent 2016; McGrath 2017). The concept makes a call for moving beyond presentist, often celebratory, accounts of value chain inclusion towards an analytical focus on uneven development: i.e., forms of devaluation, disinvestment and displacement that make value chains possible (Bair/Werner 2011; Werner 2016).

Critical literatures have explored these negatives of value production, including labor devaluation (Werner 2016; McGrath 2017), dispossession/enclosures (Challies & Edwards 2011; Ince 2014), crisis (Ouma 2015), and ruins (Tsing 2015). More recently, leading scholars of the value chain/global production network field have also picked up on some of these elements (e.g., Coe/Yeung 2015), and others are using a range of methods, including large surveys, to consider dynamics of uneven development such as social stratification (Maertens/Swinnen 2009). When taken up in this mainstream literature, however, disarticulations are largely framed as empirical outcomes of a given set of local and network conditions, diminishing the analytical potential of the approach.

This panel focuses on the methodological challenge of accounting for the multi-scalar and multi-temporal processes through which commodity chains serve as mechanisms of uneven development. We welcome papers that explore the following questions: To what extent can attending to the dark sides through a disarticulations perspective allow us to move beyond empiricist findings towards empirically-informed theoretical insights? Can approaching commodity chains in this way help to reveal the dynamics of these power-laden and heterogeneous assemblages which are co-constituted through the production of difference (e.g. “gender”, “race”, “class”, “age”, “citizenship”)? What is the place of situated knowledge, positionality and politics in our methodologies? How do researchers navigate the differentiated and often conflict-ridden spaces of capital, labor and local communities entangled with global commodity chains ? How might critical perspectives on development, including decolonisation, produce more progressive methodologies? How might historical methodological tools and critical quantitative methods aid in our understanding of contemporary processes of disarticulations in commodity production? How can these studies inform social justice-oriented politics?

Please send name, affiliation and abstracts to Stefan Ouma ([log in to unmask]) by October 15th.

References

Argent N (2017) Rural geography I: Resource peripheries and the creation of new global commodity chains. Progress in Human Geography 43: https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132516660656.

Bair J and Werner M (2011) Commodity Chains and the Uneven Geographies of Global Capitalism: A Disarticulations Perspective. Environment and Planning A 43(5): 988–997.

Bair J, Berndt C, Boeckler M and Werner M (2013) Dis/articulating producers, markets, and regions: new directions in critical studies of commodity chains. Environment and Planning A 45(11): 2544–2552.

Challies E and Murray W (2011) The Interaction of Global Value Chains and Rural Livelihoods: The Case of Smallholder Raspberry Growers in Chile. Journal of Agrarian Change 11(1): 29–59.

Coe NM and Yeung HW-c (2015) Global production networks: Theorizing economic development in an interconnected world. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Maertens M and Swinnen JFM (2009) Trade, Standards, and Poverty: Evidence from Senegal. World Development 37(1): 161–178.

McGrath S (2017) Dis/articulations and the interrogation of development in GPN research. Progress in Human Geography: doi: 10.1177/0309132517700981.

McMichael P (2013) Value-chain Agriculture and Debt Relations: contradictory outcomes. Third World Quarterly 34(4): 671–690.

Neilson J (2014) Value Chains, Neoliberalism and Development Practice: The Indonesian Experience. Review of International Political Economy 21(1): 38–69.

Ince OU (2014) Primitive Accumulation, New Enclosures, and Global Land Grabs: A Theoretical Intervention. Rural Sociology 79(1): 104-131.

Ouma S (2015) Assembling export markets: The making and unmaking of global food connections in West Africa. Chichester, U.K: Wiley-Blackwell.

Tsing AL (2015) The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Wallerstein I and Hopkins T (1986) Commodity Chains in the World Economy Prior to 1800. Review 10(1): 157–170.

Werner M (2016) Global production networks and uneven development: Exploring geographies of devaluation, disinvestment, and exclusion. Geography Compass 10(11): 457–469.

Werner M, Bair J and Fernández VR (2014) Linking Up to Development? Global Value Chains and the Making of a Post-Washington Consensus. Development and Change 45(6): 1219–1247.

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