Ethnographies of Power
Working Radical Concepts with Gillian Hart
Author(s)
Greenburg, Jennifer
Kipfer, Stefan
Contributor(s)
Chari, Sharad (editor)
Hunter, Mark (editor)
Samson, Melanie (editor)
Language
EnglishAbstract
What does it mean to work with radical concepts in our time of rampant inequality, imperial-capitalist plunder, racial/sexual/class violence and ecocide? When concepts from the past seem inadequate, how do scholars and activists concerned with social change decide what concepts to work with or renew? The contributors to Ethnographies of Power address these questions head on.
Gillian Hart is a key thinker in radical political economy, geography, development studies, agrarian studies and Gramscian critique of postcolonial capitalism. In Ethnographies of Power each contributor engages her work and applies it to their own field of study.
These applied concepts include: ‘gendered labour’ practices among South African workers, reading ‘racial capitalism’ through agrarian debates, using ‘relational comparison’ in an ethnography of schooling across Durban, reworking ‘multiple socio-spatial trajectories’ in Guatemala’s Maya Biosphere Reserve, critiquing the notion of South Africa’s ‘second economy’, revisiting ‘development’ processes and ‘Development’ discourses in US military contracting, reconsidering Gramsci’s ‘conjunctures’ geographically, finding divergent ‘articulations’ in Cape Town land occupations, and exploring ‘nationalism’ as central to revaluing recyclables at a Soweto landfill.
Ethnographies of Power offers an invaluable toolkit for activists and scholars engaged in sharpening their critical concepts for the social and environmental change necessary for our collective future.
Keywords
human geography; critical development studies; disabling globalisation; development geography; Gillian Hart; Gramsci; South AfricaDOI
10.18772/22022076666ISBN
9781776146666, 9781776147755, 9781776147717, 9781776146772, 9781776146833Publisher
Wits University PressPublisher website
http://witspress.co.za/Publication date and place
Johannesburg, 2022Series
Critical Thinkers,Classification
Human geography
Social theory