McKenzie Marcia - Place in research: theory, methodology, and methods

An increased focus on place in critical research matters because it enables greater attention to the ways in which land and environmental issues intersect with social issues and social life. Just some examples of these intersections include the following:

• Issues of borders, displacement, and (re)place-making for diasporic and refugee populations
• War and militarism in relation to territorial identification or expansion
• The role of spatial and place-based practices in colonialism and settler colonialism, from practices of property ownership to those of the environmental poisoning of fish and wildlife on Indigenous traditional territories
• Access to healthy food, equitable education, or the uneven geographic distribution of other social services within urban environments based on racialization, gender, or economic disparities
• Municipal and regional inequities in the distribution of environmental harms, such as the location of industrial or nuclear waste storage
• Global North-South inequities in which those regions and populations hardest hit are those least responsible for climate change
• Human-caused harm and extinction of other forms of life
• Intergenerational injustices entailed in loss of places and species, and the increasing possibility of human extinction due to climate change

The conditions for these and other interwoven social and environmental forms of injustice have been created by long histories of hierarchical divisions among peoples, to other species, to the land. Legacies and ongoing practices of Empire and globalization, racialization and privilege, and destructive land management practices, exacerbated by industrialization, capitalism, and increasing global mobility, have created circumstances in which inequalities on almost all scales are increasing (e.g., inequalities in financial wealth within most countries, global economic inequalities between countries, interspecies injustice, intergenerational injustice) (IPCC, 2013).

Neoliberalism, as a term used to describe currently dominant global and globalizing governance systems, promotes free-market conditions that prioritize corporations and economic growth over considerations of social equity or environmental protection. As Peck (2013) suggests, neoliberalization processes should be viewed as operating alongside other dominant trajectories, such as those of globalization, as well as taking hybrid forms in relation to more localized histories and priorities. While variegated across nations and social contexts, various formations of neoliberalism can be understood to share an emphasis on privatization, public-sector austerity, tax cuts, and regulatory restraint. For our discussions here, we particularly want to point out a less articulated characteristic of neoliberalism as a current formation of capitalism and Empire, which is the reliance on territory and the natural environment to fuel unsustainable and colonialist economies.

One component of this largely absent analysis of political systems in relation to land is the relationship between capitalism and the biophysical. This comprises a focus in Neil Smiths (2008) book Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space , which Noel Castree (2007) summarizes as follows:

Smith argues that the biophysical world is both a condition of, and propellant to, capitals uneven development in space and time. This is true not only in the case of nature-dependent industries and areas (think of agricultural, forestry and mining districts, or fisheries communities). It is more generally true for capital writ-large, since ultimately all aspects of capitalist society are nature-dependent in some way, shape or form: the making, moving, selling, servicing, consuming and disposal of any and all commodities necessarily requires raw materials, energy sources, physical spaces and waste disposal opportunities. It follows, for Smith, that uneven development is simultaneously a political economic and biophysical process. Capitals restless search for new investment opportunities and new markets routinely entails: (i) the abandonment of no longer productive zones (where the conditions of production may be deteriorating and too costly or risky to fix); (ii) biophysical changes in virgin territories because new energy- and raw-material intensive infrastructures may emerge combined with new productive activities that may themselves make large biophysical demands; and (iii) the use of these territories as absorption zones for surplus capital from growth regions, including myriad resource-commodities like trees, foodstuffs and minerals in search of market opportunities. At moments of crisis economic, political and reproductiveenvironmental problems in one area can become the impetus for new rounds of biophysical transformation elsewhere as capital switches (often speculatively) into new growth areas. But even in non-crisis conditions, Smith argues, the compulsion to work existing biophysical assets harder and seek-out new ones is part-and-parcel of capitalisms normal functioning. (pp. 3233)