Violet Lawson
Biographic Data
| ID | 244261 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Violet Lawson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Violet |
| FAMILY NAME | Lawson |
| SIGNATURE | LAWSON V |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Washington |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7362-7176 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 50 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1434 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 50 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1985 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 17 |
Repurposing retail space
The retail sector is experiencing unprecedented change, from ongoing shifts in shopping behaviour to retailer rationalisation and business failure. Internationally, this is impacting the crucial economic and social role of many highly developed city centres. This paper examines how key stakeholders have responded to the challenges of adapting city centres for the future. Empirically, the paper draws on a series of repurposing schemes across five …
Portraits for change
We analyze viewers' experiences and understandings of an installation of portraits featuring vendors who sell Seattle's Real Change street newspaper. In doing so, we argue that Real Change is enacting a complex politics of refusal and explore this in relation to future political lives of Real Change activism. We explore political possibilities for the transformation of urban life opened by the politics the exhibit expresses. We analyze the exhibi…
Re‐Politicising Poverty
This collection of essays extends cross‐disciplinary conversations between co‐authors that began as part of a podcast series by the Relational Poverty Network, “New Poverty Politics for Changing Times”. The authors engage impoverishment as a relation, as an outcome of intersecting political projects of racialised oppression, political‐economic injustice and socio‐legal control. Across various sites, the collection’s essays trace poverty politics,…
Humanitarianism as conflicted care
The arts of poverty politics
This paper explores disruptive poverty politics arising from creative activisms that challenge homelessness/impoverishment. We analyze forms and potentials of creative activisms that challenge hegemonic meanings and practices around impoverishment. Bringing together geographers’ work on creative activisms, geographies of art, and the dialectics of thinkable and unthinkable poverty politics; we analyze activism by Real Change, a Seattle economic a…
Repoliticizing poverty
Commentary on 2018 Roepke Lecture “Economic Geography and Ethical Action in the Anthropocene”
CommentaryGibson-Graham et al.’s Roepke Lecture continues a three-decade collaboration that realizes a feminist agenda of challenging patriarchal knowledges through both critique and rebuilding. This body of work entails both vital substantive contributions and also a deeply ethical critique of academic knowledge production that has historically venerated the I while obscuring the always collective practices of building understanding. In its plac…
My Dog is My Home
My Dog is My Home is an art activist project in Los Angeles dedicated to sharing testimonies about the redemptive bonds of care and love between homeless persons and their canine companions. These testimonies politicize the structural violence and oppressive norms about propertied citizenship and notions of home that operate to render homeless human and animal lives disposable and ungrievable. Informed by the experts’ testimonies on multispecies …
Geographical relational poverty studies
Relationality is a persistent concern of socio-spatial theory, increasingly invoked in geographical scholarship. We bring geographical scholarship on relationality to bear on relational poverty studies, an emergent body of work that challenges mainstream approaches to conceptualizing, explaining, researching and acting upon poverty. We argue that relationality scholarship provides ontological, theoretical, and epistemological interventions that e…
Neutralizing Homelessness
Peter Marcuse’s (1988) “Neutralizing Homelessness” was written at a moment of unprecedented homelessness in the United States and rising homeless activism and advocacy. The paper issued a radical c
Middle-Class Poverty Politics
In a context of rising inequality and economic vulnerability in the United States, we explore links between class identities, urban place-making, and poverty politics. We ask how class difference and poverty politics are made and remade in neighborhood-level place-making and with what implications for boundaries and alliances between middle-class and poorer residents. Place-making refers to activities through which residents work to produce the n…
The poor are us
We investigate middle-class poverty politics in Seattle and Buenos Aires in a period of recovery from deep neoliberal economic crisis. Reading these cases in relation to one another allows us to examine what sorts of class subjects emerge in the US, which is theorized as remaining deeply entrenched in neoliberal governance and Argentina, conceptualized as postneoliberal. We investigate the poverty politics of middle-class residents engaged in ant…
The Sage Handbook of Human Geography
Encountering Poverty
Our paper focuses on moments and spaces of encounter in which middle class people come into contact with “poor others”. Much critical poverty work focuses on the re-inscription of difference across class, race and gender lines. We explore where, when and how middle class actors engage with “poor others” in ways that (sometimes) lead to shifts in neoliberal and individualized understandings of poverty. Our paper explores boundary-breaking transfor…
Commentary
Decentring poverty studies
Editors' Note : The following is the tenth in the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography Lecture Series . It is based on the plenary presentation of 13 April at the AAG held in Seattle in 2011. In this essay I explore relational poverty analysis to take seriously the spatially varied intersections of political-economic, social ordering and cultural-political processes in shaping understandings of poverty. My work as part of the Middle Class Pove…
Care of the body
Care—concept, emotion, practice, politics, moral exhortation—is a starting point for a range of critical geographies. Care affords geographers a richness of possibilities through which to engage critically with a range of politically charged discourses. This special issue offers a suite of ‘think’ pieces on geographies of care which provoke further examination of three challenges. First, we need conceptual strategies to explore the connections of…
Recentring care
We trace how the category of care comes to be constituted historically and in social theory in ways that privilege the autonomous individual as economic agent and, in the process, renders care a problematic residual to social order and social theory. We investigate how theoretical categories, social relations, institutional orders and discursive practices separate care and economy in ways that constitute those in need (including the impoverished)…
Composing our careers
Susan Hanson's career exemplifies the notion that our lives are compositions rather than predictable, linear trajectories. In this essay I argue that Susan's career is an empowering example of a collage of woven-together life experiences, substantive research interests, feminist values and progressive professional practices. I illustrate these ideas through three compositions that I trace throughout Susan's career: networking gender; caring geogr…
Articulations of Place, Poverty, and Race
This project extends poverty research by addressing the lack of knowledge about place and race differences in poverty processes (Blank 2005 Blank, R. 2005. Poverty, policy and place: How poverty and policies to alleviate poverty are shaped by local characteristics. Regional Science Review, 28(4): 441–64. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Rural places experience a range of modes of articulation within the global division of rural…
Reshaping Economic Geography? Producing Spaces of Inclusive Development
The World Development Report 2009 discusses a crucial development challenge-that of understanding spatially uneven development. The report lays out a series of policy responses to spatial unevenness that are intended to mobilize the growth-enhancing advantages of unbalanced development while ensuring inclusive development. However, the report mobilizes a narrow view of economic development that is disconnected from place, politics, and society. I…
Indigenous Wetland Burning
Instead of Radical Geography, How About Caring Geography
Building economies from the bottom up
This paper examines interconnected processes of economic restructuring and representations of poor subjects that rely on imaginaries of race, ethnicity, class and rural space. We argue that poverty and privilege are mutually produced and so we focus on the representational practices of White leaders in persistently poor counties across the American Northwest. We draw from case study research to understand region-wide material and discursive proce…
Introduction
We live in a world of growing fearfulness, one in which interrogating deployments of both fear and of hope become ever more necessary. Fear and hope are powerful emotions that shape human actions i
Geographies of Care and Responsibility
Across the decades geographers have been concerned with questions of our ethical responsibilities to care. It would seem that care is nothing new in geography. I argue however, that contemporary societal shifts are extending market relations into caring realms of our lives and that we are witnessing reductions in public provision of social supports. These twin trends have made care a more pressing concern and have simultaneously marginalized care…
Arguments within geographies of movement
In this article, I engage the ways in which migrants' experiences are socially constructed and situated in particular political-economic and cultural contexts in meaningful ways. Drawing on migrants' own stories, I examine the ways in which social relations of gender and ethnicity shape their experiences. The analysis examines the interplay of desires, identities and subjectives in multiple sites in order to understand processes of belonging, exc…
Locating Globalization
The literatures on economic globalization and feminist understandings of global processes have largely remained separate. In this article, our goal is to bring them into productive conversation so that research on globalization can benefit from feminist engagements with globalization. In the first section, which focuses on the conceptual challenges of bringing the economic globalization literature into conversation with feminist analysis, we iden…
Recentring care
We trace how the category of care comes to be constituted historically and in social theory in ways that privilege the autonomous individual as economic agent and, in the process, renders care a problematic residual to social order and social theory. We investigate how theoretical categories, social relations, institutional orders and discursive practices separate care and economy in ways that constitute those in need (including the impoverished)…
Hierarchical households and gendered migration in Latin America
In this review essay, the author argues that migration theory can be advanced by analyzing gender differences in migration processes. The author brings together feminist empirical work from diverse settings within Latin America in order to illustrate and discuss theoretical extensions to migration research. In particular, the discussion focuses on the centrality of intra-household power relations and dynamics for understanding who migrates, and w…
Geographical relational poverty studies
Relationality is a persistent concern of socio-spatial theory, increasingly invoked in geographical scholarship. We bring geographical scholarship on relationality to bear on relational poverty studies, an emergent body of work that challenges mainstream approaches to conceptualizing, explaining, researching and acting upon poverty. We argue that relationality scholarship provides ontological, theoretical, and epistemological interventions that e…
Care of the body
Care—concept, emotion, practice, politics, moral exhortation—is a starting point for a range of critical geographies. Care affords geographers a richness of possibilities through which to engage critically with a range of politically charged discourses. This special issue offers a suite of ‘think’ pieces on geographies of care which provoke further examination of three challenges. First, we need conceptual strategies to explore the connections of…
Placing the Migrant
This article presents a review of geographic research literature on migration locations and theoretical conceptions of migrants. This focus reveals important continuities in themes of migration theories of development identity and culture and illustrates the options for exploring new issues. The literature indicates a broad range of research methods that have benefited understanding over time. A more critical perspective on development as a disco…
Decentring poverty studies
Editors' Note : The following is the tenth in the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography Lecture Series . It is based on the plenary presentation of 13 April at the AAG held in Seattle in 2011. In this essay I explore relational poverty analysis to take seriously the spatially varied intersections of political-economic, social ordering and cultural-political processes in shaping understandings of poverty. My work as part of the Middle Class Pove…
Encountering Poverty
Our paper focuses on moments and spaces of encounter in which middle class people come into contact with “poor others”. Much critical poverty work focuses on the re-inscription of difference across class, race and gender lines. We explore where, when and how middle class actors engage with “poor others” in ways that (sometimes) lead to shifts in neoliberal and individualized understandings of poverty. Our paper explores boundary-breaking transfor…
Sophisticated People Versus Rednecks”
In this paper, we argue for the importance of constructing a human geography of white class difference. More particularly, we present a theoretical framework for understanding the cultural politics of class and whiteness in the context of rural restructuring. We theorize these politics through an examination of the national discourse of redneck that has emerged in the US. We analyze the term “redneck” as one of several rhetorical categories that …
Instead of Radical Geography, How About Caring Geography
Middle-Class Poverty Politics
In a context of rising inequality and economic vulnerability in the United States, we explore links between class identities, urban place-making, and poverty politics. We ask how class difference and poverty politics are made and remade in neighborhood-level place-making and with what implications for boundaries and alliances between middle-class and poorer residents. Place-making refers to activities through which residents work to produce the n…
Beyond the Firm
In this study I investigate social adjustments emerging under neoliberal austerity policies in Ecuador. In particular, I focus on the processes of informalization and feminization of garment manufacture as Ecuadorian producers attempt to remain viable in a radically opened economy. A central premise of this study is that gendered labor supplies in places are significant to the form that industry restructuring assumes. The analysis draws on extens…
Building economies from the bottom up
This paper examines interconnected processes of economic restructuring and representations of poor subjects that rely on imaginaries of race, ethnicity, class and rural space. We argue that poverty and privilege are mutually produced and so we focus on the representational practices of White leaders in persistently poor counties across the American Northwest. We draw from case study research to understand region-wide material and discursive proce…
My Dog is My Home
My Dog is My Home is an art activist project in Los Angeles dedicated to sharing testimonies about the redemptive bonds of care and love between homeless persons and their canine companions. These testimonies politicize the structural violence and oppressive norms about propertied citizenship and notions of home that operate to render homeless human and animal lives disposable and ungrievable. Informed by the experts’ testimonies on multispecies …
Introduction
We live in a world of growing fearfulness, one in which interrogating deployments of both fear and of hope become ever more necessary. Fear and hope are powerful emotions that shape human actions i
Articulations of Place, Poverty, and Race
This project extends poverty research by addressing the lack of knowledge about place and race differences in poverty processes (Blank 2005 Blank, R. 2005. Poverty, policy and place: How poverty and policies to alleviate poverty are shaped by local characteristics. Regional Science Review, 28(4): 441–64. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Rural places experience a range of modes of articulation within the global division of rural…
Industrial subcontracting and employment forms in Latin America
Re‐Politicising Poverty
This collection of essays extends cross‐disciplinary conversations between co‐authors that began as part of a podcast series by the Relational Poverty Network, “New Poverty Politics for Changing Times”. The authors engage impoverishment as a relation, as an outcome of intersecting political projects of racialised oppression, political‐economic injustice and socio‐legal control. Across various sites, the collection’s essays trace poverty politics,…
Indigenous Wetland Burning
Migration in Third World Settings, Uneven Development, and Conventional Modeling
This paper examines how an area's development milieu affects the various components of the migration process. After reviewing the literature on migration-development interrelationships, we employ conventional statistical modeling to understand movement among Costa Rican cantons during a five-year period (1968–73). This is done for the country as a whole, enabling cross-national comparisons with earlier studies, and for urban-to-urban, urban-to-ru…
Humanitarianism as conflicted care
Tailoring is a Profession, Seamstressing is Work! Resiting Work and Reworking Gender Identities among Artisanal Garment Workers in Quito
Geographers have paid relatively little attention to the processes by which occupations and sites of work become gendered. This case study of Ecuador provides a template for examining how gender identities are constituted in the physical and discursive sites of paid work. Neoliberal restructuring in Ecuador has wrought dramatic changes on work and daily life in Quito. Specifically, economic restructuring is producing new spaces of work in garment…
Reshaping Economic Geography? Producing Spaces of Inclusive Development
The World Development Report 2009 discusses a crucial development challenge-that of understanding spatially uneven development. The report lays out a series of policy responses to spatial unevenness that are intended to mobilize the growth-enhancing advantages of unbalanced development while ensuring inclusive development. However, the report mobilizes a narrow view of economic development that is disconnected from place, politics, and society. I…
Rural-destined migration in Third World settings
This paper 1st reviews earlier research on rural-destined migration in Third World settings, in order to derive generalizations for a topic most often treated in idiosyncratic fashion. Descriptive analysis of all Costa Rican migration flows for 1968-73 then establishes that a surprisingly high proportion are rural directed. Finally, statistical analyses identify differences, in terms of explanatory variables, between urban-and rural-destined migr…
Migration in Third World Settings, Uneven Development, and Conventional Modeling
This paper examines how an area's development milieu affects the various components of the migration process. After reviewing the literature on migration-development interrelationships, we employ conventional statistical modeling to understand movement among Costa Rican cantons during a five-year period (1968–73). This is done for the country as a whole, enabling cross-national comparisons with earlier studies, and for urban-to-urban, urban-to-ru…
Government Policy Biases and Ecuadorian Agricultural Change
This paper examines links between national policy, agricultural production regimes, and regional economic change in Ecuador. Social and spatial policy biases relate to the presence of qualitatively different production structures in Ecuadorian agriculture—distinguished by their social relations of production and articulation into the capitalist economy. I investigate links between policy, agricultural production regime, and regional economic chan…
Spontaneous Shelter
1. Evolution of Third World Shelter Policies Elizabeth Kubale Palmer and Carl V. Patton 2. Geographic Perspectives on Spontaneous Shelter W. Donald McTaggert 3. Spontaneous Settlements as Vernacular Design Amos Rapoport 4. Self-Help Housing Technology David Evan Glasser 5. Environmental Issues in Spontaneous Settlements G. William Page 6. Informal Settlement in Latin America and Its Policy Implications Ernest R. Alexander 7. The Growing Housing C…
Work force fragmentation in Latin America and its empirical manifestations in Ecuador
The Location of Jobs in a Developing Metropolis. Patterns of Growth in Bogota and Cali, Colombia
Conceptual Linkages in the Study of Production and Reproduction in Latin American Cities
Victoria Lawson, Thomas Klak, Conceptual Linkages in the Study of Production and Reproduction in Latin American Cities, Economic Geography, Vol. 66, No. 4, Production and Reproduction in Latin American Cities: Concepts, Linkages, and Empirical Trends (Oct., 1990), pp. 310-327
An Introduction to Current Research on Latin American Cities
Thomas Klak, Victoria Lawson, An Introduction to Current Research on Latin American Cities, Economic Geography, Vol. 66, No. 4, Production and Reproduction in Latin American Cities: Concepts, Linkages, and Empirical Trends (Oct., 1990), pp. 305-309
Employment versus empowerment
This research re‐evaluates the female marginalisation thesis through an examination of the changing nature of work in Latin America and of women's incorporation into paid employment. We combine labour market segementation theory, which explains the emergence of low level occupations in terms of capitalist restructuring, with feminist theory, which explains why women become concentrated in inferior positions. We operationalise this reconceptualisa…
Industrial subcontracting and employment forms in Latin America
Commentary
Michael Storper, Victoria Lawson, Commentary: [Industrialization, Economic Development, and the Regional Question in the Third World], Economic Geography, Vol. 68, No. 4, Local Labor Markets (Oct., 1992), pp. 448-451
Flexibility and Contingency as Keys to Understanding Industrialization in Latin America
An Argument for Critical and Comparative Research on the Urban Economic Geography of the Americas
The authors identify problems associated with the treatment of Latin American topics in the Anglo-American social science literature, particularly in geography. Latin American research has been peripheralized and the flow of concepts and learning between Latin and Anglo America has been almost entirely from North to South. To explain why research by Latin Americans, and by Latin Americanists, has had relatively limited influence on recent geograp…
A Discussion of “Women in the Field”
(1994). A Discussion of “Women in the Field”: The Politics of Feminist Fieldwork. The Professional Geographer: Vol. 46, No. 1, pp. 96-102.
Beyond the Firm
In this study I investigate social adjustments emerging under neoliberal austerity policies in Ecuador. In particular, I focus on the processes of informalization and feminization of garment manufacture as Ecuadorian producers attempt to remain viable in a radically opened economy. A central premise of this study is that gendered labor supplies in places are significant to the form that industry restructuring assumes. The analysis draws on extens…
Gender, migration and the organisation of work under economic devolution
This paper focuses on labour force segments defined on the basis of migrant status and gender, in terms of the impact of economic devolution related to structural adjustment policies (SAPs). In this context, gender has received attention primarily since 1990, while the migrant/non-migrant section of the labour force remains to be tackled. Impact is calibrated for labour force segments based on gender, migration status, and both combined. Data rep…
Hierarchical households and gendered migration in Latin America
In this review essay, the author argues that migration theory can be advanced by analyzing gender differences in migration processes. The author brings together feminist empirical work from diverse settings within Latin America in order to illustrate and discuss theoretical extensions to migration research. In particular, the discussion focuses on the centrality of intra-household power relations and dynamics for understanding who migrates, and w…
Questions of migration and belonging
Migration studies across the social sciences are tackling exciting questions about the importance of local narratives of migration and the insights they can give on the importance of dialectical treatments of the places of migration. In this paper I explore alternative understandings and experiences of migration, drawing on in-depth interviews with urban-destined migrants in Ecuador to argue that mobility produces ambivalent development subjects.…
Placing the Migrant
This article presents a review of geographic research literature on migration locations and theoretical conceptions of migrants. This focus reveals important continuities in themes of migration theories of development identity and culture and illustrates the options for exploring new issues. The literature indicates a broad range of research methods that have benefited understanding over time. A more critical perspective on development as a disco…
Tailoring is a Profession, Seamstressing is Work! Resiting Work and Reworking Gender Identities among Artisanal Garment Workers in Quito
Geographers have paid relatively little attention to the processes by which occupations and sites of work become gendered. This case study of Ecuador provides a template for examining how gender identities are constituted in the physical and discursive sites of paid work. Neoliberal restructuring in Ecuador has wrought dramatic changes on work and daily life in Quito. Specifically, economic restructuring is producing new spaces of work in garment…
Arguments within geographies of movement
In this article, I engage the ways in which migrants' experiences are socially constructed and situated in particular political-economic and cultural contexts in meaningful ways. Drawing on migrants' own stories, I examine the ways in which social relations of gender and ethnicity shape their experiences. The analysis examines the interplay of desires, identities and subjectives in multiple sites in order to understand processes of belonging, exc…
Sophisticated People Versus Rednecks”
In this paper, we argue for the importance of constructing a human geography of white class difference. More particularly, we present a theoretical framework for understanding the cultural politics of class and whiteness in the context of rural restructuring. We theorize these politics through an examination of the national discourse of redneck that has emerged in the US. We analyze the term “redneck” as one of several rhetorical categories that …
Locating Globalization
The literatures on economic globalization and feminist understandings of global processes have largely remained separate. In this article, our goal is to bring them into productive conversation so that research on globalization can benefit from feminist engagements with globalization. In the first section, which focuses on the conceptual challenges of bringing the economic globalization literature into conversation with feminist analysis, we iden…
Hopeful Geographies
Introduction
We live in a world of growing fearfulness, one in which interrogating deployments of both fear and of hope become ever more necessary. Fear and hope are powerful emotions that shape human actions i
Political science (40 works) · Sociology (31 works) · Geography (28 works) · Economics (20 works) · Law (20 works) · Politics (18 works) · Economic geography (14 works) · Gender Studies (14 works) · Poverty (13 works) · Law (11 works)