J Wainwright
Biographic Data
| ID | 46544 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J Wainwright |
| GIVEN NAMES | J |
| FAMILY NAME | Wainwright |
| SIGNATURE | WAINWRIGHT J |
| AFFILIATIONS | The Ohio State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4401-9606 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 71 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 661 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 71 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
The techno-feudalism hypothesis is also wrong on political grounds
Trade, trust, and geopolitics
Capitalism qua development in an era of planetary crisis
Ecological crisis, massive inequality and war: our world is at a dangerous tipping point. Yet the present global crisis defies simple description and is difficult to explain. To clarify, it is argued that the character of the world crisis today is triple: ecological, economic and political. Underlying all three dimensions is the capitalist form of world society. The consolidation of this capitalist form was accompanied by the emergence of the con…
Between feminism and partisanship
This paper examines the historical trajectory of the women's movement in Belize, focusing on a critical period (1975-1993).We draw upon original sources from archival research coupled with interviews with Belizean women to interpret the rise and decline of the women's movement.The movement in Belize emerged in the late 1970s and peaked during the 1980s.At the height of the movement, female-led NGOs organized women across Belize with the goal of e…
Class processes and agrarian change in southern Belize, 1981–2020
Environmental and agrarian changes are proceeding rapidly in southern Belize. Despite common recognition of these changes, little research has attempted to examine the class processes involved in social and environmental change. We trace how capitalism has transformed household reproduction over the past four decades, focusing on two key pathways by which these changes unfold: the commercialization of land use and the education of the labour forc…
No privacy, no peace
In mid-2020, the movement for Black liberation reached a new stage after the murder of George Floyd generated unprecedented urban protests against racial injustice. Two years on, these appeals have not translated into widespread policy change. We analyze the movement’s relationship to the U.S. state, focusing on state surveillance of the movement. To grasp this, we consider four distinct but intersecting historical processes: first, the long-stan…
The Maya and the Belizean state
Like indigenous peoples across the hemisphere, the Maya of southern Belize have long struggled to decolonize their ancestral lands. For over four decades, the ‘Maya movement’ has clashed with the state, yielding mixed results. After a series of favorable court decisions, the Maya communities have won legal claim to their lands. However, the government of Belize has not substantively addressed this decision, and the rural Maya communities of Toled…
The Ethics of Geography–Military Relations
This is a reply to the commentaries on a critique of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) Geography and Military Study Committee Report. We discuss the recent changes to the AAG Statement of Professional Ethics, focusing on two new passages concerning the involvement of the military in geographical research. We conclude with four actionable suggestions for the AAG
The political economy of development in Belize under the People’s United Party
The former British colony of Belize faces serious economic problems today, reflecting a collapse in tourism following COVID-19. To account for this fragility, a return to economic history is needed. We focus on two critical periods. First, we examine why the Belizean state was unable to form a developmental state in the period of the anticolonial movement and self-government (the 1950s–1960s). Particular attention is given to George Price, leader…
Contradiction and restructuring in the Belt and Road Initiative
The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a massive Chinese state/capitalist programme of transnational infrastructure construction initiated in 2013. Between 2013 and 2016, Chinese banks extended hundreds of billions of dollars –principally across Asia, but also Europe and Africa – for transportation and energy networks. Recently released statistics, however, suggest that project lending for the BRI collapsed from 2016 onwards. Our paper examines th…
Praxis
This essay provides a concise review of the meanings of praxis, emphasizing its complex evolution since Aristotle formulated it within a triad of concepts. While the transformation of the concept owes something to Hegel, Marx’s writings in 1844–6 (not fully published until the twentieth century) gave praxis a central role in Left philosophy. Yet this inheritance is complex and uncertain. Notwithstanding many profound elaborations on the philosoph…
Leveraging monopoly power up the value chain
Changes in food consumption in an indigenous community in southern Belize, 1979-2019
In recent years, scholars have studied the complex social and economic transformations of Belizean Maya livelihoods resulting from the historical legacies of British and Spanish colonization and the consolidation of capitalist social relations. However, little research has considered how the pathways through which indigenous Maya households procure food are being transformed. This paper examines changes in indigenous livelihoods over time, drawin…
Marx’s “Capital” after 150 Years
The sesquicentennial of the publication of Marx’s first volume of Capital generated renewed interest in his masterwork and resulted in the publication of numerous reassessments. Musto’s (2019) edit
How Does the Law Obtain Its Space? Justice and Racial difference in Colonial Law
Is Critical Human Geography Research Replicable
The debate concerning replicable scientific research has reached geography’s shores. This has exposed old fault lines in our discipline, because some forms of geographical inquiry are more amenable to replicability than others. If there is a corner of the discipline that seems especially ill-suited to replicability, it is critical human geography. Almost no work in the subfield exhibits the combination of qualities-explicit and replicable methods…
The Colonial Origins of the State in Southern Belize
Recent research in Belizean historiography has improved our understanding of twentieth-century colonial state relations and the transition to the post-colonial authoritarian democratic state. Following a concise review of these works, I draw on archival documents to examine the origins of the British state in southern Belize. This analysis provides two principal findings. First, the earliest state institutions were founded at the behest of coloni…
A Critical Commentary on the AAG Geography and Military Study Committee Report
The formation of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) Geography and Military Study Committee by the AAG Council in April 2017 and the submission of the report by the Committee to Council in February 2019 were important events for the discipline. Yet, to date, the Committee’s report has received very little attention or comment. This article provides a critical analysis, focusing on the report’s claim that the AAG should leave it up to in…
How Not to Think about Climate Change
Fifty years ago, Auguste Rodin’s famous work The Thinker was bombed at the Cleveland Museum of Art. This essay uses the occasion and the artwork to reflect upon the challenge of thinking amidst the climate crisis
Capital and Climate in Times of Coronavirus
In this essay, the authors of Climate Leviathan reply to their critics
Human Geography, Indigenous Mapping, and the US Military
In 2017, Cartographica published an article that criticized some human geographers for misguided oversensitivity to the use of funding from the US military to map indigenous lands. According to Kelly and others, geographers who map indigenous lands with funding from the US military – as they have done in Honduras – do not compromise the discipline’s ethical norms as long as they openly reveal their source of funds. We re-evaluate this claim by co…
Capital and Social Difference in Gramsci and Luxemburg
Antonio Gramsci's prison notebooks are widely celebrated for their theorization of the political and of hegemony in capitalist society. We may also read the notebooks as works analyzing conditions where capitalist social relations are prevalent, but where pre- and noncapitalist social relations have only partially decomposed. This opens the way for situating them alongside Rosa Luxemburg's less well-known writings, including her unpublished priso…
Capitalism, imperialism, and modes of exchange
This paper is a response to Kojin Karatani's article, “Neoliberalism as a historical stage”. Wainwright argues that Karatani elucidates the relationship between capitalism, imperialism, and empire by extending the mode of exchange theory Karatani has been developing over his career. Wainwright explains Karatani's radical reinterpretation of Marxist theory of empire and imperialism, distinguished based on their predominant mode of exchange: empire…
Science in ‘the storm’
What constitutes science? What is the relation between scientific practice and capitalist modernity? What are the responsibilities of scientists in the face of our planetary crisis? In 2016 the Zapatistas of Chiapas organized an event to reflect upon and discuss the practice and politics of science. This paper — based on a script of a presentation at the event — takes up these questions, drawing from radical thought and philosophy of science to c…
Where Is the Marxist Critique of Israel/Palestine
This essay argues for the urgent necessity of developing a new Marxist analysis and political horizon for Palestine/Israel. Two factors coalesce to affirm this conclusion: the near absence from contemporary academic writing of any discernibly Marxist analyses of Palestine/Israel and the deep crisis of the 1990s leftist project of peace, whose decline has not spurred a leftist alternative to it. The authors suggest several explanations for this st…
Cartography, territory, property
The attention given to indigenous peoples' use of maps to make claims to land and rights of self-government raises the question: what exactly it is that these maps do? This paper outlines an analytic for examining indigenous mapping projects, drawing upon two prominent instances - by the Maya of Belize and the Mayangna community of Awas Tingni in Nicaragua - where human rights lawsuits have been woven together with participatory mapping. In each …
Climate Leviathan
While there is much justifiable attention to the ecological implications of global climate change, the political implications are just as important for human well-being and social justice. This article posits a framework for understanding the range of political possibilities in light of the response of global elites to climate warming and the challenges it poses to hegemonic institutional and conceptual modes of governance and accumulation. The a…
The Value of Nature to the State
In recent years geographers have produced a considerable literature on the creation of markets in environmental goods and services. This literature reveals numerous complications with such market-based conservation strategies, yet it has failed to address the conception of value that underlies capitalism and drives the capitalist state. To address this gap, we offer an analysis of how the concept of the value of nature has been taken up in U.S. e…
Geopolitical economy and the production of territory
Recent work in political geography and Marxist, critical political economy has refocused attention on the interrelations between political economy and geopolitics. This paper examines the contributions of Antonio Gramsci to the theory of geopolitical economy and the production of territory. Doing so enables two key insights. First, explaining the production of territory requires unraveling multiple-sometimes competing-levels of geopolitical and g…
Territorialization, science and the colonial state
This paper examines a recent conflict over the rerouting of Highway 55 in the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota. During a three-year struggle over the project, a group of indigenous people argued that the space where the highway would pass was sacred and of historical importance. We analyse a Cultural Resource Assessment prepared by a team of scientists that responded to these claims and cleared the way for the reroute. Our reading, which draws from…
After Post-Development
The post-development school associated with the thought of Arturo Escobar treats development as a discursive invention of the West, best countered by ethnographic attention to local knowledge of people marginalised by colonial modernity. This approach promises paths to more equitable and sustainable alternatives to development. Post-development has been criticised vigorously in the past. But despite its conceptual and political shortcomings, it r…
Muddying the waters
This book forum extends a discussion that Laura Pulido first organized around Richa Nagar’s Muddying the Waters: Coauthoring Feminisms Across Scholarship and Activism at the 2015 Annual Meeting of
The Battles in Seattle
The dilemma of decontamination
The Geographies of Political Ecology
This paper offers theoretical reflections on a series of questions raised by the shift in political ecology from the Third World to the First: what precisely constitutes a context for political ecology? How does something come to be a space or region that calls for political ecology? To respond to these questions, I argue for a turn to the thought of Edward Said, who articulates a Gramscian approach to geography that calls into question the const…
On Gramsci’s ‘conceptions of the world’
Antonio Gramsci is widely celebrated for his conceptualisation of hegemony. This paper elucidates a related concept that appears frequently in Gramsci’s prison notebooks yet has been surprisingly under-emphasised: ‘conceptions of the world’. By conceptions of the world, Gramsci refers to things that inform our understanding of the world and our place in it. Each conception of the world is inherently practical and philosophical, relational and pol…
Climate Change, Capitalism, and the Challenge of Transdisciplinarity
A new sense of urgency has grown among many scientists for policies to address climate change, resulting in unprecedented investments by scientists in public education and, in some cases, political activism. As climate scientists have investigated future climate scenarios—and potential social responses to environmental changes—they have become, ipso facto, social scientists. This article examines these changes to reflect on how they could reshape…
The U.S. Military and Human Geography
In recent years, the U.S. military-intelligence community has shown a growing interest in human geography. This article examines the available literature to consider this trend. I contend that the growing military-intelligence use of human geography, both as a concept and as a practice, deserves critical scrutiny. Although military involvement in geographical research is a long-standing and well-recognized fact, the growing emphasis on human geog…
Climate change and the transgenic adaptation strategy
Climate Change and the Adaptation of the Political
In the face of climate change, along what path might we attempt transformation that could create a just and livable planet? Recently we proposed a framework for anticipating the possible political–economic forms that might emerge as the world's climate changes. Our framework outlines four possible paths; two of those paths are defined by what is called “Leviathan, ” the emergence of a form of planetary sovereignty. In this article we elaborate by…
Nature, Economy, and the Space — Place Distinction
This paper reconsiders the distinction between the concepts of space and place. We argue that, rather than favoring one side of the place – space division, or dissolving the partition between them, the distinction needs to be maintained because it is a key site of Western metaphysics. Specifically, the distinction between space and place cannot be abandoned or easily altered because it remains inextricably entangled with other key concepts. Drawi…
The Battles in Miami
In November 2003 thousands of demonstrators staged protests in the streets of Miami while trade ministers from across the hemisphere met for the Eighth Ministerial of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). Accounts of these events tend to rehearse a common narrative about mass urban protests that frame such demonstrations as a conflict between proglobalization governments and antiglobalization activists. This narrative focuses on the physica…
Mad cow militancy
Agamben, Postcoloniality, and Sovereignty in South Korea
This paper examines modern Korean politics through the framework of Giorgio Agamben's theories of sovereign power, bare life, and the state of exception. Though his political analysis draws from the European history, we contend that the nature of his method attests to the possibility of analogical examples in non‐Western places. Thus, we argue that a postcolonial encounter with Agamben may enrich our understanding of sovereignty and political geo…
Critique is impossible without moves’
In this dialogue, geographer Joel Wainwright interviews the celebrated Marxist philosopher, Kojin Karatani. Their wide-ranging discussion examines key concepts by a series of philosophers – especially Kant, Marx, Hegel and Derrida – through an analysis of several core geographical concerns: the spatial organization of global capitalism, the formation of empires and territorial nation states, the current economic crisis, and more. The interview co…
Battles in Seattle Redux
This paper examines the possibilities and complexities of transnationalism through an analysis of political protests organized in Seattle against the Korea–US Free Trade Agreement, arguably the most significant bilateral trade negotiations involving the US state today. By studying the political practices of the Korean farmers' movement through participant research in Seattle from 4 to 9 September 2006, and revisiting the analysis of the 1999 “bat…
Contradiction and restructuring in the Belt and Road Initiative
The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a massive Chinese state/capitalist programme of transnational infrastructure construction initiated in 2013. Between 2013 and 2016, Chinese banks extended hundreds of billions of dollars –principally across Asia, but also Europe and Africa – for transportation and energy networks. Recently released statistics, however, suggest that project lending for the BRI collapsed from 2016 onwards. Our paper examines th…
The first duties of persons living in a civilized community’
In recent years, historical geography has been at the forefront of new scholarship on the spatiality of colonial power and its complex relations with indigenous communities. This literature shows that imperial policies – emerging through state and scientific institutions, cultural practices, and capitalist ventures – required particular ways of conceptualizing, mapping, and organizing spaces and territories which transformed the geographies of in…
Is Critical Human Geography Research Replicable
The debate concerning replicable scientific research has reached geography’s shores. This has exposed old fault lines in our discipline, because some forms of geographical inquiry are more amenable to replicability than others. If there is a corner of the discipline that seems especially ill-suited to replicability, it is critical human geography. Almost no work in the subfield exhibits the combination of qualities-explicit and replicable methods…
From a New Deal to Projekt Deal
Dating the Bronze Age in Spain
How can archaeologists combine and use C14 determinations when they have irregular recalibrated dates? This question is solved by an example with six determinations from the Bronze Age settlement of El Castillo in the mountains of eastern Spain. For the first time we can date precisely the end of the Eneolithic to 2150–2110 BC, and the start of a Bronze Age expansion stage by 1960 BC. Each has a distinctive material culture; that of the Bronze Ag…
The Battles in Seattle
Territorialization, science and the colonial state
This paper examines a recent conflict over the rerouting of Highway 55 in the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota. During a three-year struggle over the project, a group of indigenous people argued that the space where the highway would pass was sacred and of historical importance. We analyse a Cultural Resource Assessment prepared by a team of scientists that responded to these claims and cleared the way for the reroute. Our reading, which draws from…
Politics of nature
Bruno Latour: Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004a. See especially Bruno Latour and S. Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social ...
The Geographies of Political Ecology
This paper offers theoretical reflections on a series of questions raised by the shift in political ecology from the Third World to the First: what precisely constitutes a context for political ecology? How does something come to be a space or region that calls for political ecology? To respond to these questions, I argue for a turn to the thought of Edward Said, who articulates a Gramscian approach to geography that calls into question the const…
The Battles in Miami
In November 2003 thousands of demonstrators staged protests in the streets of Miami while trade ministers from across the hemisphere met for the Eighth Ministerial of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). Accounts of these events tend to rehearse a common narrative about mass urban protests that frame such demonstrations as a conflict between proglobalization governments and antiglobalization activists. This narrative focuses on the physica…
Decolonizing Development
The first duties of persons living in a civilized community’
In recent years, historical geography has been at the forefront of new scholarship on the spatiality of colonial power and its complex relations with indigenous communities. This literature shows that imperial policies – emerging through state and scientific institutions, cultural practices, and capitalist ventures – required particular ways of conceptualizing, mapping, and organizing spaces and territories which transformed the geographies of in…
Uneven Developments
Since its publication, Marxists have debated the relation between the Grundrisse and the first volume of Capital . This paper offers one entry point into this debate by comparing the way each text frames its “problematic of uneven development”, that is, the way that capitalism's inherently uneven development is thematized as a problem for explanation. In the Grundrisse the uneven nature of capitalism as development is explained by the emergence o…
Marx Without Guardrails
Battles in Seattle Redux
This paper examines the possibilities and complexities of transnationalism through an analysis of political protests organized in Seattle against the Korea–US Free Trade Agreement, arguably the most significant bilateral trade negotiations involving the US state today. By studying the political practices of the Korean farmers' movement through participant research in Seattle from 4 to 9 September 2006, and revisiting the analysis of the 1999 “bat…
The dilemma of decontamination
Miguel Ángel Asturias and the Aporia of Postcolonial Geography
In this essay we examine the relation between race and space in the Americas. We do so by offering a broadly postcolonial reading of the Mayanist writings of Miguel Ángel Asturias, the Guatemalan writer who won the 1967 Asturias , Miguel Ángel 1967 ‘Nobel Banquet Speech’ , www.nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1967/asturias-speech-sp.html . [Google Scholar] Nobel Prize in literature. Specifically, we trace the ways in which his work problematiz…
Nature, Economy, and the Space — Place Distinction
This paper reconsiders the distinction between the concepts of space and place. We argue that, rather than favoring one side of the place – space division, or dissolving the partition between them, the distinction needs to be maintained because it is a key site of Western metaphysics. Specifically, the distinction between space and place cannot be abandoned or easily altered because it remains inextricably entangled with other key concepts. Drawi…
Cartography, territory, property
The attention given to indigenous peoples' use of maps to make claims to land and rights of self-government raises the question: what exactly it is that these maps do? This paper outlines an analytic for examining indigenous mapping projects, drawing upon two prominent instances - by the Maya of Belize and the Mayangna community of Awas Tingni in Nicaragua - where human rights lawsuits have been woven together with participatory mapping. In each …
Was Gramsci a Marxist
This paper argues that Antonio Gramsci's theory of hegemony is rooted in Marx's theory of value. Although value theory, and Marx's economic writings more generally, are by no means central themes of the Prison Notebooks, they nevertheless shape Gramsci's theoretical disposition and political analysis in fundamental respects. Thus, Gramsci's critique of economism should be seen as an extension of Marx's critique of political economy
On Gramsci’s ‘conceptions of the world’
Antonio Gramsci is widely celebrated for his conceptualisation of hegemony. This paper elucidates a related concept that appears frequently in Gramsci’s prison notebooks yet has been surprisingly under-emphasised: ‘conceptions of the world’. By conceptions of the world, Gramsci refers to things that inform our understanding of the world and our place in it. Each conception of the world is inherently practical and philosophical, relational and pol…
When seed fails
Climate Change, Capitalism, and the Challenge of Transdisciplinarity
A new sense of urgency has grown among many scientists for policies to address climate change, resulting in unprecedented investments by scientists in public education and, in some cases, political activism. As climate scientists have investigated future climate scenarios—and potential social responses to environmental changes—they have become, ipso facto, social scientists. This article examines these changes to reflect on how they could reshape…
Reading Joel Wainwright's Decolonizing Development
Mad cow militancy
On the Nature of Gramsci's “Conceptions of the World”
This chapter contends that Antonio Gramsci could be described as a Marxist philosopher who investigated “conceptions of the world” (concezione del mondo). This expression, which Gramsci used sparingly before 1930 and more frequently after, is woven like a red thread through his Prison Notebooks. This chapter argues that “conceptions of the world” represents one of the most creative and radical elements of Gramsci's thought. It suggests that Grams…
Critique is impossible without moves’
In this dialogue, geographer Joel Wainwright interviews the celebrated Marxist philosopher, Kojin Karatani. Their wide-ranging discussion examines key concepts by a series of philosophers – especially Kant, Marx, Hegel and Derrida – through an analysis of several core geographical concerns: the spatial organization of global capitalism, the formation of empires and territorial nation states, the current economic crisis, and more. The interview co…
Climate change and the transgenic adaptation strategy
Geopiracy
Geopiracy is a study of the 'Bowman expeditions'—a project through which geographers, with funding from the US Army, are mapping the 'human terrain' of foreign lands. Wainwright offers a critique of h
Political science (53 works) · Sociology (49 works) · Law (46 works) · Politics (40 works) · Law (34 works) · Economics (25 works) · Philosophy (25 works) · Epistemology (22 works) · Philosophy (21 works) · Geography (19 works)