Ouma
Biographic Data
| ID | 26085 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ouma |
| FAMILY NAME | Ouma |
| SIGNATURE | OUMA |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Bayreuth |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3180-1754 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 40 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 397 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Economic geography I: Conjunctures of Big Finance/Big Tech/Big Ag
This report centres Bigness. It samples recent work in economic geography and related fields that have developed a deeper understanding of the consolidation and concentration of capital in the economy since the 2000s, examining its drivers, power effects, and geographical manifestations. Adopting a macroeconomic geographic perspective that remains sensitive to the place-based footprints of concentrated capital, I focus particularly on contributio…
African Decolonial Theory: A Conversation
Antipode has become a key platform for engaging with decolonial and anticolonial scholarship, as well as adjacent fields such as Black geographies, Indigenous studies, Latin American feminism, and work on settler‐colonialism. African reference points in this literature, however, have been far less common, both in the journal and more broadly in radical geography. Recognizing that there are several loci of enunciation for decolonial and anticoloni…
The material politics of labour in Africa: A commentary
Making sense of funding inequalities in the venture capital space: A state of the art review paper with views from Africa
Between 2015 and 2022, venture capital (VC) investments in Africa have increased significantly. However, a closer look reveals that these investments have been distributed unevenly in socio-spatial terms. In this article, we seek to demonstrate that the existing literature on the VC-inequality nexus in North America can help make sense of the interrelationship between VC allocation decision-making and socially differentiated access to VC in Afric…
Relationships between rural migration and perceptions of environmental change: Insights from Bushbuckridge, South Africa
Planetary Futures: On Life in Critical Times
Based upon the opening keynote address at the German Congress of Geography held in Frankfurt am Main in 2023, this article traces the current debate on the planetary in the humanities, social sciences and Earth System Science in three parts. Instead of taking the concept of the planetary for granted, we explore the question of how it is reflected in our respective fields of research (cultural geography, social geography, and economic geography) a…
Capitalising on conjunctures: Tesla's ups and downs in financialised capitalism
This article explores the puzzling ups and downs of Tesla, going through one the most volatile stock market swings of the recent past, under conditions of financialised capitalism. We adopt a conjunctural approach, highlighting both the macro and micro dynamics shaping the firm's financial market trajectory. Among these, meticulously maintained narratives, boosted by social media, attracted dedicated followers, while the rise of new retail tradin…
Finance, Land and Labour
Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study
Accounting for Capital in the Countryside: Toward a Visual Politics of the Asset Form
This commentary seeks to advance a public economic geography that rests on the ambition of making things public—things that are otherwise “hidden” from societal scrutiny, such as the material footprint of globalized investment chains. This ethos, bridging the concerns of science and technology studies and critical political economy, can be well aligned with Massey’s “global sense of place.” This ethos is applied to an ongoing research project on …
Spaces of Global Production
Spaces of global production comprise a diverse set of spatial figures that result from and support a global division of labour. The proliferation of spatial figures in scholarly work on global production in economic geography and beyond maps a conceptual landscape. The network , the agglomeration , the frontier, the plantation, the gateway , the corridor , the zone , the enclave , and the archipelago are key concepts mobilized by social sciences …
Jenseits eurozentrischer Wirtschaftsgeographie: Ein Kommentar zu Marion Werner
Defetishizing the asset form
In response to Birch and Ward's paper, this commentary makes a call for a more systematic attempt to politicize contemporary logics of property ownership, and the extractive financial schemes based upon them. Building on earlier critiques of commodity fetishism in geography, I argue that a geographical politics of the asset form can help us defetishize and (re-)politicize the DNA of the ‘global return society’. Innovative visual methodologies pla…
Reconfiguring African Studies, reconfiguring economics: Centring intersectionality and social stratification
African and African diaspora scholars have made key contributions to contemporary understandings of inequality, intersectionality, institutions and ‘development'. A recent major contribution to this debate is offered by Franklin Obeng-Odoom’s Property, Institutions and Social Stratification in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Drawing on a wide range of literatures, but especially from traditions of Black radical economic thought that sp…
Navigating the landscape of defiant scholarship in and beyond Africa: On archives, bridges and dangers. A commentary on Patricia Daley and Amber Murrey's ‘Defiant scholarship: Dismantling coloniality …
I am grateful for being part of the conversation that was sparked by Patricia Daley and Amber Murrey's thoughtful piece on defiant scholarship and dismantling coloniality in contemporary African geographies. Their contribution raises a broad range of questions for human geography, in and beyond the continent, but also beyond the discipline of geography itself. The ‘beyond geography’ looms large in their contribution since much of the decolonial i…
Agri-investment scholars of the world unite! The finance-driven land rush as boundary object
This response addresses several of the issues raised by the commentaries on my book Farming as Financial Asset: Global Finance and the Making of Institutional Landscapes (2020). Reflecting upon the intentions and limitations of the book, it makes a call for treating agri-investments to which scholars contribute from different geographical, theoretical, and methodological angles. In detail, it engages with the question of how farmland investments …
When agricultural commercialization fails: ‘Re-visiting’ value-chain agriculture and its ruins in northern Ghana
Commercialization via value-chain agriculture, under which small farmers often collaborate with big companies, has become a prominent development strategy across Africa. Often framed in win-win terms, the dark sides of such projects (e.g. project failure, related losses) are often sidelined in both academic and practitioner discourses on agricultural commercialization. Informed by a collaborative ethnography of a failed value-chain agriculture pr…
Labour, Efficiency, Critique: Writing the Plantation Into the Technological Present-Future
In this commentary, we call upon critical labour scholars, including labour geographers, to feature what sociologist Palmer called the 'thrust of efficiency' more centrally in their work. We put forth that the push for efficiency, as made possible by digital technology, needs to be analysed in terms of its historical lineage as well as in terms of its geographical scope. Centreing efficiency in critical labour studies, necessitates three scholarl…
Welche Bio_Ökonomie für welche Zukunft? Zur Repolitisierung eines Diskurses im Globalen Norden durch Einsichten aus Tansania
Mehrere Kritiker*innen warnen, dass die Verbreitung des Bioökonomie-Diskurses die Kolonialität von Märkten und Wissen weiter verfestige, welche die formal postkolonialen Nord-Süd-Beziehungen prägten. In diesem Text stimmen wir diesem Gedankengang nur teilweise zu. Kritiker*innen der globalen Wirkungsmacht des Bioökonomie-Diskurses setzen ein zu enges Verständnis von Bioökonomie voraus. Wir argumentieren, dass ein unumstrittener Kern des Bioökonom…
Farming as Financial Asset: Global Finance and the Making of Institutional Landscapes
Fundamental to the Economic Transformations series is the conviction that "geography matters" in the diverse ways that economies work, for whom they work, and to what ends.The so-called imperatives of globalization, the promises of development, the challenges of environmental sustainability, the dull compulsion of competitive life, the urgency of campaigns for economic rights and social justice -in all of these realms geography really matters, ju…
This can('t) be an asset class: The world of money management, "society", and the contested morality of farmland investments
Drawing on several years of fieldwork-based research on and in the "farmland investment space", this paper argues that a combined reading of debates on assets and assetization in financialized capitalism and convention theory offers novel insights into the moral struggles associated with the transformation of farmland into an "alternative asset class". It demonstrates that central to the assetization of farmland is the globally distributed effort…
Investor
Africapitalism
“Every now and again a new era requires a new word or phrase to better encapsulate the changed times” The Africapitalist tells us in its first feature (Rundell, 2014). The first reaction of critical scholarship when encountering a new word or phrase that attracts widespread enthusiasm among political, corporate or academic elites should not be to passionately embrace it, but rather to ask where it comes from – why do we now speak about it? What w…
Envisioning African futures: Perspectives from economic geography
Changing beyond Recognition”: Reimagining the future of smallholder farming systems in the context of climate change
Shrooms of hope: Can Matsutake save Global Commodity Chain Research…and ‘our’ dear world
Rethinking the financialization of 'nature
This editorial provides an analytical intervention to accompany the theme issue's empirical papers on "Rethinking the Financialization of Nature." The papers turn our attention towards three often neglected themes in prior research on finance and nature: (1) the frictional processes through which money leverages nature and resource-based ventures to produce more money ("Getting between M-C-M'"); (2) the role played by moralities, values, and affe…
From financialization to operations of capital: Historicizing and disentangling the finance–farmland-nexus
Farming as Financial Asset: Global Finance and the Making of Institutional Landscapes
Fundamental to the Economic Transformations series is the conviction that "geography matters" in the diverse ways that economies work, for whom they work, and to what ends.The so-called imperatives of globalization, the promises of development, the challenges of environmental sustainability, the dull compulsion of competitive life, the urgency of campaigns for economic rights and social justice -in all of these realms geography really matters, ju…
This can('t) be an asset class: The world of money management, "society", and the contested morality of farmland investments
Drawing on several years of fieldwork-based research on and in the "farmland investment space", this paper argues that a combined reading of debates on assets and assetization in financialized capitalism and convention theory offers novel insights into the moral struggles associated with the transformation of farmland into an "alternative asset class". It demonstrates that central to the assetization of farmland is the globally distributed effort…
Extending the margins of marketization
Global Standards, Local Realities: Private Agrifood Governance and the Restructuring of the Kenyan Horticulture Industry
Over the past decade, private food safety and quality standards have become focal points in the supply chain management of large retailers, reshaping governance patterns in global agrifood chains. In this article, I analyze the relationship between private collective standards and the governance of agrifood markets, using the EUREPGAP/GLOBALGAP standard as a vantage point. I discuss the impact of this standard on the organization of supply chains…
Getting in between M and M′ or: How farmland further debunks financialization
This commentary takes up some of the arguments Christophers develops in his piece on ‘The Limits to Financialization’ and spins them further through the prism of the ‘financialization’ of farmland and agriculture. The paper requalifies the optic, empiric, and strategic limits of the financialization literature that Christophers identifies, eventually making a call for ‘getting in between’ M and M′—exploring the practical activities of financial e…
The difference that ‘capitalism’ makes: On the merits and limits of critical political economy in African Studies
The goal of this Briefing is to weigh in carefully on the respective merits and limits of critical political economy perspectives in African Studies (and beyond) and to make a case for ontological and theoretical modesty. Rather than taking African capitalist societies for granted, we should unpick how particular social entities are being made
Labour, Efficiency, Critique: Writing the Plantation Into the Technological Present-Future
In this commentary, we call upon critical labour scholars, including labour geographers, to feature what sociologist Palmer called the 'thrust of efficiency' more centrally in their work. We put forth that the push for efficiency, as made possible by digital technology, needs to be analysed in terms of its historical lineage as well as in terms of its geographical scope. Centreing efficiency in critical labour studies, necessitates three scholarl…
Defetishizing the asset form
In response to Birch and Ward's paper, this commentary makes a call for a more systematic attempt to politicize contemporary logics of property ownership, and the extractive financial schemes based upon them. Building on earlier critiques of commodity fetishism in geography, I argue that a geographical politics of the asset form can help us defetishize and (re-)politicize the DNA of the ‘global return society’. Innovative visual methodologies pla…
Envisioning African futures: Perspectives from economic geography
When agricultural commercialization fails: ‘Re-visiting’ value-chain agriculture and its ruins in northern Ghana
Commercialization via value-chain agriculture, under which small farmers often collaborate with big companies, has become a prominent development strategy across Africa. Often framed in win-win terms, the dark sides of such projects (e.g. project failure, related losses) are often sidelined in both academic and practitioner discourses on agricultural commercialization. Informed by a collaborative ethnography of a failed value-chain agriculture pr…
Reconfiguring African Studies, reconfiguring economics: Centring intersectionality and social stratification
African and African diaspora scholars have made key contributions to contemporary understandings of inequality, intersectionality, institutions and ‘development'. A recent major contribution to this debate is offered by Franklin Obeng-Odoom’s Property, Institutions and Social Stratification in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Drawing on a wide range of literatures, but especially from traditions of Black radical economic thought that sp…
Changing beyond Recognition”: Reimagining the future of smallholder farming systems in the context of climate change
Relationships between rural migration and perceptions of environmental change: Insights from Bushbuckridge, South Africa
Finance, Land and Labour
Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study
Planetary Futures: On Life in Critical Times
Based upon the opening keynote address at the German Congress of Geography held in Frankfurt am Main in 2023, this article traces the current debate on the planetary in the humanities, social sciences and Earth System Science in three parts. Instead of taking the concept of the planetary for granted, we explore the question of how it is reflected in our respective fields of research (cultural geography, social geography, and economic geography) a…
Capitalising on conjunctures: Tesla's ups and downs in financialised capitalism
This article explores the puzzling ups and downs of Tesla, going through one the most volatile stock market swings of the recent past, under conditions of financialised capitalism. We adopt a conjunctural approach, highlighting both the macro and micro dynamics shaping the firm's financial market trajectory. Among these, meticulously maintained narratives, boosted by social media, attracted dedicated followers, while the rise of new retail tradin…
Shrooms of hope: Can Matsutake save Global Commodity Chain Research…and ‘our’ dear world
Starved for Science: How biotechnology is being kept out of Africa, by Robert Paarlberg
Journal Article Starved for Science: How biotechnology is being kept out of Africa, by Robert Paarlberg Get access Starved for Science: How biotechnology is being kept out of Africa, by Robert Paarlberg. Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. xv + 235 pp. £16.95 (hardback). ISBN 978 0 674 02973 6 Stefan Ouma Stefan Ouma University of Frankfurt Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar African Affairs, Volume 1…
Global Standards, Local Realities: Private Agrifood Governance and the Restructuring of the Kenyan Horticulture Industry
Over the past decade, private food safety and quality standards have become focal points in the supply chain management of large retailers, reshaping governance patterns in global agrifood chains. In this article, I analyze the relationship between private collective standards and the governance of agrifood markets, using the EUREPGAP/GLOBALGAP standard as a vantage point. I discuss the impact of this standard on the organization of supply chains…
The Making and Remaking of Agro-Industries in Africa
This article introduces the special section on the making and remaking of agro-industries in Africa. It examines what the contributions tell us about how agro-industries work, but also why national industries work the way they do, how they came to be that way and what factors and forces drive or hinder their dynamism
Creating and Maintaining Global Connections: Agro-business and the Precarious Making of Fresh-cut Markets
This article reconstructs the evolution of a multinational fruit processing company from Ghana. Starting from the perspective that firms more generally aim at achieving stability in intra- and extra-organisational relations, the article explores the practical means (organisational forms, resources, technologies, strategies and routines) through which the case study company achieved relational stability in global markets, but also shows how this w…
The New Scramble for Africa
The New Scramble for Africa, Padraig Carmody, Polity, Cambridge (2011). 240 pp. £15.99 (pbk). ISBN 978-0-7456-4785-2. For some time now there has been a renewed interest in Africa's place in the gl
Extending the margins of marketization
Markets in the Making“: Zur Ethnographie alltäglicher Marktkonstruktionen in organisationalen Settings
Drawing on the example of a research project on the extension of the margins of the global agricultural market through the workings of agribusiness in Ghana, this paper explores what contribution ethnographic approaches can make to the study of quotidian market constructions in organizational settings. It demonstrates how ethnographies of marketization can be grasped conceptually, epistemologically and methodologically, as well as what practical …
Situating global finance in the Land Rush Debate: A critical review
Assembling Export Markets: The Making and Unmaking of Global Food Connections in West Africa
The new zones of circulation
Global logistics is a burgeoning yet opaque field of techno political intervention. It sustains a world in motion. It is the means to engineer, ensure and manage global commodity circulation. As commodities and cargo are put into circulation, their global ubiquity, mobility and 'orderability' are often regarded as the 'economic normal' of the current century. The formation of private cargo networks and corridors, we argue, relates to a new ration…
Getting in between M and M′ or: How farmland further debunks financialization
This commentary takes up some of the arguments Christophers develops in his piece on ‘The Limits to Financialization’ and spins them further through the prism of the ‘financialization’ of farmland and agriculture. The paper requalifies the optic, empiric, and strategic limits of the financialization literature that Christophers identifies, eventually making a call for ‘getting in between’ M and M′—exploring the practical activities of financial e…
The Rise of the BRICS in Africa: The Geopolitics of South-South Relations By PádraigCarmodyLondon: Zed Books, 2013
From financialization to operations of capital: Historicizing and disentangling the finance–farmland-nexus
The difference that ‘capitalism’ makes: On the merits and limits of critical political economy in African Studies
The goal of this Briefing is to weigh in carefully on the respective merits and limits of critical political economy perspectives in African Studies (and beyond) and to make a case for ontological and theoretical modesty. Rather than taking African capitalist societies for granted, we should unpick how particular social entities are being made
Shrooms of hope: Can Matsutake save Global Commodity Chain Research…and ‘our’ dear world
Rethinking the financialization of 'nature
This editorial provides an analytical intervention to accompany the theme issue's empirical papers on "Rethinking the Financialization of Nature." The papers turn our attention towards three often neglected themes in prior research on finance and nature: (1) the frictional processes through which money leverages nature and resource-based ventures to produce more money ("Getting between M-C-M'"); (2) the role played by moralities, values, and affe…
Investor
Africapitalism
“Every now and again a new era requires a new word or phrase to better encapsulate the changed times” The Africapitalist tells us in its first feature (Rundell, 2014). The first reaction of critical scholarship when encountering a new word or phrase that attracts widespread enthusiasm among political, corporate or academic elites should not be to passionately embrace it, but rather to ask where it comes from – why do we now speak about it? What w…
Envisioning African futures: Perspectives from economic geography
Changing beyond Recognition”: Reimagining the future of smallholder farming systems in the context of climate change
Farming as Financial Asset: Global Finance and the Making of Institutional Landscapes
Fundamental to the Economic Transformations series is the conviction that "geography matters" in the diverse ways that economies work, for whom they work, and to what ends.The so-called imperatives of globalization, the promises of development, the challenges of environmental sustainability, the dull compulsion of competitive life, the urgency of campaigns for economic rights and social justice -in all of these realms geography really matters, ju…
This can('t) be an asset class: The world of money management, "society", and the contested morality of farmland investments
Drawing on several years of fieldwork-based research on and in the "farmland investment space", this paper argues that a combined reading of debates on assets and assetization in financialized capitalism and convention theory offers novel insights into the moral struggles associated with the transformation of farmland into an "alternative asset class". It demonstrates that central to the assetization of farmland is the globally distributed effort…
Welche Bio_Ökonomie für welche Zukunft? Zur Repolitisierung eines Diskurses im Globalen Norden durch Einsichten aus Tansania
Mehrere Kritiker*innen warnen, dass die Verbreitung des Bioökonomie-Diskurses die Kolonialität von Märkten und Wissen weiter verfestige, welche die formal postkolonialen Nord-Süd-Beziehungen prägten. In diesem Text stimmen wir diesem Gedankengang nur teilweise zu. Kritiker*innen der globalen Wirkungsmacht des Bioökonomie-Diskurses setzen ein zu enges Verständnis von Bioökonomie voraus. Wir argumentieren, dass ein unumstrittener Kern des Bioökonom…
Navigating the landscape of defiant scholarship in and beyond Africa: On archives, bridges and dangers. A commentary on Patricia Daley and Amber Murrey's ‘Defiant scholarship: Dismantling coloniality …
I am grateful for being part of the conversation that was sparked by Patricia Daley and Amber Murrey's thoughtful piece on defiant scholarship and dismantling coloniality in contemporary African geographies. Their contribution raises a broad range of questions for human geography, in and beyond the continent, but also beyond the discipline of geography itself. The ‘beyond geography’ looms large in their contribution since much of the decolonial i…
Agri-investment scholars of the world unite! The finance-driven land rush as boundary object
This response addresses several of the issues raised by the commentaries on my book Farming as Financial Asset: Global Finance and the Making of Institutional Landscapes (2020). Reflecting upon the intentions and limitations of the book, it makes a call for treating agri-investments to which scholars contribute from different geographical, theoretical, and methodological angles. In detail, it engages with the question of how farmland investments …
Political science (24 works) · Economics (21 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Politics (17 works) · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development (14 works) · Law (14 works) · Geography (13 works) · Business (10 works) · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism (9 works) · Global trade, sustainability, and social impact (8 works)