Kendra Strau
Biographic Data
| ID | 307189 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kendra Strau |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kendra |
| FAMILY NAME | Strau |
| SIGNATURE | STRAU K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Simon Fraser University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3216-5793 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 46 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 989 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 46 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Queering feminist geography IV: Toward Queer and Trans-Feminist Coalition
Social reproduction, precarity, and the ‘new asset geographies’
This commentary briefly develops Birch and Ward's argument that research on the ‘new asset geographies’ can make important contributions to understanding new and evolving geographies of social reproduction. I argue that processes and mechanisms of assetization connect not only to the making of markets but also of investor subjects, and are empirically and conceptually connected to multi-dimensional precarity in and beyond paid work. The latter si…
Beyond crisis? Using rent theory to understand the restructuring of publicly funded seniors' care in British Columbia, Canada
Crises of seniors' care in countries like the UK and Canada, further highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic, have been connected to processes of privatization and financialization. In this paper I argue that rent theory is important for disaggregating mechanisms, including of accumulation by dispossession, the devaluation of labour, and assetization, that underpin the process of financialization in the sector. Work on rents often divides between cr…
A virtuous industry’: The agrarian work-family ethic in US rulemaking on child agricultural labour
US rules on child agricultural labour have remained largely unchanged since the 1960s. In 2011, the U.S. Department of Labour (DOL) announced a rulemaking proposal to limit child farm labour, especially for migrant children. Yet by 2012, the DOL abandoned its proposed changes following heavy opposition. Based on a random sample and grounded thematic analysis of public submissions to the 2011 rulemaking proposal, our research explores how meanings…
Devalued labour, Covid-19, and the problem of profitability: Crises of seniors care in Shanghai, China and British Columbia, Canada
While differences exist in the organization of seniors care in Shanghai and British Columbia, both systems exhibit the simultaneous devaluation of, and reliance on, feminized labour. In this paper, we argue that COVID-19 highlighted underlying crisis tendencies built into the profit models in both increasingly privatized systems. The crisis of seniors care cannot be addressed without fundamental changes to the way care labour is valued, which in …
Introduction to Displacements
In the first months of 2020, the call for papers for the 2022 Special Issue of the Annals of the American Association of Geographers was circulated. It invited papers that engage with multiple forms and meanings of displacements and their geographies: patterns of shifting, dislocation, or putting out of place; substitutions of one idea for another or the unconscious transfer of intense feelings or emotions; activities occurring outside their norm…
Process, mechanism and the project of economic geography
This response engages Yeung’s arguments about the value of critical realism (CR) in economic geography (EG), and how they can be further strengthened by better theorizing mechanism and process in relation to mid-level concepts like neoliberalization and path dependence. While there is much to value in the attention Yeung pays to how economic geographers conceptualize and study relational socio-spatial change, I argue that the lack of attention to…
Labour geography III: Precarity, racial capitalisms and infrastructure
This final report highlights the increasing attention to precarity, including academic precarity, within geography. After briefly discussing the implications for approaches to agency, I argue for attention to debates about racialized and racial capitalism from labour geographers. I suggest that theorizations of racial capitalism emerge from particular standpoints, and that geographers are well placed to explore racial capitalisms in a plural sens…
Precarious Work
The concepts of precariousness and precarity are multivalent, with different conceptual and political traditions reflected in different disciplinary approaches. In geography, the notion of precarious work has been utilized by economic and labor geographers exploring the flexibilization of labor markets, changing relations of employment, and the conditions of low‐paid and migrant workers in the Global North. This research has focused on economic r…
Labour geography II: Being, knowledge and agency
This report builds on an examination of different approaches to labour precarity and precarious employment to argue for the need for labour geographers to examine the foundations of our approaches to agency. The debate about agency has become the terrain on which many labour geographers meet, but the dominant epistemology of agency has an (implicit or explicit) grounding in debates about labour’s spatial fix. This grounding rests on assumptions a…
At home with the boss: Migrant live‐in caregivers, social reproduction and constrained agency in the UK , Canada, Austria and Switzerland
In many countries of the global North, families increasingly rely on live‐in caregivers to look after their children and elderly. Although much care work remains unpaid and informal, several states have set up a variety of migration and labour regimes to guarantee a steady supply of workers to provide paid live‐in care in the home. This paper contributes to a broadening of the focus of labour geography beyond “productive” labour by factoring in t…
At the Intersection of Urban and Care Policy: The Invisibility of Eldercare Workers in the Global City
Demographic aging can alter physical and social infrastructures in cities, and reshape the broader dynamic processes that theories of urbanization seek to describe and analyze. We argue that both urban and eldercare policy often render paid reproductive labor and the workers who do it invisible. They are invisiblized in both policy and urban space. A neoliberal bias in urban policies, reconstructed in the rhetoric of global cities/creative cities…
Precarious Work
The concepts of precariousness and precarity are multivalent, with different conceptual and political traditions reflected in different disciplinary approaches. In geography, the notion of precarious work has been utilized by economic geographers exploring the flexibilization of labor markets, changing relations of employment, and the conditions of low‐paid and migrant workers in the Global North. This research has focused on economic restructuri…
Labour geography 1: Towards a geography of precarity
This progress report examines the relationship between continued growth in the sub-field of labour geography, especially in research on migration, and the concept of precarity. An increasingly dominant frame in critical studies of labour and the employment relation, and resonant in the political sphere within (and now beyond) Europe, precarity has seen slower uptake by geographers. However, research on migrant labour and emerging work on technolo…
Migration and the Canadian Labour Market
Migration and the Canadian Labour Market Kendra Strauss (bio) Leah F. Vosko, Valerie Preston, and Robert Latham, eds., Liberating Temporariness?: Migration, Work, and Citizenship in an Age of Insecurity (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2014) Mary Romero, Valerie Preston, and Wenona Giles, eds., When Care Work Goes Global: Locating the Social Relations of Domestic Work (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014) Luin Goldring and Patricia Lan…
Sorting victims from workers: Forced labour, trafficking, and the process of jurisdiction
This paper builds on work on forced labour and human trafficking to argue for the value of geographical approaches to legal scale, and for more geographical research on the process of jurisdiction. Vulnerability to forced labour and human trafficking is related to processes of social and political categorization and legal characterization. Yet territorial understandings of jurisdiction, and those which conceptualize jurisdiction as a process of s…
Feminist political economy in geography: Why now, what is different, and what for
Temporary migration, precarious employment and unfree labour relations: Exploring the ‘continuum of exploitation’ in Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program
Mind the gap: Gender disparities still to be addressed in UK Higher Education geography
This paper evidences persistent gender inequalities in UK higher education ( HE ) geography departments. The two key sources of data used are: Higher Education Statistics Agency ( HESA ) data for staff and students, which affords a longitudinal response to earlier surveys by M c D owell and M c D owell and Peake of women in UK university geography departments, and a qualitative survey of the UK HE geography community undertaken in 2010 that sough…
Feminist inclusions in economic geography: What difference does difference make
[no abstract]
With, against and beyond Lefebvre: Planetary urbanization and epistemic plurality
In this paper, we discuss a number of recent efforts to critique, dismantle and problematize the categorical ontologies of 'the urban' and articulate an overarching epistemological framework for urban theory. Our intervention in these debates, which to date have focused primarily on Henri Lefebvre's hypothesis regarding 'planetary urbanization', highlights the absence of an engagement with the long legacy within feminist urban scholarship of conf…
Precarious Worlds: Contested Geographies of Social Reproduction
This edited collection contributes to the theoretical literature on social reproduction--defined by Marx as the necessary labor to arrive the next day at the factory gate--and extended by feminist geographers and others into complex understandings of the relationship between paid labor and the unpaid work of daily life. The volume explores new terrain in social reproduction with focus on the challenges posed by evolving theories of embodiment and…
In, against and beyond neo-liberalism: The “crisis” and alternative political futures
No abstract available
British Jobs for British Workers? Negotiating Work, Nation, and Globalisation through the Lindsey Oil Refinery Disputes
This paper explores the relationships between labour organising, globalisation and national identity through an engagement with the 2009 Lindsey Oil Refinery strikes. Some strikers adopted the controversial slogan ‘British Jobs for British Workers’ in response to employers' attempts to undercut existing wages and conditions with a new migrant workforce. This led to accusations of xenophobia. We make three inter‐related arguments. First, we conten…
Feminist economic geography and Capital in the Twenty-First Century: Going beyond ‘add gender and stir’
Progressive localism and the construction of political alternatives
Temporary migration, precarious employment and unfree labour relations: Exploring the ‘continuum of exploitation’ in Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program
Labour geography 1: Towards a geography of precarity
This progress report examines the relationship between continued growth in the sub-field of labour geography, especially in research on migration, and the concept of precarity. An increasingly dominant frame in critical studies of labour and the employment relation, and resonant in the political sphere within (and now beyond) Europe, precarity has seen slower uptake by geographers. However, research on migrant labour and emerging work on technolo…
With, against and beyond Lefebvre: Planetary urbanization and epistemic plurality
In this paper, we discuss a number of recent efforts to critique, dismantle and problematize the categorical ontologies of 'the urban' and articulate an overarching epistemological framework for urban theory. Our intervention in these debates, which to date have focused primarily on Henri Lefebvre's hypothesis regarding 'planetary urbanization', highlights the absence of an engagement with the long legacy within feminist urban scholarship of conf…
Labour geography III: Precarity, racial capitalisms and infrastructure
This final report highlights the increasing attention to precarity, including academic precarity, within geography. After briefly discussing the implications for approaches to agency, I argue for attention to debates about racialized and racial capitalism from labour geographers. I suggest that theorizations of racial capitalism emerge from particular standpoints, and that geographers are well placed to explore racial capitalisms in a plural sens…
Feminist political economy in geography: Why now, what is different, and what for
Labour geography II: Being, knowledge and agency
This report builds on an examination of different approaches to labour precarity and precarious employment to argue for the need for labour geographers to examine the foundations of our approaches to agency. The debate about agency has become the terrain on which many labour geographers meet, but the dominant epistemology of agency has an (implicit or explicit) grounding in debates about labour’s spatial fix. This grounding rests on assumptions a…
Precarious Worlds: Contested Geographies of Social Reproduction
This edited collection contributes to the theoretical literature on social reproduction--defined by Marx as the necessary labor to arrive the next day at the factory gate--and extended by feminist geographers and others into complex understandings of the relationship between paid labor and the unpaid work of daily life. The volume explores new terrain in social reproduction with focus on the challenges posed by evolving theories of embodiment and…
Re-engaging with rationality in economic geography: Behavioural approaches and the importance of context in decision-making
Behavioural approaches have become mainstream in economics, supported by the research of cognitive scientists and psychologists, yet their findings have attracted little attention from geographers. This article argues for a renewed behavioural economic geography that builds on research in behavioural economics but also addresses one of its main shortcomings: a lack of engagement with the social context of decision-making. I outline a research age…
At home with the boss: Migrant live‐in caregivers, social reproduction and constrained agency in the UK , Canada, Austria and Switzerland
In many countries of the global North, families increasingly rely on live‐in caregivers to look after their children and elderly. Although much care work remains unpaid and informal, several states have set up a variety of migration and labour regimes to guarantee a steady supply of workers to provide paid live‐in care in the home. This paper contributes to a broadening of the focus of labour geography beyond “productive” labour by factoring in t…
Unfree Again: Social Reproduction, Flexible Labour Markets and the Resurgence of Gang Labour in the UK
The reproduction of human insecurity in contemporary capitalist societies is linked to the need to “produce” labour at a price that permits the realisation of surplus value, and crises of social reproduction (both generalised and specific). In this paper I use a social reproduction lens to focus on the example of the emergence, and recent resurgence, of gang labour in the UK. I look first at the gang labour system, its evolution, and processes an…
Coerced, Forced and Unfree Labour: Geographies of Exploitation in Contemporary Labour Markets
This paper examines approaches, both within geography and more broadly, to the issue of forced labour in contemporary labour markets. Far from a vestige of pre-capitalist social relations, unfree labour is part of the continuum of exploitation that is intrinsically related the contradictory nature of commodification and to capital as a social relation. The paper focuses on the UK, but draws attention to the ways in which relations of unfreedom in…
Individual pension-related risk propensities: The effects of socio-demographic characteristics and a spousal pension entitlement on risk attitudes
The transition from defined-benefit to defined-contribution occupational-pension plans has placed a premium on the participants' or contributors' decision-making competence. Their attitudes to risk and their responses to available investment options can have far-reaching implications for their retirement income. Behavioural research on risk and uncertainty has raised understanding of the limits of individual decision-making, but the social status…
Mind the gap: Gender disparities still to be addressed in UK Higher Education geography
This paper evidences persistent gender inequalities in UK higher education ( HE ) geography departments. The two key sources of data used are: Higher Education Statistics Agency ( HESA ) data for staff and students, which affords a longitudinal response to earlier surveys by M c D owell and M c D owell and Peake of women in UK university geography departments, and a qualitative survey of the UK HE geography community undertaken in 2010 that sough…
In, against and beyond neo-liberalism: The “crisis” and alternative political futures
No abstract available
British Jobs for British Workers? Negotiating Work, Nation, and Globalisation through the Lindsey Oil Refinery Disputes
This paper explores the relationships between labour organising, globalisation and national identity through an engagement with the 2009 Lindsey Oil Refinery strikes. Some strikers adopted the controversial slogan ‘British Jobs for British Workers’ in response to employers' attempts to undercut existing wages and conditions with a new migrant workforce. This led to accusations of xenophobia. We make three inter‐related arguments. First, we conten…
These Overheating Worlds
In 2003 the British literary magazine Granta published an issue on climate change, “This Overheating World,” containing reportage and essays but almost no fiction—and the claim that our “failure of the imagination” regarding socioenvironmental change is both a political and a literary one. The decade since has seen a relative burgeoning of what has been dubbed “cli-fi,” dominated by apocalyptic and dystopian literary–geographical imaginations. In…
Cognition, Context, and Multimethod Approaches to Economic Decision Making
Research in behavioural economics, as in economic geography, seeks to address fundamental questions about cognition, the status of human rationality, and social-cum-spatial structure in economic decision making. Critiques of the 'strong' model of economic rationality that underpins models of behaviour in orthodox economics by those working under the rubric of the former, such as Thaler and Sunstein, are gaining the attention of politicians and po…
Sorting victims from workers: Forced labour, trafficking, and the process of jurisdiction
This paper builds on work on forced labour and human trafficking to argue for the value of geographical approaches to legal scale, and for more geographical research on the process of jurisdiction. Vulnerability to forced labour and human trafficking is related to processes of social and political categorization and legal characterization. Yet territorial understandings of jurisdiction, and those which conceptualize jurisdiction as a process of s…
Feminist inclusions in economic geography: What difference does difference make
[no abstract]
Intervening in globalization: The spatial possibilities and institutional barriers to labour’s collective agency
Trade unions are facing a series of challenges around place-based forms of work in industries such as construction, transport and public services. New spatial strategies by employers involving corporate reorganization, increased outsourcing and the use of migrant labour, allied to a deepening of neoliberal governance processes are accelerating a race to the bottom in wages and conditions. Drawing upon the experience of two recent labour disputes …
At the Intersection of Urban and Care Policy: The Invisibility of Eldercare Workers in the Global City
Demographic aging can alter physical and social infrastructures in cities, and reshape the broader dynamic processes that theories of urbanization seek to describe and analyze. We argue that both urban and eldercare policy often render paid reproductive labor and the workers who do it invisible. They are invisiblized in both policy and urban space. A neoliberal bias in urban policies, reconstructed in the rhetoric of global cities/creative cities…
Accessing pension resources: The right to equality inside and out of the labour market
Pensions constitute an important link, in many welfare regimes, between processes of social categorisation and labour market segmentation over the life-course. Pensions also reveal how socio-economic rights are defined in relation to normative and ideological categories (such as gender, class and race), how (and for whom) the state prioritises their distribution, and what these processes reveal about notions of equality and their political and le…
Beyond crisis? Using rent theory to understand the restructuring of publicly funded seniors' care in British Columbia, Canada
Crises of seniors' care in countries like the UK and Canada, further highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic, have been connected to processes of privatization and financialization. In this paper I argue that rent theory is important for disaggregating mechanisms, including of accumulation by dispossession, the devaluation of labour, and assetization, that underpin the process of financialization in the sector. Work on rents often divides between cr…
Introduction to Displacements
In the first months of 2020, the call for papers for the 2022 Special Issue of the Annals of the American Association of Geographers was circulated. It invited papers that engage with multiple forms and meanings of displacements and their geographies: patterns of shifting, dislocation, or putting out of place; substitutions of one idea for another or the unconscious transfer of intense feelings or emotions; activities occurring outside their norm…
Re-engaging with rationality in economic geography: Behavioural approaches and the importance of context in decision-making
Behavioural approaches have become mainstream in economics, supported by the research of cognitive scientists and psychologists, yet their findings have attracted little attention from geographers. This article argues for a renewed behavioural economic geography that builds on research in behavioural economics but also addresses one of its main shortcomings: a lack of engagement with the social context of decision-making. I outline a research age…
Globalization's contradictions: Geographies of discipline, destruction and transformation edited by Dennis Conway and Nik Heynen
Individual pension-related risk propensities: The effects of socio-demographic characteristics and a spousal pension entitlement on risk attitudes
The transition from defined-benefit to defined-contribution occupational-pension plans has placed a premium on the participants' or contributors' decision-making competence. Their attitudes to risk and their responses to available investment options can have far-reaching implications for their retirement income. Behavioural research on risk and uncertainty has raised understanding of the limits of individual decision-making, but the social status…
Being in the market: The UK house-price bubble and the intended structure of individual pension investment portfolios
It is widely observed that being in the market gives financial traders access to knowledge and information not available to remote traders. A truism of the geography of finance, it is also a perspective that can shed light on the interaction between market location, global financial movements and personal welfare. In this article, we develop an explanation of the premium attached to being in the market, drawing upon previous contributions on the …
Accumulation and Dispossession: Lifting the Veil on the Subprime Mortgage Crisis
Cognition, Context, and Multimethod Approaches to Economic Decision Making
Research in behavioural economics, as in economic geography, seeks to address fundamental questions about cognition, the status of human rationality, and social-cum-spatial structure in economic decision making. Critiques of the 'strong' model of economic rationality that underpins models of behaviour in orthodox economics by those working under the rubric of the former, such as Thaler and Sunstein, are gaining the attention of politicians and po…
Financial Sophistication, Salience, and the Scale of Deliberation in UK Retirement Planning
Whether people appreciate the importance of saving for the future, and whether they intend to do so, are not well understood. On the basis of a representative sample of UK residents, we show that the perceived importance of pension planning is positively correlated with respondents' risk tolerance, age, and income, and whether their spouses participate in employer-sponsored pension plans. Those less likely to believe planning for the future is im…
Globalization and the Service Workplace: Citizenship, Entitlement, and the Future of U.K. Occupational Pensions
The global economic recession has hit the U.K. service economy hard; less remarked on has been the recession’s effect on the British pension system. As private-sector occupational pension coverage continues to plummet, public-sector pensions are also in the sights of politicians looking to cut public spending. The government, which in 2005 announced plans for a universal (citizen’s) state pension, has now shifted its focus to a new system of pers…
Interventions in the political geography of 'libertarian paternalism
The Home, Pension Savings and Risk Aversion: Intentions of the Defined Contribution Pension Plan Participants of a London-based Investment Bank at the Peak of the Bubble
In the lead-up to the peak of the financial bubble (and before the onset of the global financial crisis), property was regularly promoted as a ready-made alternative to private pensions. This paper explores the importance of owner-occupied housing for the retirement savings strategies of defined contribution (DC) pension plan members. Based upon a unique survey of over 2300 participants in the DC pension scheme of a London-based international ban…
Progressive localism and the construction of political alternatives
Labour Regime Change in the Twenty-First Century: Unfreedom, Capitalism and Primitive Accumulation , by Tom Brass
Coerced, Forced and Unfree Labour: Geographies of Exploitation in Contemporary Labour Markets
This paper examines approaches, both within geography and more broadly, to the issue of forced labour in contemporary labour markets. Far from a vestige of pre-capitalist social relations, unfree labour is part of the continuum of exploitation that is intrinsically related the contradictory nature of commodification and to capital as a social relation. The paper focuses on the UK, but draws attention to the ways in which relations of unfreedom in…
The problem with work: Feminism, marxism, antiwork politics and postwork imaginaries
Kathi Weeks, a John Hope Franklin Centre Book, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2011, 304 pp., $84.95 (hardback), $23.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-8223-5096-5 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-8223-511
Unfree Again: Social Reproduction, Flexible Labour Markets and the Resurgence of Gang Labour in the UK
The reproduction of human insecurity in contemporary capitalist societies is linked to the need to “produce” labour at a price that permits the realisation of surplus value, and crises of social reproduction (both generalised and specific). In this paper I use a social reproduction lens to focus on the example of the emergence, and recent resurgence, of gang labour in the UK. I look first at the gang labour system, its evolution, and processes an…
Naming the next generation: Early career perspectives on the future of the W omen and G eography S tudy G roup
Accessing pension resources: The right to equality inside and out of the labour market
Pensions constitute an important link, in many welfare regimes, between processes of social categorisation and labour market segmentation over the life-course. Pensions also reveal how socio-economic rights are defined in relation to normative and ideological categories (such as gender, class and race), how (and for whom) the state prioritises their distribution, and what these processes reveal about notions of equality and their political and le…
Intervening in globalization: The spatial possibilities and institutional barriers to labour’s collective agency
Trade unions are facing a series of challenges around place-based forms of work in industries such as construction, transport and public services. New spatial strategies by employers involving corporate reorganization, increased outsourcing and the use of migrant labour, allied to a deepening of neoliberal governance processes are accelerating a race to the bottom in wages and conditions. Drawing upon the experience of two recent labour disputes …
These Overheating Worlds
In 2003 the British literary magazine Granta published an issue on climate change, “This Overheating World,” containing reportage and essays but almost no fiction—and the claim that our “failure of the imagination” regarding socioenvironmental change is both a political and a literary one. The decade since has seen a relative burgeoning of what has been dubbed “cli-fi,” dominated by apocalyptic and dystopian literary–geographical imaginations. In…
Challenging labor and work to survive well
In Take Back the Economy, as in work by J.K. Gibson Graham, a key focus is on the control that we can exert over ‘the economy’ rather than the control it exerts over us. This focus is like looking
Precarious Worlds: Contested Geographies of Social Reproduction
This edited collection contributes to the theoretical literature on social reproduction--defined by Marx as the necessary labor to arrive the next day at the factory gate--and extended by feminist geographers and others into complex understandings of the relationship between paid labor and the unpaid work of daily life. The volume explores new terrain in social reproduction with focus on the challenges posed by evolving theories of embodiment and…
In, against and beyond neo-liberalism: The “crisis” and alternative political futures
No abstract available
British Jobs for British Workers? Negotiating Work, Nation, and Globalisation through the Lindsey Oil Refinery Disputes
This paper explores the relationships between labour organising, globalisation and national identity through an engagement with the 2009 Lindsey Oil Refinery strikes. Some strikers adopted the controversial slogan ‘British Jobs for British Workers’ in response to employers' attempts to undercut existing wages and conditions with a new migrant workforce. This led to accusations of xenophobia. We make three inter‐related arguments. First, we conten…
Feminist economic geography and Capital in the Twenty-First Century: Going beyond ‘add gender and stir’
Geoff Mann'sDisassembly Required: A Field Guide to Actually Existing Capitalism(2013, Oakland: AK press): Introduction
Sociology (41 works) · Political science (36 works) · Economics (32 works) · Politics (25 works) · Law (24 works) · Law (21 works) · Employment and Welfare Studies (16 works) · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism (16 works) · Political economy (14 works) · Social science (14 works)