Uma Kothari
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 366227 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Uma Kothari |
| NOMBRES | Uma |
| APELLIDO | Kothari |
| FIRMA | KOTHARI U |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Manchester |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8098-6655 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 55 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 681 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 51 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 5 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1997 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 14 |
Islandness and resilience
Food systems in Small Island Developing States are considered vulnerable to shocks. • In the Maldives, islanders employ multiple strategies to increase food system resilience. • They anticipate and adapt to shocks and disruptions to food systems. • Challenging the vulnerability paradigm, this paper highlights Islander’s resilience. Islands have long been depicted as vulnerable, lacking in resources, and constrained in their ability to adapt and r…
Development as (In)Justice
This article critically examines the ongoing legacy of colonial land dispossession and its impacts on marginalized communities to reveal the limitations to achieving restorative justice. We focus on the unequal (re)distribution of land, the German Namibian reconciliation agreement and the threats posed by a planned German Namibian mega-project to produce green hydrogen, to advocate for development that delivers material benefits to marginalized g…
Challenging Global Development
This open access book seeks to promote and sustain new forms of solidarity and conviviality that work towards achieving social justice
Sensing the past along Britain’s A roads
This paper seeks to explore the particular characteristics of British A-roads by focusing upon a motoring journey from Slough to Torquay. This trip was undertaken as part of an extended motoring adventure by two Indian tourists in 1955, and exactly the same route was followed in 2023 by the authors. Informed by the interviews and records of the tourists, we scrutinized the infrastructure of the A-roads along which we travelled, as well as the roa…
Custodians of a resort island
This paper explores the experiences of three Bangladeshi migrant workers who are the sole inhabitants and custodians of a former Maldivian island resort. We show how they currently remain in a state of indeterminate standby as the future of the resort remains uncertain, put in this state of limbo by the capacity of the resort’s owners to exploit their disposability and manipulability. We investigate the rich material and sensory qualities of the …
Storying Pandemia Collectively
During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of academic geographers got together across borders to share our varied experiences. In this paper we illustrate how this storying of pandemia helped us critically and collaboratively understand, (re)imagine and reconfigure ways of living during a global pandemic. We were especially interested in exploring different forms and practices of collective thinking and academic labour, within and b…
Disaster mobilities, temporalities, and recovery
Large‐scale disasters are frequently portrayed as temporally bounded, linear events after which survivors are encouraged to ‘move on’ as quickly as possible. In this paper, we explore how understandings of disaster mobilities and temporalities challenge such perspectives. Drawing on empirical research undertaken on Dhuvaafaru in the Maldives, a small island uninhabited until 2009 when it was populated by people displaced by the Indian Ocean tsuna…
Multiplicities of sandscapes and granular geographies
This commentary on William Jamieson’s article, ‘For Granular Geography’, which illuminates the granular relations of sand as it is transformed by capitalist urbanism, suggests that understanding what might constitute granular geographies requires further consideration of the multiplicities of granular material. It considers the manifold values of sand beyond its worth as an economic resource and explores the temporalities associated with the move…
Spatial and temporal ways of knowing sea level rise
Sea level rise presents risks to ecosystems, populations, and infrastructure in low‐lying areas. This article considers diverse ways of knowing, understanding, and experiencing these risks. It explores differences and connections between knowledge produced through the technological methods of scientific research and that which emerges through the experiences and insights of local people. For example, while scientific assessments measure and forec…
Seafarers, the mission and the archive
The Mission to Seafarers, founded in 1856, is an international organisation that offers support to the seafaring community. Recently, at its mission in Melbourne, Australia, a century's worth of records were discovered, concealed in boxes under its theatre stage. These included annual reports, scrapbooks, diaries, letters, visitors log books, newsletters, artefacts and an array of evocative photographs. Besides providing rich insights into the hi…
Chila Kumari Singh Burman
Wandering along the desolate North Bank of the River Thames during lockdown on a February evening, London’s wintry gloom was suddenly punctuated by a vibrant, multicolored display of illumination t
The Routledge Handbook of Place
Considering place as more-than-local, this chapter takes a relational approach to understanding place production. It does so by exploring notions of place, and by investigating environmental policies as integral to urban place-making. Using as a case study the ‘Greening the Gateway Cities’ program, a formal governance program to plant trees in a number of cities in Massachusetts, USA, the chapter considers a number of human and non-human actors t…
Between the land and the sea
In the context of the refugee crisis, seascapes are taking on new dimensions with borders shifting from the shoreline to being redrawn in the water itself. As such, refugees are now crossing waters that have become extended sovereign borders. This is manifest in increased maritime surveillance to prevent refugees arriving by boat and landing on Europe’s and Australia’s shores. In this context, materially and symbolically, lighthouses mark out the…
Bordering
Materially and symbolically manifest, borders are shaped by history, politics and power. This second special issue of a two-part series brings together an international collective of authors who presented their papers at a conference on Technologies of Bordering convened by the editors at the University of Melbourne, Australia in July 2019. We invited presentations that critically engage with multiple and varied forms of bordering as expressions …
Routledge Handbook of Place
Colonial imaginaries, colonized places 1
This chapter examines the production of colonial imaginaries in the practice of Empire and how they were manifest, and contested, in colonized places. It considers the specificities of place in accounts of colonialism in order to appreciate the situatedness of colonial rule, and the entanglements of its material and discursive forces. It begins with an examination of how power was inscribed onto the fabric of colonized places through the creation…
Covid-19 and the case for global development
Becoming an island
Islands, long portrayed in the Western imaginary as remote, static, and bounded entities, have increasingly come to be viewed as places constantly in the making: as connected sites formed by complex and shifting relations and assemblages of people and things. This paper considers the role that waste plays in this process through exploration of how discarded and unwanted matter decays, moves, and comes to rest in relation to a small island in the …
Time, temporality and environmental change
Shifting sands
This article explores the different timescales and temporalities of the movement of sand. In recent years, growing scholarly attention has focused on the qualities of sand and the increasing demands for its use worldwide. However, the dynamics of this complex substance and the ways in which it flows through entangled human and non-human environments remains largely under-explored. In drawing on recently collected empirical data, this article expl…
Everyday life and environmental change
This paper explores how daily changes in the physical environment intersect and connect with people's everyday lives, routines and practices in the Maldives. Day-to-day life is often regarded as mundane and ordinary, and therefore not particularly worthy of study. As this paper argues, however, the everyday is central to understanding how environmental change occurs and how people respond to it. Much recent work has challenged the ontological sep…
Re-articulating labour in global production networks
The global production network approach constitutes a relational theorising of production processes, incorporating firm and non-firm actors, including the state, civil society and labour. Despite renewed attention to labour, global production network analysis focuses predominantly on formal waged work, giving insufficient attention to growing numbers of precarious workers, including self-employed and own-account workers, who are often the most vul…
Consuming colonial imaginaries and forging postcolonial networks
Drawing on an extended road trip from England to India undertaken by two Indian travellers in the 1950s, this paper challenges the dominant travel stories and Eurocentric academic accounts that persistently privilege western tourists. Focusing upon the literary desires that shaped their British itinerary and a dramatic encounter in Egypt, we highlight two distinctly different experiences that emerged during their journey. We demonstrate how a swi…
Contestation over an island imaginary landscape
This article demonstrates how maintaining high-end tourism in luxury resorts requires recreating a tourist imaginary of pristine, isolated and unpeopled island landscapes, thus necessitating the ceaseless manipulation and management of space. This runs contrary to the belief that tourism industries are exerting an increasingly benign influence on local environments following the emergence of 'sustainable tourism' in recent decades. Rather than pr…
Participation as spiritual duty; empowerment as secular subjection.
Authority and Expertise
I explore how the increasing professionalisation of international development has enabled the expansion of the neoliberal agenda of development agencies and, at the same time, the co-optation of so-called "alternative" approaches onto this agenda. The focus is on the key figure of the development "expert" as an agent involved in consolidating unilinear notions of modernising progress. First, there is an examination of the post-war production of t…
Global Peddlers and Local Networks
This paper is based on the experiences of street traders from South Asia and West Africa who currently live and work in Barcelona. I argue that in the 'informal' and marginal spaces inhabited, utilised, and created by these traders, they produce forms of nonelite cosmopolitanism through which livelihoods are sustained, social bonds are strengthened, and fluid, diasporic identities are produced. These are enabled by the development and maintenance…
An agenda for thinking about ‘race’ in development
This paper reveals some of the silences about ‘race’ in development ideologies, institutions and practices. It suggests that these mask the perpetuation of a racialized discourse in development, its complicity with broader historical and contemporary racial projects and the effects of ‘race’ on the processes and consequences of development. The paper provides an agenda for understanding development in terms of ‘race’ and identifies three potentia…
Political discourses of climate change and migration
There is general agreement that migration is likely to play an increasingly crucial role in adaptation to climate change. However, as this paper argues, technocratic and de-politicised discourses of climate change have often been invoked to conceal underlying political agendas in which environmental concerns are drawn upon to justify unfavourable government policies of mobility and resettlement. This paper examines the politics of climate change …
Covid-19 and the case for global development
Challenging climate change and migration discourse
Transnational Development Networks
Development is embedded in networks that extend across space and time. These networks-maintained, reworked, and given meaning through the practices of the actors who constitute them-bring together assemblages of institutions, knowledges, and commitments that make possible and shape the ways in which development is done through them. The authors explore the usefulness of concepts of network and assemblage for conceptualizing development, elaborati…
Shifting sands
This article explores the different timescales and temporalities of the movement of sand. In recent years, growing scholarly attention has focused on the qualities of sand and the increasing demands for its use worldwide. However, the dynamics of this complex substance and the ways in which it flows through entangled human and non-human environments remains largely under-explored. In drawing on recently collected empirical data, this article expl…
Critiquing ‘race’ and racism in development discourse and practice
I 'Race' in developmentForms of racism and expressions that articulate ideas about 'race' are fluid and multiple, contingent and contextual, ranging from overt to covert and unreflexive.Historically and geographically rooted, such expressions have become increasingly variegated, even detached from their originary impulses, and can travel far and wide.It is in this spirit of critical enquiry that the papers in this special issue aim to reveal some…
From Colonialism to development
This paper is concerned with the form and extent to which colonial discourses, cultures and practices continue to pervade the workings of the post-independence international development aid industry. It is based on the personal narratives of individuals involved in both colonial administration and subsequently in the field of development as expatriate consultants whose experiences provide a resource for interrogating the varied articulations of t…
Everyday life and environmental change
This paper explores how daily changes in the physical environment intersect and connect with people's everyday lives, routines and practices in the Maldives. Day-to-day life is often regarded as mundane and ordinary, and therefore not particularly worthy of study. As this paper argues, however, the everyday is central to understanding how environmental change occurs and how people respond to it. Much recent work has challenged the ontological sep…
Colonial Imaginaries and Postcolonial Transformations
This article draws on Edward Said's notion of ‘imaginary geographies’ to explore how representations of small island states enabled particular colonial interventions to take place in the Indian Ocean region and to show how these representations are currently being reworked to support development strategies. It examines how particular colonial imaginaries justified and legitimised spatially and temporally extended transactions before focusing on t…
New spaces of development partnership
The concept of partnership is frequently invoked in international development as discourse and policy prescription to better understand relationships and engagements between donors and beneficiaries. Despite the increasing prominence of the idea of partnerships, in reality mutual, equal and sustainable development partnerships remain limited. This article examines the extent to which recent growth in international development volunteering can pro…
Extending networks and mediating brands
We examine how increasingly volatile global flows and tenuous networks rearrange local spaces and are inhabited by local people by looking at the strategies adopted by stallholders on a Mauritian market who acquire and sell locally manufactured branded clothes. Continuously (re)negotiating their connections to power‐holders within networks of clothing production, we highlight how these traders achieve momentarily stable arrangements within a cont…
Time, temporality and environmental change
Contesting colonial rule
Reworking colonial imaginaries in post-colonial tourist enclaves
This article critically explores the complex politics of reworking colonial imaginaries in post-colonial tourist enclaves. It examines the persistence of colonial spaces and representations in the tourist industry along with the reproduction of boundaries that sustain distinctions between people. Based on research in Mauritius, this article identifies the distinctive characteristics of generic tropical, luxury hotel resorts and the specific strat…
Introduction to politics of climate change
This Themed Section aims to increase understanding of how the idea of climate change, and the policies and actions that spring from it, travel beyond their origins in natural sciences to meet different political arenas in the developing world. It takes a discursive approach whereby climate change is not just a set of physical processes but also a series of messages, narratives and policy prescriptions. The articles are mostly case study-based and…
Re-articulating labour in global production networks
The global production network approach constitutes a relational theorising of production processes, incorporating firm and non-firm actors, including the state, civil society and labour. Despite renewed attention to labour, global production network analysis focuses predominantly on formal waged work, giving insufficient attention to growing numbers of precarious workers, including self-employed and own-account workers, who are often the most vul…
Saving, Spending, and Future-Making
Money is a distributed technology for the government of futures. Using ethnographically informed accounts of social practices around saving and collective remittances in poor countries this paper examines how the malleability of money enables it to have the potential for formalisation which allows it to be brought into formal relations of future-making and foreclosure, at the same time as its potential for investments and reallocation enables it …
Spatial and temporal ways of knowing sea level rise
Sea level rise presents risks to ecosystems, populations, and infrastructure in low‐lying areas. This article considers diverse ways of knowing, understanding, and experiencing these risks. It explores differences and connections between knowledge produced through the technological methods of scientific research and that which emerges through the experiences and insights of local people. For example, while scientific assessments measure and forec…
Becoming an island
Islands, long portrayed in the Western imaginary as remote, static, and bounded entities, have increasingly come to be viewed as places constantly in the making: as connected sites formed by complex and shifting relations and assemblages of people and things. This paper considers the role that waste plays in this process through exploration of how discarded and unwanted matter decays, moves, and comes to rest in relation to a small island in the …
Different bodies, same clothes
Seafarers, the mission and the archive
The Mission to Seafarers, founded in 1856, is an international organisation that offers support to the seafaring community. Recently, at its mission in Melbourne, Australia, a century's worth of records were discovered, concealed in boxes under its theatre stage. These included annual reports, scrapbooks, diaries, letters, visitors log books, newsletters, artefacts and an array of evocative photographs. Besides providing rich insights into the hi…
Contestation over an island imaginary landscape
This article demonstrates how maintaining high-end tourism in luxury resorts requires recreating a tourist imaginary of pristine, isolated and unpeopled island landscapes, thus necessitating the ceaseless manipulation and management of space. This runs contrary to the belief that tourism industries are exerting an increasingly benign influence on local environments following the emergence of 'sustainable tourism' in recent decades. Rather than pr…
Development Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory
Gender and Industrialisation
Gujurati migrants' search for modernity in Britain
If people stay in one place there is no progress' T he stories were collected as part of a research project which was a response to some puzzling fin din gs whi ch emerged during earlier rese arch by Uma Kothari in India in 1986 88. Despite their prosperity, farming households had family members living abroad either in the UK or East Africa, and those remaining had submitted visa applications and were waiting to migrate to Brit ain. Many of them …
Development Theory and Practice
This text provides a critical assessment of dominant features of development theory and practice in such areas as globalisation, governance, social development, participation, feminism and postcolonialism, civil society, environment and development management. Each chapter addresses a particular approach within development by setting out the orthodoxy, and critically evaluates this before engaging more constructively with the challenges presented…
An agenda for thinking about ‘race’ in development
This paper reveals some of the silences about ‘race’ in development ideologies, institutions and practices. It suggests that these mask the perpetuation of a racialized discourse in development, its complicity with broader historical and contemporary racial projects and the effects of ‘race’ on the processes and consequences of development. The paper provides an agenda for understanding development in terms of ‘race’ and identifies three potentia…
Critiquing ‘race’ and racism in development discourse and practice
I 'Race' in developmentForms of racism and expressions that articulate ideas about 'race' are fluid and multiple, contingent and contextual, ranging from overt to covert and unreflexive.Historically and geographically rooted, such expressions have become increasingly variegated, even detached from their originary impulses, and can travel far and wide.It is in this spirit of critical enquiry that the papers in this special issue aim to reveal some…
Different bodies, same clothes
Authority and Expertise
I explore how the increasing professionalisation of international development has enabled the expansion of the neoliberal agenda of development agencies and, at the same time, the co-optation of so-called "alternative" approaches onto this agenda. The focus is on the key figure of the development "expert" as an agent involved in consolidating unilinear notions of modernising progress. First, there is an examination of the post-war production of t…
Spatial practices and imaginaries
This paper explores the spatiality of colonial and postcolonial power and discourse as produced, performed and imagined by former British colonial service officers and contemporary UK international development professionals. It focuses on two key aspects of spatial practices. The first addresses the spaces inhabited by these colonial officers and development professionals overseas and how their locatedness, embedded or enclavic, shapes relationsh…
From Colonialism to development
This paper is concerned with the form and extent to which colonial discourses, cultures and practices continue to pervade the workings of the post-independence international development aid industry. It is based on the personal narratives of individuals involved in both colonial administration and subsequently in the field of development as expatriate consultants whose experiences provide a resource for interrogating the varied articulations of t…
Extending networks and mediating brands
We examine how increasingly volatile global flows and tenuous networks rearrange local spaces and are inhabited by local people by looking at the strategies adopted by stallholders on a Mauritian market who acquire and sell locally manufactured branded clothes. Continuously (re)negotiating their connections to power‐holders within networks of clothing production, we highlight how these traders achieve momentarily stable arrangements within a cont…
Transnational Development Networks
Development is embedded in networks that extend across space and time. These networks-maintained, reworked, and given meaning through the practices of the actors who constitute them-bring together assemblages of institutions, knowledges, and commitments that make possible and shape the ways in which development is done through them. The authors explore the usefulness of concepts of network and assemblage for conceptualizing development, elaborati…
Symbol of Authority
This highly engaging and meticulously researched book captures the experiences of men who served as District Officers (DOs) in the British Colonial Administrative Service (CAS). While there exist numerous texts on British colonial and imperial history, this densely detailed account foregrounds the lives and work of individuals who were representatives of the British government and performed its responsibilities overseas in the latter days of the …
Global Peddlers and Local Networks
This paper is based on the experiences of street traders from South Asia and West Africa who currently live and work in Barcelona. I argue that in the 'informal' and marginal spaces inhabited, utilised, and created by these traders, they produce forms of nonelite cosmopolitanism through which livelihoods are sustained, social bonds are strengthened, and fluid, diasporic identities are produced. These are enabled by the development and maintenance…
Empire, Development and Colonialism
Participation
Empire, Development and Colonialism
Spatial Practices & Imaginaries Experiences of Colonial Officers & Development Professionals
Colonial Imaginaries and Postcolonial Transformations
This article draws on Edward Said's notion of ‘imaginary geographies’ to explore how representations of small island states enabled particular colonial interventions to take place in the Indian Ocean region and to show how these representations are currently being reworked to support development strategies. It examines how particular colonial imaginaries justified and legitimised spatially and temporally extended transactions before focusing on t…
Contesting colonial rule
Saving, Spending, and Future-Making
Money is a distributed technology for the government of futures. Using ethnographically informed accounts of social practices around saving and collective remittances in poor countries this paper examines how the malleability of money enables it to have the potential for formalisation which allows it to be brought into formal relations of future-making and foreclosure, at the same time as its potential for investments and reallocation enables it …
Dynamics of Unfree Labour in the Contemporary Global Economy
This short introduction to the symposium sets the context for the collection of articles, locating them in debates about labour conditions in the global economy. It outlines the two central questions which animate the symposium. First, what forms do unfree labour take in the contemporary global economy, and what are the implications for the most vulnerable workers in diverse contexts? Second, which processes, conditions and dynamics generate and …
Geographies and Histories of Unfreedom
This article contributes to debates on the continuities and divergences of different forms of labour migration over time and the degrees of unfreedom they manifest. It suggests that levels of (un)freedom can usefully be understood by analysing the various forms of control exercised over the movement of labour. More specifically, the article explores how unfreedom can be understood as a particular assemblage of spatial practices that simultaneousl…
Introduction
This article introduces the special edition that follows. It begins by outlining five important aspects of social theory—generalization, explanation, understanding change, comparison and knowledge building. It then goes on to highlight the four key common interests which the contributions to this collection share. These are a response to theoretical gaps in mainstream developing thinking, the need to theorize development processes, the value of t…
Trade, consumption and development alliances
This article examines the historical legacy of contemporary development alliances through an analysis of the British government’s Empire Marketing Board poster campaign from 1926 to 1933. The primary aim of these posters was to instil in the British public a preference for buying empire-grown goods and the significance of their role as consumers in maintaining the Empire. By conveying messages of a common humanity and invoking a visual language o…
Sociology (34 obras) · Political science (30 obras) · Law (27 obras) · Law (19 obras) · Archaeology (18 obras) · Geography (18 obras) · History (17 obras) · Colonialism (14 obras) · Economics (14 obras) · Politics (12 obras)