Tom Cowan
Biographic Data
| ID | 577006 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Tom Cowan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Tom |
| FAMILY NAME | Cowan |
| SIGNATURE | COWAN T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Nottingham |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7131-4240 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 90 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 13 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Geographies of subsumption
This article draws on heterodox scholarship on capitalist subsumption to revise core approaches within Marxist and critical geography. The article argues that a heterodox account of subsumption provides us with an analytical tool with which to understand the geographies of capitalist difference without recourse to spatial determinism nor nonrelational accounts of externality. While heterodox approaches to subsumption are experiencing something of…
High‐resolution property: Drone enclosures in digital India
Drawing from ethnographic research on the implementation of Svamitva, one of the largest digitalised property titling schemes in the world, this paper examines how new drone and geospatial technologies are being deployed to enclose rural customary lands across contemporary India. Focusing on the initial processes of drone survey, GIS mapping and data‐creation under the scheme, the paper argues that the creation of ‘high‐resolution property’ is ac…
Urbanization without guarantees: Articulation, Rentier Capitalism and Occupancy on the Agrarian Urban Frontier
This article engages with the work of Stuart Hall to examine conditions of agrarian city-making on India’s urban frontier. The article draws on Hall’s writings on articulation and marxist method to propose an approach to studying the urban frontier “without guarantees’. That is without a priori presumption of the total consolidation of the non-urban to a financial-capitalist urban fabric. Examining India’s agrarian-urban frontier, the article arg…
City drafting: Property-making and bureaucratic urbanism in South Asia
This Special Feature explores the negotiated bureaucratic politics shaping urbanization in South Asia. City drafting refers to the flexible and contextual practices, procedures and policies required to haul diverse property regimes into order and provisionally render urban land clear and settled. The drafted city, we argue, is necessarily provisional and uneven, left open to politicised remapping, redrafting and resettlement by a host of institut…
Theorizing peripheral labor: Rethinking “surplus populations
Critical scholarship on twenty-first century capitalist development has called attention to certain structural limits on employment growth. Large populations excluded from formal employment are seen to eke out a precarious subsistence in informal economies, seemingly "surplus" to the needs of capital. This article, by contrast, aims to recast labor in the "peripheries," not as an externalized quantity redundant to emerging economic formations, bu…
Subaltern Frontiers: Agrarian City-Making in Gurgaon
In urban and peri-urban areas across the Global South, politicians, planners and developers are engaged in a voracious scramble to refashion land for global real estate investment, and transfer state power to private sector actors. Much of this development has taken place on the outskirts of the traditional metropoles, in the territorially flexible urban frontier. At the forefront of these processes in India, is Gurgaon, a privately developed met…
The village as urban infrastructure: Social reproduction, agrarian repair and uneven urbanisation
This paper draws from research conducted in Gurgaon, a city which has been transformed from agricultural hinterland to a bustling metropolis over the course of the past 30 years. The aim of this paper is to expand debates on the uneven geographies of urbanisation in India by reconsidering marginalised urban neighbourhoods as infrastructural nodes, wherein the complex and contested work of reproducing urban life is carried out. Extending scholarsh…
Uncertain Grounds: Cartographic Negotiation and Digitized Property on the Urban Frontier
Based on ethnographic research with cadastral land surveyors and revenue bureaucrats in Gurgaon, North India, this article examines how the desire to etch out and impose digitized private property titles on India's urban frontier is mediated by the shifting socio-materiality of bureaucratic work. The article argues that bureaucratic uncertainty structures the commodification of rural land in Gurgaon, and explores how digital technologies, designe…
Rooted flexibility: Social reproduction, violence and gendered work in the Indian city
Drawing on feminist marxist and feminist geography scholarship the article develops the concept 'rooted flexibility' to examine the latent frictions between flexible labour regimes and the rooted, gendered demands of social reproduction in worker tenements and factories in Gurgaon, India. The article explores the everyday gendered terrain through which migrant women are incorporated into, disciplined and navigate flexible labour and precarious so…
The Urban Village, Agrarian Transformation, and Rentier Capitalism in Gurgaon, India
Gurgaon, India's “millennium city”, is today synonymous with India's embrace of global real estate capital and private sector‐led urban development. This paper asserts that Gurgaon's spectacular urbanisation has been fundamentally underpinned by an uneven process of land acquisition, exemption and agrarian transformation. Shifting away from dispossession‐centred analyses of contemporary urbanisation in India, this paper explores Gurgaon's “urban …
Subaltern counter-urbanism: Work, dispossession and emplacement in Gurgaon, India
Introduction: Enclosures and discontents
Book synopsis: The contributions in this volume all revisit and reformulate Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation from diverse empirical contexts in the present global age. The chapters present research drawn from Gaza, Syria, Greece, the Philippines, DR Congo, and the Yucatan; global locations that have in common the ongoing, varied, and often repetitive occurrence of dispossession forced by violent conflict, crisis and austerity politics, an…
History's Milestones of African-American Higher Education
The Urban Village, Agrarian Transformation, and Rentier Capitalism in Gurgaon, India
Gurgaon, India's “millennium city”, is today synonymous with India's embrace of global real estate capital and private sector‐led urban development. This paper asserts that Gurgaon's spectacular urbanisation has been fundamentally underpinned by an uneven process of land acquisition, exemption and agrarian transformation. Shifting away from dispossession‐centred analyses of contemporary urbanisation in India, this paper explores Gurgaon's “urban …
Rooted flexibility: Social reproduction, violence and gendered work in the Indian city
Drawing on feminist marxist and feminist geography scholarship the article develops the concept 'rooted flexibility' to examine the latent frictions between flexible labour regimes and the rooted, gendered demands of social reproduction in worker tenements and factories in Gurgaon, India. The article explores the everyday gendered terrain through which migrant women are incorporated into, disciplined and navigate flexible labour and precarious so…
Urbanization without guarantees: Articulation, Rentier Capitalism and Occupancy on the Agrarian Urban Frontier
This article engages with the work of Stuart Hall to examine conditions of agrarian city-making on India’s urban frontier. The article draws on Hall’s writings on articulation and marxist method to propose an approach to studying the urban frontier “without guarantees’. That is without a priori presumption of the total consolidation of the non-urban to a financial-capitalist urban fabric. Examining India’s agrarian-urban frontier, the article arg…
The village as urban infrastructure: Social reproduction, agrarian repair and uneven urbanisation
This paper draws from research conducted in Gurgaon, a city which has been transformed from agricultural hinterland to a bustling metropolis over the course of the past 30 years. The aim of this paper is to expand debates on the uneven geographies of urbanisation in India by reconsidering marginalised urban neighbourhoods as infrastructural nodes, wherein the complex and contested work of reproducing urban life is carried out. Extending scholarsh…
Uncertain Grounds: Cartographic Negotiation and Digitized Property on the Urban Frontier
Based on ethnographic research with cadastral land surveyors and revenue bureaucrats in Gurgaon, North India, this article examines how the desire to etch out and impose digitized private property titles on India's urban frontier is mediated by the shifting socio-materiality of bureaucratic work. The article argues that bureaucratic uncertainty structures the commodification of rural land in Gurgaon, and explores how digital technologies, designe…
Subaltern counter-urbanism: Work, dispossession and emplacement in Gurgaon, India
City drafting: Property-making and bureaucratic urbanism in South Asia
This Special Feature explores the negotiated bureaucratic politics shaping urbanization in South Asia. City drafting refers to the flexible and contextual practices, procedures and policies required to haul diverse property regimes into order and provisionally render urban land clear and settled. The drafted city, we argue, is necessarily provisional and uneven, left open to politicised remapping, redrafting and resettlement by a host of institut…
Introduction: Enclosures and discontents
Book synopsis: The contributions in this volume all revisit and reformulate Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation from diverse empirical contexts in the present global age. The chapters present research drawn from Gaza, Syria, Greece, the Philippines, DR Congo, and the Yucatan; global locations that have in common the ongoing, varied, and often repetitive occurrence of dispossession forced by violent conflict, crisis and austerity politics, an…
Theorizing peripheral labor: Rethinking “surplus populations
Critical scholarship on twenty-first century capitalist development has called attention to certain structural limits on employment growth. Large populations excluded from formal employment are seen to eke out a precarious subsistence in informal economies, seemingly "surplus" to the needs of capital. This article, by contrast, aims to recast labor in the "peripheries," not as an externalized quantity redundant to emerging economic formations, bu…
Geographies of subsumption
This article draws on heterodox scholarship on capitalist subsumption to revise core approaches within Marxist and critical geography. The article argues that a heterodox account of subsumption provides us with an analytical tool with which to understand the geographies of capitalist difference without recourse to spatial determinism nor nonrelational accounts of externality. While heterodox approaches to subsumption are experiencing something of…
History's Milestones of African-American Higher Education
Introduction: Enclosures and discontents
Book synopsis: The contributions in this volume all revisit and reformulate Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation from diverse empirical contexts in the present global age. The chapters present research drawn from Gaza, Syria, Greece, the Philippines, DR Congo, and the Yucatan; global locations that have in common the ongoing, varied, and often repetitive occurrence of dispossession forced by violent conflict, crisis and austerity politics, an…
The Urban Village, Agrarian Transformation, and Rentier Capitalism in Gurgaon, India
Gurgaon, India's “millennium city”, is today synonymous with India's embrace of global real estate capital and private sector‐led urban development. This paper asserts that Gurgaon's spectacular urbanisation has been fundamentally underpinned by an uneven process of land acquisition, exemption and agrarian transformation. Shifting away from dispossession‐centred analyses of contemporary urbanisation in India, this paper explores Gurgaon's “urban …
Subaltern counter-urbanism: Work, dispossession and emplacement in Gurgaon, India
Rooted flexibility: Social reproduction, violence and gendered work in the Indian city
Drawing on feminist marxist and feminist geography scholarship the article develops the concept 'rooted flexibility' to examine the latent frictions between flexible labour regimes and the rooted, gendered demands of social reproduction in worker tenements and factories in Gurgaon, India. The article explores the everyday gendered terrain through which migrant women are incorporated into, disciplined and navigate flexible labour and precarious so…
The village as urban infrastructure: Social reproduction, agrarian repair and uneven urbanisation
This paper draws from research conducted in Gurgaon, a city which has been transformed from agricultural hinterland to a bustling metropolis over the course of the past 30 years. The aim of this paper is to expand debates on the uneven geographies of urbanisation in India by reconsidering marginalised urban neighbourhoods as infrastructural nodes, wherein the complex and contested work of reproducing urban life is carried out. Extending scholarsh…
Uncertain Grounds: Cartographic Negotiation and Digitized Property on the Urban Frontier
Based on ethnographic research with cadastral land surveyors and revenue bureaucrats in Gurgaon, North India, this article examines how the desire to etch out and impose digitized private property titles on India's urban frontier is mediated by the shifting socio-materiality of bureaucratic work. The article argues that bureaucratic uncertainty structures the commodification of rural land in Gurgaon, and explores how digital technologies, designe…
Subaltern Frontiers: Agrarian City-Making in Gurgaon
In urban and peri-urban areas across the Global South, politicians, planners and developers are engaged in a voracious scramble to refashion land for global real estate investment, and transfer state power to private sector actors. Much of this development has taken place on the outskirts of the traditional metropoles, in the territorially flexible urban frontier. At the forefront of these processes in India, is Gurgaon, a privately developed met…
Theorizing peripheral labor: Rethinking “surplus populations
Critical scholarship on twenty-first century capitalist development has called attention to certain structural limits on employment growth. Large populations excluded from formal employment are seen to eke out a precarious subsistence in informal economies, seemingly "surplus" to the needs of capital. This article, by contrast, aims to recast labor in the "peripheries," not as an externalized quantity redundant to emerging economic formations, bu…
City drafting: Property-making and bureaucratic urbanism in South Asia
This Special Feature explores the negotiated bureaucratic politics shaping urbanization in South Asia. City drafting refers to the flexible and contextual practices, procedures and policies required to haul diverse property regimes into order and provisionally render urban land clear and settled. The drafted city, we argue, is necessarily provisional and uneven, left open to politicised remapping, redrafting and resettlement by a host of institut…
High‐resolution property: Drone enclosures in digital India
Drawing from ethnographic research on the implementation of Svamitva, one of the largest digitalised property titling schemes in the world, this paper examines how new drone and geospatial technologies are being deployed to enclose rural customary lands across contemporary India. Focusing on the initial processes of drone survey, GIS mapping and data‐creation under the scheme, the paper argues that the creation of ‘high‐resolution property’ is ac…
Urbanization without guarantees: Articulation, Rentier Capitalism and Occupancy on the Agrarian Urban Frontier
This article engages with the work of Stuart Hall to examine conditions of agrarian city-making on India’s urban frontier. The article draws on Hall’s writings on articulation and marxist method to propose an approach to studying the urban frontier “without guarantees’. That is without a priori presumption of the total consolidation of the non-urban to a financial-capitalist urban fabric. Examining India’s agrarian-urban frontier, the article arg…
Geographies of subsumption
This article draws on heterodox scholarship on capitalist subsumption to revise core approaches within Marxist and critical geography. The article argues that a heterodox account of subsumption provides us with an analytical tool with which to understand the geographies of capitalist difference without recourse to spatial determinism nor nonrelational accounts of externality. While heterodox approaches to subsumption are experiencing something of…
Political science (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Politics (9 works) · Economics (8 works) · Geography (7 works) · Political economy (7 works) · Urban Planning and Governance (6 works) · Agriculture (5 works) · Capitalism (5 works)