Storing value: The infrastructural ecologies of commodity storage

As Marx pointed out in the second volume of Capital, storage is a critical moment in the circulation of capital. Yet, despite the resurgent interest in the political economy of circulation, logistics, and infrastructures, commodity storage remains under-examined in critical human geography. This paper examines the “hidden abode” of storage by tracing attempts to control moisture and realize value in two different commodity chains: Newfoundland saltfish and American grain in the late-19th- and 20th centuries. Storing preserved codfish and grain presented different biophysical obstacles for firms, but both required interventions to discipline moisture to preserve and realize the value embodied in the commodities. Through our empirical work, we frame storage sites as infrastructural ecologies: complex, more-than-human assemblages that both constrain and enable the realization of value embodied in lively commodities. This paper contributes to debates on circulation, logistics, and infrastructures by highlighting historical geographies of storage as a novel vantage point from which to analyze the frictions and flows of value under capitalist social relations. By grounding logistics in a value-theoretical framework, this paper also contributes to recent debates regarding the value (and valuation) of nature in political economy, by highlighting the role of storage and realization in the nature–value nexus.

HUMAN GEOGRAPHY WITH OPEN GIS AS A TRANSFORMATIVE INTRODUCTORY HIGHER EDUCATION COURSE

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> Curricula in human geography and GIS can integrate open-source GIS with critical human geography, moving beyond a curricular divide between critical human geography and technical GIS. This integration requires significant transformation of GIS curricula, requires students to simultaneously develop fundamental knowledge of both GIS and human geography to critically address spatial problems in society, and calls for transformation of GIS technology itself. The curriculum is transformed to teach GIS fundamentals experimentally through video tutorials and handouts, teach GIS problem-solving with error detection and debugging skills, teach human geography concepts by reading and replicating research papers, and apply critical human geography concepts and open-source GIS techniques to solve novel problems. Students develop skills in assessing error and uncertainty in GIS, applying GIS to solve human geography problems, and questioning the powerful interactions between politics, economics, and geospatial technologies. GIS technology is transformed as instructors develop software features to facilitate human geography inquiry for novice GIS students and students apply their new problem-solving skills to identify bugs and consider new GIS features.</p>

The Geographer Marx

In celebration of Marx's 200th birth anniversary, this symposium revisits how Marx has influenced geography research and pedagogy. Capital, capitalism, commodity, use value, surplus value, labor theory of value, class, exploitation, class struggle, dialectics, dialectical materialism are now ubiquitous in critical human geography research. Theories inspired by Marxism like critical theories of imperialism, geographic transfer of value, dependency has been the mainstay for envisioning relationship between Global North and Global South. Theories inspired by class, class-consciousness and ideology have inspired geographies of labor, labor unionism and social movements. Commodity, commodification of nature, production, and accumulation has also inspired post-structural and feminist research on social reproduction, feminization of poverty and informality, environmental degradation, climate change, and consumption landscape. In this symposium, authors self-select concepts, ideas, theories, and metaphors from Marx and discuss how, and in what ways, these influenced their work (research and teaching), and also how their Marxist geography influences Marxism and society.

Die Abwesenheit der Phänomenologie in der deutschen Humangeographie

This article is written from the perspective of phenomenology. Its potential gain for a critical human geography is discussed in contrast to the paradigmatic frame of basic assumptions in constructivism. The example of atmospheres will illustrate another theoretical conception of space. In phenomenological view there happens not only a reality of things but also a circum-actuality is not spatially extended like a house or another material objective. Atmospheres are vital qualities (Dürckheim) we feel like a cloud in our sense perception in situations of awareness. This implies the necessity to make a difference between a material body (Körper) and a felt body (Leib). This epistemic knowledge will improve our critique of neoliberal societies, tuned by aestheticisation especially in glamour CBDs of postmodern cities. Finally there is a close link to the work of Michel Foucault, topped off in his The Hermeneutics of the Subject. References to the Critical Theory (Frankfurter Schule) are connected.

Geographies, Critical and Marxist, and Lessons from South Africa

Analysis in human geography has shown persistent tendencies of a pluralistic sort: a view of the world as the product of numerous independent and interacting forces. The advent of Marxist geography in the 1970s promised a path in a more totalizing direction. This emphasized the contradictory unity of the world, while placing production as the point both of departure and of return. The social process was conceived as a unity and its different moments as production relations. Society and space represented a further move in a pluralizing direction. Since then critical impulses in human geography have tended to be subordinated to that view. Critical human geography is a product of this. Engaging in research from the standpoint of one particular social moment – the institutional, the cultural and the discursive, among others – is emblematic. It is not enough, however, to criticize this by invoking the generalities of Marx's method. More convincing are actual empirical studies. In this paper I explore the case of South Africa prior to 1990 as a way of demonstrating how constructions of race, space, and gender, along with institutions must per necesita be interpreted as production relations and how this can shed light on particular geographies; a light, I will maintain, that is necessarily beyond the reach of critical human geography.