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Refereed Journal Articles
Faria C and Whitesell D, “Sequined Styles, Intersectional Moves: Economic Geography, Let’s Dress Up!” Economic Geography doi.org/10.1080/00130095.2022.2030215
Focusing on the burgeoning Ugandan bridal industry, this article demonstrates the insights of a feminist, postcolonial intersectionality in economic geography. This lens makes visible how power-relations drive and are manifest in commodity trade, and how power forms the fabric that connects seemingly distinct processes, relationships, objects, and affects. In what follows we touch down in two moments of the Ugandan bridal industry: first, the international trade into Uganda of imported dresses and, second, their refashioning, design and sometimes original manufacturing there. We use dress, and the act of dressing up, then in two ways. First, we see Ugandan bridal gowns as deeply instructive material objects that tells us much about the geographies of economies. And second, as a metaphor for playful connection, helping us to refashion, and reimagine the subfield of economic geography as malleable, open, transformative, transgressive, and always in-becoming.
Faria C and Whitesell D (2020) “Global Retail Capital and Urban Futures: Feminist Postcolonial Perspectives” Geography Compass doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12551
Critical scholarship on urban development and displacement has a long history in geography. Yet one emergent driver remains strikingly understudied and poorly understood: global retail capital (GRC). This essay engages feminist postcolonial approaches, grounded in African continental feminist work, to theorize from the urban transformations, displacements, and resistances driven by GRC and emerging in urban East Africa. This framework engages an intersectional understanding of capitalism, and its work driving urban displacement, as always co‐produced through gender, racial, colonial, heteronormative, nationalist, and other power‐geometries. We assert that feminist postcolonial geography helps us imagine other urban futures, within and beyond Africa: critical of colonial past‐presents; free of the modernizing imperatives of normative urban planning; and that recognize the work and insights—intellectual and material—of African women.
Faria C, Kyotowadde C, Katushabe J, and Whitesell D (2020) “‘You Rise Up...They Burn You Again’: Market Fires And The Urban Intimacies Of Disaster Capitalism” Transactions Of The Institute Of British Geographers doi.org/10.1111/tran.12404
In this paper we develop a feminist political ecology of disaster colonialism. To do so, we focus on a series of fires that devastated Park Yard Market in Kampala, Uganda, one of the largest retail spaces in East Africa. Officially accidental, rumours suggest the fires were deliberately set to displace traders and make way for the lucrative (re)development of the city‐centre land. Concerned less with the veracity of these rumours and more with their political ecologies, we show how narratives of Park Yard forwarded by the state and private interests indeed readied it for disaster. Here, we trace how colonial narratives of urban planning in the city, driven by technocratic imperatives of improvement, modernisation, and safety echo in the contemporary devaluation of Park Yard and its women traders. Against this, we show how the caring labour and investment by those traders was central to the formation and maintenance of the market. Over time they created an economically viable space, even as their work was devalued and legally unrecognised. Our analysis interrogates the colonial past‐presents and the gendered‐racialised logics of neoliberal urban development. This framing understands spectacular disaster, a series of highly destructive fires, as inextricably connected to historically produced systems of precarious urban marginality. It demonstrates the uneven impacts, and in particular the deeply deleterious impacts for low‐income Ugandan women; the relationship between fire disaster, vulnerability, and the labour of social reproduction; and the varied ways female traders resisted, adapted, and struggled to defend their economic space in the city. Specifically, a feminist political ecology also helps us understand the embodied nature of this relationship. That is, it is always produced through emotion‐laden, material, and corporeal gendered, racialised and classed power and both relies on and violates particular kinds of idealised or disposable urban subjectivities.
Whitesell D and Faria C (2019) “Gowns, Globalization, and ‘Global Intimate Mapping’: Geovisualizing Uganda’s Wedding Industry” Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, Special issue: Feminist Political Geographies: Critical Reflections and New Directions doi.org/10.1177/2399654418821133
In this article, we put critical geographic information systems (GIS) methods into conversation with feminist political and economic geographies, mapping the Ugandan wedding industry across the body, city, and the global. In doing so, we ground macro geopolitical and geoeconomic shifts in the lived experiences of women involved in the wedding industry, revealing some of the cross-scalar political economies of the trade. We develop a form of “global intimate mapping” to ask, empirically: how are new transnational trade networks reflected in the cityscape and the bodies of brides? And conceptually: what productive insight does feminist GIS offer for feminist political and economic geographies?
Book Chapters
Elledge A, Faria C, and Whitesell D, "Building a fun, feminist and forward space together: Our research and mentoring collective”, in Gökarıksel B, Hawkins M, Neubert C, and Smith S. Feminist Geography Unbound: Intimacy, Territory and Embodied Power. West Virginia Press.
Other publications
Bachmann-Padilla T, Walenta J, and Whitesell D, “Going Hungry on Campus” The End of Austin