CISA Annual Lecture featuring Professor Vinay Gidwani, University of Minnesota

Friday, May 3, 2019

3:30 PM - 4:45 PM
Charles E Young Library Main Conference Room

Abstract: My talk re-considers the agrarian question in an urban context by examining social reproduction and petty accumulation within migrant households in contemporary India. Based in life histories of working-class women of rural origin and one in particular, I show the intimate entanglements of violence and value-making in an urban economy marked by informal employment, uncertainty, and attrition. The exigencies of survival and the pulls of aspiration in present times require families to be increasingly mobile and inventive in locating income streams; families are stretched in space as social reproduction becomes multi-sited. This exacerbates the burden of care and repair that women must bear, but also creates wiggle room for them to disorient normative hierarchies and become agents of petty accumulation. There is a larger lesson here for our age of informality: how one builds a life when perched between the fatigue of reproduction and the renewing desire to be more.

Vinay Gidwani navigated an uneven ideoscape consisting of Marxist geography, neoclassical economics, agrarian studies, and environmental science to arrive at his present home in Geography and the Institute of Global Studies. Close engagement with disparate intellectual traditions, which often disagree on issues of epistemology and politics, has been a source of creative tension. His approach to theory and praxis reflects this. Although he studies issues of work, poverty, livelihoods, and agroecological change within the Indian context, his scholarship is defined by research problematics rather than by regional affiliation. He draws liberally on Africanist, Latin American, and Southeast Asian scholarship for insights.