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Introduction
Cindi Katz is Professor in the Doctoral Program in Earth and Environmental Sciences, CUNY Graduate Center, where she is also affiliated with the Programs in Environmental Psychology, Women's and Gender Studies, and American Studies. Her research concerns social reproduction, the production of nature, the workings of the security state in everyday environments, the privatization of the public environment, and the intertwining of memory and history in the geographical imagination. In a variety of collective endeavors Katz is continuing to develop her ideas around 'minor theory, and 'counter-topography.' She is working on two book projects: 'childhood as spectacle' and a collection of her writings on social reproduction.
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August 1987 - present
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Publications (76)
In this article I draw on ideas associated with minor theory to address the politics of knowledge that permeate the discourse and aspirations of planetary urbanization, and think through what is at stake in some of its broader claims. Existing critiques challenge the evacuation of agency, subjectivity and forms of difference in the planetary ambiti...
Neste artigo Cindi Katz levanta um problema intrínseco da produção capitalista globalizada: o descompromisso com os lugares e seus habitantes, agravando desigualdades de classe, gênero, raça. A autora discute este problema de maneira singular a partir de uma abordagem materialista da reprodução social. Como a globalização, a reprodução social é exa...
The power of myth to take on important political meaning while at the same time obscuring embodied historical geographies lurks everywhere. The mythic status of John Henry, when mobilized by Pete Seeger for instance, was used as a symbol for labor struggles across the U.S. Given the positive portrayal of his racialized might and power, so rarely va...
During childhood the practices around sharing knowledge are particularly important as children acquire and internalise the working knowledge of their communities in all of its unevenness and quirkiness—pernicious and delicious. This knowledge is not just taught directly but learned in a community of practice and through the inhabited spaces of ever...
During childhood the practices around sharing knowledge are particularly important as children acquire and internalise the working knowledge of their communities in all of its unevenness and quirkiness—pernicious and delicious. This knowledge is not just taught directly but learned in a community of practice and through the inhabited spaces of ever...
Contemporary capitalism is in the throes of crises precipitated by over-accumulation and the effects of decades of privatization, commodification, and financialization, each sieved through the other. The angel of geography is conjured to mark these crises on the grounds of everyday life. Their profound and uneven consequences for the present and fu...
The People, Place, and Space Reader brings together the excerpted writings of scholars, designers, and activists from a variety of fields upon which we draw in our teaching and research to make sense of the makings and meanings of the world we inhabit. They help us to understand the relationships between people and the environment at all scales, an...
Field research produces all kinds of knowledge, only some of which makes it into our texts. Rich troves of data are mined over many years, but some materials get stuck, constituted as marginal, imagined as private musings, anecdotes, mere ‘stories’ told over dinner but never part of the formal narrative. During a year of often-arduous field researc...
This commentary engages with Kevin Cox?s (2013) ?Notes on a Brief Encounter: Critical Realism, Historical Materialism and Human Geography.? Identifying a trajectory in historical geographical materialism that focused on the material social practices of everyday life fully attuned to the social relations of production and social reproduction of spac...
This piece grows out of my on-going project, 'Childhood as Spectacle', and my enduringconcern with social reproduction and what it does for and to Marxist and othercritical political-economic analyses. After more than 30 years of Marxist-feministinterventions around these issues, symptomatic silences around social reproductionremain all too common...
Pairing dynamic out-of-school-time (OST) programs with zoos can encourage young people's relationships with and sense of responsibility for animals and the environment. The project presented in this article, Animal Rescuers, gave the authors the opportunity to examine how such a pairing can work. OST programs enable learning in settings that are ge...
This commentary on Afflicted Powers focuses on RETORT's theorization of the spectacle. Through a discussion of mimetic versus metonymic politics and an examination of childhood as a site of spectacle, the domestic security state and the social reproduction of weak citizenship are brought into the discussion.
THE NOTION OF a hidden city of social reproduction, suggests that the uneven relations and material practices of social reproduction are respectively hidden and targeted by a neo-liberal urban agenda. A discussion of the public-private Grand Central Partnership in New York City, reveals some of the ways that this agenda is pursued through preservat...
Hurricane Katrina scoured the political economic landscape of New Orleans revealing the toll of decades of disinvestment in and 'hostile privatism' toward social reproduction in a city with corrosive inequalities around class, race, and gender. This piece addresses the failures of the state and capital around issues of social reproduction in the wa...
As the 21st century picks up speed and settles into place, childhood has become a spectacle — a site of accumulation, commodification, and desire — in whose name much is done. In this article, I argue that the spectacle of childhood is associated with the rise of ontological insecurity provoked by anxieties around the political—economic, geopolitic...
Building upon earlier work that brought together an examination of children's geographies with an analysis of the effects of global economic restructuring on social reproduction, this paper addresses the new spatialities of childhood in the United States. I argue that the spaces of contemporary childhood at all scales from the body to the globe are...
In the days after September 11th, 2001, and continuing until now, the national guard and other military personnel fanned out around New York City. Automatic rifles slung over their camouflaged shoulders, they “guarded” New York City's transportation stations, vital corners and thoroughfares, marquee buildings, and each and every bridge and tunnel e...
neoliberalism and the new political subjectivities, partners in crime;skill-enhancing, effectiveness-increasing in professionalization;Aotearoa New Zealand and state neoliberalism, and local partnerships;neoliberal “roll back” into community, the contradictory bargain;“strategic brokers”, and ways of being “governmentalised”;women's mean role, of m...
Life's Work is a study of the shifting spaces and material practices of social reproduction in the global era. The volume blurs the heavily drawn boundaries between production and reproduction, showing through case studies of migration, education and domesticity how the practices of everyday life challenge these categorical distinctions. New and in...
IntroductionTheorizing the Relations between Production and ReproductionConceptualizing the State and Social ReproductionContributions to This VolumeAcknowledgmentsEndnotesReferences
A vagabond, as is well known, moves from place to place without a fixed home. However, vagabondage insinuates a little dissolution—an unsettled, irresponsible, and disreputable life, which indeed can be said of the globalization of capitalist production. This paper reframes the discussion on globalization through a materialist focus on social repro...
Social power is reflected in and exercised through the production and control of space. These socio-spatial relations are gendered and vary across the life course, riddled by differences associated with class, ethnicity, race, and nationality. From “dad’s chair” to occupied national territories, the spatial forms of control are charged with and int...
In this essay I develop the notion of 'minor theory' following the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari on Kafka's 'minor literature' as a way of reconfiguring the production of knowledge in geography. I will explore the politics of producing theory that is, for example, interstitial with empirical research and social location; of scholarship...
Many questions-practical, strategic, political, ethical, personal-are raised by conducting field research. Some of these seem, or are constituted as, separate from the “research itself,” yet are integral to it. In this paper I attempt to cut through the breach that divides the doing of fieldwork and the fieldwork itself by addressing what constitut...
This paper explores systematic disruptions of social reproduction, the ways children do not receive the knowledge and skills necessary for the world in which they will come of age, in two sites deeply affected by global economic restructuring and en vironmental change, rural Sudan and New York City. The paper calls for rethinking of debates about t...
This collection of essays aims to extend understanding of the diversity and commonalities of women's experiences within different cultural contexts over the life course. The introduction includes some basic demography and concepts useful in illuminating changing geographies, whilst the main body of the book is thematical. The first two chapters exp...
This chapter explores the diversity of females' spatial experience, addressing some of the enduring consequences of women's restricted access to and control of the environment. It examines the relationship between girls' socialization and spatial range in two discrete sociocultural settings, both to draw comparisons between the two and to scrutiniz...
Metaphor and metonymy, then. These familiar concepts are borrowed, of course, from linguistics. Inasmuch, however, as we are concerned not with words but rather with space and spatial practice, such conceptual borrowing has to be underwritten by a careful examination of the relationship between space and language. (Henri Lefebvre)
Feminism, decolonization, and "new social movements' have decentered the geopolitical power of the "First World' and ruptured the relations of exploitation, domination, and imperialism that undergird it and the authority of the white, male, ruling class, Western subject. The tensions and reorientations in the macrological sphere resonate in social...
As part of the project for the Participatory Design of Two Community Elementary Schoolyards in Harlem, P.S. 185 and P.S. 208 (The Schoolyards Project), the Children's Environments Research Group of the City University of New York held an International Student Design Competition for the design of these schoolyards. The competition drew sixty entries...
This paper presents detailed findings on various practices of social reproduction - the production, exchange, and deployment of environmental knowledge - and points to the transformative potential inherent in the mundane practices of work, play, and learning. The village of Howa in Sudan has been incorporated within a state-sponsored agricultural d...
This paper addresses the silence that surrounds nature within social science, the discipline of geography included. We begin by connecting the modernist project to the domination of nature, using the example of Scott's race to the South Pole. In addition, we show the way in which the externalization of nature is built into our concepts of science....
Small children reveal their perceptions, resource appraisals, and use of water in free play, in interviews, and in semiprojective tests. Discussions of pictures of a water tap and a cloud by three-, four-, and five-year-olds indicate that the perception of hydrologic connections increases with age. Two distinct hydrologies are perceived: a domestic...
A partir d�estudis anteriors que vinculaven les geografies dels nens i les nenes amb una anàlisi dels efectes de la reestructuració de l�economia global en la reproducció social, aquest article examina les noves espacialitats de la infantesa als Estats Units. Defenso que els espais contemporanis de la infantesa, a totes les escales, des de les del...
Thesis (Ph. D.)--Clark University. Typewritten manuscript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 543-561). Photocopy of typescript. s
