From relational thinking to relational politics of responsibility: Reclaiming outrage in economic geography

Abstract

Informed by economic geography’s history and by contemporary feminist thought, this exchanges commentary proposes the strategic reclamation of outrage to inform the construction and purpose of explanation in the subfield.

What role can economic geographers play in the construction of scholarly explanation to grapple with the contemporary moment – conditions characterized by economic disparities, ecological uncertainty, social unrest and political turbulence? Observing that economic geography has in recent years often drifted away from normative commitments, this commentary revisits how key thinkers in the field have previously channelled their moral reactions to prevailing economic conditions into methodological and epistemological interventions. Outrage about oppressive social conditions in 1960s American cities, for example – and the detached, descriptive research being done at the time to explain these conditions – catalysed a key moment in the history of economic geography: Harvey’s move from a rationalist (1969) to Marxian-inspired historical materialist (2010 [1973]) approach. While 1969’s Harvey searched for objectively verifiable facts through hypothetical-deductive models of explanation (Barnes, 1996), 1973’s Harvey argued that separating facts from values was not a harmless intellectual exercise, and that cities and economies should be studied not as objects but as lenses for understanding the structural production of distributional inequalities and unjust urban planning. This can be the power of seeking to understand what produces conditions that feel outrageous – things that offend our sensibilities by feeling shockingly bad, wrong, unjust. From Explanation in Geography to Social Justice and the City, Harvey drew on his outrage to propose a novel methodology tied to an explicitly politicized philosophy of geography.

Fifty years after Social Justice and the City, we may be culturally more acclimated to outrage, but are often intellectually less so. As an emotion, outrage affects scholars’ worldviews, motivations and decision-making, but contemporary economic geographers have become surprisingly hesitant to talk about it. While the radical politics of the 1970s and 1980s energized critical economic geography (Barnes and Sheppard, 2019), contemporary ‘outrage culture’ has become more associated with a Right-wing, xenophobic, anti-education politics that is directly antagonistic to academic freedom, critical pedagogy and efforts to diversify university curricula and student and faculty bodies. Yet, I argue, ceding outrage to its associations with fringe reactionaries, or just to other areas of the discipline of geography, is a missed opportunity for economic geographers. As I elaborate below, strategic reclamation of outrage can imbue descriptive research on unjust economic outcomes with a relational politics of responsibility, allowing economic geographers to better connect economic consequences with their causes, identify whom (individuals, governments, institutions, communities, others) might be responsible for responding, and how this might be done. In doing so, contemporary economic geographers can avoid allowing the production of oppression and inequality, so politically insightful for the economic geography of the 1970s, to become merely an interesting paradox or taken for granted contradiction of capitalism, and avoid reproducing the arms-length approach of neoclassical economics, which is largely underwhelmed by the cruelties of 21st century economic life. Building on the work of Doreen Massey, I propose going beyond relational analysis to a relational politics of responsibility that can imbue explanation with a renewed sense of purpose.

Scholarly explanation involves ‘a set of statements usually constructed to describe a set of facts which clarifies the causes, context, and consequences of those facts. It may establish rules or laws, and may clarify the existing rules or laws in relation to any objects or phenomena examined’ (Drake, 2018: 160–161). Explanation is a process of starting with facts or observations and searching for their cause, context and consequences – the why or the how or the ‘with what results?’ These consequences can be a useful place to centre our investigations, but the temporalities of research and life itself often lead us to look retrospectively. If we are ‘starting with the facts’ in our goal of explanation, the consequences can be an opening anecdote for research – a paradox or event that stands in for larger processes that are then explained through a distillation of causes and context (or, conjuncture – see Peck’s, 2023). While economic geography is deeply concerned with inequality, inequalities in their concrete manifestations are often positioned as interesting puzzles that demand theoretical or causal (Yeung, 2019) explanation. In short, in recent decades, research focused on distilling contexts or causes has been less directly concerned with the politics of the consequences.

Despite gestures to economic geography’s potential for opening up normative and political possibilities (e.g. Barnes and Sheppard, 2010; but see Bonds, 2013; Werner et al., 2017), these possibilities are often vague in contemporary economic geographical research, avoiding the direct political prescriptions of 1970s and 1980s radicalism. Explicit political aims have rather risen to the fore in other subfields like Black, Latinx and feminist geographies – fields often loosely lumped into the realm of ‘social geography’; a slightly older body of literature on moral and ethical geographies (e.g. Barnett, 2014; Darling, 2009; Smith, 1999) was also somewhat removed from studies of the economy. This is a missed opportunity for economic geographers, as questions of economic distribution are fundamental to social inequalities, including those based on identity. Unjust economic distribution is a worthy place for outrage, and thus for explanation driven by normative commitments! In the rest of this commentary, I reflect on how outrage has productively fuelled past explanatory projects in economic geography and related fields, and propose that an outrage-informed, relational epistemological orientation could deepen contemporary explanation and disciplinary purpose.

Explanations for the outrageous: Histories and the tentative present

In the histories economic geographers tell of our discipline, the outrage of two scholars in particular has been singled out as fuelling distinctive explanatory breakthroughs and methodological paradigm shifts. Throughout his work, Karl Marx’s moral outrage pervades an indignant description of the social consequences of industrial production, which also underlies his logic. In Capital, for example, Marx’s anger is palpable as he uses the capitalist system’s own logic to demolish the system analytically, arguing in chapters like ‘The Working Day’ that capitalism is so rife with contradictions that capitalists can only profit by breaking their own rules and engaging in activities such as wage theft, skimming and adulteration (Marx, 2010 [1867]). This theoretical bedrock is driven by an outraged-fuelled analysis of capitalism that is itself storied in the field of economic geography.

Harvey (2010 [1973]) , inspired by this approach and its politics, drew on Marx in constructing a new method to explain and politicize the distributional consequences of assumptions built into urban planning – along the way indicting the field of geography, and the broader social sciences, for documenting injustice at arms’ length ‘before retiring to our fireside comforts’. Many economic geographers will remember the thrill of reading these passages for the first time: ‘Mapping even more evidence of man’s patent inhumanity to man is counter-revolutionary in the sense that it allows the bleeding-heart liberal in us to pretend we are contributing to a solution when in fact we are not’ (p. 144); ‘Our objective is to eliminate ghettos. Therefore, the only valid policy with respect to this objective is to eliminate the conditions which give rise to the truth of the theory. In other words, we wish the von Thunen theory of the urban land market to become not true’ (Harvey (2010 [1973]) . Harvey’s outrage led not only to an overhaul in the means and methods of explanation, but to a revolutionized purpose, or ends, for explanation. And just like that of Marx, Harvey’s outraged affect proved hugely influential in economic geography.

Yet while these two men’s outrage fuelled epistemological revolutions, other scholars’ outrage has failed to register in the same way, highlighting outrage’s intrinsic connections to politics, praxis and social context. Julie Graham, writing in the early 2000s, decried outrage’s associations with ‘victimhood and injury’, seeing outrage-driven scholarship as overly masculinist and focused on class relations. Despite appreciation for the Marxist analytic of class conflict, Graham argued that, despite its popularity at the time, ‘the empowerment of outrage’ that was centred around class conflict did not produce ends that were very useful to politics or scholarship (quoted in Sharpe, 2014). On the other hand, Black feminists and other feminists of colour have demonstrated how outrage ca be visionary and purposeful, arguing for a politics of anger rooted in experiences and observations of racism and oppression (e.g. Lorde, 1997), drawing on rage as an intellectual resource (Bailey, 2018).

One thing we can learn from Black feminist scholarship, however, is that experiences and processes that produce rage are often not understood as economic as such, being dismissed as ‘merely social’ or ‘not scholarly’ at all (hooks, 1991; Thompson, 2017). This is important because the perceived legitimacy of rage is key to its acceptance, both in terms of scholarship and politics. As noted above, contemporary economic geography has become somewhat distanced from its radical, political roots; geographers like Laura Pulido and Ruth Wilson Gilmore are now usually categorized as social/political geographers despite the fundamentally economic character of their scholarship. Gilmore’s geography is deeply influenced by Marxian thought, but economic geography has largely failed to ‘claim’ such scholarship and such scholars, as part of its remit. Examining the dominant identities of people who identify as economic geographers (Rosenman et al., 2020) may provide insight into why research that draws its politics from a sense of outrage about prevailing socioeconomic conditions has tended to occur in other subfields. In this way, contemporary economic geography has, somewhat perversely, differentiated itself from other areas of geography by being comparatively less outraged than other subfields.

Of course, it’s not as if contemporary economic geographers are complacent about conditions of inequality or oppression. Most would claim to be concerned with these to some degree. Yeung (2023), for example, argues that causal explanation is a ‘necessary and normative step’ towards ‘emancipatory socio-spatial interventions’ and ‘transformations in material worlds’. Influential approaches of late take great pains to specify causal mechanisms (Yeung) and contexts/conjuctures (Peck) while leaving consequences more abstract and open. Yet it is the geography of consequences that often produces a moral/ethical outrage that can inform the choices we make in explanation: where to start, methods used and whether we look retrospectively or forward to understand uneven outcomes.

The things and places we study, however, are much more personal for some scholars than for others (e.g. Daigle, 2019). Who gets to be insulated by claims of objectivity – and who does not – and who is accused of being ‘not objective enough’ given their identity – are all questions that persist in debates about how to and who should study the consequences of economic processes, and over who has the legitimacy to do so (Roy, 2016). It is also true that moral/ethical outrage is not always guided by progressive politics. ¹ A pluralistic view of outrage (Lugones, 2007) suggests that we ask why Harvey and Marx’s rage against structural oppression has seemed so much more appropriate and palatable to economic geographers than the rage of mothers, housewives, domestic workers, Black people, etc. Here, economic geography has other powerful intellectual guides to follow. Pulido (2017), writing on the racial production of capitalist inequalities and environmental degradation, for example, demonstrates how the conceptualization of the problem of racial oppression inherently shapes both analytical and political strategies (see also Gilmore, 2023). These connections can form the basis of an alternative epistemology of economic phenomena, which, as I articulate below, can be achieved through relational analysis, a particular strength of economic geography, and augmented by the kind of moral-ethical orientation that Pulido and others espouse.

Towards consequences: Epistemologies of outrage

As noted above, contemporary cultural associations with outrage make it feel uncomfortable for an academic arena, perhaps hinging on its associations with the irrational, emotional, indignant and anger-fuelled, leading to dismissals of its role in academic life (Ahmed, 2017). The first step is to refuse to think of outrage as a unitary, homogenous object and to follow Black feminist thought in problematizing the notion that it is an inappropriate driver for epistemology and methodology. Both feminist thought and scholars like Harvey provide a road map for connecting outrage with rigorous analysis of power and politics towards emancipatory ends: remember, we wish the von Thunen theory of the urban land market to become not true!

Outrage at oppression suffered personally or by others can both be hugely motivating, as evidenced by social and academic movements happening around the globe at the time of this writing in reaction to the Israeli-perpetuated genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Activism and emerging scholarly work beyond economic geography insists on the conflict’s connections to climate injustice, colonialism, US imperialism, spatial segregation, labour issues and many other economically-driven phenomena. To contribute to these debates, economic geographers might challenge themselves to fuse the subfield’s strengths in relational analysis with our moral reactions to the conflict – analysis of the consequences of economic power differentials, for example, is one of the things economic geographers do best.

Relationality is a heuristic associated with Doreen Massey, one of economic geography’s most beloved figures, but it is important to remember the ends of Massey’s relationality, not just her pathbreaking methodology. Massey (2004) explicitly connected her relational approach to whom and what processes were responsible for socially uneven outcomes – for causing them, certainly, but also for what and who could ameliorate them. This was Massey’s relational politics, which has not received nearly the attention within economic geography as her relational methodology. Massey’s (2004, 2013) relational thinking was designed to combat essentialism based on ostensibly inherent characteristics and then to connect relationally-constructed identities to political responsibility. She called for attentiveness to the geography of social and political responsibility to counteract the ‘persistent apparent oblivion [of local people – in this case well off Londoners] . . . to the external relations, the daily global raiding parties of various sorts, the activity of finance houses and multinational corporations, on which the very existence of the place, including its mixity, depends’ (Massey, 2004: 15). In Massey’s view, explaining what produces the place understood as London, and the identities of people who dwell there, also constitutes a politics of responsibility for and towards the locationally near and far-flung places, people and processes through which London is produced. It was a direct call to identify who is responsible for the production of uneven development. For Massey, responsibility was both an analytical object and a political purpose. Ahmed (2010: 175), similarly suggests a productiveness both scholarly and political that is opened up by relationality: ‘anger is not simply defined in relationship to a past, but as opening up the future. In other words, being against something does not end with “that which one is against” . . . Being against something is also being for something, something that has yet to be articulated or is not yet’.

A brief Massey-inspired thought experiment about how we can explain the social results of the COVID-19 pandemic points to how economic geography is often missing half the story and how outrage could help us remedy this. What would it mean to view the pandemic’s economic geographies as a relational process? With the pandemic as lens, we might observe the exacerbation of many gendered, racialized and health/disability-related economic inequalities. Without bringing in Massey’s relational politics, we might stop there. As a society we in fact have stopped there – a lack of conceptualization of responsibility and collective moral outrage underlies the currently uneven landscape of who gets to move on from the pandemic and who does not. Conceptualizing this unevenness in terms of responsibility – whether of the state, the individual, the national government, the global public health apparatus, etc. – can take us from variegation in causes/contexts (back to) to variegation in consequences. And this, in turn, might help us start to think about what all of this is for in the first place – to whom do we wish to be accountable as economic geographers (Narayan and Rosenman, 2022)? In reframing the question from ‘what are the geographies of the pandemic’s economic outcomes’ to ‘why and how have already-marginalized groups suffered disproportionate economic harms and continue to suffer disproportionate harm in the wake of the pandemic?’ or ‘why and how did state interventions into pandemic-driven economic crisis focus on returning national economies to the highly inequitable status quo?’ we can begin to see how outrage need not be solely the purview of the Right wing. These inequalities are not simply an interesting new thing to gawk at – for shame, Harvey (2010 [1973]) would say. Let us reclaim our outrage and infuse explanation with a moral ethos, reclaiming economic geography’s radical roots to respond to contemporary forms of injustice.