Economic geography for and by whom? Rethinking expertise and accountability

Abstract

This commentary builds on Doreen Massey's thinking on the economy and relationality to ask: who gets to produce economic knowledge and whose lives does research make visible as economic matters of concern? These questions have been thrown into sharp relief as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. While the pandemic has highlighted the need for better infrastructures of care, it has also demonstrated that the mission of ‘saving the economy’ from the ravages of COVID-19 has not centred the concerns of those who have experienced the crisis most acutely. Drawing inspiration from the various economic subjects who continue to make, re-make, and articulate the economy through regular shocks and crises – workers, caregivers, and people marginalized by identity or geography – this commentary makes a case for a public economic geography that rethinks who is taken seriously as an ‘expert’ on the economy, and to what publics the field speaks. This, at its heart, is a radical rethinking of accountability, calling on economic geographers to ask: what should research do for whom, and how?

Economic geographies in the wake of the pandemic

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, governments around the world took dramatic actions in the name of saving the economy: business bailouts, unprecedented forms of monetary policy, and the suspension of normal social activities like the operation of public schools. This is understandable: when the total economic cost of COVID-19 is estimated at US$16 trillion (Cutler and Summers, 2020), and since social futures rest on maintaining economic growth and stability, addressing an economic crisis takes on an air of utmost importance. The priorities embedded in COVID-19 era economic policy were not hard to identify: quantitative easing over guaranteed childcare; consumer discounts for essential workers over paid sick leave for all workers. Three years later, with corporate profits at record highs (Weber and Wasner, 2023), economic decision-makers call upon workers not to ask for raises in the name of what is good for the economy (The Chatterer, 2022). In sum, economic policy-making in reaction to and through COVID-19 has positioned the concerns of various people and places as unevenly available to be sacrificed to the mission of regaining economic stability and growth.

Economic crises are chronic in contemporary capitalism, and COVID-19 was in this sense nothing unique. For the people who traditionally hold the role of ‘experts’ on the economy – bankers, policy-makers, consultants, economists – the pandemic moment is merely an aberration in a longer trajectory of stability. Yet for many people, perhaps the majority of people, what is called ‘the economy’ is a consistently, not momentarily, volatile experience. Tying the ups and downs of the financial system to life-making activities through financialized pensions, savings, and systems of housing valuation means that economic volatility is endemic in everyday life (Tooze, 2022). Events characterized as ‘crises’ by traditional economic experts stem from long-unfolding economic decisions. It is frequently when external shocks spill over to make everyday precarities untenable that economic subjects take to the streets, as witnessed recently in Lebanon and Sri Lanka, to name only a few instances. Authoritarian, crony capitalist political regimes routinely cause shocks to existing protections for workers through new laws and policies: these do not go unnoticed by those whose livelihoods are at stake, as was the case with farmer protests in India in 2021. These events highlight how the traditionally recognized experts on the ‘state’ of the economy are often out of alignment with the experiences of economic subjects whose lives can be upended by economic shocks or new economic policies.

Our attention to the uneven weight given to the expertise and perspectives of various economic subjects is inspired by Doreen Massey, one of economic geography's most beloved thinkers, who characterized the economy as a set of social and spatial relations (1984; 2013). Reacting to what she saw as the blindness of Marxian categories to the question of who filled them, Massey insisted that these categories must be rendered concrete because economic phenomena like globalization are not universally experienced. Massey reminds us that while that abstraction of ‘the economy’ – as well as business and policy decisions rendered in its name – affects everyone, the effects of these decisions are uneven. Despite the fact that humans are nearly universally economic subjects, only a few get the chance to define how the economy should work.

In this commentary, we follow Massey in asking the question of who: who gets to produce economic knowledge that drives decision-making, whose lives are visible as economic matters of concern, and with what implications for the field of economic geography? In thinking about the state of this subfield of geography, we think about who is written about, who is this research for, and who does the writing. Our central argument is that the ‘whos’ have important implications for the ‘whats’ of economic geography as well as the field's ‘hows’ and ‘whys’.

Massey's attention to how social processes literally ‘take place’ led relational analysis to take a core place in the field of economic geography. Massey's relationality, however, is not merely explanatory but also political (Hall et al., 2015; Massey, 2004). This necessarily informs economic geographers’ relationships with research participants, communities, audiences, and publics. We thus argue for the necessity of applying relational thinking to understandings of our accountability to the people that enliven the categories of ‘the geographical distribution of economic activity’. Taking seriously how economy and socio-cultural life are entwined (Mitchell, 2013), we think through how economic geography might platform an understanding of economy fashioned to different political ends – for publics beyond the 1%. In probing the possibilities inherent in expanding the ‘who’ of economic geography, a public-centred mission can be built on understandings of economies that rethink to whom research and research producers are accountable.

Expanding the who of economic geography

Postcolonial thought on the politics of knowledge calls on scholarly communities to pay attention to who gets to create research. For economic geography, this raises the question of who counts as an expert interlocutor in scholarly analysis on the geographical distribution of economic activity. While the field has in recent decades concertedly tried to incorporate heterodox approaches (Peck, 2012), we propose imagining heterodoxy as emerging not just within the structures of academia, but also from outside of it. That is, in addition to diversifying the traditions of thought, we propose basing more research and theory-building on the perspectives of economic actors who understand and articulate the economy in ways less traditionally understood as Economic or academic. It is significant that domestic workers, teachers, labour organizers, precarious workers, students, children, and social movements are primary actors in other domains of geography, but in economic geography they are often framed as precarious outcomes of ‘larger scale’ economic processes. As a first step, these actors could be understood in economic geographical research and theory-building not simply as people impacted by economic processes but as actants who, through their everyday life-making, make, remake, articulate, and theorize the economy itself. Why are feminized, marginalized, and less powerful research participants so often centred in the field of feminist geography, or feminist political economy, but not economic geography? This tendency offers clues to who is considered a ‘serious’ subject of economic geography and who is conceptualized at the periphery of causality. This leads us to call for those who are often framed as the ‘recipients’ of economic activity to be reconceptualised and recentred: as its drivers.

If we take the most basic definition of economic activity, which is activity ‘of, relating to, or based on the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services’ (Merriam-Webster, n.d.), it is clear that matters of the economy concern literally everybody. What is more economic than the activities of everyday life-making by the global majority? We should thus refuse to continue allowing the economy to be defined and directed for the many by a distant, privileged few who are materially isolated from the economy's everyday turbulence. Those who do not get to speak for themselves, who tend not to be heard within hegemonic circuits of knowledge production and economic policy-making, function as economic subalterns in our current knowledge production systems. Can we transform these structures so as to enable these actors to produce knowledge, be read, and be seen? A vision for ‘heterodoxy’ in approaches (Barnes and Sheppard, 2010) must make room for a heterodoxy of expertise from outside the academy, instead of only within it. This is particularly important especially considering what a long way academia has to go before it can truly call itself ‘diverse’ (Priya, 2020; Rosenman et al., 2020). If we create space for new legibilities of expertise in economic geography, we can enliven our understandings of who the field's publics could be. And from new publics can emerge a more public purpose for the field of economic geography itself.

The economics of making public

Concerns about how to be relevant have perhaps contributed to many economic geographers’ tendency to research mid- and large-scale processes and loci of power. Looking at the policy purchase of neoclassical economic theory, economic geography could be forgiven for a bit of envy. Let us recall, however, why economic geography has so often been grounded in core questions of political economy: an attention to the power relations inherent in geographical distributions of economic activities. Turning these critical questions inward towards processes of knowledge production leads us to some different questions of relevance: knowledge for whom, and knowledge for what purpose (Burawoy, 2005)? Public scholarship engages with audiences beyond the academy to become a vehicle for public debate (Castree, 2006). Therefore, the task of a public economic geography, centred around an enlivened and expanded notion of who qualifies as an actor powerful enough to influence the direction of the economy, is to actively create our publics through research and discourse itself (Burawoy, 2005; Warner, 2002; cf. Jazeel and MacFarlane, 2010), rather than simply responding to powerful publics who already exist. This entails a public orientation beyond the relevance of our work to policy, or the relative proximity of other disciplines compared to economic geography (Peck, 2012). A postcolonial consideration of knowledge production makes the question of ‘relevance’ less relevant: since all knowledge produced has effects in the world (Jazeel and MacFarlane, 2010), a public orientation to research praxis could involve the effort to interpellate publics and audiences for whom the research can work and be accountable. Fields like community geography have put this orientation to good work (Fischer et al., 2022). Yet this sort of work is at the margins of what has traditionally been considered as the bread and butter of economic geography.

Some inspiration may be instructive here. The Sangtin Writers' collaborative reflection with academic Richa Nagar (2007) on the NGOization of rural women's empowerment is a model for scholarship that re-imagines authorship, expertise, and theory-making on development geography. The Strike Debt Collective, cofounded by economic anthropologist Hannah Appel, has forced public discussions about the financial violence of how many people are forced to pay for things that matter to life-making – education, healthcare, and housing. Economic sociologists Louise Seamster and Raphael Charron-Chenier documented structural racial inequalities in US student debt, and their public outreach alongside people burdened by student debt influenced debt cancellation policies. What these examples have in common is a praxis through which alternative understandings and conceptions of, and demands from, the economy are made, alongside actors who are not conventionally considered economic knowledge producers.

In imagining what a public economic geography could look like, we began this commentary with the question: not just for whom or for what, but also by whom? We hope this question invites scholars to enact economic geography differently, thoughtfully engaging in questions of expertise, accountability, audiences, rigor, and responsibility. By way of conclusion we extend these questions further to include:

In doing research where we ‘learn things from the field’, from whom did we learn and how are they already theorizing and enacting the economy? How can we acknowledge them in the knowledge we produce?

How can we rethink research design, authorship, review and feedback mechanisms, and monetary and other rewards, to rightfully acknowledge the expertise and intellectual labour of those from whom we learn?

Instead of performing expertise in a teacup to the mini-publics within the ivory tower, to whom could we speak beyond the academy, and how we might translate knowledges, both literally across languages (Muller, 2021) and otherwise, between the university and publics?

How can the academic insularity of research review practices be re-imagined for a public knowledge practice? Could the practice of ‘rigor’ be retooled to centre accountability and a democratic knowledge creation model?

What are the ways in which our research and conclusions are always constructed in relation to others (Massey, 2004), and how can we embody and enact this responsibility to our interlocutors? Can we communicate, make public, and construct platforms on which they can be recognized and valued as knowledge producers and as stakeholders of knowledges produced?