GEOG20011 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Anthropocene, Social Practice, Intersectionality
16 May 2018
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LECTURE 11 & 12: UNDERSTANDING GLOBAL INEQUALITIES
• Scale driving differences of surface level v systemic inequalities
• Access to resources, and how people experience differences in access to such resources
• Critical thinking – opening of thinking to positions of power and where individuals/groups lie on this spectrum
• Marginalisation!
• Try to reduce emotive language and implications in writings
• Action & time: urgency, scales of time, Anthropocene
GRIPS
• A framework for guiding a critical interrogation of the grounded and complex ways in which inequalities are experienced and
(re)produced
o Grounded – based on empirical research and evidence, by visiting individuals/group – and how inequalities play
out on the ground
• Geographically grounded approach:
o Understanding how inequalities are experienced requires an approach which accounts for:
▪ Scale: time and space
• Time/space lens matters – tells us different stories
• Intergenerational differences!!!!
▪ Social difference: we need to account for ways inequalities are experienced differently by people in diff
social categories
• No groups are homogenous – migrants, local people/communities, indigenous people, people of
colour
• Break down assumptions of groups of people
▪ Social practice: inequalities are produced through social practice
• Actions (and words) people take, performative way of reinforcing inequality esp. gender norms
• Region:
o Understanding inequalities requires we pay attention to social, economic, political and environmental structures
and processes particular to the region, and at different scales of space and time
o Can define your own scale – groups of people upon whom the processes are bearing and how the effect
experiences
▪ Broad: social, economic, political and environmental – past and present
▪ Local: practices and ways of understanding
• Not just about resource distribution, also about how resources are understood, valued and used
o Important for ensuring equitable access to pay attention to how resources are valued in
a local context
• Intersectionality:
o To understand inequality, we need to explore the ways in which social categorisations intersect, to produce
interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage (or advantage)
o Helps us think carefully about differences between and within groups
o Need to think about how fields of inequality (education, work, health) are themselves intersecting – always
interacting with each other
o Health and housing – impact on sanitation
• Position:
o Need to understand how people are positioned with respect to dominant structures of power
o Inequalities occur over a spectrum, implicating ourselves in this spectrum
o Scale of analysis matters – who’s included in the study
o Important: role of representation and perception in establishing this position – politically loaded, moral
judgements
• Social Change:
o How have recent transformation (social, economic, political, environmental) led to change in social relations, and
ways inequalities are experienced
o Dialectical: inequalities may be the effect or cause of change
o Region & change: change may create inequalities in particular regions
▪ But inequalities may also change a region, create new regions of analysis
Document Summary
Critical thinking opening of thinking to positions of power and where individuals/groups lie on this spectrum. Scale driving differences of surface level v systemic inequalities: access to resources, and how people experience differences in access to such resources, marginalisation, action & time: urgency, scales of time, anthropocene. Try to reduce emotive language and implications in writings. Time/space lens matters tells us different stories. Social difference: we need to account for ways inequalities are experienced differently by people in diff social categories: no groups are homogenous migrants, local people/communities, indigenous people, people of colour, break down assumptions of groups of people. Local: practices and ways of understanding: not just about resource distribution, also about how resources are understood, valued and used. Important for ensuring equitable access to pay attention to how resources are valued in a local context. Position: need to understand how people are positioned with respect to dominant structures of power.
