Globalization has become a buzzword today. It means different things to different people. Those in the Global North often understand it as outsourcing of jobs, migration of labor, inflow of commodities from China, and those in the Global South understand it as the influx of foreign capital, entry of multinational corporations, proliferation of sweatshops and American fast food.
Globalization clearly is complex. It encompasses cultural, economic, social, and political changes. These changes alter spaces and places, i.e. regions, towns, cities, villages, and entire countries, producing new geographies. Regions, towns, cities, and villages in turn, ground globalization in curious ways. For example, McDonald's in China serves noodles. The geographies of globalization are not only curious and interesting but also they often cause massive changes in the lives and livelihoods of common people--indigenous people displaced by global logging corporations, hotel and hospitality industries ironing out slums in prime cities of the Global South (Photo 1), unemployment caused by outsourcing from countries of the Global North.
Photo 1: Ahmedabad city and its slums soon to be displaced.
Dr. Ipsita Chatterjee investigates these complex geographies of globalization, but more particularly, the exploitative and unjust aspects of globalization. Her current research investigates how globalization is altering the cities of the Global South. She accomplishes this by looking at exploitation of labor (Photo 2), marginalization of ethnic minorities, displacement of marginal groups, and exploitation of women through informal work. In studying various forms of exploitation and marginalization, she provides a critical lens to understand the global city not only as glittering, glossy, clean, green, fast-track, and world class, but also as anti-poor, Islamophobic, sexist, and racist (Photo 3).
Photo 2- Informal labor along the banks of the Sabarmati river, Ahmedabad city.
Photo 3: Ahmedabad, a city of contrasts--the glossy and the gritty.
She borrows from Marx, Foucault, Gramsci, Le Febvre, Richard Peet, David Harvey, and Nancy Fraser to adopt a materialist understanding of exploitation. The purpose of her research is to expose the nuts and bolts of exploitation so that a better world can be theoretically re-imagined--theoretical re-imagination is resistance, and therefore academics, according to Dr. Chatterjee, is a social movement against exploitation. Dr. Chatterjee's most recent work is a book titled Displacement, Revolution, and the New Urban Condition by Sage publishers and it is currently in press.
Chatterjee has taught classes on Geographies of Globalization, Women, Ideas and Society, Globalization, Conflict and Resistance, Human Geography, Cultural Geography, and Geography of International Affairs.
Dr. Chatterjee is a new faculty member in the Department of Geography. For more information about research in the department, go to http://geography.unt.edu/people/faculty.