Producing Privatization: Re‐articulating Race, Gender, Class and Space

Abstract

This article combines insights into the mutually constituting nature of gender, race, class and space with Marxist analyses that interrogate how social relations both produce and are constrained by institutions to explore waste management privatization in Johannesburg. It argues that the crystallization of racialized, gendered inequalities within bargaining institutions underpinned financial motivations for privatization. The form of privatization varied across the city due to the ways in which the class of the area serviced articulated with the racialization and gendering of capital and labour in these spaces. An array of material conditions and ideologies informed these processes in which workers were active, although not necessarily progressive agents. Focusing on how privatization is produced through spatialized and institutionalized social relations illuminates avenues for struggle hidden from view in both aspatial, ideal-type feminist political economy analyses and geographic analyses of privatization inattentive to the mutually constituting nature of gender, race and class.

Expansion of the Waste-Based Commodity Frontier: Insights from Sweden and Brazil

“…To most governments waste is a manageable object, to be governed with managerial tools, through privatization of the sector and with engineering alternatives [15]. From that perspective business provides the solutions and fills the management gaps, most often with expensive, large scale technology (e.g., automatized recycling stations, waste incinerators, multipurpose 'compactor' garbage collection trucks).…”

“…Coming from a critical theory perspective we will reveal how WtoE bares risks of further accumulating wealth among waste management businesses, while dispossessing the most excluded population, waste pickers, who have historically reclaimed recyclables from waste, as is the case in Brazil. While the majority of the waste pickers still mostly operate informally, a growing number has organized, operating with various levels of integration in formal waste management, through different collaborative arrangements with government, industry, service providers and civil society organizations as well as with diverse degrees of public policy support [8,14,15]. Whether organized or not, waste pickers have agency and particularly when challenged by proposed WtoE projects, they mobilize and resist.…”

Rescaling White Space in Post‐apartheid Johannesburg

“…Building on Hall () and Gramsci (), Hart () deploys the concept of “articulation” to analyze the material and symbolic practices through which race, class, gender, and nationalism are brought together in context‐specific unities. Samson () uses this concept to study the privatization of waste management in post‐apartheid Johannesburg. Following Hart and Samson, I analyze the contingent, context‐specific articulations between race, class, and space in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg.…”

Negotiating Neoliberal Empowerment: Aboriginal People, Educational Restructuring, and Academic Labour in the North of British Columbia, Canada

“…As geographers have theorized, the neoliberalization of state practices individualizes workers and fragments communities (Peck ; Samson ). In Canada, both public sector workers and marginalized citizens have been affected by large‐scale reductions in spending.…”