Coming to terms with recent insights concerning the (post-) political is a key challenge for transition management. To start with, transition management understands the relation transition initiatives adopt towards existing regimes not in political, but in market terms. This impacts their internal processes, which are based on a deliberative notion of democracy, assuming the existence of a common good and misrecognizing the constitutive role of conflict. Moreover, transition management embraces a governance approach centring on public-private bodies which, in the name of bottom-up processes and participation, especially gives a voice to a privileged group of business, policy and civil society actors. Insofar as citizens get a place, it is merely in their role as consumers. Finally, as it is based on a market model itself, transition management fails to politicize one of the most fundamental current 'landscape' elements. The crucial question is how these features affect transition management's possibilities to contribute to effective and democratic sustainable change.
The emerging literature on the globalization of real estate has addressed how internationally circulating capital has increasingly found its ways into housing markets of the "Global South". With relatively underdeveloped financial and real estate markets, these countries have discursively and materially been rebranded as emerging markets, that is, they have been shaped into frontiers in the global urbanization of capital. In this paper we scrutinize the transnational real estate networks that shape and reshape the Cuban housing market. First, we reconstruct how, following the 2011 legalization of housing prices set between buyers and sellers, Cuban migrants and a few foreign investors, in cooperation with Cubans residing in Cuba, are buying properties in Cuba's cities, beach resorts and other towns. Second, we explore the economic and extra-economic motives behind such transnational property transactions, highlighting how residential properties are bought and converted into private restaurants or hotels. Central to our analysis is that the present development is not simply shaped by local or national demand and processes but also by international investment. We contend that a pattern of economic globalization unfolds where transnational remittances, rather than institutional investments or mortgage finance, steer Cuba's emerging property market, along with local investments among Cuban citizens.
In this paper, we draw on our personal experiences with the perpetuating gender bias in (early-career) academia, more specifically within geography. We develop two main arguments. First, we argue that everyday academic practices stand in sharp contrast with the critical content geography, as a discipline, aims to study and teachincluding its feminist, anti-colonial, and queer understandings. Strikingly, geography as a field does not seem able to apply its academic insights into its internal organization. Indeed, everyday academic practices within geography reproduce structural gendered inequalities. Consequently, geography reproduces the historical 'maleness' of the discipline, both in terms of who embodies it and through the methods and topics it focuses on. Second, we reflect on the strategies we develop to denounce and alter the unjust practices we are confronted with. Yet, these strategies reveal the double bind early career women face, as these very strategies may risk to undermine one's own precarious position, or to give the skewed impression of reproducing the male, disembodied ideal we are fighting.
In this paper, I draw on my experiences doing field research in Cuba, to contribute to the idea that participating in illegal activities is not necessarily unethical. Using a reflexive analysis, I argue that as a foreign researcher in Cuba’s dual economy, full participation in Cubans’ daily life—though illegal for both the researcher and the participants—was necessary to establish trust. This allowed me to gain social access to the field while allowing participants to spread the risk. Ultimately, it led to a more accurate account of Cubans’ daily practices through which I was able to address unbalanced and misinformed interpretations of the island and its people, which is crucial in the midst of highly politicized literature on Cuba.
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