Translocal Precarity: Labor and Social Reproduction in Cambodia

Green, W. Nathan; Estes, Jennifer

doi:10.1080/24694452.2021.2015280

Cited by 18 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 61 publications

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“…Feminist perspectives of infrastructure have also returned to an embodied and vital understandings of infrastructures and differentiated experiences of such work on the basis of race, class, and gender, often intersected with critical recognition of infrastructures’ coloniality (Fredericks, 2014, 2018; Riedman, 2021; Siemiatycki et al, 2020; Strauss, 2020). Others have also sought to disrupt the perceived distinction between socially reproductive and productive labour by adopting translocal approaches (Green and Estes, 2022), highlighting labour refusals amidst the financialisaton of social infrastructures (Horton 2022), and juxtaposing historical social infrastructures of unfree labour to the contemporary context (Mullings, 2021). Similarly, Cowan (2019) has sought to bridge understandings of social reproduction, infrastructure, and repair by arguing that urban villages can constitute social infrastructures by reproducing the labour which underpins collective urban life.…”

Section: Locating Infrastructural Labourmentioning

confidence: 99%

Doing the work: Locating labour in infrastructural geography

Stokes

Coss‐Corzo

2023

Progress in Human Geography

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As the social sciences undergo an infrastructural turn, geographers have taken steps to broaden, disrupt, and reconceptualise understandings of infrastructure and its relationship to social, political, economic, and ecological processes. We contribute to this discussion by highlighting the emergence of a comparatively understudied yet crucial aspect within infrastructural geographies – infrastructural labour. We identify key theoretical anchors that guide contemporary analyses of infrastructural labour, which we query by focusing on five key areas of scholarly discussion. Building on these, we offer a working definition of infrastructural labour to help guide further engagement and point to questions meriting additional investigation.

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Section: Locating Infrastructural Labourmentioning

confidence: 99%

Doing the work: Locating labour in infrastructural geography

Stokes

Coss‐Corzo

2023

Progress in Human Geography

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“…The rest took on debt to pay for their basic needs, including daily household consumption (especially education), home construction, consumer durables like motorcycles, healthcare, and the mounting costs of agricultural production. In other words, Cambodians have borrowed from MFIs and banks to pay for many of the services that have been chronically underfunded by the state, notably education, healthcare, and agriculture (Green and Estes 2022). This trend has only been exacerbated by the Covid‐19 pandemic.…”

Section: Austerity Financial Inclusion and Debtmentioning

confidence: 99%

Financial Inclusion or Subordination? The Monetary Politics of Debt in Cambodia

Green

2023

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Financial inclusion is a leading driver of household debt across the global South. Although critical geographers have analysed this debt through the lens of financialisation, few have examined it in terms of monetary politics. This is a salient issue, because poorer nations often have limited control over their monetary policy due to their dependence on foreign currencies, which can adversely affect the structure of their financial markets. Building on the concept of monetary dependency from scholarship on financial subordination, I analyse the monetary politics of debt in Cambodia. Drawing on elite interviews and ethnographic research, I argue that Cambodia's extreme monetary dependence on the US dollar has shaped monetary and fiscal policies that compel poorer households to take on private debt to pay for their basic needs. This paper advances critical geographies of debt and development by studying financial subordination and its impact on financial inclusion in the global South.

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“…Third, a financial ecologies approach foregrounds the spatial dimensions of household debt relations. As discussed above, household debt relations can stretch quite far across space (Green and Estes, 2019, 2022; Guermond, 2021; Harker, 2020). With agrarian household members migrating out of rural areas to repay debts, these households depend on wage labor markets located in urban areas or in different countries.…”

Section: Towards a Geography Of Agrarian Financementioning

confidence: 99%

Financing agrarian change: Geographies of credit and debt in the global south

Green

2022

Progress in Human Geography

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This article critically analyzes agrarian finance in terms of household credit and debt in the global south. I introduce interdisciplinary concepts about agrarian finance before reviewing how political ecologists and development geographers have studied this topic in relation to agricultural production, social reproduction, and farm mortgages and dispossession. To advance this research, I engage with financial geography scholarship about financial ecologies and variegated financial capitalism. I argue that agrarian finance is always embedded in the agricultural practices and interdependencies of rural life, but that such relations are increasingly shaped by global finance capital governed by institutions operating at multiple scales.

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Translocal Precarity: Labor and Social Reproduction in Cambodia

Cited by 18 publications

References 61 publications

Doing the work: Locating labour in infrastructural geography

Doing the work: Locating labour in infrastructural geography

Financial Inclusion or Subordination? The Monetary Politics of Debt in Cambodia

Financing agrarian change: Geographies of credit and debt in the global south

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