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Geography

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  • ItemOpen Access
    Quantifying the Effect of Stressors on Carbon Dioxide Uptake by Vegetation Communities in the Bruce Peninsula
    (2023-12-08) Achidago, Lord-Emmanuel; Bello, Richard L.
    Climate change poses a potential threat to the CO2 uptake of terrestrial ecosystems, with uncertain implications for vegetation on the Bruce Peninsula. This UNESCO global biosphere reserve boasts some of the oldest Eastern white cedar trees (Thuja occidentalis). In this study, I investigate the response of Bruce Peninsula vegetation to climate change and vegetation cover variations over the past two decades, focusing on the sequestration capacity of different vegetation types. Utilizing Gross Primary Productivity (GPP) data from the Moderate Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and the Global Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) Sunlight Induced Fluorescence (GOSIF) datasets, I identify nine study sites based on land cover type. By examining trends in climate and vegetation growth and assessing the impact of environmental stresses, I aim to estimate the CO2 sequestration potential of these sites. Seasonal comparisons of GPP data with the area's ERA-5 climate data reveal no significant GPP trend. Notably, MODIS GPP exhibits a more pronounced response to environmental stressors, especially during the spring, compared to GOSIF GPP. Coniferous forests in the Bruce Peninsula emerge as the most effective in absorbing CO2.
  • ItemOpen Access
    The Impact of Fire on the Reported Presence of Animals in California Deserts Using Open-Source Data
    (2023-12-08) Goldgisser, Marina; Lortie, Christopher
    Changing fire regimes across southwest North American deserts may impact endangered animal communities endemic to the region. This study examines the impact of fires on the occurrence of endangered animal species (ES) in California desert systems and evaluates ES recovery trends using open-source data—mostly collected through citizen science—retrieved from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. Mean annual NDVI was used to evaluate vegetation productivity in fire impacted desert regions. ES occurrence records were fit to generalized linear mixed models and compared pre- and post-fire to evaluate ES response to fire disturbance. ES recovery was evaluated using a incidence-based ChaoSørensen similarity index. Burned regions had higher vegetation productivity than unburned regions in some, but not all, deserts. ES continue to visit burned habitat, even 19 years after a fire. Findings suggest ES resiliency to fire disturbance, likely through habitat-use modification, and support implementing citizen science data in future ecosystem monitoring.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Exploring Activist Perspectives on Indigenous-settler Solidarity in Toronto's Food Sovereignty Movement
    (2023-12-08) Seidman-Wright, Taliya; Rotz, Sarah
    In Canada, Indigenous and ally scholars have called upon food movements to reimagine approaches to food system change in ways that confront settler colonialism and support Indigenous struggles for land and sovereignty. Engaging with critical Indigenous and food sovereignty scholarship, this project explores how nine settler food activists in Toronto are responding to these calls. Findings suggest that some Toronto food activists are actively working to build solidarity with Indigenous peoples by (un)learning and building relationships. However, few organizations seem to be prioritizing Indigenous initiatives or conversations around settler colonialism in their public media, implying that participants’ efforts may be in the minority among Toronto food organizations. Ultimately, settler food sovereignty movements must do more to reckon with the coloniality of food movement work, relinquish settler claims to define food systems on stolen lands, and push for structural changes towards permanent redistribution of power and land to Indigenous peoples.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Constellations of Elsewheres: Queer and Trans* Youth Lives in Suburban Toronto
    (2023-12-08) Sharp, Benjamin WIley; Bain, Alison L.
    Loneliness, isolation, and suicide are endemic among queer and transgender youth, especially for those who live in the suburbs, where queer and trans* social infrastructure is scarce. This thesis explores how queer and trans* youth negotiate the cisheteronormative social infrastructure of suburban Toronto, how their everyday practices of dwelling shift the possibilities that this infrastructure affords, and how they build grassroots social infrastructure in Toronto’s suburban elsewheres. To explore these everyday practices, this research employs go-along interviews, participatory photography, and participant observation to sketch a constellation of suburban elsewheres where queer and trans* youth make their lives across the urban region. Finally, this thesis argues that queer and trans* youth build grassroots forms of social infrastructure across the urban-suburban region that enable them to survive and thrive amid the precarious landscapes of Toronto and its suburbs.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Disinformation, Exclusion, and its Politics: Canadian Right-Wing Extremist Community within a Digital Landscape
    (2023-12-08) Costanzo-Vignale, Christian; Gilbert, Liette
    Research on right-wing extremism has historically been overwhelmingly focused on the movement’s preoccupations in the United States and Europe. Scholarly literature on Canadian groups and their beliefs has been sparse, with few studies mapping the extent of their activities. Right-wing extremism has captured journalistic attention in recent years as lone-wolf right-wing extremists radicalized on the Internet take up arms against racialized groups they see as anathema to their White supremacist groups’ survival. This research examines right-wing extremist conceptions of out-groups (the ‘Other’) and resulting political demands to contain this imagined threat through a case-study approach of Stormfront Canada. I conducted a thematic analysis of publicly available digital communications exchanged between community members between January 1st and December 31st, 2021. Major themes identified for forum threads were anti-hate initiatives, politics, crime, and health within the COVID-19 context, while for forum replies these were disinformation, offensive speech, and politics. I also quantified the extent of this community’s activity and found that most content shared to the website is posted by less than six active members. This thesis argues that discursive constructions of the Other depend on exclusionary belief systems predicated on support for White hegemony, and that political demands expressed by community members to contain the perceived threat posed by the continued existence of racial out-groups are shaped by an adherence to the Great Replacement superconspiracy.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Paper Money, Paper Homes: How the Financialization of Housing Ruined Housing Policy
    (2023-12-08) Giblon, Melissa Ruth; Kipfer, Stefan Andreas
    There is a global housing affordability crisis; the cost of housing has skyrocketed at rates that far outpace real wages. Using a Marxist lens, I look at the dynamics of commodification and financialization in a capitalist land market. My thesis argues that the existence of a profit motive undermines the potential for affordability to be prioritized. Financialization specifically has entrenched and intensified this process of ‘housing-for-investment’ over ‘housing-for-shelter’. My thesis explores modern political solutions to this crisis, performing a comparative analysis of inclusionary zoning by-laws introduced in Toronto and New York City. This analysis dissects how capitalist-oriented housing affordability policies are structurally bound to the same dynamics of profit-over-people; thus, they can never produce affordable housing. Alternatively, I propose a series of non-reformist reforms and radical political approaches to decommodify housing and remove its tender from the private market altogether.
  • ItemOpen Access
    A patina of sustainability: Corporate social responsibility and large-scale copper mining in Solwezi, Zambia
    (2023-12-08) Dvoretskiy, Vladimir; Zalik, Anna
    The Kansanshi mine in Solwezi, Zambia is one of the largest copper-gold mines in Africa by output. Since 2005, the mine has been operated by First Quantum Minerals Ltd (FQM), establishing it as the largest Canadian-owned mining asset in Africa. The study aims to understand the influence of FQM's corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies on social and spatial relations within the local community, as well as the environmental and land use impacts of these policies. By examining the decision-making processes behind the CSR interventions, the research sheds light on the extractivist nature of sustainability in large-scale mining operations. Drawing on the corporate imperialism theory, the research suggests that an appearance of stakeholder well-being becomes crucial for the corporate vision of sustainability, turning the pursuit of a social license to operate into a form of extraction itself.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Hydrogeomorphology of Lava Rise Pits in The Laki Lava Field, Southeast Iceland
    (2023-12-08) Keen, Teddy D'Moi; Young, Kathy Lynn
    Lava Rise Pits (LRPs) are found within the Laki lava field in Southern Iceland. LRPs naturally occur in pahoehoe lava flows and form when the flow in lava tubes ceases and collapses. The goal of this study was to better understand the hydrogeomorphology of LRPs during the Fall-winter season. Three LRPs were selected, and a range of sensors and measurements monitored thermal and soil moisture (SM) regimes, precipitation, and vegetation and soils surveys. Thermal regimes were primarily impacted by depth, pit openness, ground temperatures (GTs) and air temperature (AT). LRPs more open and exposed to the atmosphere, their near surface above-ground, and GTs mimicked ATs. Precipitation was the most important source of water, with overland flow, and groundwater potentially having a significant role within the LRPs. When GTs were below 0°C, SM levels were low and once GTs rose, snow and ice melt increased SM, linking SM and GT conditions.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Tracking the Dispersal of the Endangered Eastern Prickly Pear Cactus (Opuntia cespitosa) by Animal Vectors in Canada
    (2023-08-04) Huynh, Mandy; Drezner, T.
    Opuntia cespitosa is an endangered cactus with only one substantive population in Point Pelee National Park (PPNP), Canada. Staff observations at the Park include that many cactus fingerlings (young Opuntia seedlings) appeared in sites frequented by the Eastern Wild Turkeys. This study aims to assess the effectiveness of seed dispersal by wild turkeys and other animals at PPNP, and to identify the primary seed dispersers. We used trail cameras, analyzed wild turkey scats, and examined fingerlings to determine potential seed dispersers from August to October 2020. Migrating birds were the most frequent visitors at cactus sites, followed by rabbits and wild turkeys. We conclude that while wild turkeys consume and disperse cactus seeds, the seeds are not necessarily preferred by them in their diet. This research has important implications for O. cespitosa’s reproduction and potential genetic variability and can be used to inform Park managers about conservation strategies for this species.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Worth the Wait and Hype? Gentrification, Anxiety, and the Hipster Geographies of Boutique Ice Cream
    (2023-08-04) Mark, Bryan James; Bain, Alison L.
    In the opening decades of the twenty-first century, gentrification continues to upscale city fabrics, including their retail landscapes, beyond recognition. The ongoing expansion of boutique shops and aestheticized commerce displacing longtime stores and ordinary services increasingly signals new geographies of hipster retailing dominating the marketplace of local shopping streets in old inner-city areas. The qualitative analysis of this Master’s thesis traces the socio-spatial articulation of new hipster geographies within retail gentrification processes by offering a cultural critique of an ice-cream boutique located on Ossington Avenue in downtown Toronto, attending to material and digital dynamics of urban production and consumption. At the same time, this Master’s thesis locates the presence of anxiety within contemporary urban change. Shedding light on the phenomenon of 'queuing' outside of the independent ice-cream shop, my research reveals how anxiety underpins popular identity performances on Instagram and animates the experience of actors on the gentrifying street.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Enduring Displacement, Enduring Violence: Camps, Closure, and Exile In/After Return (Experiences of Burundian Refugees in Tanzania)
    (2023-03-28) Weima, Yolanda Melody; Hyndman, Jennifer M.
    “Return home” was the joint message by the Burundian and Tanzanian presidents in 2017, just two years after hundreds of thousands Burundians were recognized as refugees in neighbouring countries, and as more continued to seek refuge or asylum each month. In Tanzania, where refugees are subject to strict encampment, the vast majority of Burundian refugees had previously been refugees at least once before. Many returned to Tanzania less than three years after their prior return to Burundi, which, as camps were closed, had been framed as a “durable solution” to their displacement. This thesis explores the interrelated dynamics of enduring displacement, encampment, and closure, by drawing on life history research with Burundian refugees in two camps in Tanzania (2017-8), as well as semi-structured interviews with government and humanitarian staff, and ethnographic methods. Empirically, this dissertation contributes to knowledge by tracing the diverse prior trajectories of current Burundian refugees, both within and beyond camp boundaries, challenging there-and-back-again geographical imaginary of refuge management. It highlights an understudied but constitutive aspect of camps—their ultimate closures—by recounting refugees’ memories of the violent closure of Mtabila camp, as well as its fearful afterlives and present-presence. The violence of past camp closure is part of the violence of current encampment due to its evocation as a a disciplinary dispositif to “encourage” return, threatening and anticipating future violence. State and humanitarian practices “close” and harden space for those deemed “undesirable,” through forced encampment, camp closures, and coerced or forced return. In so doing, they produce and prolong displacement, in which varied spatio-temporalities of violence endure. Burundian refugees’ life histories thus trace the ways displacement endures, and is endured.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Forced Displacement and Racialization: The Colombian Experience
    (2023-03-28) Gutierrez Castano, Julian; Basu, Ranu
    This thesis compares the differential processes of racialization from a Colombian perspective experienced by three groups of displaced migrants in the global North and South. First, internally displaced persons (IDPs) who have been forced to move to the Coffee Region in Colombia after leaving their homes in rural regions between 2000 and 2015. Second, Colombian refugees who had similarly sought asylum in Toronto, Canada, and who migrated between 1997 and 2004. Third, Venezuelan migrants who arrived in the Coffee Region in Colombia between 2014 and 2018 due to the deteriorating living conditions and crisis in Venezuela. This research contributes to further theoretical debates on critical geographies of race, postcolonial geography, and urban geography in relation to forced migration. The objective of this research is to question understandings of race and racism, particularly how space and mobility affect the dynamics of racialization through such diverse experiences of forced displacement. The main argument of this research is that the process of forced displacement (as experienced by the Colombian IDPs and Venezuelan migrants to the Coffee Region in Colombia, and for the Colombian refugees to Toronto), results in spatialities of racialization. While escaping violence and economic hardship, forced migrants are subjected to oppressive and exclusionary processes that make them vulnerable to systemic racism and microaggressions. This comparative research uses a combination of qualitative methodologies, including in-depth semi-structured interviews, participant observation, field diary, and policy and document reviews. The research reveals that despite different experiences of internal displacement or transnational migration, spatial processes of racialization present similar dynamics of white supremacy as the dominant racial ideology.
  • ItemOpen Access
    From Haiti to Canada: The Migration That Binds
    (2022-12-14) Therien, Mark Andre James; Hyndman, Jennifer M.
    This study explores Haitian migration to Canada, the networks tying the two countries together, and the statecraft managing this movement during the decade beginning in 2010. The work investigates transnational spaces as a principal feature of contemporary Haitian migration and contends that Haitian cultural identity and solidarity within these spaces become decisive factors around why many Haitians choose to come to Canada. The concept of a diasporic lakou is highlighted as a transnational space of collectivist solidarity that provides a new and culturally inflected approach to future Haitian migration and migrant transnationalism research. Ideas of slow harm and ontological security are also integrated into this relational theoretical framework. Based on interviews in two Canadian provinces with people of Haitian backgrounds, empirical findings point to the intensifying impoverishment and insecurity generated by natural disasters and political instability in Haiti. Changing government provisions, agreements, and regulations on Haitian migration are also traced to deepen the analysis.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Climate Mitigation from a Renter-Centered Perspective: A Case Study of Boulder's SmartRegs Program
    (2022-12-14) Yoon, Da Young; Wood, Patricia Burke
    My thesis is a renter-centered analysis of the City of Boulder’s SmartRegs rental energy efficiency standards, as a policymaking process that purports to address both climate and housing issues simultaneously, rather than one at the expense of the other. This focus on renters starts from the premise that housing and climate justice should be about the people most impacted. My preliminary findings indicate that, despite nearly all rental units meeting the SmartRegs’ basic energy efficiency requirements, SmartRegs did not result in improved tenant comfort and lower utility bills, as promised by the City of Boulder. I argue that SmartRegs was predominantly a carbon-focused policy to reduce emissions in rental buildings, rather than a renter-centered policy that improved housing quality issues or affordability for renters. I recommend that cities like Toronto learn from Boulder and proactively include renters in policymaking processes and protect them against unaffordable housing and local climate impacts.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Anguilla Rostrata, Our Teacher: Addressing Anishnabe Epistemicide through Eels
    (2022-12-14) Gansworth, Leora; Wood, Patricia Burke
    Epistemicide is proposed in global social theory to describe the deliberate decline of pluralistic knowledge that results from sweeping processes of assimilation and coloniality, including the introduction of settler colonialism as a way of being in place throughout North America. Attention to ontological pluralities demonstrates that individuals and groups are living in and from different Lebenswelt, or lifeworlds, a concept that supports different understandings of constructed and overlapping places and spaces to include epistemological foundations, phenomenological orientations, behaviours and institutions. Anguilla rostrata, also known as eels, are migratory fishes with a deep saltwater origin who can traverse an aquatic path over two thousand miles; they migrate to and enter some freshwater environments across the North American continent. Anguillid species have been historically crucial to Indigenous societies and cultures around the world and are presently threatened by human behaviours. Anguilla rostrata has experienced massive decline in recent decades throughout North America, evoking an uneven response in multiple sectors. This dissertation seeks to align with methods and conventions in Anishnabe studies, informed by concepts in critical Indigenous geography and Indigenous environmental justice scholarship. The methods develop an embodied lifeworld that inquires about Anguilla rostrata through Anishnabe epistemological framing. The research is informed by an emerging Anishnabe geography along with Indigenous legal traditions for the revitalization of Indigenous lifeways as viable methods by which to frame possibilities for improved relationships with ecologies where Anguilla rostrata migrate. Using place-based research, digital surveys, and interviews, the research offers possibilities for an enhanced understanding of eels through pursuit of epistemic justice. Approach of relationships with Anguilla rostrata involves temporal, environmental, and cognitive justice that argues for the eel’s right to be and for amelioration of an inverted, destructive social and environmental order. The research demonstrates that violence rendered against eels must be acknowledged as a tangible effect of imposed governance regimes installed through brute force and ignorance in settler colonial modes of land seizure and occupation.
  • ItemOpen Access
    The Geoeconomic and Geopolitical Dimensions of Migrant Rescue
    (2022-12-14) Rudolph, Terence Adam; Hyndman, Jennifer M.
    In 2015, over one million people fled to Europe across the Mediterranean Sea; of these, at least 3,735 died in crossing (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 2015). The commercial shipping industry plays a substantial role in the rescue of people in distress on the Mediterranean. According to the International Chamber of Shipping, in the first few months of 2014, 1,000 commercial vessels rescued more than 65,000 people (Saul, 2015, para. 4). In a highly publicized and deadly rescue effort in April of 2015, 800 people drowned when a migrant boat crashed into merchant vessel the King Jacob in the Central Mediterranean (Heller & Pezzani, 2016, p. 1). Various sources have since reported that commercial ships are “deliberately avoiding migrant-heavy areas, refusing to reveal their position, or by-passing migrant vessels in distress” to avoid the risks associated with performing rescue at sea (Aarstad, 2015, p. 414). Based on original findings about commercial ship rescues, I analyze humanitarian and geopolitical risks that govern maritime rescue in the Central Mediterranean. The research is based on interviews with 24 maritime professionals with experience in maritime rescue and a series of freedom of information requests (FOI) to the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex) for information about rescues involving commercial ships. By examining Frontex data pertaining to maritime incidents involving migrants I was also able to determine that, of the 2,779 recorded incidents during the European Border and Coast Guard Agency’s Joint Operation (JO) Triton that took place from 2014 to 2018, 359 identified the involvement of commercial/merchant ships. My contribution also develops a new and unique method of analyzing the geographies of migrant rescue using geospatial ship tracking technology; the Automatic Identification System (AIS). These geospatial data help illustrate the economic risks and costs associated with rescue. Based on data from the FOI requests, I provide examples of how commercial ships involved in rescues can be identified and studied using free online ship tracking software to reveal a variety of details about the geography of a particular rescue. This digital approach provides a spatialized analysis of how maritime rescue on the Central Mediterranean is governed, but it also highlights an economic geography of maritime rescue that is entangled with the political geography of migration and border security at sea. I argue that geographical analysis of commercial shipping provides insights into the economic interests and political risks that drive these vessels and their movement. Specifically, I examine the role of ship captains in maritime rescue and show how their humanitarian responsibility is coordinated from state-based rescue stations and mediated by geopolitical tensions surrounding disembarkation and geoeconomic interests that fuel the commercial vessels.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Geographies of Home: Adolescent Girls', Trans', Non-Binary Youths' Sexual Wellbeing in the GTA During COVID-19
    (2022-12-14) Coppella, Leah Isabel; Bain, Alison L.
    This thesis examines how sexual wellbeing is related to the home as a spatial site during the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown. We conducted five virtual focus groups (n=34) with those who identified as adolescent girls’, trans’, or non-binary youths’ in the GTA between April-June 2021. We inquired about home, privacy, and sexual wellbeing during Canada’s third wave. Sessions were transcribed using Zoom and coded using an inductive framework with NVivo. Using intersectionality theory and embodiment theory, this research analyzes how youth’s diverse identities shape their understandings and experiences of sexual wellbeing. We found youth needed spaces where they were not only unseen, but importantly, unheard. Additionally, white youth cited the bedroom as the best space for sexual wellbeing practices, but BIPOC youth felt the bedroom was only their best available option and still found they had to negotiate privacy. We also found BIPOC and sexual minority youth often had to resort to physical boundary negotiations. I map place and self to the queer home, intergenerational home, and single parent home to understand how space is relationally defined. I argue McRobbie and Garber’s (1976) bedroom culture concept can be expanded towards an intersectional analysis and coupled with increasing ICTs. I argue sound as an important piece of boundary-work that reveals the way youth construct space during precarious times. I also expand on Hernes’ (2004) concept of physical, social and mental boundary-work to include sound as a fourth type, straddling amongst. This research shows how privacy, gender and sexual identities were negotiated at home in times of extreme uncertainty, highlighting how implications of home as a ‘place’ during the pandemic, constructs sexual wellbeing. I conclude with suggestions for supporting adolescent sexual wellbeing, inside and outside the home, during and after COVID-19.
  • ItemOpen Access
    The Plight of Mixed Ethnic People in Ethiopia: Exclusion, Fragmentation, and Double Consciousness
    (2022-12-14) Asfaw, Tewodros Zewdu; Mensah, Joseph
    Several millions of mixed ethnic people live in Ethiopia. They have been living there for centuries. Their presence benefited the country by creating conducive socio-political and spatial environments for an interethnic relationship among the 80 plus ethnic groups of Ethiopia. However, in the early part of the 1990s, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) led regime reorganized people and space along a single ethnolinguistic line by treating mixed ethnic identity as an erasable category. This was done using patrilineal affiliation as the only relational system via the 1995 Constitution and the Kilil system. Subsequently, people with mixed ethnic identity suffered greatly when the EPRDF’s patriarchally oriented institutional arrangements excluded them from its ethnic-based relational system. I would like to bring into focus the plight of mixed ethnic people using lived experience as an analytical tool to create awareness and to effect change. My findings show that the EPRDF’s relational system has been negatively impacting mixed ethnic people for the past three decades, by fragmenting their family unit, and by excluding mothers from their family unit. Also, this discriminatory relational system exposes mixed ethnic people to double consciousness by forcing them to investigate their own identity via a single ethnic lens. In other words, mixed ethnic people were pressured to adopt an inadequate ethnolinguistic criterion as the basis of their identity. This unrelatable socio-political system adds further harm against mixed ethnic people by denying them spatial representation, which makes them vulnerable to internal displacement and violence. In this view, the thesis calls for an inclusive socio-political and spatial system to liberate mixed ethnic people and women from ethnic and gender-based violence, discrimination, and constitutional and spatial biases.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Exploiting Overlapping Landsat Scene Classifications and Focal Context to Identify Boreal Disturbance Mapping Uncertainty
    (2022-12-14) Wu, Wesley Jovia; Remmel, Tarmo
    The BorealDB dataset is derived from a mosaic of Landsat scenes that were independently classified to identify historic fire and timber harvesting disturbances within Ontario. This thesis identifies and flags areas of classification uncertainty within BorealDB and scrutinizes them to assess classification confidence. The focal context of all orthogonal neighbour states was quantified to feed classification tree (CT) and random forest (RF) classifiers to predict focal disturbance classes. Uncertainty is deemed to exist where BorealDB and predicted CT or RF classes disagree. When RF and CT predictions were compared with the BorealDB classes, RF predicted more uncertainty (58%) than CT predictions (15%). Sampled locations compared with original satellite imagery and visual assessments suggested uncertainty depended on classifier, disturbance type, and spatial neighbours. Timber harvest disturbance classifications had the most uncertainty and CT predictions was the most consistent with neighbouring classifications and visual assessments indicating it is more effective than RF.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Land, Labour, and Under-Industrialization in Post-Reform India: Case Studies from Odisha
    (2022-12-14) Richards, Jarren Donald; Das, Raju J.
    With some four decades of data to draw on, it is now clear that the post-reform period has failed to deliver on its promise of industrialization in India: manufacturing accounts for a declining share of the national product, and has failed to emerge as a driver of employment. In fact, the post-1990 period under-performs on a range of indicators when measured against the early post-independence period, while the benefits of what little industrialization there is continue to bypass the country’s poorest citizens and regions. Why? Two case studies from the Indian state of Odisha are presented in pursuit of this question: the Kalinga Nagar Industrial Complex in Jajpur, billed as India’s next Steel City, and POSCO’s captive steel plant in Jagatsinghpur, once the largest FDI project in India’s history. A broad history of the literature on industrial development and industrial policy is reviewed (structuralist, neoclassical, and neo-Weberian). This literature is counterposed to the radical political economy literature, from which I assemble an alternative framework for understanding under-industrialization in the Global South, drawing on extensive fieldwork carried out in the region in 2016-17. I argue that liberalization is incapable of delivering meaningful industrialization in low-income/developing countries because (a) it engenders forms of land- based struggle and resistance which, due the scalar nature of politics, disrupt land commodification processes, and (b) it robs, through mediated processes of exploitation, the would-be beneficiaries of what little industrialization there is.