Professor, Geography I am a human geographer and political economist interested in how economic landscapes are made. Within that broad description, I have been particularly focused upon exploring how working people play active roles in shaping economic landscapes and how, in turn, the physical and ideological form of the landscape can sometimes enable and sometimes constrain the possibilities for working people’s actions – that is to say, I am interested in the ways in which working people make their own geographies but not under the conditions of their own choosing. It is this approach to understanding working people’s spatiality – what I have termed “Labor Geography” – upon which I have focused much of my research for the past 25 years or so. My research has involved such diverse topics as: how US east coast dockers struggled to control the location of work once technological innovations like containerization began to affect their industry in the 1950s; how dockers also went about building new geographical scales of organizing in response to the growing national spatial integration of the cargo-handling industry; how autoworkers were able to bring General Motors’s operations to a grinding halt in the late 1990s by striking at several strategic choke points in the corporation’s structure; how Western unions went about working with unions in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1990s to help rebuild the labor movement there after the collapse of Communism; the role played by the US labor movement in fighting Communism in Latin America and the Caribbean, and what this meant for the subsequent globalization of US capital; and the challenges faced by precarious workers in industries such as cleaning and how they are fighting to resist the pressures being brought to bear upon them by neoliberal capitalism. A second, though related, area of my scholarship has been on the topic of what has come to be termed “globalization.” Globalization is many things – an economic process, a political process, a cultural process, and a historical process. But it is also a fundamentally geographical process, as different parts of the planet are connected together – and sometimes disconnected – in new and different ways than they were in the past. Importantly, this connecting of places geographically also plays out in a historically uneven manner. My main goal, then, has been to understand globalization as a historical-geographical process, both materially and also ideologically (i.e., how do we think about globalization and how do the ways in which we think about it shape what we believe is happening in the global economy and therefore what might be possible politically?). Within this broad goal I have been particularly interested in articulating how working people have played active roles in promoting globalization in some times and places and in resisting it in others, with both activities playing profound roles in shaping how the contemporary global economy functions. What I suggest is that the creation of new linkages between different places and the rescaling of contemporary economic, political, and social life (what we call "globalization") do not come about solely through the actions of collective capital but, rather, are the result of deeply contested processes, ones in which workers have played – and continue to play – fundamental roles. Recognizing this means that we can collectively imagine different futures for our planet and different versions of “globalization” (such as proletarian internationalization) rather than simply accepting a neoliberal version of what globalization is. More recently, along with colleagues Al Rainnie (Flinders University, Adelaide), Susan McGrath-Champ (University of Sydney), and Graham Pickren (Roosevelt University), I have written on the topic of Global Production Networks (GPNs), especially on the role played by workers in shaping these networks’ organizational (and thus spatial) structures. Extending our interest in how commodities are put together and how the contested labor process shapes the manner in which this occurs, we also have explored how they are taken apart in other types of networks – what we are calling Global Destruction Networks (GDNs) – as their constituent elements (like precious metals, plastics, and so forth) are extracted for possible re-use as inputs into new GPNs. As with our work on GPNs, so does our work on GDNs detail how workers' activities and the ways in which the labor process is organized shape these networks’ structures. Through this work we have sought to insert a focus upon labor into the so-called “circular economy” literature. I would be interested in supervising graduate students with interests in any of these areas, as well as with interests in issues of labor and political economy more generally.
