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   Faria, Caroline; Whitesell, Dominica (January 2021, Geography Compass)

   Abstract Critical scholarship on urban development and displacement has a long history in geography. Yet one emergent driver remains strikingly understudied and poorly understood: global retail capital (GRC). This essay engages feminist postcolonial approaches, grounded in African continental feminist work, to theorize from the urban transformations, displacements, and resistances driven by GRC and emerging in urban East Africa. This framework engages an intersectional understanding of capitalism, and its work driving urban displacement, as always co‐produced through gender, racial, colonial, heteronormative, nationalist, and other power‐geometries. We assert that feminist postcolonial geography helps us imagine other urban futures, within and beyond Africa: critical of colonial past‐presents; free of the modernizing imperatives of normative urban planning; and that recognize the work and insights—intellectual and material—of African women. 

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2. Designing a ‘vibrant, attractive and sustainable city’: feminist approaches to beautification in Kampala, Uganda

   https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2024.2352118  

   Whitesell, Dominica; Faria, Caroline; Boonabaana, Brenda; Bakeiha_Ankunda, Jasper; Katushabe, Jovah; Tumuhaise, Phiona (June 2024, Gender, Place & Culture)

   Beauty, as an aesthetic ideal and intrinsically power-laden paradigm, is central to urban development projects. Yet there remains limited critical work that interrogates the colo- nial underpinnings, violent outcomes, and negotiations of beauty politics in urban beautification programs. In our arti- cle, we approach urban beautification campaigns in down- town Kampala, Uganda via an explicitly African, and Black feminist analytic of beauty. Specifically, we center the expe- riences of women market vendors as they navigate city greening initiatives and development plans which promise to ‘transform’ Kampala and re-brand it once again as the ‘Garden City of Africa’. We argue that pairing urban beautifi- cation and Black and African scholarship around beauty offers generative insights as it understands such spatial pro- grams as always embodied, contested, and inseparable from intersectional power hierarchies. In turn, we take seriously and carefully examine discourses around beautification: by tracing its colonial and gendered foundations and its visceral impacts as it is internalized and renegotiated by low-income women operating in downtown markets in Kampala. As such, our focus on beauty situates beautification as a disci- plining and displacing practice and as mentally and physi- cally violent. Finally, it reveals how women try to envision their own beautiful Kampala. 

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3. A Darling ^® of the beauty trade: race, care, and the imperial debris of synthetic hair

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   Faria, Caroline_V; Jones, Hilary (July 2019, cultural geographies)

   This article pushes for a postcolonial geography of care, through hair. Working with the ‘imperial debris’ of care as a disciplinary racial logic, we show how it is renewed, remade, and resisted in the present through the travels, narratives, and practices of the African synthetic hair trade. Here we interrogate Lebanese business expansion, entrepreneurialism, manufacture, and styling, tracing in each case how contemporary narratives of care mirror, entrench, and rework colonial ideals and subjectivities of Whiteness. Disrupting these logics, we close by attending to the influences of Ugandan stylists and consumers who draw on Caribbean, US-American, and other diasporic circuits of Blackness, along with locally rooted innovations. Our work demonstrates how racial power travels through time and across space, asserting the important and sustained insights of a postcolonial geography of care. 

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4. Speculative urbanism and the urban-financial conjuncture: Interrogating the afterlives of the financial crisis

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   Goldman, Michael (April 2021, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space)

   This article proposes an analytical–methodological approach to understand this historical conjuncture of speculative urbanism in which global finance capital plays an increasingly important role in urban transformation. Whereas the scholarship on urban financialization makes sharp distinctions between what occurs in the global North and the South, portraying the process in the South as one of subordination or peripheralization and in the North as mature and stable (although volatile), this article seeks to demonstrate that the North–South divide is less effective as an explanatory power. Instead, it presents an analytical approach that is attuned to the relentless dynamism and inter-scalar hyper-mobility of finance capital working across the postcolonial map—in other words, a relational–conjunctural approach. The article suggests the method of “following the financial strategy” by analyzing urban forms and projects as processes constituted by the nexus of practices in finance and city planning. It looks closely at finance’s use of inter-scalar financial tools (such as arbitrage, interest rate swaps, collateralized debt obligations, and currency hedges) across borders, sectors, infrastructures, and conditions, as mediated by national and international state actors. The value of this analytical–methodological approach will be illustrated through notable financial transactions occurring in and across cities to emphasize their speculative and financial characteristics—specifically highlighting investments traversing cities of Spain, the USA, and India. The focus here is on financial strategies emerging from the detritus of the 2008 global financial crisis and shaped by the expanding discursive-material formation of speculative urbanism. 

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5. Sequined Styles, Intersectional Moves: Economic Geography, Let’s Dress Up!

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   Faria, Caroline; Whitesell, Dominica; Birungi, Kasfah; Elledge, Annie; Katushabe, Jovah; Kyotowadde, Catherine (January 2022, Economic Geography)

   In this article, we build on the vital insights of feminist thought in economic geography, extending this body of work via a global Black feminist geographic lens. To do so, we center two moments of the Ugandan bridal industry: the international trade of imported dresses and their design and refashioning there. Via the journeys of these dresses, we make visible how connected racial-gendered and classed power relations structure, drive, and manifest global trade networks. We provide geographically contextualized accounts of the gendered-racialization of economies, while always tracing the ties between varied forms of that racialization across place and through history. And we demonstrate the agency and crucial economic worldmaking of African women who labor within and fashion economic geographies. More broadly, we use dress, and the act of dressing up, in two ways. First, via a global Black feminist lens, we show how dress can be a deeply instructive material object that tells us much about the geographies of economies. Second, we use dress as a metaphor for urgent and playful connection, helping us to refashion the subfield of economic geography as feminist, antiracist, and critically transformative. 

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