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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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This content will become publicly available on December 1, 2025
Making the energy connection: A review of the geographies of high-voltage transmission
Energy is a resurgent topic in geography and cognate fields, but its theoretical development and empirical exploration have been uneven. I argue that centering transmission as an analytical lens — rather than treating it as incidental to extraction, generation, and consumption — brings the multi-scalar spatial politics of energy systems into the foreground through attention to circulation. This article reviews work on transmission from energy geographies, science and technology studies, and the histories of energy, technology, and the environment, identifying four main themes. First, transmission is used as a lens to examine larger energy metabolisms and how the circulation of electricity entrenches spatial relations. Second, transmission is an instrument of state territorialization, both within and across borders. Third, transmission, as a particular form of electricity capital, is subject to specific regimes of accumulation and regulation. Finally, transmission lines can become objects of social contestation that entangle multi-scalar politics of energy transition, electrification, and development. The article concludes by identifying areas for further research — empirical, theoretical, and policy-oriented — through which scholarly attention to transmission can inform energy geographies, energy studies, and human-environment geography more broadly.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2400991
- PAR ID:
- 10580282
- Publisher / Repository:
- SAGE Publications
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Progress in Environmental Geography
- Volume:
- 3
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 2753-9687
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 311 to 331
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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