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Feminist political ecologies of land have long traced how land dispossession impacts women and exacerbates gender inequalities. However, there remains limited work on land compensation in extractive economies. In this article, we take this up via a focus on oil development in Uganda. We examine how compensation is bound up with, and reinforces, power inequalities of gender, marital status, ethnicity, and class. In particular, we focus on women positioned as non-favored or ‘secondary’ wives, highlighting their particular vulnerabilities to dispossession during compensation and resettlement. Our research is based on interviews, participant observation, and focus groups with secondary wives conducted in 2015, 2018 and 2024 in Kabaale Parish in the Albertine Graben region of Western Uganda. We trace the legal and socio-cultural norms that enable women’s dispossession, as well as their resilience following land loss. We trace the ways that intimacies of family, marriage, and interpersonal relationships are tightly interwoven with state policy, land wealth, access to compensation, and control of resources. We show that the land dispossession of secondary wives is not only a fall-out of oil extraction, but also facilitates it, making the process more lucrative for companies, the Ugandan state and, to a lesser extent, for resettled husbands. Our work makes important contributions to feminist political ecologies of land, marriage, and oil and gas industrial development in Global South settings. Given the centrality of patriarchy to extractive theft, we assert that analyses of this industry must consider the intimate and intersectional politics of compensation. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

In this paper we develop a feminist political ecology of disaster colonialism. To do so, we focus on a series of fires that devastated Park Yard Market in Kampala, Uganda, one of the largest retail spaces in East Africa. Officially accidental, rumours suggest the fires were deliberately set to displace traders and make way for the lucrative (re)development of the city‐centre land. Concerned less with the veracity of these rumours and more with their political ecologies, we show how narratives of Park Yard forwarded by the state and private interests indeed readied it for disaster. Here, we trace how colonial narratives of urban planning in the city, driven by technocratic imperatives of improvement, modernisation, and safety echo in the contemporary devaluation of Park Yard and its women traders. Against this, we show how the caring labour and investment by those traders was central to the formation and maintenance of the market. Over time they created an economically viable space, even as their work was devalued and legally unrecognised. Our analysis interrogates the colonial past‐presents and the gendered‐racialised logics of neoliberal urban development. This framing understands spectacular disaster, a series of highly destructive fires, as inextricably connected to historically produced systems of precarious urban marginality. It demonstrates the uneven impacts, and in particular the deeply deleterious impacts for low‐income Ugandan women; the relationship between fire disaster, vulnerability, and the labour of social reproduction; and the varied ways female traders resisted, adapted, and struggled to defend their economic space in the city. Specifically, a feminist political ecology also helps us understand the embodied nature of this relationship. That is, it is always produced through emotion‐laden, material, and corporeal gendered, racialised and classed power and both relies on and violates particular kinds of idealised or disposable urban subjectivities. 

Between 2018 and 2020, dramatic changes in US-Mexico policy transformed experiences of asylum on the border. Quotas on applications at ports of entry (known as metering), the “Remain in Mexico” policy, and the deployment of the pandemic era “lockdown” through Title 42, each severely limited asylum opportunities. In response, a host of informal waiting lists emerged, developed and were utilized by a binational network of non-governmental and government agencies, shelters, cartels, and individuals. In this article we use a feminist geographic lens to examine the intimate geopolitics of esperar created by these lists. Via in-depth oral histories with Mexican asylum-seekers, shelter staff, legal advocates, and the wider border bureaucracy, we examine their formation, everyday management, the slow violences and immediate threats they posed, and their work as an informal technology of state control. Our analysis demonstrates how the lists operated as informal tactics of diversion and delay, producing a false sense of certainty while using indefinite waiting times as soft and surreptitious mechanisms to block displaced people’s legal claims for asylum. This imposed distinctly gendered burdens on women and youth. However, we also identify how the lists, where appropriated by migrants themselves, became tools to resist the hierarchies of the US nation-state and its territorial impositions. Our work extends established political geographic analyses of migration by attending to the interscalar, quotidian, and embodied realities of border practice – manifest amidst today’s lockdown by the slow violences of waiting.