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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. In constructive tension with Marxist urban geographies of displacement, antiracist, feminist, postcolonial, and queer scholarship disrupts Anglo Euro-American and capitalo-centric intellectual modes of thought. It pushes for an intersectional understanding of capitalism, including its work driving urban displacement, as always co-produced through gender, racial, heteronormative, nationalist and other power-geometries. This essay reviews and connects these literatures, using feminist postcolonial work to theorize from the processes, drivers, impacts of and scholarship around global retail capital emerging in urban East Africa. With this we assert that feminist postcolonial interventions, engaging but other-than Marxist norms, and grounded in African continental critical feminist work, offers more complex and historicized understandings of those urban transformations, displacements and resistances driven by global retail capital. feminist postcolonial geography helps us imagine other urban futures, with and beyond Africa, that are 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. 

There is little geographic work on beauty. Yet beauty offers important insights into spatial, geopolitical, and geoeconomic processes. In this article, we attend to the powerful role of beauty labor, norms, and practices in national development. We center the Miss Tourism Uganda beauty pageant, held annually since 2011, and the centerpiece of tourism-based development in Uganda. Designed to attract foreign visitors and investors and to promote a sense of nationalist pride among Ugandans, the pageant-as-development strategy is increasingly mirrored across the neoliberalized Global South. This approach relies on young women’s beauty labor: the work of self-improvement via intimate beauty technologies, and the intellectual work of learning and showcasing a beautiful, idealized, national imaginary. This labor is physically, emotionally, and financially demanding, and is largely unremunerated. Yet, it is lucratively exploited to promote local and international corporate brands, generate tourism revenue, and attract foreign investment. Despite this, pageant participants and organizers find creative and collaborative strategies to navigate these demands. As part of our efforts to fashion a “geographies of beauty”, this article argues that the power of beauty, and specifically the labor of beauty, is central to understanding contemporary tourism-centered development efforts. 

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. 

Building on calls for “slow scholarship,” we highlight the importance of time and care in producing rigorous, ethical research through our advising practices. We describe how feminist ethics and epistemologies shape each of our research clusters: the Hydro‐Feminist Lab at West Virginia University and the Feminist Geography Collective at the University of Texas at Austin. We show a couple of ways that feminist geographers can adopt the “lab model” and use it to build meaningful mentoring networks, fostered through time and care, and in a way that both meets and transgresses the demands of academic neoliberalism. We then show how this approach extends into our fieldwork, recounting instances where the importance of mentoring over time and through a caring ethic surface. Unfolding over weeks, months, and years we show the value of time and care, both in deepening the quality of advising relationships and in creating mentoring relationships of trust and support. We contend that this better prepares students for the intellectual and emotional challenges of feminist that research and, in turn, strengthens that research. In the face of neoliberalism's quickening drives, we highlight the benefits and the contradictions of this kind of slow and caring “lab‐field” feminist mentoring for geographic research. 

This paper advances current debates about feminist methodologies in geography by attending to affectual intensities and their resonance. Affectual intensities emerge through encounters between different bodies and objects, and are deeply power‐laden, enabling, disabling, transforming, and restricting geographic research. We attend to three moments of resonance that surfaced in Elisabeth Militz's field research on nationalism in Azerbaijan. In each, we show how attending to affectual intensities reveals much about the work of power in nationalism and in the constitution of geographic knowledge about it. The paper calls for an affectual methodology, a process of critical writing, reflection, and rewriting about moments of resonance between different bodies and objects in the field, and as we analyse, present, and write up our data. This is a layered, dialogic, and collaborative writing strategy that, we argue, enables us to write through and with affect. In particular, our work contributes a nuanced and multi‐layered approach to uncover often‐neglected power structures of predominantly white and heteronormative geographic research practice.