Queen’s University is situated on traditional Anishnaabe and Haudenosaunee Territory
WHAT WE DO
GEELs, Global Economies and Everyday Lives, is a creative and critical community of scholars at Queen’s University interested in issues related to social reproduction, racial capitalism, cities, diaspora, and social transformation in spaces of the Global South. Moving beyond the geographical North/South divide, we take the perspective that the global north and south are produced through ongoing colonial relations of power that operate throughout the globe. These relations of power include colonial divisions of humanity, the production of socio-economic inequalities through colonial-capitalist development, and the marginalization of knowledge cultures in order to dispossess.
We specifically consider how communities made precarious through (neo)colonial, racialized and (neo)liberal capitalist processes negotiate and re-make social reproductive practices. Our respective work centres diasporic caring relationships; creative cultural productions and popular culture; community-centred food and infant-feeding practices; youth employment and precarity; political ecological disaster and renewable energy; and new forms of work and labour. Our research takes us across Canada, Chile, Cuba, Bahamas, Brazil, Ghana, Jamaica, Nigeria, South Africa and Turkey. At the heart of our interrelated projects sits a shared concern: to advance a feminist political economy embedded in decolonial and anti-racist feminist praxis.
Check out our profiles for our individual research projects. You can also find out more about what we’re up to by looking at our events page and blog.
↑ Photo Visual artists’ silhouettes and political signs wheatpasted onto a street in Old San Juan. San Juan, Puerto Rico 2018.
WHO WE ARE
The lab at Queen’s is a collaborative environment where we share ideas, read and discuss chosen texts, review each other’s work, test new research methods, share scholarly resources, mobilize and disseminate knowledge, and organize events. As our work takes us beyond Queen’s University and Canada, GEELs aims to create a community of international scholars, activists and artists similarly interested in shared concerns of social reproduction and care.
Please contact us if you’d like to participate in the GEELs community.
Josie Whittmer
PostDoctoral Fellow & Adjunct Assistant Professor, Geography & Planning
E. Alkim Karaagac
Postdoctoral Fellow (Queen’s University) and Adjunct Assistant Professor, Geography (University of Waterloo)
RESOURCES
As a lab, GEELs meets regularly to discuss texts related to our research themes. Under Resources you can find some of the texts that are currently inspiring us to think creatively about a decolonial and anti-racist feminist political economy.
WHAT WE’RE WRITING (BLOG)
- Channon Oyeniran published an article in the Canadian Encyclopedia
- GEELs’ Claudia Hirtenfelder and Nathalia Santos Ocasio interviewed about international students at Queen’s
- Kim Hill-Tout has published an op-ed in The Conversation about food and COVID-19
- New article published by Kasmine Forbes
- New article published by Kasmine Forbes
WHAT WE’RE UP TO
EVENTS
Many GEELs’ members organize events and take part in podcasts, artistic engagements, and public talks throughout the academic year. The GEELs lab is also planning events for when we are able to meet in person again. Click here to find out more about what we’ve been up to!
WRITINGS/RESEARCH
GEELs members are involved in many of their own research and writing projects. We also plan to collaborate around shared research interests. Click here to see what we’ve recently written.