Victoria A. Lawson

Faculty Affiliate Victoria Lawson is the Thomas L. & Margo G. Wyckoff Endowed Faculty Fellow in the Geography department. Her theoretical and empirical work is concerned with the social and economic effects of global economic restructuring in the Americas. Professor Lawson engages with three key literatures: first, feminist and poststructural theories of migration and identity formation; second, critical development studies work on neoliberal modernization debates, informal work and the feminization of poverty; and third, postcolonial theory which explores the ways in which power dynamics are structured around discourses and practices of race, class, gender, sexuality and nationality.

Major Research Projects:

• Critical Global Poverty Studies - The Critical Global Poverty Studies (CGPS) network with Asun Lera-St.Clair (University of Bergen) is being formed under the umbrella of the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN). Our point of departure is one of intellectual dissatisfaction with current poverty knowledge. Our work focuses on unsettling dominant discourses of poverty and the poor, and practices that result, across the globe. We critique the disassociation of poverty analyses and policies in the Global North and South from each other, and instead argue for more effective alternatives which begin from understanding the interconnected processes that produce and name the poor across the globe. The network involves scholars from across the social sciences and in North America, the United Kingdom, India, Norway, Europe and China (the group is currently being expanded).


• Geographies of Race / Ethnicity and Poverty in the American Northwest - This project, funded by the National Science Foundation and collaborative with Lucy Jarosz and Anne Bonds, analyzes the geography of White and Latino rural poverty in the American Northwest. We examine how patterns of poverty vary in accordance with rural restructuring. We also investigate the cultural processes through which the poor and rural poverty are identified and understood. The 1990's have been a decade of dramatic population growth and restructuring of employment opportunities in rural counties of the American West. We investigate a series of questions dealing with how cultural and economic processes are mutually intertwined and embedded in places to produce both certain cultural understandings of White and Latino poverty and certain kinds of outcomes in terms of perpetuating or transforming rural poverty and identities. First we analyze the political economy of rural restructuring in Montana, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington over the past twenty-five years through bibliographic, archival and statistical research. Second, we conduct in-depth research in eight communities in the American Northwest to understand how social and cultural tensions over rural restructuring and poverty are being worked out.


• Critical Development Geographies - This book titled 'Critical Development Geographies' (2007) is part of the Edward Arnold Series, Human Geography in the Making, series editor, Alexander Murphy. This book provides an intellectual history of development geography and assesses recent trends within development geography/studies. I argue that a poststructural feminist political-economy approach constitutes an exciting future for development geography. I introduce readers to Critical Development Geography (CDG) which analyzes development as polyvalent and contextual in terms of its intellectual and material foundations. CDG also attends to the formation and experiences of diverse subjects of development, analyzing the ways in which particular intellectual streams privilege or erase different subjects and actors. Finally, and central to CDG, I argue that attending to the spatiality of development -- the ways in which discourses and practices of development link places, move through scales and operate in relation to boundaries -- can reveal and help explain the paradoxes and also work to democratize development.

Sample Publications:

• Lawson, V., (2008), Instead of radical geography, how about caring geography?, Antipode.


• Lawson, V., Jarosz, L., and A. Bonds, (2008), Building economies from the bottom-up: (mis)representations of poverty in the American Northwest, Social and Cultural Geography.
  
  
• Lawson, V., (2007), Introduction: Geographies of Fear and Hope, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 97(2): 335-337.

Contact Information:

Victoria A. Lawson
Email: lawson@u.washington.edu
Homepage: http://faculty.washington.edu/lawson/
Victoria Lawson’s CV: http://faculty.washington.edu/lawson/pages/cv.html