Contributors

Vinay Gidwani

Professor of Geography
Program in Earth and Environmental Sciences
The City University of New York

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Vinay Gidwani is interested in capitalist transformations of agriculture and agroecologies, and their inter-connections with cities through labor and capital flows. In attempting to understand various spatial resolutions of the ‘agrarian question’ he foregrounds three areas of research: first, the cultural politics and geographies of work; second, the more-than-human constitution of social relations; and third, emergent terrains of injustice and struggle. He is presently working on urban and regional circuits of waste, and the labor processes that emerged around these, in the growth of metropolitan Delhi post-1930. This endeavor is part of a larger project called The Afterlives of Waste that is an investigation into the spatial histories, political uses, and contemporary global political economy of commodity detritus. Gidwani’s analytical approach builds on a range of intellectual currents, most prominently agrarian studies, economics, ecology, postcolonial criticism and various strands of Marxism, particularly Marxist geography. He is the author, most recently, of Capital, Interrupted: Agrarian Development and the Politics of Work in India (Minnesota, 2008).