Sacrifice Flows: Racial Capitalism and Uneven Geographies of Development

Seminar Critical Development Studies, Fall 2024

Abstract

Critical development studies have painstakingly documented the costly trade-offs, side effects, and negative consequences of even well-intentioned development projects. Despite this invaluable body of work, there has been limited treatment of development costs deemed  justifiable. We focus on sacrifice zones (concentrated areas of environmental contamination and degradation) to draw attention to the “acceptable losses” associated with large-scale development projects. We then consider toxic mobilities to illustrate the shortcomings of the sacrifice zone concept, which we argue is problematically constrained. We offer the notion of sacrifice flows as a corrective to the  spatial fixity and containment implied by sacrifice zones.

About the speaker

Kimberley Thomas is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography, Environment and Urban Studies and Director of the Climate Justice Field School at Temple University. Her research on environmental justice and agrarian change in the Mekong and Ganges Deltas examines the political economy of climate adaptation, the relational production of security and insecurity, and the vulnerabilizing effects of water infrastructure at multiple scales. This work has been supported through funding from the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program, the Council of American Overseas Research Centers, and the Institute for Human Geography, and has appeared in a range of journal outlets, including Global Environmental Change, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Political Geography, Development and Change, and WiRES Climate Change.

About the series

The Critical Development Studies Seminar Series is a graduate student-led effort that aims to provide space for junior scholars to share innovative research and discuss emergent debates within critical development studies.

Invited speakers cover a range of geographical areas, disciplinary backgrounds, and research topics. Examples of potential topics include agroecology and food justice issues, state-building, land and labor, extractivist politics, the gendered and racial dynamics of ongoing capitalist development, and the political ecological histories of the global development project. The target audience for the series is graduate students and faculty interested in critical development studies both within the Cornell community as well as external scholars. 

Seminar organizers for 2024-25 are Natalia Correa Sanchez, Kyunghee Kang, Jenny Goldstein, and Mariah Doyle-Stephenson.