6 - Linda McDowell: Complex Geographies that Matter

Summary

Introduction

Linda McDowell has been path-breaking within and beyond the discipline of geography, and particularly at the intersection of economic and feminist geography. She has been at the forefront in demonstrating how and why ‘geography’, ‘class’, ‘ethnicity’ and ‘gender’ matter in research into a more complete understanding of space, place, capital and power. She has written highly influential articles on social and economic processes underlying economic restructuring and divisions of labour in United Kingdom, the impact of migration and of women's changing lives, and how this relates to feminist methodology and theory. Her empirical trajectory has covered an extraordinary array of contexts, ranging from rethinking migrant women's voices, to examining young White unskilled men searching for employment, through to bankers in the City of London. Yet, they are all related by their focus on the significance of gender as a category of analysis (McDowell, 1997, 2003a,b, 2016a,b).

Together, these all highlight the importance of a more localized lens for understanding how geography affects opportunity and employment. Linda's ideas are communicated in path-breaking scholarly papers and pioneering books which have been translated into a number of languages, including Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, German and Korean. While documenting the changing and varied gender, ethnicity, class and employment interconnections would be a challenge to anyone, Linda has achieved this with seeming ease. Many previous studies had ignored these categories, reaching general conclusions that neglected important distinctions between economic and social subgroups. It has become clear not only that significant categories are apparent but also that they can be related in a coherent way to classifying factors of the individual or the group.

Despite the remarkable diversity of economic geographies today, there remains a fundamental tension between a disciplinary approach via practice of scholarship and one that endorses different perspectives. Instead of an engaged pluralism, economic geography has largely descended into a fragmented pluralism for reasons very much internal to the history of the field (Clare and Siemiatycki, 2014). Here, I outline the contributions that Linda McDowell has made to a fuller, more diverse economic geography that is grounded in rigorous empirical research.

Gender in economic geography

Gender refers to ‘socially created distinctions between femininity and masculinity’

McDowell and Sharpe, 1997: 20, original emphasis