In praise of chaotic research pathways: A feminist response to planetary urbanization

One blustery and dreary November night in 2015, I performed drag king urban think-tank expert and ‘tool for urban change’ Toby Sharp at the Fail Better cabaret in Glasgow. For the performance, I drew inspiration from my research: an intersectional feminist analysis of ‘creative city’ policies and the potential of radical arts practice for resisting them. Engaging in the feminist and queer practice of drag kinging is my way of disrupting the binaries that separate theory from practice (Halberstam, 2011). Drag kinging also challenges audiences to consider the classist, racist, heteronormative, and ableist performances that pass for our foundational normative modes of thought and behaviour in our everyday lives. That night at Fail Better, I introduced the audience to an array of fictitious partnerships meant to ‘makeover’ Glasgow’s neighbourhoods for white middle class professionals and to catalyze economic development. On the stage, I drew inspiration from an array of public–private partnerships already underway in the city: research collaborations that connect drone manufacturers on the River Clyde with universities; community policing strategies in Glasgow’s Govanhill neighbourhood that mobilize security technologies developed in Palestine; and Glasgow city council-funded strategies that encourage arts organisations to prime vacant lots for real estate development.

As a feminist scholar committed to critiquing depoliticized ‘creativity’ discourse that has circulated in certain urban studies and policy networks over the past decade, I am sympathetic with Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid’s call for alternative analytical approaches in recent debates surrounding planetary urbanization. In particular, I find their interrogation of ubiquitous ‘urban age’ research, a body of work that positions cities as sites of ‘innovation’, ‘creativity’ and ‘sustainability’, timely and generative. Here, they critique this area of urban research and policy-making for ‘black-boxing’ (Brenner and Schmid, 2014: 155) the globally-reaching geographies and contradictory geo-economic forces that constitute cities and regions. They point out how this lack of criticality and complexity obfuscates uneven urban development resulting from several decades of neoliberal regulatory restructuring and ongoing geo-economic crisis (Brenner and Schmid, 2015: 157).

Because I am inspired by geographers who examine the various ways the everyday and the global intersect, I also see some promise in planetary urbanization because it posits cities as enveloped in an ‘unevenly woven’ (Brenner and Schmid, 2015: 170) and globally-extending fabric of forces. With this approach, researchers can move beyond static notions of place-bound cities and, instead, map the heterogenous processes that constitute neoliberal urbanization: from fracking in North Dakota, to bedbugs in London, to place-marketing strategies in Bangkok. Moreover, a planetary epistemology offers strategies to map and interrogate emergent conditions, processes, and transformations associated with certain forms of contemporary activism. Some examples include the Occupy Wall Street movement and recent Indigenous-led anti-pipeline protests at Standing Rock.

However, I agree with recent feminist and queer scholars (Natalie Oswin, Ananya Roy, Kate Derickson, Linda Peake and others) who critique Brenner and Schmid for reproducing familiar hierarchies and exclusions in urban studies research. Not only is the planetary urbanization approach totalizing, it privileges a lineage of particular white, male, and European Marxist and neo-Marxist political economists at the expense of feminist, queer, and anti-colonial contributions to this sub-field (Oswin, 2018). I and others also find Brenner and Schmid’s tendency to position researchers and research subjects as monadic and pre-constituted, not formed through struggle, dialogue and praxis, rather confining (Pratt and Rosner, 2012). Additionally, as critics argue, the approach reproduces power dynamics as it privileges a ‘god-trick-like’ (Haraway, 1988) telescopic view from nowhere, a standpoint that feminists have critiqued for decades (Derickson, 2014; Peake, 2015). As Derickson (2014) contends, like any conceptual or methodological approach, a planetary standpoint is partial, limited, and limiting.

Such feminist and queer criticality prompts me to ask: is it possible to construct alternative urban research approaches that take seriously feminist, queer, post-colonial, and de-colonial analyses of the embodied and the everyday, as well as political economic research on structural forces? (Deutsche 1991; McDowell, 1992; Oswin, 2018). A more heterogenous strategy for investigating urban politics and processes could include Brenda Parker’s ‘feminist partial political economy of place,’ FPPEP (Parker, 2016). This methodological tool kit combines both an overview of larger economic forces and, drawing from post-structural paradigms and the work of Black feminist thinkers, embodied and community-engaged analyses of lives lived from the grassroots up. With FPPEP, researchers can uncover the raced, classed, and gendered discourses and practices that result in the vastly uneven production of space with analyses that encourage humility, reflexivity, and a feminist commitment to slow scholarship (Mountz et al., 2015). Alternative urban analytical approaches can also draw from a range of intersectional feminist researchers interrogating the constitutive role of ability, sexuality, race, and gender in capitalist development (Cahill, 2007; Catungal and Leslie, 2009; Doan, 2011; Muller-Myrdahl, 2013). As an example, through detailed empirical and action-oriented research with a homeless women’s organisation in a gentrifying Toronto neighbourhood, Kern chronicles the interconnections between small, everyday, and embodied hardships of living in poverty with broad political economic processes in a settler colonial context (Kern, 2016).

In a similar vein, an alternative epistemology for urban research could learn from Richa Nagar’s ‘situated solidarities’, a praxis-oriented research and pedagogical strategy that considers the heterogeneous webs of multi-scalar processes involved in the production of spaces and subjectivities (Nagar, 2014; see also Peake, 2015). By encouraging collaboration with artists, activists, and scholars, a situated solidarity approach decentres Eurocentric theoretical and methodological frameworks that privilege text-based approaches and position particular individuals and communities as objects of study. Furthermore, by recognising poetry, music, and theatre as valuable methods for negotiating everyday urban life and forging solidarities, Nagar de-centres what she refers to as ‘the class system of the intellect’ (Nagar, 2014: 160) often reproduced by scholarly research. As McKittrick (2006) contends, such relational, praxis-oriented methodologies make visible spaces of ‘human life’: sites of collectivist struggle to contest colonial domination and everyday, systemic racism.

From the standpoint of a researcher incorporating queer theory and arts-based approaches, I also question Brenner and Schmid’s claim that their new epistemology of the urban brings rigour and consistency to urban studies. According to them, their approach brings order to an increasingly ‘chaotic’ (Brenner and Schmid, 2014: 743) field with a diminished ‘collective capacity to offering convincing, accessible alternatives to the dominant ideologies of our time’ (Brenner and Schmid, 2015: 159).

But what counts as productive and rigorous research and who decides? Such claims to tame ‘chaotic’ analytical conceptual and methodological approaches have already been the subject of several cautionary critiques in other disciplines. Queer theorist Jack Halberstam, for example, has critiqued the hetero-normative imposition of intellectual rigour and disciplinary order in standard academic discourse by drawing on the likes of Paulo Freire, Fred Moten and Jacques Rancière (Halberstam, 2011). For Halberstam, establishing theoretical schemas and road-maps are particularly colonialist, homogenising, masculinist and hetero-patriarchal acts because they create hierarchies that separate what counts and doesn’t count as valuable research. Instead, Halberstam contends that undisciplined research strategies outside predetermined frameworks and exploratory work that risk failing uncover subjugated knowledges and generate counter-spaces where artists, activists and scholars can enact world-making practices. Furthermore, according to Halberstam, we need exploratory work that risks failing in order to produce politically and intellectually generative scholarship.

Queer theorists also claim that unusual research pathways can provide a way of escaping the current professionalization of knowledge production in the university sector (Halberstam, 2011; Schulman, 2011). As an example, in the UK context in which I am currently working, researchers and graduate students are pressurised to produce ‘four-star’ articles to compete in the Research Excellence Framework. Within this regime, high-profile and well-resourced scholars define what counts as ‘rigorous theory’ constructing citational economies that reproduce their expertise and modes of thought. Planetary urbanization, in advocating a reproducible research model while excluding others, might unintentionally play into this paradigm of academic capitalism.

Such an articulation of systematic academic financial gain is no minor matter. Not only are universities heavily implicated in neo-liberal employment and urban planning practises, university administrators increasingly favour globally-extending research schemes that mobilise multiple private sector, government, and community partners. They are pushing scholars to produce ‘impactful’ work, research that benefits policy makers, economists, and private sector collaborations. Within this context, funding bodies tend to devalue small-scale and politicised community-engaged approaches (Pain, 2014). Taken together, choosing to legitimate a totalizing research schema could have far-reaching consequences for already-marginalised methodological and theoretical approaches.

Nevertheless, it could be argued that all scholarship is subject to such power dynamics, and that we are all ensnared in reproducing these contradictions. As critical scholars committed to social and spatial justice, we continue to muddle through crafting and implementing our own research toolkits.

These strategies can combine political economic, anti-colonial, feminist, and queer conceptual and methodological approaches that make sense for our research journeys. For example, in my own post-doctoral research on neoliberal cultural policies and arts activism in Glasgow, Schmid and Brenner’s planetary approach furnishes me a critical political economic analysis of the globalised network of actors involved in the marketing of Glasgow as a competitive ‘creative city.’ With a lens informed by David Harvey, Henri Lefevbre, and Bob Jessop to name a few, I can examine how internationally-connected private, public and non-profit actors are complicit in the production of uneven urban space. This includes analyzing the implementation of globally-replicated, neoliberal culture-led urban regeneration initiatives meant to attract professionals and catalyze urban regeneration to a city struggling from the loss of manufacturing jobs, unionised employment, and an eroded industrial base since the 1970s (Gray, 2008). With Brenner and Schmid’s approach, I can also map and interrogate how culture-led regeneration planners mobilizing urban age research make-over neighbourhoods into sites of market-friendly cultural consumption. From this perspective, I can analyze how the success of Glasgow’s art scene (branded as ‘The Glasgow Miracle’) and its internationally-connected artists are complicit in the gentrification of some of the UK’s most disinvested neighbourhoods. Specifically, over the past two decades, city boosters, consultants, and public funding organisations have worked in collaboration with the Glasgow School of Art, universities, IT companies, and urban regeneration planners to re-brand disinvested neighbourhoods as ‘creative hubs’. At the same time, access to community services and affordable housing has rapidly declined (Gray, 2008) and arts funders consistently sideline artists of colour prompting difficult conversations about racialized inequalities in Glasgow and in Scotland more broadly (Mother Tongue, 2013).

Yet, in order to make sense of the ways artists and activists are contesting this voracious neoliberal creativity and how these regimes exacerbate pre-existing inequalities along the lines of race, class, gender, and ability, a planetary approach is limited. Instead, I rely on a feminist research tool kit that incorporates feminist, queer, and engaged arts-based approaches. Over the past few years, this has included actively following a regular political cabaret called Fail Better. An homage to poet Samuel Beckett’s call to ‘fail again, fail better’, Fail Better fearlessly creates a unique space for underrepresented working class, feminist, queer, and non-binary artists, disabled artists, and artists of colour to perform, meet and interact. This mixed performance event takes place at McChuills, a small bar on the edge of the city’s east end with a clientele who are known to support radical and anarchist causes such as a refugee football league and anti-racist organisations. Curated by politicized arts practitioners with strong connections to activist communities, the twice-a-month cabaret features an eclectic mix of comedy, hip-hop, poetry readings, independently-produced short films, and a range of unclassifiable performances (striptease, fire-walking, performance art). In direct opposition to the current neoliberal emphasis on ‘award-winning’ artists, Fail Better makes space for works-in-progress and amateur artists alongside their well-established and known counterparts.

It is important that I don’t over-emphasize the radical potential of events like Fail Better, spaces that often attract a narrow and self-selecting group of artists and activists in a moment when even the most radical arts practice is consumed as spectacle. However, echoing what performance theorist and artist TL Cowan refers to as the ‘trans-local’ arts practice of cabaret, the activities taking place in Fail Better spark friendships and activist networks that extend outwards to spark an unruly mix of politicized interventions and world-building activities (Cowan, 2012; see also Muñoz, 1994). Indeed, Fail Better evenings are lively convergence spaces where every night has an overtly politicized theme: Fuck the Patriarchy, Tent Town Logic, and No Bregrets (a post-Brexit event) are some pertinent examples. In the space, artists and activists rally support, such as raising funds to cover legal costs of anti-drone factory protestors, Medical Aid to Palestine and a youth centre in the Aida Refugee Camp. Moreover, Fail Better artists are involved in activist interventions that address local and global concerns – and ask the audience for more than just donations. During an event focussed on a protest to shut down Dungavel (an asylum seeker detention centre situated a few hours south of the city) practical strategies for a more effective demonstration were shared, and the audience mobilised to get involved. There was also a fund-raiser for a female asylum seeker night shelter program based at a Glasgow social centre that exists because of a fierce resident-led occupation. On other occasions, the focus can be more global. For example, the launch of poetry collections co-edited with Palestinian novelists and poets (Lochhead et al., 2014).

Fail Better may have provided a lively space to practice an action-based analysis of the class, race and gender politics of ‘creative city’ planning in Glasgow, but however significant I found these events, experiencing and observing these activities places me at one remove, following the path of the traditional urban researcher. Exploring further as a feminist practise-based researcher means taking to the stage in solidarity with the performers I’ve witnessed. I find myself uncomfortable with the objectifying distance of study and research. Becoming a performing research subject is not simply a knowledge-seeking endeavour; it is a dialogical intersubjective practise of equal exchange and risk (Cowan, 2011). My drag-king character Toby Sharp may have been born from my frustration working as a community planner in Toronto before I embarked on my doctoral research (Mclean, 2016) but his hyperbolic caricature of the gendered politics of arts-led regeneration planning was equally applicable to Glasgow.

Toby’s satirical critique of the entrepreneurialization of urban planning involved scripting a Toby TED-style talk that critiqued recent arts-led regeneration efforts to make-over Glasgow’s East End neighbourhoods for property development. For the act, Toby presented himself as a Canadian urban think tank expert that had parachuted into the city to conduct a Commonwealth Games 2014 evaluation. With the help of a young woman intern, we handed out questionnaires that asked the audience if they felt more ‘creative’ since the Games invested millions of dollars in a few weeks of community-engaged arts programs that promoted social inclusion. Referring to activist research on funding cuts in the community and arts sectors alongside the increase in moralizing public–private ‘creativity’ partnerships in Scotland, we satirized the contradictory politics of Games efforts to ‘re-invent’ neighbourhoods for middle class and white professionals with culture-led regeneration (Glasgow Games Monitor, 2014).

In staging the satire, I had to research marketing materials and critical conversations on the Commonwealth Games. While useful, this material research does not compare to the trust I gained and the knowledge I exchanged with other performers and the activist audience who approached me afterwards. For me, this was not an instrumental networking exercise, these interactions sparked friendships. By engaging with Fail Better and getting to know the artists who have performed, I have developed a nuanced understanding of the diverse networks of activist-artists who are actively resisting austerity politics in Glasgow. This became an unruly, embodied and risky research journey that planetary urbanization would have struggled to either generate or identify.

One such collective I was introduced to was the They They They’s, a queer and disabled music and spoken word group who discuss borders, migration, non-binary lives, and violent cuts to community services in their lively British Sign Language translated performances (Alland, 2016). Collectives like the They They They's have helped me develop a more nuanced understanding of disability politics and austerity urbanization in Glasgow. For example, I have learned firsthand about the financial barriers under-resourced disabled artists and activists encounter when they require British Sign Language translators to work comfortably with queer and non-English signing communities. Furthermore, when it came to selecting the acts for the Antipode Foundation funded ‘Arts and Precarity Forging New Solidarities’ cabaret in January 2016 the collective accepted my invitation accepted my invitation to perform. In turn, the group enriched the cabaret and workshop by making connections between current anti-racist and migrant justice activism in Glasgow with rich histories of disabled and queer organising for community space in the city. As an able-bodied, white, cis-gendered researcher working in the university sector, I acknowledge that my understanding of these struggles is limited and partial (see also de Leeuw et al., 2012). However, in queer and feminist acts of praxis and dialogue, the participants in the cabaret and workshop demonstrated how inequalities manifest in Glaswegian arts scenes and the ways artists collectively confront them.

As a feminist urban studies researcher and teacher, I appreciate that Brenner and Schmid’s call for planetary urbanization has renewed challenging discussions about how we approach the urban in our analytical endeavours. However, this totalizing approach risks reinforcing historic and ongoing divisions that separate particular political economy lines of inquiry from those that take intersectionality and difference seriously. As a result, such a lens could unintentionally marginalise research that engages communities in messy dialogue and exchange and seeks to forge situated solidarities. Furthermore, I am concerned that their call for researching cities from a planetary standpoint situates the kinds of activities taking shape in Fail Better as ineffective. Through a lens pre-occupied with mapping flows of capital and neoliberal policies, local sites of activism are set up as weak and useless in the face of steamroller-like neoliberal policies.

In a time of multiple inequalities including vicious austerity policies, racist policing of borders, post-Brexit xenophobia in the UK, and the white supremacist, settler colonial, and misogynist logic of Trump’s ascendance in the US, we require multiple research tool kits that spark difficult conversations regarding intersectional difference, power, and collective learning that challenges hegemonic structures. Calls for masculinist research that refuses to learn from queer and feminist critique and lived experience entrenches gendered and raced exclusion in a moment when we should reflect on how we can forge affinities and alliances, resource intersectional scholar activism, and break down colonial hierarchies. Furthermore, Brenner and Schmid risk feeding into already well-cited networks of scholars that thrive in the neoliberal citational economy. And citation matters. As Derickson notes ‘the act of theorizing the urban and, by association, theorizing political possibilities, is fundamentally shaped and limited by the intellectual and philosophical traditions upon which they are based, and the empirical examples upon which they draw’ (Derickson, 2014: 651).

To conclude, what we draw from determines where we go forward. It is crucial that urban studies’ calls for alternative and radical new research roadmaps committed to social justice embrace heterogenous, dialogic, and praxis-oriented approaches. This means taking seriously humble, reflexive, and embodied strategies that take risks and meandering turns to research what Peake refers to as the ‘undecideability of the urban’ (Peake, 2015). Inevitably, we have to allow for the discomforting uncertainties of the chaotic and to value the humility of all of our situated and grounded perspectives. This also means risking failing in our analytical endeavours so that we might fail better.