Winners of the Ashby prizes

Jinn-yuh Hsu, Dong-Wan Gimm, and Jim Glassman

We are very grateful to have been recognized by the Environment and Planning A editorial board for our work on the development of Ulsan and Kaohsiung during the Cold War period. While the topic is geographical-historical, we hope that the thematic arguments we have presented will resonate beyond the specific spatio-temporal confines of our study. Certainly, as we see it, issues such as the degree to which urban development today is conditioned by geopolitical considerations remain relevant—and not just in South Korea and Taiwan, two of the enduring sites of Cold War geopolitics. We know this is a view shared by many of our East Asian colleagues, a large number of whom have helped us with the development of our arguments and our overall research projects, and who deserve recognition here. Without prejudice, and without implying anything by the order of recognition, we want to mention Bae-Gyoon Park, Young-Jin Choi, Laam Hae, Jamie Doucette, Seung-Ook Lee, Joel Wainwright, Jung Won Sonn, Szu-Yun Hsu, Ling-I Chu, and all the other participants in the 2015 International Research Roundtable at the University of British Columbia (UBC), along with all of the participants in other gatherings of the EARCAG-Geopolitical Economies (GPE) of East Asia Network, and the Social Sciences Korea project on East Asian Cities. We would also like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at UBC for sponsoring the second GPE meeting in Vancouver, along with Jinn-yuh and Dong-Wan’s visit, and the Ministry of Science and Technology in Taiwan for sponsoring the third GPE meeting in Taipei, along with Jim’s two-week stay in Taiwan during that visit, which allowed time for more constructive dialogue among us. The camaraderie and intellectual support provided by these dynamic research networks has been crucial and energizing for all of us.

Our paper builds on work that each of us has done, within this network and individually, as part of efforts to make sense of distinctive trajectories of urbanization and development within the broader processes of East Asian social transformation. Some of that work has involved examining the general effects of military spending on urban-industrial transformation, particularly in South Korea. But we also argue that the specificities of the South Korean case—in which a remarkable amount of US military procurement during the US war in Vietnam contributed to a remarkable dynamic of heavy industry growth, with places like Ulsan at the center—can sometimes obscure the broader impact of geopolitical decision-making on development trajectories. In this sense, our argument is not a narrow claim that specific forms of military spending have contributed (say) “x” amount to growth in country “y”; rather we are arguing against economistic and reductionist accounts of development planning by showing that geopolitical considerations have played an integral role in decisions about projects for specific urban centers and regions.

The Ulsan and Kaohsiung cases are especially useful in this regard, because all analysts of East Asian developmental states agree that (a) South Korea and Taiwan seem to be parts of the same broad East Asian Cold War-era development dynamic, and (b) that the two countries nonetheless have had very distinctive patterns of economic growth and industrial transformation during the Cold War and since—with South Korea characterized more by growth dominated by heavy industry (and a developmental state devoted to spurring such growth), while Taiwan has been characterized more by the growth of electronics and other “lighter” industries (along with a state typically seen as less dirigiste). While this is terrain that has been trodden by a generation of development scholars, we believe the geopolitical factors that contributed to these differences have been underestimated and under-analyzed. We hope our arguments will contribute to a reassessment of the importance of geopolitics, and thus to the merits of a geopolitical economic approach to the study of development.

We also find the cases of Ulsan and Kaohsiung useful because they refocus attention somewhat from the national scale of development (and development planning), highlighting the fact that industrial growth in South Korea and Taiwan—as in all cases of industrial growth—has been very uneven and has favored particular locations much more than others. We show that the specific dynamics of growth in Ulsan and Kaohsiung further emphasize the importance of geopolitics, including the spatially complex (transnational/national/local) interactions of capitalist and planning elites, whose decisions helped set in motion the rapid transformations of these two cities.

This last point also brings to the fore what we think are some of the stakes in this kind of urban analysis. Simply recognizing the fact of uneven urban and regional development doesn’t necessarily get us any closer to understanding why (say) a region like Yeongnam and a city like Ulsan grow very rapidly while a region like Honam and a city like Kwangju are comparatively disadvantaged, or why (say) an export platform like Kaohsiung grows rapidly while much of rural southern Taiwan remains comparatively disadvantaged. Moreover, the mere recognition of unevenness does not help us understand why, in particular historical conjunctures, places like Kwangju or southern Taiwan become hotbeds of opposition to existing political leadership groups. The fact that geopolitical decisions about development priorities may have contributed to this by no means explains everything; but we do hope that showing some of the ways geopolitical considerations have been intertwined with development planning will help enliven debates about the politics of uneven urban and regional growth, and the reasons why even some very successful processes of growth can become highly politically contentious.

Carolin Schurr and Elisabeth Militz

In April 2019, I (Carolin) was wandering around in Sacre Coeur Paris, waiting for my mother to finish her visit. We were there, as a happy family, my mum, my three siblings and my 10-month-old baby to celebrate my mum’s 70th birthday. A bit bored, I opened my email. I stumbled. “Ashby Prize.” That must be the call to apply for this honorable prize. I think about Leigh Johnson with whom I shared an office—our “pregnant belly office” as we called it—during her and my first pregnancy in Zurich and who had just been awarded the prize back then for her paper “Index insurance and the articulation of risk-bearing subjects” (2013). Yet, I can’t believe what I read. Us, being awarded the Ashby Prize? For a paper that had taken so many twists and turns? Whose reviewers have been sometimes enthusiastic, but more often quite critical, unconvinced by our attempt to bring geographies of marketization together with affect, emotions, and Sara Ahmed’s critique of the happy family, to understand global family-making with the help of Mexican surrogate mothers? This clearly must be a misunderstanding!

My first thought: We are probably some kind of quota women, the non-Anglophones, the feminists—those who don’t quite fit into the journal, those whose research is not at the core of the discipline of economic geography but rather represents what Peck and Olds (2007) have called “donut dialogues.” As feminist geographers, we are eager to dissolve the borders of the discipline to engage in boundary conversations with feminist and cultural theory. We focus on the private, the affective, the reproductive body to show how processes of economic globalization are increasingly intertwined with intimate lives (Pratt and Rosner, 2006). Yes. We are those who nurture the donut, feeding it with all kind of delicious feminist theories, nurturing the fringes of the donut while hollowing out the center.

My second thought: We don’t deserve this prize. An Ashby Prize is for the most innovative papers of EPA: Economy and Space. My flirtation with economic geography, however, was short and schizophrenic. Throughout my undergraduate studies at a small Bavarian university, I had been inspired by Marc Boeckler and Christian Berndt who sparked my great interest in poststructuralist theories and to a much lesser extent the market. Nonetheless, geographies of marketization (Berndt and Boeckler, 2009, 2012) have been with me for a long time. They are a bit like my academic breast milk. They have been fed to me without me having asked for it. Back then, Judith Butler and her gender trouble seemed so much more relevant to me as a graduate student than the question of how markets come into being. Eventually, as any adolescent, I left my academic home in Bavaria to do my PhD in feminist political geography and gender studies at the University of Bern.

But, just as in real families, it is difficult to abandon our “academic parents”—in this case Berndt and Boeckler. Christian Berndt was kind enough to host me in the economic geography unit at the University of Zurich when I was looking for a new academic home having been awarded “The Branco Weiss Fellowship – Society in Science” for my postdoctoral project on transnational reproduction. Callon (1998, 2013) was at the center of many discussions in reading groups and colloquiums. It was only then that I started to read the body of literature labelled “marketization studies.” “Markets,” however, did not only come to me because of my new institutional home. Markets were at the center of my postdoctoral research interest: from the beginning I had been struck by how women’s and men’s Kinderwunsch has engendered an increasingly transnational market that caters to national and international intended parents seeking to revendicate their desire for a genetically related child in a global market place.

Upon my arrival in Zurich in fall 2013, I started to develop a paper entitled “The a/effective economy of assisted reproduction: Mexico as a transnational reproductive marketplace” based on my AAG talk in Los Angeles. This was my first attempt to engage with the market of assisted reproduction before having even set foot into a fertility clinic in Latin America. It was based on a visual analysis of the homepages of fertility clinics to study the role emotions play in producing the transnational marketplace of infertility. I found the online world of the global fertility business fascinating—less so the paper that came out of it. I let it sit and went to Guatemala and Mexico instead to do a first round of explorative fieldwork.

On my return, I workshopped the paper with the economic geography unit at the University of Zurich and was told by my smart feminist economic geographer colleagues Karin Schwiter, Heidi Kaspar, and Leigh Johnson that I would be better to include some of the fascinating insights of my fieldwork and cut the visual analysis of homepages to a minimum. The paper disappeared into a folder in my computer and I went off to King’s College in London where I worked with Bronwyn Parry whose work on the commodification of bodies (Parry, 2008) and surrogacy in India (Parry, 2015) has been a great source of inspiration for my research on transnational surrogacy markets in Mexico. A year and a baby later, I submitted the paper to Environment and Planning A in the anxiety one holds when coming back from a far too short maternity leave feeling that the baby has taken away any intellectual capacity. After a couple of months of sleepless nights (because of the baby, not the paper), the reviews came back just before Christmas. Reviewer one found that “there are many interesting threads to this paper, but there is much room for improvement” and reviewer two agreed that “the paper touches a fantastic topic and is theoretically ambitious, however, it is still quite rough around the edges.” The critiques the reviewers raised were quite fundamental. I decided to think about them next year. The new year, however, left little space for writing with a new job, endless bouts of flu, and a baby at home who refused to faire ses nuits. In spring 2017, I went hiking with my new postdoc Elisabeth in the Swiss Alps, with baby Louise in the carrier (Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

Elisabeth, Carolin and little Louise hiking in the Swiss Alps, spring 2017.

I told her about the worries I had with this paper and that I would like to totally rewrite it using Sara Ahmed’s notion of affective economy. Sara Ahmed was our academic feminist heroine at the time and we had just taught a whole Master’s course on her book The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004). As supportive as my new small team of awesome feminists has always been, Elisabeth pulled me out of my hole of self-doubt and said, “Let’s do that together!” And so, we did. We sent the paper back and forth and finally resubmitted it.

Elisabeth and I have since walked a long way down the road from Zurich, to the University of St. Gallen where we first started working together, to Marseille (Figure 2) where we collaborated across distance and met for retreats and hiking, to our new academic home at the University of Bern.

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Figure 2.

Carolin and Elisabeth in Marseille, December 2018.

Looking at academic careers and prizes such as the Ashby Prize, academic life seems sometimes quite straightforward and effortless. What this short history of our paper tells, however, is that (academic) life is a lot messier than it appears from the outside; shaped by many ups and downs, moments of crisis and euphoria. Bare life of newborns who depend on our presence, deaths of family members and friends, and political struggles of our loved ones challenge our academic productivity and intellectual capacity while at the same time relativizing our academic anxieties as privileged citizens and academics living and working in Switzerland. This is above all a story of relationships—academic heroines who turn into colleagues; team-mates who become friends; partners, children, and family members who complement our academic lives in wonderful ways. In the end, we would like to take the opportunity in receiving such an honorable prize as the Ashby Prize to thank all those people who have inspired, mentored, and nurtured us. Merci!