Caroline Faria
Associate Professor — Ph.D., University of Washington, WA
Trice Fellow, Co-Associate Director of Plan II
Contact
- E-mail: cvfaria@austin.utexas.edu
- Office: RLP 3.414
- Campus Mail Code: A3100
Interests
Feminist political and economic geographies; feminist methodologies; Africa and the African diaspora
Biography
My primary research goal is to advance our understanding of 20th and 21st Century nationalism, development, and neoliberal globalization. I examine the drivers and impacts of these processes, and the connections between them. This brings together longstanding and complex bodies of scholarship on each area. As a feminist geographer, I complicate our understanding by demonstrating how these processes are embodied. I use a feminist ‘global-intimate’ scalar lens to understand how neoliberalism, nationalism, and development are: tied to gendered, racialized, classed, and sexualized geometries of power; grounded in colonial and postcolonial pasts; experienced unevenly; and lived in the everyday. In connection, I focus on undertheorized and typically marginalized people and places, most notably women and the region of East Africa.
My research examines three connected strands of work on neoliberal globalization, development, and nationalism. These are: 1) diasporic nationalism, violence and migration 2) globalizing beauty trade networks, and 3) global retail capital and urban displacement. In addition, 4) I have written extensively on geographic methodologies, developing a set of antiracist feminist geographic research tools and perspectives. I detail below how my research advances understanding in each of these areas.
My current research project centers a collaboration with Dr Brenda Boonabaana in the Department of Forestry, Environmental and Geographical Sciences at Makerere University, Uganda. We are examining the role of global retail capital in driving urban development and displacement, with a focus on a global south city at the cutting edge of urban change—Kampala, Uganda. I examine how and why global retail capital is transforming cities of the early 21st century, the spatial form that transformation is taking, and its widely differential impacts on city residents and workers. Deploying a multi-scalar analysis, I link globalized capital investments from the U.S, Gulf, Europe and China to the local political economies of Kampala, and examine the impacts on, and strategies of resistance, deployed by low-income female entrepreneurs. Finally, I will examine and assess effective strategies, developed by alliances of city residents and workers, city managers, and international entities, to build more sustainable, safe, and secure urban futures.
One of my past projects examined the commodity chain of synthetic and human hair production, distribution and consumption in East Africa. I traced the flow of hair weaves and related beauty products from Dubai to the markets of Kampala and Nairobi and onto the emerging markets in the newly independent republic of South Sudan. Through the lens of the beauty salon I examined the political-economy of business development, the tensions around and opportunities for new migrants, and the shifting notions of fashion and beauty in the new nation. In particular, I examined the contradictory ways in which the foreign, the modern and the cosmopolitan are both celebrated and worried over in the contemporary nationalist moment.
In a related past project I focused on the US-based South Sudanese diaspora and the contemporary processes of gendered development and nation-building that have emerged since the signing of the 2005 Sudanese Comprehensive Peace Agreement. Through a feminist and critical race lens, I examine how the nation is bounded, reproduced and contested in the politics and performances of gendered bodies. This has included research on a South Sudanese diasporic beauty pageant, South Sudanese-American male musical performance, shifting gender norms following resettlement, diasporic new medias, and the emergence of transnational South Sudanese feminisms in the post-conflict era. My work on this activism is ongoing, with a focus on the possibilities for and problems of feminist nationalist development in the newly independent South Sudan.
My intersectional feminist scholarship is mirrored by my disciplinary activism around mentoring women and faculty and students of color. A central imperative of my work is to support women and minority geographers, and those excited by geographic approaches but who may not see a place for themselves in the discipline. This work includes: building and sustaining faculty-student and peer-peer mentoring networks for undergraduates, graduates and fellow faculty; mentoring around research, writing, publication, and securing academic positions; and both writing on and practicing diverse geographic futures.
In the fall I rotate teaching "Geographies of Globalization", "Geographies of Health" (UGS) and Introduction to Human Geography. In the spring I teach "International Development in Africa" at the upper-level undergraduate level and a graduate seminar on Feminist Geographies. I am particularly well positioned to advise graduate and undergraduate students with an interest in feminist and postcolonial theory, ethnographic methods, and critical visual and textual discourse analysis. *I ask that you have taken at least one class with me before we begin working together on a research project.* Feel free to contact me if you're interested!
Under/graduate research
I co-founded and run the Feminist Geography Collective in our department. This brings together faculty, graduates and undergraduates from across UT (and beyond) who are interested in the relationship between power and place, and who are committed to building diverse geographic futures. Please see the link for more details.
