Summer 2003
Crossing borders
Photo by Jayme Halbritter
VINAY GIDWANI
Assistant professor, geography and global studies
Education
Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, 1997
M.F.S. Yale University; A.B. Bowdoin College
If I could have one wish…
“I love questions that allow me to imagine my ideal world! If I had that one miraculous wish, I would ask for a world free of fear, prejudice, and stifling inequalities.”
Some life-changing books
Gopinath Mohanty’s novel Paraja, about “the brutal exploitation of tribals” in the eastern Indian state of Orissa: “I was left with a sense of outrage that still today reminds me why I first entered academia.”
The Moral Economy of the Peasant, by Yale political scientist James C. Scott
The Making of the
English Working Class, by British historian E.P. Thompson
Says Gidwani, “The concept of ‘moral economy,’
which Scott borrows from Thompson, was a powerful way of getting
away from economic reductionism and thinking more productively
about the ordinary motivations that can inspire ordinary people
to extraordinary actions.”
Notes on life and family
“My wonderful
partner, Divya, is my staunchest critic and friend; and my
9-month old son, Aseem (his name means “without borders”),
has reminded me, as I reluctantly enter middle age, how sublime
it is to feel and act spontaneously.”
As a child, Vinay Gidwani moved with his family from the rural village of Dhoraji in Gujarat, western India (where his mother was a doctor at a charity hospital) to New Delhi, an urban metropolis with extremes of affluence and poverty. Today an assistant professor of geography and global studies in CLA, Gidwani points to that eye-opening childhood move as the beginning of his preoccupation with the dynamics—and root causes—of inequality.
Growing up, Gidwani recalls, “I became aware of the stark disparities between urban and rural areas—and between middle-class families such as mine and most urban residents.” That awareness was still fresh some years later, when, for his Ph.D. dissertation, he studied how a large surface irrigation scheme transformed agrarian social relations in central Gujarat. He sought to determine how structural inequalities reproduce themselves across generations and whether economically and politically excluded groups can overcome their disadvantages.
Since then, Gidwani has traveled far both geographically and intellectually, developing new theoretical paradigms and broadening the scope of his research. Today, his research focuses on the regional and national implications of globalization for labor migration and social movements in India.
Gidwani’s scholarly approach—which takes him in, through, and around the nooks and crannies of multiple disciplines that include geography, anthropology, and economics—has enabled him to think about phenomena like “globalization” in unconventional ways. But his search for a faculty position several years back demonstrated for him the pitfalls of living outside the traditional academic box. “One of the problems of trying to evade disciplines is that disciplines avoid you,” he muses.
Lo and behold, in 1999 CLA’s geography and global studies programs were seeking a candidate with expertise in economic geography and international issues of development and globalization. Gidwani was the perfect candidate.
Working outside the box
Writing what he calls “labor’s geographies,”
Gidwani takes a wide-angle approach to “spatial phenomena”
that is truly groundbreaking, says geography professor and department
chair John Adams.
Gidwani doesn’t study nations, cultures, or political and economic systems in isolation, as discrete chapters in a value-laden, top-down “master historical narrative.” Breaking from what he calls the “forward march” paradigm of history—a “universalized story of progress” with winners and losers and developed (“civilized”) and developing (“uncivilized”) nations—Gidwani seeks to “make space for difference, for alternative histories and geographies.”
Describing Gidwani’s work, Adams says, “Noting how globalization is breaking down local labor markets, Vinay emphasizes its complex impact on migrants’ livelihoods in the places where they circulate. Yet he is also interested in their possible broader impact on national politics—for example, the growth of Hindu nationalism in response to disruptions of globalization.”
In his forthcoming book, The Nature of Work, the Work of Nature, Gidwani shows how “place-specific ecologies and logics of work” unsettle conventional accounts of economic development and agricultural change. “To better understand societal, structural inequalities in society, it’s been important for me to first understand inequalities within labor relations,” he explains—that is, “how labor is constituted to reflect what societies value as ‘good,’ how social hierarchies crystallize, and how relations of power operate to reinforce the status quo.”
Gidwani’s comparative research puts persistent inequalities in perspective worldwide, including in the United States. Take migrant labor, for instance. Global trade agreements have opened up world markets for agribusiness and brought a flood of migrant workers to the U.S. But like agricultural workers in India, these contract workers are only tenuously protected by labor laws, says Gidwani. They generally are paid subsistence or below average wages, live in substandard housing, and reap few, if any, of the fruits of their labors.
As globalization radically alters national and local economies and nations both strong and weak race to compete in the world marketplace, labor bears the brunt of the impact, says Gidwani. The shock wave has been felt in industries across the United States, including right here in Minnesota. Steel workers on the Iron Range face competition not only from within U.S. borders but also from around the globe, where cheap, non-union labor is plentiful.
In the end, global shifts in economies and labor regimes affect local political systems in significant ways, says Gidwani. As in India, where the rise of Hindu nationalism is tied to global economic shifts, political reconfigurations in Minnesota and across the United States can be traced in part to global as well as domestic economic forces.
Think globally, act locally
Recently named a McKnight Land-Grant Professor, Gidwani is bringing
his research into his classrooms to prepare the next generation
to investigate issues that will drive the economic and political
futures of the world’s people.
“[What’s important is] what questions we pose to students and what questions they take from the research,” Gidwani says. “We give them the tools for thinking critically about issues that affect people of all nations, whether they are studying labor practices in rural India or the changing political economy of Minnesota.”
Aware of the limits of the classroom setting, Gidwani and a dozen or so colleagues and graduate students are sending those tools beyond the academy with a bimonthly newspaper, The SouthAsian. The goal of the paper, he says, is to “bring people with South Asian roots into conversations around issues of common concern.”
Dialogue is central, Gidwani stresses. In keeping with a teaching philosophy that he describes as “heterodox,” he advises students on his Web site, “Dissent from the taken-for-granted. Defend your point of view, without being dismissive of alternative positions; use alternative ways of seeing to map the limitations of your own gaze, and to sharpen its focus.
“Learning is a process of cooperative conflict: ultimately, we argue with texts, distant authors, and each other to advance a dialogue, not to defend a dogma.”
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