A feminist project of belonging for the Anthropocene

In this chapter we are trying to do something we are not ready to do" which is to begin to rethink regional development as a way of belonging differently in the world. Regional development has been a longstanding interest for us, starting with research on deindustrialization in the New England region of the United States in the 1970s. Our political economic take on regional development was later broadened by a feminist perspective on household and industry regional restructuring and then by a Foucauldian interest in genealogies of regional identity (Gibson, 2001; Gibson-Graham, 1994). More recently we have taken up action-oriented research on alternative pathways for regional development both in our respective "local" regions as well as at some distance in regions of the majority world (Gibson-Graham, 2010). In all our work thus far, the focus has been on economic activates and human political subjects" hence our unreadiness to write a paper that displaces the assumed primacy of humans to the project of regional development.