Diverse economies : performative practices for 'other worlds'

As graduate students in the 1970's, we were schooled to see social scientific work as a political intervention. Joining with other radical economic geographers to theorize capitalist restructuring, we focused on the nature and dynamics of a globalizing economy with the goal of "understanding the world in order to change it." This familiar Marxist prescription turned out to be difficult to follow, especially when it came to changing the world; our theories seemed to cement an emerging world in place rather than readying it for transformation. But when we encountered post-structuralism in the late 1980's, our interventionist view of social knowledge was re-energized. Untethered from the obligation to represent what was "really going on out there," we began to ask how theory and epistemology could advance what we wanted to do in the world. Tentatively at first, we dropped our structural approach to social explanation and adopted an anti-essentialist approach, theorizing the contingency of social outcomes rather than the unfolding of structural logics. This gave us (and the world) more room to move, enlarging the space of the ethical and political (Laclau and Mouffe 1985). At the same time, we embraced a performative orientation to knowledge rather than a realist or reflective one. This acknowledged the activism inherent in knowledge production and installed a new kind of scholarly responsibility (Butler 1993; Callon 2009; Law and Urry 2004). "How can our work open up possibilities?" "What kind of world do we want to participate in building?" "What might be the effect of theorizing things this way rather than that?" These became the guiding questions of our research practice.