Nancy Ettlinger

former Oversight Committee member

As a critical human geographer, Associate Professor Nancy Ettlinger asks: how can critiques of our social, political, economic, and cultural environment offer insights into how to produce change? From the vantage point of economic geography, what are the geographies of competitiveness? What are the social, political, and cultural dimensions of production and consumption, and how and why does the 'non-economic' figure in competitive dis/advantage? Under what conditions might competitiveness and social well being converge? From the vantage point of urban-social geography, how does the everyday economy figure in the urban landscape of uneven development, and how can we draw insight from, and reconfigure economic theory so that goals merge with social and political goals? From the vantage point of political geography, what are the implications of different interpretations of 'democracy'? How do democracy/ies dis/connect with the everyday economy? How are everyday citizens governed and enrolled in societal projects (e.g. neoliberalism) and what are the possibilities for resistance? What is the relation between subjectivity and change? Underscoring all these questions is a concern with the relation between individuals and larger-scale phenomena (firms, institutions, societal projects), as well as an interconnected view of social, political, economic, and cultural processes.