Progress Report: Development and geography: anxious times, anemic geographies, and migration

Rachel Silvey, University of Toronto

In this review essay, first I explore the ways that the desire- and terror-loaded discursive presence of the migrant (Puar, 2007) haunts and limits the geographic imagination of development as intervention (WDR, 2008). I pay particular attention to the 2008 and 2009 World Development Reports as examples of policy-oriented development research that inscribes a depoliticized view of the geographies of migration. Second, and in contrast, I trace the current reinvigoration of feminist interest in social reproduction. Research on migration as it ties into social reproduction complements Hart’s (2004) call for critical ethnographies of development. Specifically, migration research that engages with the spatial politics of farmwork, dom- estic work, factory jobs, childcare, nursing, and sex work (for a review, see Boyle, 2002) attends to the dynamic processes and power relations that go into making international development (Lawson, 2007b). Serious en- gagement with feminist development re- search (Katz, 2001a; Radcliffe, 2006), and in particular with the political geographies of social reproduction, can provide insight into the specific ways that development as intervention is ‘shaped by political-economic relations [that it presumes it] cannot change; how [it] is constituted, that is, by what it excludes’ (Li, 2007: 4). Social reproduction and migration are not entirely excluded from policy-oriented development studies, but their full implications for development studies have yet to be elaborated.