Wednesday, November 30, 6:30pm
Room 6112, Sociology lounge
The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016
This event will not be livestreamed
The Geography of the Global Garment Industry after 2008
The way clothes are produced, traded and sold today around the world reflects many of the problems capitalism poses to the working classes, with deleterious consequences on the environment as well. This presentation addresses these problems through an analysis of the changing map of clothing manufacturing since the 2008 financial crash. Challenging the long-standing dominance of Global Commodity Chains and Global Value Chains approaches in debates about the geography of the clothing industry, this presentation draws on recently reanimated debates on uneven development, emphasising broad processes of capital accumulation and circulation over empirical network analysis. More specifically, attention is paid to the effects of the capitalist crisis, the eastward shift in globalisation, geoeconomic tensions, declining labour supply and rising labour costs across Southern and SE Asia on corporate spatial strategies. The emphasis on meso-level processes and connections, therefore, helps address politically important questions about possible future trajectories of garment manufacturing and supply in and beyond global production networks.
About the speaker:
Dr. Jerónimo Montero Bressán is a researcher of Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) at the Universidad Nacional de San Martin (UNSAM). He received his PhD in Human Geography from Durham University. His research is focused on changes in the geography of fashion production and consumption over the last 50 years, and their consequences on labour. He has worked at Argentina’s Ministry of Labor and as consultant for the International Labour Organization and the Inter-American Development Bank. He also teaches economic geography at the Faculty of Economics, Universidad de Buenos Aires.
Advance registration is required for non-CUNY guests. If you do not have access to the Graduate Center through Cleared4 as a CUNY community member, please register here and check the building access requirements. One-day visitors may present proof of vaccination by presenting either a CDC Vaccination Card or the NYS Excelsior Pass, or proof of a negative COVID-19 PCR test by presenting a copy of the lab results.
This event is free and open to the public. It is sponsored by the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the Graduate Center, CUNY.
This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
