Geoff Mann

THE BASICS

My research and teaching concern the political economy of capitalism. I am interested in basically everything about it, theoretically, empirically, and politically, in all its varieties, past, present and future. Most of my teaching directly engages these questions, and economic geography more broadly.

My research focuses on macroeconomic governance in the affluent global North, especially the ways in which monetary and fiscal policy affect and are affected by economic and ecological crisis, and their relationship to the range of social arrangements we call ‘democracy’. At the moment, I am completing a book on the many lives of Keynesianism, from the French Revolution to the present. I am also just beginning a project focusing on the changing meaning of state ‘intervention’ in the Eurozone, especially in the Italian and Spanish contexts.

At SFU, beyond the Geography department, I am involved with the Centre for Global Political Economy, the Morgan Centre for Labour Studies, and the Urban Studies program. I am also the Chair of the Board of Directors of the Dogwood Initiative, a Victoria-based NGO, a research associate and member of the Research Advisory Committee of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, and work with Vancouver’s Purple Thistle Centre.


RECENT WRITING

2013

Disassembly Required: A Field Guide to Actually Existing Capitalism (Oakland & Baltimore: AK Press).

Who’s afraid of democracy? Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 24(1): 42-48. [.pdf]

Climate Leviathan, Antipode 45(1): 1-22. [.pdf]
{with Joel Wainwright, Ohio State University}

2012

Release the hounds! The marvellous case of political economy, in T. J. Barnes, J. Peck and E. Sheppard (eds.) The New Companion to Economic Geography. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 59-71.

State of confusion: money and the space of civil society in Hegel and Gramsci, in M. Ekers, G. Hart, S. Kipfer and A. Loftus (eds.) Gramscian Geographies. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, pp. 104-20.

2011

Economie$, in Vincent J. Del Casino, Mary E. Thomas, Paul Cloke and Ruth Panelli (eds.) The Companion to Social Geography. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 172-88.

2010

Value after Lehman, Historical Materialism 18(4): 172-88. [.pdf]

Hobbes' redoubt: toward a geography of monetary policy, Progress in Human Geography 34(5): 601-25. [.pdf]

2009

Colletti on the credit crunch: a response to Robin Blackburn, New Left Review II/56: 119-27. [.pdf]

Should political ecology be Marxist? A case for Gramsci's historical materialism, Geoforum 40(3): 335-44. [.pdf]

Gramsci lives! Geoforum 40(3): 287-91. {with Alex Loftus and Michael Ekers} [.pdf]

2008

Time, space and money in capitalism and communism, Human Geography 1(2): 4-12. [.pdf]

A negative geography of necessity, Antipode 40(5): 920-33. [.pdf]

Marx without guardrails: geographies of the Grundrisse, Antipode 40(5): 848-56. [.pdf] {with Joel Wainwright, Ohio State University}

Why does country music sound white? Race and the voice of nostalgia, Ethnic and Racial Studies 31(1) (2008): 73-100. [.pdf]

2007

Our Daily Bread: Wages, Workers, and the Political Economy of the American West (Chapel Hill: UNC Press).

The social production of skill, in Robert Fletcher (ed.) Beyond Resistance? The Future of Freedom (Hauppage NY: Nova Science), pp. 111-21.

2006

Interests and the political terrain of time, Rethinking Marxism 18(4): 565-72. [.pdf]


  1. +I regularly contribute small pieces to a variety of collected volumes, journals, and other publications, from Stay Solid! (AK 2013), a new handbook for youth, to the Encyclopedia of U.S. Labor and Working Class History (Routledge 2007) and the Encyclopedia of Society & Environment (Sage 2008).  I also write occasional book reviews for journals like Economic Geography, Society & Space (E&P D), Labour/Le Travail, Rethinking Marxism, Labor Studies Journal, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas and Antipode.


Writing soon to appear

Labour, distribution, and the monetary exception, Capital and Class 2013.

The ‘current situation’: Marxism, historicism, and relative autonomy, Dialogues in Human Geography 2013.


GRADUATE TEACHING

Graduate students with whom I work study a wide variety of problems, from the fringe financial system in the US to the politics of climate change policy in British Columbia. What they share is a firm critical grounding in social and political economic theory, and an emphasis on the distributional tensions, both political and economic, in liberal capitalism. If by any chance you are interested in applying, please send me an email describing your plans with, if possible, a brief writing sample and a little bit about your work and educational background (the former being just as interesting to me as the latter).


Students, past and present

Emily LeBaron (M.A. current)

Howard Tenenbaum (Ph.D. current)

Mark Kear (Ph.D. current)
Dissertation: Fringe Finance and the Regulation of Poverty in North America

Chloe Brown
Thesis: The Geography of Climate Change in a Rural Resource-Dependent Town: The Case of McBride, British Columbia
(M.A. 2012)

Emilia Kennedy
Thesis: Found in Translation: Discourse, Imaginaries, and the Production of Meaning in Planning Urban Sustainability
(M.A. 2010; currently Ph.D. student at UBC)

Dawn Hoogeveen
Thesis: What’s at Stake? Diamonds, Mineral Regulation, and the Law of Free-Entry in the Northwest Territories
(M.A. 2008; currently Ph.D. student at UBC)

Genevieve Bucher
Thesis: Implementing Sustainability in Surrey: Amending the East Clayton Neighbourhood Concept Plan
(M.Urb. 2008; currently Senior Social Infrastructure Planner, City of Vancouver)

Robin Jane Roff
Dissertation: Revolution from the Aisle? Anti-Biotechnology Activism and the Politics of Agricultural Restructuring
(Ph.D. 2008; currently with the UBC Faculty Association)


Associate Professor, Dept. of Geography

Director, Centre for Global Political Economy

Simon Fraser University

office: RCB 7226

geoffm at sfu dot ca

Photo courtesy of Moby