Vinay Gidwani
· ProfessorUniversity of Minnesota · Korean Studies
Active 1992–2025
About
Vinay Gidwani is the Department Chair of the Department of Geography, Environment, and Society at the University of Minnesota. His role involves leading the department and overseeing its academic and research activities. The department has a reputation for cutting-edge research across human geography, biophysical geography, and geographic information science (GIS), employing diverse research methods from qualitative to quantitative, cartographic to computational. The department emphasizes community-engaged research and offers a framework for understanding and addressing the grand challenges facing society and the environment, combining scientific and humanistic inquiry to provide a contemporary liberal arts education.
Research topics
- Political Science
- Computer Science
- Sociology
- Finance
- Economy
- Economics
- Economic geography
- Geography
- Law
- Environmental ethics
- Business
- Engineering
Selected publications
2025-10-27
book-chapterSenior authorAbstract Capitalist growth and consumption have expanded waste production, rendering it an environmental liability but also a store of dormant economic value. This chapter examines the ongoing formalization of Solid Waste Management (SWM) in urban India, where waste—once a quasi-commons accessible to informal waste-pickers as a means-of-production—is being reconfigured as an asset under municipal and corporate control. We argue that formalization entails a dual process of enclosure and labour grabbing, whereby the metabolic labour of waste-pickers, crucial for offsetting the entropic effects of urban waste, is increasingly exploited under new wage and rent regimes. Through ethnographic research in Indore, Delhi, and Pune, we develop a typology of formalization, showing its heterogeneous yet exploitative impacts. We show that despite its promises of environmental efficiency, the most prevalent forms of formalization distribute entropic burdens unevenly and deepen the metabolic depletion of waste workers, while exacerbating social hierarchies of caste and gender.
Environment and Planning A Economy and Space · 2022 · 36 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Computer Science
- Business
- Economic geography
If the entanglements of real estate and finance capital are pivotal in ongoing urban transformations in cities of the global south, then a less visible but equally vital dimension is the process of land assembly on which residential and commercial real estate speculation and development are premised. This paper pries open the value chain of land assembly that underlies these transformations in a rapidly expanding peri-urban frontier of Bengaluru, India. Drawing on detailed interviews with land market intermediaries, operating across different scales, who were instrumental in assembling agricultural land for a large apartment complex, the paper shows how existing forms of social power and local knowledge are harnessed to create inter-scalar linkages that enable the creation and extraction of value in Indian real estate. It makes the case for understanding the economic and cultural work of intermediaries in animating land's value chain as ‘articulation work’. Finally, the paper assesses the varying forms and quantum of value that are generated and captured by different actors in the value chain, which stretches from the landowning farmer up to a major real estate company, to reflect on the micro-dynamics of speculative urbanism and agrarian urbanization.
The Gender of Value: Punctuated Violence and the Labor of Care
Feminist Studies · 2021-01-01 · 6 citations
articleSenior author546 Feminist Studies 47, no. 3. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Priti Ramamurthy and Vinay Gidwani The Gender of Value: Punctuated Violence and the Labor of Care Usha is the eldest daughter of a high-caste, Rajput family from a small village in eastern Uttar Pradesh in north India.1 She married into a family that owns three bighas (approximately 1.8 acres) of land. But no one in her marital family has tilled it for the last three generations . Usha's husband and her husband's younger brother have opted to tread a path that is increasingly commonplace for men of their generation and younger: they have chosen to migrate to a city. The land is cultivated by lower-caste sharecroppers. But it has not been sold. Even as the city's gravitational pull deepens, land retains its affective value. It is more than property. It is the guarantor of patriliny. It is an asset that gives, forms, anchors a sense of personhood in place. It is also a sentiment and a promise. And one that travels with the thousands of rural migrants who flock to India's cities every day, every month, every year. Usha, daughter of a communist party comrade who roamed nearby villages trying to organize agricultural laborers for the revolution that never came, has capitalized on the art of land to firm her foothold in the city. But more on this later. Usha's past still tugs. 1. All names are pseudonyms. Usha's family read and commented on this essay, and it is with their permission that we share it. We recognize gender identities and expressions do not necessarily align with those assigned at birth or presumed. The people we talked with identify and express themselves as cisgendered. Priti Ramamurthy and Vinay Gidwani 547 Her communist father used to work in a munitions factory in Kolkata before he was summarily dismissed for trying to organize a union. He came home to their village in eastern Uttar Pradesh, severed from his factory wage and land poor, still flush with red zeal and still a Rajput, unable to stoop to agricultural wage labor to support his household. That task fell to Usha's mother, who lent out money—the provident fund her husband had earned as a migrant worker in the gun factory—to cultivators in the village and was paid interest in grain to feed her family of nine, two adults and seven children. A formidable woman, Usha's mother was beaten up several times by their Rajput neighbors, for talking out against these dominant agrarian upper caste men. Usha was eighteen when she married Dinesh Singh, who was a year older. Her father sold one bigha of land for the wedding. That Usha's marriage was arranged to a man, whom she had never seen, from a Rajput family in a village about twenty miles from hers, is not unusual.2 She entered her new joint family of eight and was quickly overpowered by a complex grammar—violence—that was to tattoo itself, painfully and indelibly, on Usha's being. As we will hear, her body, her memories, her conduct, her comportment all still bear the marks of her torment in the early years of marriage. Her mother-in-law, Usha says, was sharp-tongued (tez)3 and demanding. There was no room for empathy for a young girl of eighteen, wrenched from her natal home. The housework was punishing, and Usha was expected to do it all. After the wedding, her husband soon departed for Delhi, leaving Usha behind with her in-laws. This, too, is not unusual for the Hindi belt from which Usha hails.4 2. Caste is reproduced through kinship in India. In this part of the country, north India, in addition to caste endogamy—marrying within the same caste—the norm is village exogamy, that is, marrying into a village other than your own since a girls' village brethren are considered her kin. Patrilocality , patrilineality, and a corporate organization of households with several generations residing in the same household space characterize and solidify regional patriarchy. In translocal households, generations are split across village and city, with older generations, daughters...
Repair Work as Care: On Maintaining the Planet in the Capitalocene
Antipode · 2021 · 80 citations
Senior authorCorresponding- Sociology
- Political Science
- Environmental ethics
Abstract If the Anthropocene is the Capitalocene, then one of its signature attributes in the drive for profits is the abstraction of life itself and of the human/nonhuman relations that sustain it, creating a wake of waste in its path. Repairing the fraying human and ecological systems that underwrite life entails ongoing care work that is frequently invisible or devalued, and whose burdens fall disproportionately on vulnerable populations. We detail this through three connected instances: infrastructural labour that recuperates the detritus of city life; social reproductive labour that undergirds these systems and life itself; and hands‐on repair work inherent to care. By understanding maintenance and repair work as care, our paper demonstrates the importance of this labour to our collective survival in a broken world, and the imperative of embracing a care ethics where we shoulder together the everyday burdens and benefits to live “as well as possible”.
2020-06-04 · 2 citations
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingOur paper re-considers the agrarian question in urban India by focusing on the social reproduction of labor in informal economy households. Based on life histories of working-class women of rural origin, we explore lived forms of differentiation within the informal economy, the social division of labor as mediated by intersecting lines of difference, and possibilities of disorienting normative hierarchies through acts of ‘cultural production’. Our term ‘middle migrants’ characterizes households that have managed to establish a foothold in cities, even as they remain enmeshed in their rural lives through translocal householding and cultural dispositions to difference.
Fordham University Press eBooks · 2020-06-22 · 3 citations
book8. For a Marxist Theory of Waste: Seven Remarks
Fordham University Press eBooks · 2020-10-29
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingThe lives of waste and pollution
Economic and political weekly/Economic & political weekly · 2019-01-01 · 12 citations
articleSenior authorTime, Space, and the Subaltern:
University of Georgia Press eBooks · 2019-03-15 · 6 citations
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingTOWARDS A QUEER PHENOMENOLOGY OF SOCIAL REPRODUCTION:
Agenda Publishing eBooks · 2018-09-04 · 2 citations
book-chapterSenior author
Recent grants
Doctoral Dissertation Research: Global Policy, National Law, and Local Economies
NSF · $16k · 2016–2017
Frequent coauthors
- 5 shared
Bharati Chaturvedi
- 5 shared
Priti Ramamurthy
National Geophysical Research Institute
- 5 shared
Pak Kin Wong
- 4 shared
K. Sivaramakrishnan
- 3 shared
Sharad Chari
- 3 shared
Anant Maringanti
- 3 shared
Carol Upadhya
- 3 shared
Wendy Larner
Victoria University of Wellington
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