People and place in economic geography: Learning from women’s entrepreneurship

Susan Hanson

Clark University

At the heart of economic geography is the relationship between people and place. Feminism has fostered new ways of thinking within economic geography, but the impacts have been largely confined to issues of labor and worlds of work. Examining entrepreneurship through a feminist lens illustrates new ways of thinking in economic geography that link to labor but go well beyond worlds of work to illuminate the relationship between people and place.

I use studies of entrepreneurship as a gendered geographic process, undertaken in various places around the world, to show how people and place emerge in tandem. Of particular interest are (1) what is the object of study and what are the goals of economic geography, (2) why use gender and entrepreneurship as a way into thinking about the relationship between people and place, (3) why emphasize diversity, difference, heterogeneity—of both people and place—in processes of co-creation of people and place, and (4) what are the implications of these ideas for the practice of economic geography within and outside of academe?