New Times, New Spaces: Gendered Transformations of Governance, Economy, and Citizenship

ThespecialissueisbasedonthecontributionstoanESRCSeminarSeries called Feminism and Futurity held at the University of Bristol during 2010and 2011. This series, organized by four feminist geographers, drew together fem-inist academics from a diverse range of disciplines to foster debate and dialoguearound the present status and future potential of feminist and gender-sensitiveresearch. The aim of this special issue is to examine the gendered transformationsof governance, economy, and citizenship, and to explore what these might meanfor feminist scholarship. We are particularly interested in two dimensions ofcurrent debates. First, as feminist geographers, we are concerned to identify andexamine the new times and new spaces being revealed in contemporary feministand gender-sensitive research, and the ways in which these problematize familiarunderstandings of gender, sexuality, and femininity. For example, new forms ofgovernance, financialization, and changing forms of community organizationhave all reconfigured conventional unders tandings of relationships between thestate and the market, production and social reproduction, men and women, sexand gender, here and there. Second, we are concerned to trace the new questionsthat have emerged as scholars have redeployed the analytical tools provided byfeminist theory in new domains. What does it mean to think about the conven-tional concepts and categories of social s cience through understandings devel-oped in contemporary feminist theory? What new questions begin to emerge?What new conceptions of space and time are involved?For regular readers of Social Politics, the content of this special issue willextend familiar debates into new terrains. Social Politics has long been thehome for important articles in feminist scholarship that have helped us under-stand the content and implications of the gendered reworking of economy,