Accounting for Capital in the Countryside: Toward a Visual Politics of the Asset Form

Abstract

This commentary seeks to advance a public economic geography that rests on the ambition of making things public—things that are otherwise “hidden” from societal scrutiny, such as the material footprint of globalized investment chains. This ethos, bridging the concerns of science and technology studies and critical political economy, can be well aligned with Massey’s “global sense of place.” This ethos is applied to an ongoing research project on the global assetization of farmland. I particularly deal with the question of how we can make public the operations of finance capital in the global countryside in quantitative terms, exploring the potential for a visual politics of the asset form.