American geographer
Don Mitchell (born 1961) is Professor of Cultural Geography at Uppsala University (since 2017) and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Geography in the Maxwell School, Syracuse University. From an academic household in California, he is a graduate of San Diego State University (1987), Pennsylvania State University (1989) and received his Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 1992, working with Neil Smith.[1] He taught at the University of Colorado, Boulder before joining Syracuse in the late 1990s.
In 1998, he became a MacArthur Fellow,[2] and in 2008 a Guggenheim Fellow. He was awarded the Anders Retzius Medal from the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography in 2012.[3]
Contributions
Considered an influential Marxist and radical scholar, he is best known for his work on cultural theory, showing how landscapes embody strong links to histories of struggle, oppression, and unacknowledged labor involved in their creation and maintenance. He has applied this to the history of immigrant labor in California's agricultural landscapes, public and privatized public spaces like shopping malls, and public parks where homeless people are threatened or evicted People's Geography Project.[4] He works on labor struggles, human rights and justice.
He is also known for an editing technique, particular useful for book manuscripts or other long (10,000 words or more) texts, as well as for texts having undergone multiple revisions over a long period of time. The writer prints out the piece, rereads and makes edits, then retypes the entire text (except for block quotes, which can be pasted from a previous draft). The technique eliminates the incoherence resulting from cutting and pasting, and it compels the writer to reread, revise, and even eliminate prose that no longer works. This technique appears arduous but has the reputation of saving time over the long term.
Mitchell has written extensively on homelessness in the United States, a topic he developed an interest in during his time at college in the 1980s when homelessness was increasing around the country. In his 2020 book Mean Streets,[5] he examines the structural causes of homelessness, and the role capitalism has played in creating and exacerbating it, going back to the breakdown of the feudal system in the 15th century. He posits that as racist and unjust as U.S. capitalism was during the Keynesian period following the implementation of the New Deal, social welfare programs mitigated its harshest excesses, which changed during the transition to a neoliberal economy starting in the 1970s and accelerating under the Reagan administration. He says:
The U.S. economy was organized differently from the New Deal until 1973. As incomplete, uneven, and racist as it was, social welfare and public housing worked to ameliorate the grossest injustices of the capitalist system. Capitalism was organized in a way that was less mean than it is now. The world can be organized such that it doesn’t simultaneously produce the people we call homeless and the thinking that we have to get rid of them.[6]
