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Confronted with mixed evidence linking economic upgrading in global value chains to improved social outcomes, proponents have called for a new emphasis on “social upgrading” to promote better employment, gender equality, and poverty reduction. Originally focused on a central role for states, unions, and social movements, the discourse on social upgrading has shifted, emphasizing the benefits of corporate social responsibility and global markets. Drawing on political economic, critical theory, and psychoanalytic paradigms, we explore the politics of this shift and argue that social upgrading is gradually being deployed as a neoliberal market fantasy, designed not to challenge the limits of market integration, but to obscure and deny them. The strength of the social upgrading discourse emerges less from its pretense toward objective, data-driven analysis, than its effectiveness as an ideological fantasy in meeting the contradictory, non-rational desires of experts and non-experts.

This paper explores the production of urban spaces as deathscapes, or spaces that are defined by death. We probe the ways in which these spaces are produced by the material content of the spaces themselves, and the discursive representations of those spaces found in popular media. We take as our empirical starting point personal encounters with dead animal bodies in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. Combining qualitative and quantitative methodologies, we juxtapose personal experiences with death in the city with popular representations of Baltimore, as well as a spatial analysis of the geographies of non-human death. Using mixed methodologies, we tease out and highlight the ways in which death, dying, bodies, and violence are used to produce urban deathscapes. Our analysis shows how the production of death and deathscapes are inherently uneven spatial processes, which work in tandem to (re)produce certain spaces as deadly. Furthermore, we illustrate how these spaces are produced in part by discourse, politics, representation, and the material presence of non-human death, challenging what we might think of as being capable of producing space, and broadening the concept of deathscapes. Ultimately we conclude that producing urban spaces as deadly is a means by which capital seeks to reproduce itself, and, through harnessing the power of the non-human dead to produce space, utilize nature to produce new forms of urban capital.