Human geography Books

Book SynopsisGunnar Olsson’s tale follows an explorer from the oldest creation epics extant to the power struggles of today, an attempt to codify the taken-for-granted, a struggle with the invisible powers that make us so obedient and so predictable. Trade Review“This book is a significant contribution to what might be configured as the meeting points between academic geography, Western philosophy, critical social science, and arts-humanistic experimentation. It is the major reference point, the go-to source, for anyone wishing to familiarize themselves with the extraordinarily rich arc of Olsson’s thinking over the past four-plus decades.”—Christopher Philo, professor of geography at the University of Glasgow“Olsson continues to be an exciting thinker because he situates key problems within the field of geography in the broader contexts of Western humanism. . . . A fun, weird, inspiring, and engaging theoretical work. . . . It is a fascinating contribution that will likely be viewed as the capstone work of a major thinker.”—Keith Woodward, assistant professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin–MadisonTable of ContentsPreface: Who Is Who and What Is What? I: Red River Wake Enuma elish Gilgamesh Genesis Exodus Platopolis II: Imaginare Necesse Est Saussurean Bar The Republic Edging Island of Truth Mappa Mundi Universalis III: Crystal Palace Inside Basement Prophets’ Hall Ball Room Attic Penthouse IV: Archives Travelogue Notes Hidden references Alpha and Omega Given Index

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Book SynopsisIn Animated Lands Andrea Mubi Brighenti and Mattias Kärrholm focus on territory as a living phenomenonand territoriality as an active and constantly reshaping force. They explore the complexity of territorial production through a series of parallel investigations into fundamental territorial themes, such as rhythm, synchronization, melody, morphogenesis, and animism. The notion of territory is excavated through case studies including the analysis of urban playgrounds, homemaking, the transformations of urban walls, and the stabilization of peculiar building types such as the house-museum. These empirical examples span such cities as Ahmedabad, Amsterdam, London, and Rome. Animated Lands provides a broad introduction to what a theory of territories could be and how it could help to advance sociospatial studies. Trade Review"Brighenti and Kārrholm offer unique insight into the concept of territory from their writing positions as professors of social and architectural theory, respectively. Each chapter introduces concepts that enrich our understanding of territory. Brighenti and Kārrholm not only trace out the intellectual legacy of different concepts and approaches that inspired their writing but provide empirical examples that illustrate and ground often abstract ideas."—Gordon Waitt, Social & Cultural Geography“Like Husserl, Freud, and other visionaries, Andrea Mubi Brighenti and Mattias Kärrholm have discovered a new continent. With great erudition, a Cartesian style, and force of conviction, they have opened the territory for transdisciplinary exploration. The result is breathtaking. It is not just an amazingly good book but a manifesto for a whole new area of studies: territoriology.”—Frédéric Vandenberghe, professor of sociology at the Universidade Federal de Rio de Janeiro“Animated Lands breathes new life into the study of territory. Grounded in the particulars of walls and everyday places, it also cuts across traditional intellectual territories to assemble new theoretical connections between networks, vitalism, atmospheres, rhythm analysis, and the concept of home.”—Kim Dovey, professor of architecture and urban design at the University of Melbourne“In this innovative and insightful study, Andrea Mubi Brighenti and Mattias Kärrholm provide a rich reflection on the concept of territory. They introduce the idea of ‘territoriology’ as part of a wider exploration of space, materiality, and social life that lies at the cutting edge of contemporary theoretical debates.”—Matthew Gandy, professor of cultural and historical geography and fellow of King’s College at the University of CambridgeTable of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1. For a Science of Territories 2. Environments, Atmospheres, and Networks 3. The Multitemporality of Territorial Production 4. Morphogenesis and Animistic Moments 5. Domesticity and Animation 6. Territorializing Rhythms 7. Affording Play Conclusion Notes References Index

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Book SynopsisThis collection presents geography’s most in-depth and sustained engagements with the void to date, demonstrating the extent to which related themes such as gaps, cracks, lacks, and emptiness perforate geography’s fundamental concepts, practices, and passions. Trade Review“In the current period of climatic and political uncertainty A Place More Void explores the generative capacities of the unknown through the lens of different conceptualizations of the void. I came away from the reading invigorated by the productive mobilizations of the concept and fully convinced of its potential to assist in understanding and moving forward in the current conjuncture.”—Susan M. Ruddick, professor of geography at the University of Toronto“As a spatial concept the void—or a space that reflects a gap in place or time—is a curious yet compelling question to investigate in geographical research. A Place More Void is conceptually unique and definitely provides a step forward as a contribution in the discipline of geography.”—Nadia Bartolini, associate research fellow of geography at the University of ExeterTable of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: Into the Void Paul Kingsbury and Anna J. Secor Part 1. Holes 1. Urban Renewal and the Actuality of Absence: The “Hole” (Trou) of Paris, 1973 Ulf Strohmayer 2. The Crack in the Earth: Environmentalism after Speleology Kai Bosworth 3. The Vortex and the Void: Meta/Geophysics in Sedona Keith Woodward and John Paul Jones III 4. Six Voids Flora Parrott and Harriet Hawkins Part 2. Absences 5. Tracking Silence: Place, Embodiment, and Politics Morgan Meyer 6. The Void and Its Summons: Subjectivity, Signs, and the Enigmatic Mitch Rose 7. Derwent’s Ghost: The Haunting Silences of Geography at Harvard Alison Mountz and Kira Williams 8. It Watches You Vanish: On Landscape and W. G. Sebald John Wylie Part 3. Edges 9. enfolding: An Experimental geographical imagination system (gis) Nick Lally and Luke Bergmann 10. Beyond the Feminine Void: Rethinking Sexuation through an Ettingerial Lens Carmen Antreasian 11. Politics for the Impasse Jess Linz and Anna J. Secor 12. Raising Sasquatch to the Place of the Cryptozoological Thing Oliver Keane and Paul Kingsbury Part 4. Voids 13. O(void): Excerpts from “Lot,” a Long Ethnopoetics Project about the Colonial Geographies of Haida Gwaii Sarah de Leeuw 14. Playing with Plenitude and Finitude: Attuning to a Mysterious Void of Being Mikko Joronen 15. In the Void of Formalization: The Homology between Surplus Value and Surplus Jouissance Ceren Özselçuk and Yahya M. Madra 16. Localizing the Void: From Material to Immaterial Materialism Lucas Pohl Coda: A Void More Placed Paul Kingsbury and Anna J. Secor Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisThrough a geographical lens Alan P. Marcus provides a new synthesis for interpreting the Confederado story and for understanding the impact of the various stakeholders who encouraged, aided, promoted, financed, and facilitated this broader emigration from the U.S. South to Brazil. Trade Review"By adding complexity and detail to a familiar story, Confederate Exodus provides a valuable service to historians of the Civil War era and, more broadly, Atlantic world migration in understanding this unusual and fascinating episode."—Phillip W. Magness, Journal of American History"This impressively researched book on the Confederados . . . offers a fascinating look at a little-known aspect of post-Civil War American emigration. Confederate Exodus should especially appeal to those readers who are interested in Southern history."—Roger D. Cunningham, Journal of America's Military Past"Marcus's book is an example of a type of scholarship that is all too rare in the American discussion of the Atlantic world, that of historical geography with a strong sense of place and networks."—Jeremy Black, New Criterion“Well researched and masterfully presented. . . . Confederate Exodus brings to light important new information about the post–Civil War emigration of Americans to Brazil. Marcus adds a major contribution to our knowledge of this significant period in our history.”—Cyrus B. Dawsey, professor emeritus at Auburn University“Alan Marcus tells a compelling story of migration, ranging from analysis of the Confederado cemetery that brought a former U.S. president to tears, to a reinterpretation of commercial and ideological processes encouraging Southern families to move to Brazil.”—Christian Brannstrom, professor of geography at Texas A&M University“In this intriguing historical geography, Marcus illuminates the little-known postbellum migration of American Confederate veterans to Brazil. Rather than serving as a mere curiosity, the Confederado experience highlights migration, agriculture, race, and nation-building in two giants of the Western Hemisphere.”—Brian Godfrey, professor of geography at Vassar College“Through a geographer’s lens Marcus dissects the anatomy of this complex migration from its substrata of ideologies, religion, science, international trade, and Freemasonry to the power of Southern migrants’ geographical imagination juxtaposed against the realities of Brazilian locales, agriculture, and racialized politics.”—Laura Jarnagin Pang, associate professor emerita, Division of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at the Colorado School of MinesTable of ContentsList of Illustrations Preface Acknowledgments Introduction 1. The Baltimore Connection 2. Moving to Brazil 3. The Importance of Agricultural, Social, and Economic Conditions in Brazil 4. Ideologies of Race, Religion, Politics, and Science 5. Protestantism, Education, and the Campo Cemetery Grounds Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisSimon M Evans analyzes the German-speaking Anabaptist community, focusing on their history of expansion, their patterns of population growth, the additions they make to the cultural landscape of the northern plains, and their contributions to the agricultural and light manufacturing economies of their home states and provinces. Trade Review"A Geography of Hutterites in North America makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of this distinctive ethnoreligious group and its impact on the Midwest and Great Plains. It does so by moving beyond past studies, many of which have focused on religious beliefs and practices, to focus on the geography of Hutterite settlements."—Devin C. Manzullo-Thomas, Middle West Review"Evans provides a big-picture view of Hutterite interaction with their geography while differentiating between and within the four Leut. The emerging image is of a multifaceted group whose strength lies in their faith tradition and who are both open to innovation and wedded to the land."—Eva Holder, Religious Studies Review“An outstanding work of scholarship. Simon Evans combines meticulous archival research with extensive field inquiry to create a superb geographical analysis of the Hutterite communities in North America. Unrivaled in scope and detail, it promises to become the definitive work on the historical geography of the Hutterites in North America.”—John C. Lehr, senior scholar in the Department of Geography at the University of Winnipeg“A thoughtful, absorbing, original, and gracefully written study based on decades of research. . . . This is an important book that will have a central place in prairie scholarship. Readers will learn how the Hutterites have helped shape the history of the West.”—Sarah Carter, professor of history in the Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta“This well-written, in-depth summary of the Hutterites’ past and present in North America is based on Simon Evans’s half-century of interest in this fascinating German-speaking religious brotherhood. Helpful maps, charts, and images complement his impressive documentary and field research.”—Donald B. Smith, professor emeritus of history at the University of CalgaryTable of ContentsList of Figures Lists of Tables Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Forging a Home on the Frontier: Dakota Territory, 1874–1918 2. The Exodus: Crossing into Canada, 1918–1920 3. Consolidation and Acceptance: Surviving the Great Depression, 1920–1941 4. “Enemy Aliens”: World War II and Its Aftermath, 1941–1972 5. Some Freedom of Locational Choice: Varied Reactions, 1973–1981 6. Unfettered Diffusion: Expanding Settlement Patterns, 1981–2015 7. The Driving Force behind Diffusion: Hutterite Demography 8. Bones of Contention: Factors Shaping Diffusion 9. The Legacy of Diffusion: Cultural Landscapes 10. Making a Living: Diversified Agriculture 11. Beating the Squeeze: Adaptive Strategies 12. Coda: Musings on the Future Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisThis collection charts the political, conceptual, and ethical consequences of how the underexplored problem of the negative might be posed for contemporary cultural geography.Trade Review"Carrying forward the 'spatial turn' of 20th-century social thought, this welcome volume tilts critical cultural geography in a direction not yet fully realized. . . . Centering on the question of 'limits' as the site where spaces meet their unpredictable futures, this collection offers a much-needed guide for a new geography, a clear-eyed rewriting of planet Earth that takes into account the suffering of its inhabitants."—B. G. Chang, Choice“To sit with Negative Geographies is to rest in a rare but welcome space: at once intimate, philosophical, and wrenchingly relevant to our contemporary world. The must-read introduction and each beautifully crafted essay circle the horizon of that which withdraws in its singularity: the unknowable, the unrelatable, the exhausted, and the incapacitated. In its ethical commitment to failure, Negative Geographies succeeds in offering a profound effacement of the drive to knowledge, action, and mastery that pervades geographical thought and practice.”—Anna Secor, professor of human geography at Durham University “It is difficult to be too positive about Negative Geographies. The volume convenes some of the most exciting and profound thinkers working in cultural geography today. In a rare display of consistent excellence, every contributor delivers a substantive, carefully wrought essay foregrounding a mode of limitation or negativity. The themes and contexts are wide-ranging. But out of this diversity—tuned by fine framing essays from the editors—there emerges a rich, serious, and consistent collective challenge to the highly productive but one-sided ‘affirmationist’ tendency in much recent cultural geography. Negative Geographies is much more than merely a critique. Yet as critique, too, it is a masterwork. This is a group of scholars at the height of their powers, both living out and reporting upon an important, nascent widening of horizons in cultural geography with striking discernment and honesty. Together these scholars have crafted a watershed book that will shape cultural geography for years to come.”—Matthew G. Hannah, professor of cultural geography at the University of Bayreuth“Not only does this collection speak to a range of prominent currents that animate contemporary cultural geography, but it does so through a range of reflections on the unsettling times we seem to be living through. The assembled cast pursues this with a clarity and lightness that is refreshing. Negative Geographies could come to be viewed as a classic in the vein of many of the edited collections of humanistic and new cultural geography.”—Paul Simpson, associate professor of human geography at the University of Plymouth “I am impressed by the breadth of scholarship assembled in this volume. The contributions cohere into a readable and scholarly totality. The focus is clearly articulated and emerges forcefully in the assemblage that makes the book a compelling proposition.”—Ulf Strohmayer, professor of geography at the National University of Ireland, GalwayTable of ContentsList of Illustrations Preface 1. Negative Geographies Mitch Rose, David Bissell, and Paul Harrison 2. Negativism Again: “Everything . . . Less Than the Universe Is Subject to Suffering” Chris Philo 3. A Love whereof Non- Shall Speak: Reflections on Naming; of “Non-Representational Theory” Paul Harrison 4. Ethics for the Unaffirmable: The Hesitant Love of a Cultural Translator Vickie Zhang 5. The Politics of Volunteering in Loss and at a Loss: Autobiographical Reflections on Grief, Vulnerability, and (In)Action Avril Maddrell 6. Liminal Geographies of Exhaustion: Exhausted Bodies, Exhausted Places, Exhausted Possibilities David Bissell 7. “The Little Murmur of Unconsenting Man”: On Time and the Miracle Jessica Dubow 8. Dislocation: Disorientation: Disappearance: Distance John Wylie 9. To Wound Life, to Prevent Its Recovery: Enforcing Vulnerability in Gaza Mikko Joronen 10. Come and See: Witnessing and Negation in the Mobile Killing Units of Nazi Germany Richard Carter-White 11. Tragic Democracy: The Politics of Submitting to Others Mitch Rose Afterword Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisBy analyzing the rich ethical and political world-building of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, David K. Seitz argues that race and geography are central to appreciating the series’ profound critiques of neoliberal multiculturalism and U.S. empire.Trade Review"Drawing comparisons between our current cultural milieu and the universe as depicted in DS9, Seitz presents us with a much more nuanced view of the typical utopian-oriented views of science fiction. . . . In A Different Trek author Seitz gives us a lot to think about as we contemplate our present and our possible futures."—Kevin Folkman, Association for Mormon Letters“Like the Orbs of the Prophets, David Seitz’s A Different ‘Trek’ illuminates the deeper teachings of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. An incisive analysis of DS9, Seitz gives us a compelling examination of how the stories of the series, while imperfect, go where no Star Trek has gone before, challenging the consequences of militarism, colonialism, and capitalism that are too often overlooked in the liberal utopianism of the franchise. Clear-eyed and thoughtful, A Different ‘Trek’ is the close read of Deep Space Nine that we have been waiting for, built on respect and recognition of the Black intellectual and radical work foundational to both the field of cultural studies and the art of generations of Black Star Trek actors.”—Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, author of The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred“A remarkable guide to a remarkable series. Equally versed in contemporary debates in Black studies and critical theory and in Star Trek lore—and equally skilled in explaining both to outsiders—not only does David Seitz make the case for the relevance of Deep Space Nine for Leftist thought. His critical yet generous stance also provides a model for future investigations into the ways that commercial entertainment can transcend its origins and speak creatively to the political dilemmas of its age.”—Adam Kotsko, author of Neoliberalism’s Demons: On the Political Theology of Late Capital “Deep Space Nine extended the critical promise of Star Trek into our homes in an unprecedented way. Students of recent history, twentieth-century geographies, contemporary militarism, queer studies, and Afrofuturism should read A Different ‘Trek’. David Seitz reopens this chapter in popular culture to remind us that staying in place—especially on a planet like ours, with its bloodstained maps and shifting tides of power—affords us every possibility to confront legacies of injustice and imagine radical futures.”—andré m. carrington, author of Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction“David Seitz displays a vast knowledge of Star Trek lore, storylines, and fandom and masterfully deploys a constellation of lenses—queer and critical race theory, Marxism, feminism, and psychoanalysis—to turn a penetrating but generous gaze on the Trek universe. He brilliantly explores the anticolonial and inter-imperialist struggles central to Deep Space Nine as an unstable allegory of neoliberal racial capitalism from the United States to Palestine.”—Tim McCaskell, author of Queer Progress: From Homophobia to Homonationalism“This is a rich and conceptually diverse account of political possibility in the series Deep Space Nine. Through his characterization of racial capitalism at the heart of the Star Trek universe, David Seitz powerfully draws out the geopolitical tensions between the possibilities of 1990s U.S. liberal humanism and its constitutive violences. I now want to go back to the beginning of the series to re-view it in light of the insights and observations offered in the book.”—Jo Sharp, professor of geography at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, and author of Geographies of PostcolonialismTable of ContentsList of Illustrations List of Tables Preface: Beyond Uhura, “Beyond Vietnam” Acknowledgments Abbreviations Dramatis Personae Introduction: Reading Racial Capitalism from DS9 1. The Radical Sisko 2. Cardassian Settler Colonialism and the Bajoran Struggle for Decolonization 3. Jem’Hadar Marronage and the Dominion “Order of Things” 4. Defetishizing the Ferengi 5. O’Brien Family Values 6. Empire’s Queer Inheritances Conclusion: “This Darker Thing” Notes References Index

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Book SynopsisEncountering Palestine: Un/making Spaces of Colonial Violence, edited by Mark Griffiths and Mikko Joronen, sits at the intersection of cultural and political geographies and offers innovative reflections on power, colonialism, and anti-colonialism in contemporary Palestine and Israel. Organized around the theme of encountering and focusing on the ways violence and struggle are un/made in the encounter between the colonizer and colonized, the essays focus on power relations as they manifest in cultural practices and everyday lives in anti/colonial Palestine. Covering numerous sites in Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Israel, Encountering Palestine addresses a range of empirical topics—from marriage and queer aesthetics to policing, demolition, armament failure, and violence. The contributors utilize diverse theoretical frameworks, such as hyperreality, settler capitalism, intimate biopolitics, and politics of vulnerability, to help us better underTrade Review“As Encountering Palestine argues and makes clear ‘the question of Palestine is an inherently geographical one.’ In this collective volume we have a comprehensive account of the geographies of Israeli settler colonialism in Palestine—its contours of violence, spatial politics, frictions, intimacies, and resistances. Situating contemporary Palestinian colonial geographies in the past, present, and future, the chapters speak to ongoing struggles for liberation in Palestine and beyond, showing in the process how Palestinian life and, with it, resistance are both local and global.”—Polly Pallister-Wilkins, author of Humanitarian Borders: Unequal Mobility and Saving Lives“Few works have explored the geographies of encounters. Encountering Palestine adds to the expansive scholarly work on the destructive consequences of settler-colonial spatial politics by formulating encounters as a productive site of meaning-making where Palestinian lives interact with various forms, techniques, and apparatuses of settler-colonial power.”—Somdeep Sen, author of Decolonizing Palestine: Hamas between the Anticolonial and the Postcolonial“Encountering Palestine offers a new set of arguments about how to understand and frame colonial power and colonial encounters in Israel/Palestine. While the ongoing violence of Israeli colonialism and what the editors refer to as Palestinian woundedness slips in and out of the mainstream media, many chapters bring to the fore why this situation remains urgent even as so much of the violence described is slow or quiet. This collection makes a clear contribution to studies of Palestine/Israel and colonial studies more broadly.”—Christopher Harker, author of Spacing Debt: Obligations, Violence, and Endurance in Ramallah, Palestine

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Book SynopsisEncountering Palestine: Un/making Spaces of Colonial Violence, edited by Mark Griffiths and Mikko Joronen, sits at the intersection of cultural and political geographies and offers innovative reflections on power, colonialism, and anti-colonialism in contemporary Palestine and Israel. Organized around the theme of encountering and focusing on the ways violence and struggle are un/made in the encounter between the colonizer and colonized, the essays focus on power relations as they manifest in cultural practices and everyday lives in anti/colonial Palestine. Covering numerous sites in Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Israel, Encountering Palestine addresses a range of empirical topics—from marriage and queer aesthetics to policing, demolition, armament failure, and violence. The contributors utilize diverse theoretical frameworks, such as hyperreality, settler capitalism, intimate biopolitics, and politics of vulnerability, to help us better underTrade Review“As Encountering Palestine argues and makes clear ‘the question of Palestine is an inherently geographical one.’ In this collective volume we have a comprehensive account of the geographies of Israeli settler colonialism in Palestine—its contours of violence, spatial politics, frictions, intimacies, and resistances. Situating contemporary Palestinian colonial geographies in the past, present, and future, the chapters speak to ongoing struggles for liberation in Palestine and beyond, showing in the process how Palestinian life and, with it, resistance are both local and global.”—Polly Pallister-Wilkins, author of Humanitarian Borders: Unequal Mobility and Saving Lives“Few works have explored the geographies of encounters. Encountering Palestine adds to the expansive scholarly work on the destructive consequences of settler-colonial spatial politics by formulating encounters as a productive site of meaning-making where Palestinian lives interact with various forms, techniques, and apparatuses of settler-colonial power.”—Somdeep Sen, author of Decolonizing Palestine: Hamas between the Anticolonial and the Postcolonial“Encountering Palestine offers a new set of arguments about how to understand and frame colonial power and colonial encounters in Israel/Palestine. While the ongoing violence of Israeli colonialism and what the editors refer to as Palestinian woundedness slips in and out of the mainstream media, many chapters bring to the fore why this situation remains urgent even as so much of the violence described is slow or quiet. This collection makes a clear contribution to studies of Palestine/Israel and colonial studies more broadly.”—Christopher Harker, author of Spacing Debt: Obligations, Violence, and Endurance in Ramallah, PalestineTable of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: Encountering Palestine, Un/doing Power Mark Griffiths and Mikko Joronen 1. An Intimate Occupation: Governing Love in Occupied Palestine Kathryn Medien 2. Settler Capitalism and Its Witches: Palestinian Bedouin Women Struggling for Space and the Commons in the Naqab Sophie Richter-Devroe 3. Encountering the Israeli War Machine: Imminent (In)security, Vortical Violence, Rhizomatic Sumud Wassim Ghantous 4. The Regavim Show: Settler Colonialism, Simulacra, and Mirroring Mark Griffiths 5. Staying with the Failures: Iron Dome and Zionist Security “Innovation” Rhys Machold 6. Neo-Apartheid Jerusalem: Palestine/Israel and the Question of Urban Apartheid Haim Yacobi and Moriel Ram 7. Expectations to Fulfill: Anticipating the Familial Future in Palestinian Refugee Camps Tiina Järvi 8. Surreal Resistance in Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention Arun Saldanha 9. Queering Esthesis: Unsettling the Zionist Sensual Regime Walaa Alqaisiya 10. Life of the Wounded: Rethinking Settler Colonial Power in Palestine Mikko Joronen Elegy for Return Zena Agha Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisFor more than 60 million displaced people around the world, humanitarian aid has become a chronic condition. No Path Home describes its symptoms in detail. Elizabeth Cullen Dunn shows how war creates a deeply damaged world in which the structures that allow people to occupy social roles, constitute economic value, preserve bodily integrity, and engage in meaningful daily practice have been blown apart. After the Georgian war with Russia in 2008, Dunn spent sixteen months immersed in the everyday lives of the 28,000 people placed in thirty-six resettlement camps by official and nongovernmental organizations acting in concert with the Georgian government. She reached the conclusion that the humanitarian condition poses a survival problem that is not only biological but also existential. In No Path Home, she paints a moving picture of the ways in which humanitarianism leaves displaced people in limbo, neither in a state of emergency nor able to act as noTrade ReviewA heart-wrenching, sophisticated, yet readable analysis of the experiences of Georgians internally displaced by the 2008 war with Russia.... [Dunn] unpacks with great nuance how forces of capitalist neoliberalism and Georgian and Russian authoritarianism have structured the humanitarian system along various bureaucratic, economic, and political axes that reward humanitarian action no matter how poorly it fits people’s needs. * Choice *Theoretically sophisticated and ethnographically engaged, No Path Home makes a timely and ethically rich intervention in to the politics of international humanitarianism. The book pushes anthropological discussions beyond their often-medicalized focus upon the politics of life to foreground crucially relevant humanistic concerns about the politics of living. The book makes for essential reading for those interested in the literature on humanitarianism and post-socialism but also subjectivity and existential anthropology more generally. * Slavic Review *Table of ContentsNote on Place Names in the South Caucasus The Camp and the Camp 2. War Intertext 1 3. Chaos 4. Nothing Intertext 2 5. Pressure 6. The Devil and the Authoritarian State Intertext 3 7. Death Intertext 4 8. All That Remains Acknowledgments Notes References Index

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Book SynopsisPenelope Anthias's Limits to Decolonization addresses one of the most important issues in contemporary indigenous politics: struggles for territory. Based on the experience of thirty-six Guaraní communities in the Bolivian Chaco, Anthias reveals how two decades of indigenous mapping and land titling have failed to reverse a historical trajectory of indigenous dispossession in the Bolivian lowlands. Through an ethnographic account of the limits the Guaraní have encountered over the course of their territorial claimfrom state boundaries to landowner opposition to hydrocarbon developmentAnthias raises critical questions about the role of maps and land titles in indigenous struggles for self-determination.Anthias argues that these unresolved territorial claims are shaping the contours of an era of post-neoliberal politics in Bolivia. Limits to Decolonization reveals the surprising ways in which indigenous peoples are reframing their territorial projects in the conteTrade ReviewHer critical reflections on decolonization will be of interest to anthropologists and geographers seeking a ground-up perspective on how extractive economies transform marginalized communities. * Choice *Limits to Decolonization demonstrates the limitations of indigenous mapping as a liberatory project, and the emergence of a form of hydrocarbon citizenship, the cultural implications of which are as yet unclear. It is a most welcome addition to the growing literature on contemporary Bolivia. * The AAG Review of Books *

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Book SynopsisRare Earth Frontiers is a work of human geography that serves to demystify the powerful elements that make possible the miniaturization of electronics, green energy and medical technologies, and essential telecommunications and defense systems. Julie Michelle Klinger draws attention to the fact that the rare earths we rely on most are as common as copper or lead, and this means the implications of their extraction are global. Klinger excavates the rich historical origins and ongoing ramifications of the quest to mine rare earths in ever more impossible places.Klinger writes about the devastating damage to lives and the environment caused by the exploitation of rare earths. She demonstrates in human terms how scarcity myths have been conscripted into diverse geopolitical campaigns that use rare earth mining as a pretext to capture spaces that have historically fallen beyond the grasp of centralized power. These include legally and logistically forbidding locations in thTrade ReviewRare Earth Frontiers is a timely text. As Klinger notes, rare earths are neither rare nor technically earths, but they are still widely believed to be both. Although her approach focuses on the human, or cultural, geography of rare earths mining, she does not ignore the geological occurrence of these mineral types, both on Earth and on the moon.... This volume is excellently organized, insightfully written, and extensively sourced. * Choice *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1. What Are Rare Earth Elements? 2. Placing China in the World History of Discovery, Production, and Use 3. "Welcome to the Hometown of Rare Earths" 4. Rude Awakenings 5. From the Heartland to the Head of the Dog 6. Extraglobal Extraction Conclusion Appendix Notes References

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Book SynopsisLand Fictions explores the common storylines, narratives, and tales of social betterment that justify and enact land as commodity. It interrogates global patterns of property formation, the dispossessions property markets enact, and the popular movements to halt the growing waves of evictions and land grabs.This collection brings together original research on urban, rural, and peri-urban India; rapidly urbanizing China and Southeast Asia; resource expropriation in Africa and Latin America; and the neoliberal urban landscapes of North America and Europe. Through a variety of perspectives, Land Fictions finds resonances between local stories of land''s fictional powers and global visions of landed property''s imagined power to automatically create value and advance national development. Editors D. Asher Ghertner and Robert W. Lake unpack the dynamics of land commodification across a broad range of political, spatial, and temporal settings, expTrade ReviewThe eye-opening table of contents of this important essay collection provides a vivid preview of corruption and transactional dealings among wealthy, powerful, and influential groups in their role as manipulators, through fictitious deals and persuasive campaigns, who encourage advantageous change as applied to land and properties mainly owned by themselves. The bibliography provides a rich multidisciplinary collection of recommendations allowing readers to pursue further insights. * Choice *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Land Fictions and the Politics of Commodification in City and Country, by D. Asher Ghertner and Robert W. Lake 1. Fictitious but Not Utopian: Land Commodification and Dispossession in Rural India, by Michael Levien 2. Fictions of Surplus: Commodifying Public Land in Canada and the United Kingdom, by Brett Christophers and Heather Whiteside 3. Fictions of Safety: Defensive Storylines in Global Property Investment, by Sarah Knuth 4. Ground Fictions: Soil, Property, and Markets in the Colombian Conflict, by Meghan Morris 5. Narratives of Waste: The Fictions and Frictions of Land Commodification in Liberalizing India, by Sai Balakrishnan 6. Rental Fictions: Speculating in Rent-Regulated Housing, by Benjamin Teresa 7. The Fiction of Formalization: Titles, Concessions, and the Politics of Landownership in Cambodia, by Michael L. Dwyer 8. Regularization and the Fictions of Planning "Unauthorized Delhi", by D. Asher Ghertner 9. The Sanctuary of the Collective: Contesting the Fictions of State-Led Land Commodification in Peri-Urban Guangzhou, by Mi Shih 10. Rights Gone Wrong on the City's Edge: The Fictions and Fetishes of Land Documents in Ho Chi Minh City, by Erik Harms 11. Where Materiality Meets Subjectivity: Locating the Political in the Contested Fiction of Urban Land in Camden, New Jersey, by Robert W. Lake 12. The State of Land Grabs: Regulatory Fictions in Ghana's "Small-Scale" Gold Mining Sector, by Heidi Hausermann and David Ferring Afterword: Land Fictions in the Longue Durée, by Michael Watts

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Book SynopsisAn Elusive Common details the fraught dynamics of rural life in the arid periphery of southeastern Morocco. Karen Rignall considers whether agrarian livelihoods can survive in the context of globalized capitalism and proposes a new way of thinking about agrarian practice, politics, and land in North Africa and the Middle East. Her book questions many of the assumptions underlying movements for land and food sovereignty, theories of the commons, and environmental governance. Global market forces, government disinvestment, political marginalization, and climate change are putting unprecedented pressures on contemporary rural life. At the same time, rural peoples are defying their exclusion by forging new economic and political possibilities. In southern Morocco, the vibrancy of rural life was sustained by creative and often contested efforts to sustain communal governance, especially of land, as a basis for agrarian livelihoods and a changing wage laTrade ReviewIn her extensive, detailed ethnographic study, which includes a number of individual stories, she reveals the contradicting complexities of the transformations in livelihood and agricultural practices that inhabitants have experienced in this corner of North Africa. Her research illustrates the creative, often effective responses people have forged to meet new challenges. * Choice *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. Custom and the Ambivalent Romance of Community 2. Political Pluralism, Local Politics, and the State 3. Land and the New Commoning 4. Environmental Politics and the New Rurality 5. Making a Living on and off the Land Conclusion

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Book SynopsisAn Elusive Common details the fraught dynamics of rural life in the arid periphery of southeastern Morocco. Karen Rignall considers whether agrarian livelihoods can survive in the context of globalized capitalism and proposes a new way of thinking about agrarian practice, politics, and land in North Africa and the Middle East. Her book questions many of the assumptions underlying movements for land and food sovereignty, theories of the commons, and environmental governance. Global market forces, government disinvestment, political marginalization, and climate change are putting unprecedented pressures on contemporary rural life. At the same time, rural peoples are defying their exclusion by forging new economic and political possibilities. In southern Morocco, the vibrancy of rural life was sustained by creative and often contested efforts to sustain communal governance, especially of land, as a basis for agrarian livelihoods and a changing wage laTrade ReviewIn her extensive, detailed ethnographic study, which includes a number of individual stories, she reveals the contradicting complexities of the transformations in livelihood and agricultural practices that inhabitants have experienced in this corner of North Africa. Her research illustrates the creative, often effective responses people have forged to meet new challenges. * Choice *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. Custom and the Ambivalent Romance of Community 2. Political Pluralism, Local Politics, and the State 3. Land and the New Commoning 4. Environmental Politics and the New Rurality 5. Making a Living on and off the Land Conclusion

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Book SynopsisBangladesh is currently ranked as one of the most climate vulnerable countries in the world. In Threatening Dystopias, Kasia Paprocki investigates the politics of climate change adaptation throughout the South Asian nation. Drawing on ethnographic and archival fieldwork, she engages with developers, policy makers, scientists, farmers, and rural migrants to show how Bangladeshi and global elites ignore the history of landscape transformation and its attendant political conflicts. Paprocki looks at how groups craft economic narratives and strategies that redistribute power and resources away from peasant communities. Although these groups claim that increased production of export commodities will reframe the threat of climate change into an opportunity for economic development and growth, the reality is not so simple. For the country''s rural poor, these promises ring hollow. As development dispossesses the poor from agrarian livelihoods, outmigration Trade ReviewThreatening Dystopias offers a revealing political ecological analysis of climate change adaption in the southwestern Khulna region of Bangladesh, a place extremely vulnerable to threats posed by the climate crisis. Paprocki writes with great eloquence[.] Threatening Dystopias is a masterful study of the global politics of climate change adaptation in Bangladesh. * London School of Economics and Political Science Book Review *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. "Sluttish, Careless, Rotting Abundance": Prehistories of a Climate Dystopia 2. Threatening Dystopias: Development and Adaptation Regimes 3. Opportunity/Crisis: Knowledge Production and the Politics of Uncertainty 4. The Social Life of Climate Science: Circulations of Knowledge and Uncertainty in Development Practice 5. Autopsy of a Village: Agrarian Change after the Shrimp Boom 6. We Have Come This Far—We Cannot Retreat": Adaptation, Resistance, and Competing Visions of Transformed Futures Conclusion: Climate Justice and the Politics of Possibility

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Book SynopsisUnsettled Frontiers provides a fresh view of how resource frontiers evolve over time. Since the French colonial era, the Cambodia-Vietnam borderlands have witnessed successive waves of market integration, migration, and disruption. The region has been reinvented and depleted as new commodities are exploited and transplanted: from vast French rubber plantations to the enforced collectivization of the Khmer Rouge; from intensive timber extraction to contemporary crop booms. The volatility that follows these changes has often proved challenging to govern. Sango Mahanty explores the role of migration, land claiming, and expansive social and material networks in these transitions, which result in an unsettled frontier, always in flux, where communities continually strive for security within ruptured landscapes.Trade Review[W]hat readers expect is not only a well-rounded ethnography of a market rhizome, but also whether, and to what extent, the state of being in the borderland renders market formation rhizomic. * Journal of Contemporary Asia *The landscapes of Cambodia are unsettled indeed, and Sango Mahanty capyures the frenetic and precarious effects of market formation n the state-created borderlines delineating (or connecting) Cambodia and Vietnam. * Sojourn *Mahanty deftly weaves the story of a particular place within a broader tapestry of shifting market relations and integration, showing how markets are produced through the actions of individuals and families, the policies implemented by governments and other institutions, and the agency of nonhuman nature and the physical environment. Mahanty's accessible prose is complemented by excellent visuals, including clear and detailed maps of her study sites and her own photographs. The result is a text that is clear and compelling in its theoretical arguments but also an excellent resource for those interested in the Vietnam–Cambodia borderlands or the broader question of how markets take hold, how they change over time, and why efforts to govern them often fall short. * Annals of the AAG *Sango Mahanty's Unsettled Frontiers is an excellent addition to literature on Southeast Asian agrarian studies. * Sojourn *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Frontiers in Flux 1. Rubber in French Indochina 2. Market Formation in Tbong Khmum Province 3. Mobilizing Cassava Networks in Mondulkiri 4. Frontier Rupture 5. Intervening in Market Formation Conclusion: Reexamining Frontier Markets

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Book SynopsisUnsettled Frontiers provides a fresh view of how resource frontiers evolve over time. Since the French colonial era, the Cambodia-Vietnam borderlands have witnessed successive waves of market integration, migration, and disruption. The region has been reinvented and depleted as new commodities are exploited and transplanted: from vast French rubber plantations to the enforced collectivization of the Khmer Rouge; from intensive timber extraction to contemporary crop booms. The volatility that follows these changes has often proved challenging to govern. Sango Mahanty explores the role of migration, land claiming, and expansive social and material networks in these transitions, which result in an unsettled frontier, always in flux, where communities continually strive for security within ruptured landscapes.Trade Review[W]hat readers expect is not only a well-rounded ethnography of a market rhizome, but also whether, and to what extent, the state of being in the borderland renders market formation rhizomic. * Journal of Contemporary Asia *The landscapes of Cambodia are unsettled indeed, and Sango Mahanty capyures the frenetic and precarious effects of market formation n the state-created borderlines delineating (or connecting) Cambodia and Vietnam. * Sojourn *Mahanty deftly weaves the story of a particular place within a broader tapestry of shifting market relations and integration, showing how markets are produced through the actions of individuals and families, the policies implemented by governments and other institutions, and the agency of nonhuman nature and the physical environment. Mahanty's accessible prose is complemented by excellent visuals, including clear and detailed maps of her study sites and her own photographs. The result is a text that is clear and compelling in its theoretical arguments but also an excellent resource for those interested in the Vietnam–Cambodia borderlands or the broader question of how markets take hold, how they change over time, and why efforts to govern them often fall short. * Annals of the AAG *Sango Mahanty's Unsettled Frontiers is an excellent addition to literature on Southeast Asian agrarian studies. * Sojourn *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Frontiers in Flux 1. Rubber in French Indochina 2. Market Formation in Tbong Khmum Province 3. Mobilizing Cassava Networks in Mondulkiri 4. Frontier Rupture 5. Intervening in Market Formation Conclusion: Reexamining Frontier Markets

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewHawthorne embraces a scholarly commitment to clarity and a citation ethic rooted in careful engagement with works inside and outside the academy. * American Sociological Association *

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Book SynopsisSurvival and Witness at Europe''s Border focuses on one of the most mediatized migrant disasters in Europe. On October 3, 2013, an overcrowded fishing boat carrying Eritrean refugees caught fire near Lampedusa, Italy, where 368 people died. Karina Horsti shows with empathy and passion how this disaster produced a kaleidoscope of afterlives that continue to assume different forms depending on the position of the witness or survivors. Pasts and futures intersect in the present when people who were touched by the disaster engage with its memory and politics. Horsti underscores how the perspective of survival can envision a way forward from a horrific unsustainable present. Survival and Witness at Europe''s Border develops the concept of survival to rethink border deaths beyond the structures and processes that produce the murderous border and constitute the focus of critical migration studies. It demonstrates how the process of survival transfoTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Words 2. Images 3. Enumeration, Naming, Photos 4. Adopting the Dead 5. Memorial Interventions 6. Memory Politics 7. Survivor Citizenship 8. Survival 9. Surviving the Death of Another Epilogue: Kebrat's Story

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Book SynopsisEthnopolitical Entrepreneurs presents the story of the Armenians of Glendale, California. Coming from Argentina, Armenia, Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, Russia, Syria, and many other countries, this group is internally fragmented and often has limited experience with the American political system. Nonetheless, Glendale''s Armenians have rapidly mobilized and remade an American suburban space in their own likeness. In telling their story, Daniel Fittante expands our understanding of US political history. From the late nineteenth-century onward, Irish, Italian, Jewish, and several other immigrant populations in large American cities began changing the country''s political reality. The author shows how Glendale''s Armeniansas well as many other immigrantsare now changing the country''s political reality within its dynamic, multiethnic suburbs. The processes look different in various suburban contexts, but the underlying narrative holds: immigrant populations

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Book SynopsisBeirut is a city divided. Following the Green Line of the civil war, dividing the Christian east and the Muslim west, today hundreds of such lines dissect the city. For the residents of Beirut, urban planning could hold promise: a new spatial order could bring a peaceful future. But with unclear state structures and outsourced public processes, urban planning has instead become a contest between religious-political organizations and profit-seeking developers. Neighborhoods reproduce poverty, displacement, and urban violence. For the War Yet to Come examines urban planning in three neighborhoods of Beirut's southeastern peripheries, revealing how these areas have been developed into frontiers of a continuing sectarian order. Hiba Bou Akar argues these neighborhoods are arranged, not in the expectation of a bright future, but according to the logic of "the war yet to come": urban planning plays on fears and differences, rumors of war, and paramilitary strategies to organize everyday life. As she shows, war in times of peace is not fought with tanks, artillery, and rifles, but involves a more mundane territorial contest for land and apartment sales, zoning and planning regulations, and infrastructure projects.Trade Review"Once in a while, a book comes along that makes a field of inquiry reconsider its assumptions, categories, and vocabularies. Through elegant ethnography and nuanced theorization, Hiba Bou Akar's For the War Yet to Come gives us a new way of thinking about violence, development, modernity, and ultimately, the city. This city is not just Beirut but rather urban life everywhere." -- Ananya Roy * University of California, Los Angeles *"For the War Yet to Come upends our conventional notions of center and periphery, of local and transnational, even of war and peace. It takes courage and smarts to navigate these spaces, let alone to write about them. With daring and precision, Hiba Bou Akar proves herself to be a complete master." -- AbdouMaliq Simone * Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity *"How do you plan cities when the specter of war is always present? Hiba Bou Akar places 'planning' on its head to show how Beirut has developed to serve a sectarian order. Fascinating, theoretically astute, and empirically rich, For the War Yet to Come enriches our understanding of fragile cities in the Middle East and beyond." -- Asef Bayat, University of Illinois * Urbana-Champaign *"For the War Yet to Come is a feminist and postcolonial critique of a masculinized geography of urban militarism that favors the spectacular and the sublime. This vision of the city at war is blindingly technological and curiously devoid of people, as if seen from above (perhaps from a fighter jet). Bou Akar's Beirut is peopled, swirling with rumor. It is the site not of anonymized destruction but of calculated and complex construction." -- Emma Shaw Crane * Public Books *"Bou Akar is able to assess how years of sectarian warfare and conflict have turned Beirut into an arena for competing religious/political parties and groups to seize footholds and influence in the city. [Her] in-depth analysis reveals a painful reality: Beirut's urban planning reflects Lebanon's political factions' acceptance of the inevitable continuation of sectarian violence and human displacement." -- Refael Kubersky * Middle East Journal *"Hiba Bou Akar's For the War Yet to Come is an important contribution, shedding light on urban planning in unstable contexts....I highly recommend this book to readers interested in further understanding how urban planning could be viewed as a sword with two edges, for consensus or conflict building." -- Christine Mady * International Journal of Middle East Studies *"Hiba Bou Akar convincingly reveals the considerable weight of the anticipation of war and violence in the production of urban geographies in one emblematic contested city, Beirut. She names this phenomenon 'the war yet to come.' The mechanisms she skillfully describes are profoundly anchored in the urban dynamics of this city but could also be easily found in other cities....an enormous effort that succeeds in describing how fear of 'the war yet to come' is profoundly affecting urban and territorial dynamics in the contested suburbs of Beirut." -- Oula Aoun * H-Nationalism *"For the War Yet to Come is an incredibly brave book. It would have required enormous courage, fortitude, inventiveness and discipline in order to engage the sites and actors of this book—municipal officials, street-level bureaucrats, bankers, housing developers, landowners, draughtsmen in public and private planning agencies, police officers, militiamen, religious charity workers and even asphalt company employees. Instead of being overwhelmed with rumours, impressions and partial understandings, the book resounds with confidence and clarity." -- AbdouMaliq Simon * Urbanisation *"In the literature on urban development, Beirut takes on symbolic significance as a prefigurement for cities where political difference is assumed to be primordial and inherent. In contrast to this assumption, Bou Akar's focus on 'everyday sectarianism,' located in 'zones of awkward engagement' between people, and between people and place, has shown sectarianism to be spatially and temporally produced and contingent." -- Hannah Sender * Environment & Urbanization *"[With] the theoretically astute concept of 'the war yet to come'....Bou Akar masterfully weaves a spatial and temporal logic together to demonstrate how these territorial contestations are both a reconfiguration of past violence and a patchwork of destruction, construction, lavishness and poverty, otherness and marginality." -- Mona Atia * Society and Space *"[A] beautifully written book....In an almost forensically meticulous manner, Bou Akar shows us the tangible connections between territoriality, geopolitics and everyday urban life." -- Sara Fregonese * Society and Space *"Bou Akar deftly moves across transnational, national, city-wide, and neighborhood spaces, while remaining sharply attuned to the complex temporalities of 'urban warscapes'....in Beirut, as Bou Akar vividly shows, urban strategy is far from unitary and coherent." -- Federico Pérez * Society and Space *"Bou Akar's work is a fascinating study of how planning is discussed and practiced in contexts of conflict. Furthermore, her analysis provides a compelling example of the way that contestations over identity have important spatial dimensions.This book is vital reading not only for anyone who wants to better understand sectarian politics in Lebanon but also for anyone interested in the interplay of conflict and planning in urban spaces across the region and the globe." -- Matthew DeMaio * Anthropological Quarterly *"For the War Yet to Come makes an important contribution to urban studies, to be sure. Moreover, while the book is in strong dialogue with the already rich scholarship of planning and politics in Lebanon, its insights apply more broadly to contexts of urban political conflict well beyond Beirut and the Arab world" -- Alice Stefanelli * PoLAR *"Bou Akar makes an essential contribution to the urban studies and planning fields....Her analysis of Beirut's planning political economy is fascinating and insightful." -- Gerardo Francisco Sandoval * Journal of Architectural Education *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsPrologue: War in Times of Peace chapter abstractThe Prologue offers a theorization of the spatial and temporal logics of the war yet to come through which Beirut's south and southeastern peripheries are governed and regulated. It locates these peripheries spatially in the city, and provides an overview of how these peripheries, in times of peace, have been transformed into frontiers of urban growth and sectarian violence largely through the spatial practices of religious-political organizations, mostly former civil war militias and the major political players in post–civil war Lebanon. These organizations include the Shiite Hezbollah, the Sunni Future Movement, the Druze Progressive Socialist Party (PSP), and the Christian Maronite Church. Chapter 1: Constructing Sectarian Geographies chapter abstractThis chapter introduces the discourses through which sectarian geographies are constructed in Beirut's peripheries. It discusses how commonly used terms like environment (bīa in Arabic) and demography can be used to depoliticize spatial policies and practices of segregation, discrimination, and fear by relegating them from realm of the political to the realm of the natural and scientific. Through an overview of the study's approach, which included patching stories and maps together with real-time data collection, this chapter engages with the methodological question of conducting research in contested spaces and violent geographies. This chapter also situates the book within the interdisciplinary fields of urban and planning studies, Middle Eastern studies, and studies on conflict urbanism and militarization. It also explains the three research sites, and theorizes the ways in which they, together, contribute to an understanding of the geographies and temporalities of the war yet to come in contested spaces. Chapter 2: The Doubleness of Ruins chapter abstractThis chapter examines the still visible, expansive geography of war-scarred ruins left by the civil war in Hayy Madi/Mar Mikhail, by examining the transformation of these geographies of ruins within the unfolding sectarian-political spatial conflict. The doubleness of ruins arises from their being products of both a past civil war and a present territorial war that is not so different from the civil war but that uses different tools. Through this exploration, the chapter shows how the Hayy Madi/Mar Mikhail neighborhoods have become one of the major contested frontiers, one where the Christians (through the Maronite Church) and the Shiites (through Hezbollah-affiliated real estate developers) are struggling over land locally and through global networks of finance, fundraising, and religious allegiances, and where this struggle is transforming Hayy Madi/Mar Mikhail into a sectarian frontier in times of peace. Chapter 3: The Lacework of Zoning chapter abstractThis chapter traces how urban planning and zoning technologies have become technologies of warfare in times of peace, transforming Sahra Choueifat, a southeastern periphery of Beirut, into a deadly frontier of contestation and violence. The territorial battle of Hezbollah and the PSP over the area through zoning policies and real estate and housing markets is resulting in what this chapter calls the lacework of zoning. This low-income periphery is now a patchwork of apartment buildings that are in the vicinity of industries that are next to one of the most active urban agricultural areas around Beirut, with severe repercussions on the everyday life of area residents. The chapter describes how areas known to be Hezbollah's spaces in Beirut are in fact produced by the continuities and discontinuities of neoliberal practices with practices of religious affiliation, sectarian constructions, service provision, resistance ideologies, and militarization. Chapter 4: A Ballooning Frontier chapter abstractThis chapter shows how access to development sites and individual project characteristics are resulting in the simultaneous (and competitive) ballooning of Shiite al-Dahiya and the city core (primarily Sunni west Beirut) toward Doha Aramoun, a periphery that emerged as a violent frontier in the May 2008 sectarian violence. Ballooning takes place on a variety of scales, from constructing more floors than initially permitted in a building to working behind the scenes with government agencies or religious-political organizations to bypass market mechanisms to using international aid to build infrastructure that enables the extension of sectarian patterns of urbanization. Thus, in Doha Aramoun, large-scale, nationally sanctioned building and planning projects have combined with the building-by-building efforts of Hezbollah-affiliated developers to transform a formerly marginal periphery into a prime new site for sectarian violence. In these territorial battles, minority religious groups become brokers between dominant religious groups. Chapter 5: Planning without Development chapter abstractThis chapter describes the genealogy of the sectarian order in Lebanon and how it came to be understood and practiced spatially. This genealogy is constructed by tracing the debates and discourses that circulated among experts in the fields of development and urban planning since the 1950s, soon after the establishment of the Lebanese post-colonial nation state. The chapter shows how, over time, urban planning was voided of its development discourses, and transformed through militias' and religious-political organizations' interventions into a collection of "innovative" exercises aimed at balancing the spatiality of a sectarian order. It illustrates how these shifts in logic coincided with global moments of anxiety around Communism, and later, political Islam, ultimately ushering in the spatial and temporal logics of the wars yet to come. It closes with a discussion on how planning experts have become the technicians of this logic. Epilogue: Contested Futures chapter abstractThis closing discussion of contested futures shows how the geographies and temporalities of the war yet to come are often dystopic, foreclosing the possibilities of urban politics and social change outside the sociopolitical order of political difference. At the same time, it shows that hope for change lies in the continuously shifting and contested spatialities of the sectarian order. It also explains this study's relevance beyond Beirut, discussing the implications of the findings for urban studies research in cities across the Global South and Global North. By contending that the urban futures of all cities are being contested, this chapter argues that while the logic of anticipated wars is particular to cities like Beirut, many other cities are governed, regulated, and contested by the logics of conflicts that are yet to come, driven by terror, gun violence, and climate change.

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Book SynopsisIn contemporary accounts of the Shining Path insurgency and Peru's internal war, the Upper Huallaga Valley has largely been overlooked—despite its former place as the country's main cocaine-producing region. From afar, the Upper Huallaga became a political and legal no-man's-land. Up close, vibrant networks of connection endured despite strict controls on human habitation and movement. This book asks what happens to such a place once prolonged conflict has ostensibly passed. How have ordinary encounters with land, territory, and law, and with the river that runs through them all, been altered in the aftermaths of war? Gathering stories and images to render the experiences of transportation workers who have ferried passengers and things across and along the river for decades, Richard Kernaghan elaborates a notion of legal topographies to understand how landscape interventions shape routes, craft territories, and muddle temporalities. Drawing on personal narratives and everyday practices of transit, this ethnography conveys how prior times of violence have silently accrued: in bridges and roads demolished, then rebuilt; in makeshift moorings that facilitate both licit and illegal trades; and above all through the river, a liquid barrier and current with unstable banks, whose intricate mesh of tributaries partitions terrains now laden with material traces and political effects of a recent yet far from finished past.Trade Review"This is a theoretically sophisticated, beautifully written book. In its lyrical style and its approach to letting stories, objects, and descriptions speak for themselves, the book situates itself with other stylistically innovative ethnographies that eschew a distinction between 'academic' and 'creative' writing. The work is fresh, individual, and makes critical contributions to scholarship on the aftermath of war and post-conflict spaces." —Elizabeth Ferry, Brandeis University"Crossing the Current illustrates how to do situated ethnography while building solid theory. With beautiful sweeping writing, Kernaghan calls on us to reimagine politics from a sensitive plane, and to rethink history as a plot of enduring connections." —Mario Rufer, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Xochimilco

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Book SynopsisMore than 35 million Chinese people live outside China, but this population is far from homogenous, and its multifaceted national affiliations require careful theorization. This book unravels the multiple, shifting paths of global migration in Chinese society today, challenging a unilinear view of migration by presenting emigration, immigration, and re-migration trajectories that are occurring continually and simultaneously. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic observations conducted in China, Canada, Singapore, and the China–Myanmar border, Elaine Lynn-Ee Ho takes the geographical space of China as the starting point from which to consider complex patterns of migration that shape nation-building and citizenship, both in origin and destination countries. She uniquely brings together various migration experiences and national contexts under the same analytical framework to create a rich portrait of the diversity of contemporary Chinese migration processes. By examining the convergence of multiple migration pathways across one geographical region over time, Ho offers alternative approaches to studying migration, migrant experience, and citizenship, thus setting the stage for future scholarship. Trade Review"Migration practices in the globalized world are changing the ways we understand resettlement, citizenship, identity, and the sense of home. Elaine Ho's multi-sited ethnographic study offers a sophisticated analysis of the challenges and opportunities for belonging and states' management of cultural diversity in China, Canada, and Singapore today." -- Min Zhou * University of California, Los Angeles, and editor, Contemporary Chinese Diasporas *"Citizens in Motion is a pathbreaking study on contemporary migrations to and from China. It provides an instructive model on capturing the multiplicity of contemporaneous migrations that link nation-states while expanding our breadth of knowledge on questions of citizenship for transnational subjects and troubling assumptions of co-ethnic allegiance. This book is a must-read for specialists of China, migration, and racial ethnic studies across disciplines." -- Rhacel Salazar Parreñas * author of Servants of Globalization: Migration and Domestic Work *"Citizens in Motion is an invaluable contribution to literature on Chinese migration and diaspora, and wider migration studies more broadly, for several reasons: its expansive, multi-sited methodology; the varied Chinese diasporic histories woven into the present; and the conceptual frameworks she deploys, like those of 'citizenship constellations' and 'Tianxia', which complicate our understandings of mobility, belonging, difference and the state."––Caroline Faria & Devon Hsiao, Space and Polity"Citizens in Motion makes several significant interventions in a dynamic field, offering a much-welcomed update. Students and scholars of Chinese migration and society will find Ho's new book highly enlightening regarding our transnational present and the new visions we need."––Shelley Chan, The China Quarterly"[This] book is a timely production enriching the expanding scholarship on new Chinese migration. It offers an understanding of the diverse trends and directions of contemporary migrations from China and raises important questions regarding cultural and economic citizenship." -- Yuk Wah Chan * China Information *"This richly documented and theoretically provocative study is a timely and important contribution to the literature on migration journeys, showing how these transform transnational subjects and states alike. It will appeal to a broad interdisciplinary readership concerned with the questions of migration, citizenship, and ethnicity far beyond Chinese studies." -- Elena Barabsentva * The China Journal *"In Citizens in Motion, Elaine Ho...[argues] for an approach that transcends place-time snapshots in theorisations of migration and citizenship....[This] book offers a rich and complex narrative, and much food for thought for theorisations of migration and citizenship." -- Sin Yee Koh * Asian Journal of Social Science *"The conceptual framework and future directions identified by this book are aspects that scholars of overseas Chinese studies and history can learn from, especially in terms of how the book emphasises local contexts and their uniqueness, as well as the expansive analytical framework it adopts." -- Guo Mei Fen * The International Journal of Diaspora Chinese Studies *"Ho emphasizes both temporality and spatiality by drawing out the implications of multidirectional Chinese migrations and the multiple national configurations through which migrants might claim inclusion and, in turn, be claimed by various diasporas. Such multiply relocated migrants illustrate the strengths of Ho's approach." -- Madeine Y. Hsu * Cross-Currents *"Citizens in Motion should be commended for pushing the boundaries of transnationalism scholarship, and for its stimulating and insightful engagements with interdisciplinary debates on deterritorialized citizenship, multiculturalism, and, of course, Chinese diaspora....I think it is fair to say that Ho has produced a book ofexceptional quality and scholarly contribution." -- Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang * Journal of Asian Studies *"[This book] adds new and hitherto unexplored dimensions to ideas of 'multiculturalism' and 'belonging', highlighting the complexity of ethnic identity, migration and temporality....It is thought-provoking and richly informative and essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the contemporary Chinese diaspora." -- Johanna Waters * Social and Cultural Geography *"Citizens in Motion is a welcome reorientation of migration studies' conventional cartographies....[It] illuminates how migrant mobilities are animated through the entanglements of national integration and extraterritorial citizenship that differentiate the kinds of attachments and identities held by migrants." -- Ishan Ashutosh * Dialogues in Human Geography *"Ho is a skilful qualitative researcher who draws out rich data from her exhaustive fieldwork research, including interviews, participant observation, media analysis and analysis of other textual and visual sources." -- Liu Liangni Sally * Dialogues in Human Geography *"Works on international migration emphasize the mobility and flexibility brought about by transnationality, but they seldom discuss the conceptual and methodological challenges of understanding the (in)variability and multiplicity of identity and membership. Citizens in Motion promotes an approach that stresses the accretion of identities rather than the displacement of one identity for another." -- Pu Hao * Dialogues in Human Geography *Table of ContentsContents and Abstracts1Migration and Citizenship chapter abstractThis chapter considers the way that multidirectional migration flows are transforming national citizenship and its territorial premises. Eschewing the tendency to study emigration and immigration as discrete fields, it proposes an approach that brings together seemingly distinct emigration, immigration, and re-migration trends under an analytical framework known as contemporaneous migration. This approach illuminates how citizenship formations in different national contexts are increasingly drawn into a constellation of relations, situating the migration and citizenship politics of national societies in a trans-territorial context. The chapter contextualizes developments in Chinese emigration and immigration to China in wider theoretical debates on emigration and diaspora, citizenship and territory, immigrant integration and re-migration, and ethnicity and co-ethnicity. It signals the multifaceted aspects of migration that interconnect China with migration sites globally, changing citizenship norms and practices. 2Chinese Re-migration chapter abstractCounter-diasporic migration, or the return of diasporic descendants to an ancestral land, has become a global trend. This chapter troubles linear narratives of emigration and immigration by examining the re-migration of diasporic descendants, focusing on Chinese diasporic descendants in Malaya, Indonesia, and Vietnam who were compelled to leave due to persecution between 1949 and 1979, a period of the inauguration of communist rule in China. The Chinese state resettled the refugees in state-owned farms and labeled them as "returnees," legitimizing its reach toward the diaspora. But the social realities they experienced expose contestations over presumed kinship and co-ethnicity. After 1978 China's diaspora strategizing shifted from privileging co-ethnicity to encouraging foreign investment and skills transfer to benefit national development. This discussion foregrounds how citizenship formations in China were intimately connected to the experiences of the Chinese abroad and those who re-migrated to the ancestral land. 3Citizenship Across the Life Course chapter abstractAnalyzing emigration, immigration, and re-migration concurrently, under the framework of contemporaneous migration, directs us toward evaluating what it means to stake claims to different components of citizenship in more than one political community across a migrant's life course. This chapter examines the way the Mainland Chinese migrants negotiate social reproduction concerns that extend across international borders, their multiple national affiliations, and aspirations for recognition and rights as they journey between China and Canada across the life course. Patterns of re-migration are transforming the social relations of citizenship, re-spatializing rights, obligations, and belonging. Source and destination countries are also reversed during repeated re-migration or transnational sojourning. Transnational sojourning forges citizenship constellations that interlink how migrants understand and experience citizenship across different migration sites. 4Multiple Diasporas chapter abstractThis chapter examines how fraternity and alterity operate in contradictory ways under conditions of contemporaneous migration. While fraternity connotes membership in a national community, alterity refers to the state of being different or the process of "Othering." The chapter focuses on Singapore as a hub, where concurrent immigration and emigration flows are creating new postcolonial nation-building challenges. Contemporary immigration from China is juxtaposed against past migration from the same ancestral land, generating both co-ethnic and inter-ethnic tensions in a multicultural society. With growing numbers of Singaporeans now moving abroad, Singapore has also become a country that seeks to assert an extraterritorial reach over its emigrants. The multidirectional migration flows evinced in Singapore exemplify how states and national societies invoke temporal framings to prioritize natal ties that are based on selected versions of territorial belonging, memory, and culture. 5China at Home and Abroad chapter abstractStudying the interface of distinct yet interrelated migration trends through the framework of contemporaneous migration allows us to conceptualize both inter-ethnic and co-ethnic relations in culturally diverse societies. The Chinese worldview of tianxia informs understanding of the multidirectional migration patterns that reflect and impact China's domestic management of ethnic diversity and its external relations. This chapter argues that contemporaneous migration further illuminates three dimensions of alterity, namely alterity as phenotypical difference, as the diversification of co-ethnicity, and as spatial recalibration. It interfaces African immigration to China with the re-migration of Chinese diasporic descendants to the ancestral land, and the emigration of ethnic minorities in China. Such an analytical approach reveals how fraternity and alterity operate within and across ethnic categories in transnational contexts. 6Contemporaneous Migration chapter abstractThis chapter shows how the analytical framework of contemporaneous migration allows an examination of citizenship constellations that are forged across migration sites. It draws together key themes that emerge from this approach, namely on citizenship and territory, fraternity and alterity, and the co-constitution of time and space. The chapter further signals the new research directions that contemporaneous migration brings to overseas Chinese studies or research on the "Chinese diaspora," and to the Chinese worldview of tianxia in relation to notions of cosmopolitanism. It also sets out the methods through which contemporaneous migration can be studied.

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Book SynopsisThe Unsettled Plain studies agrarian life in the Ottoman Empire to understand the making of the modern world. Over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the environmental transformation of the Ottoman countryside became intertwined with migration and displacement. Muslim refugees, mountain nomads, families deported in the Armenian Genocide, and seasonal workers from all over the empire endured hardship, exile, and dispossession. Their settlement and survival defined new societies forged in the provincial spaces of the late Ottoman frontier. Through these movements, Chris Gratien reconstructs the remaking of Çukurova, a region at the historical juncture of Anatolia and Syria, and illuminates radical changes brought by the modern state, capitalism, war, and technology. Drawing on both Ottoman Turkish and Armenian sources, Gratien brings rural populations into the momentous events of the period: Ottoman reform, Mediterranean capitalism, the First World War, and Turkish nation-building. Through the ecological perspectives of everyday people in Çukurova, he charts how familiar facets of quotidian life, like malaria, cotton cultivation, labor, and leisure, attained modern manifestations. As the history of this pivotal region hidden on the geopolitical map reveals, the remarkable ecological transformation of late Ottoman society configured the trajectory of the contemporary societies of the Middle East.Trade Review"The Unsettled Plain is environmental history at its finest: not just a history of rivers, mountains, and soils or climates and diseases, but all of those and something more. Chris Gratien tells the story of an empire, meticulously researched, exceptionally insightful—all grounded in the lives and lands of Çukurova."—Sam White, author of The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire"The Unsettled Plain is a pathbreaking book that takes Ottoman studies to a new level. Chris Gratien's vivid account of how the Çukurova region was settled tackles big questions about the state, capitalism, and environmental factors, without ever losing sight of the individuals who bore the brunt of the consequences."—Reşat Kasaba, author of A Moveable Empire: Ottoman Nomads, Migrants, and Refugees"Chris Gratien charts an important new path for critical environmental history with The Unsettled Plain, which reflects scrupulous research in at least eight countries and multiple languages. A must-read for anyone interested in the dizzyingly complex relations between real people and the environment of which they are part."—Diana Davis, author of The Arid Lands: History, Power, Knowledge"[The Unsettled Plain] is a wonderful contribution to our knowledge of Ottoman history. The author gets us thinking about change as experienced by the non-elite population, and allows us to ask to what extent non-urban populations are shaped by change itself, as well as the shapers of change."—Usman Butt, Middle East MonitorHistorians of the Ottoman Empire and environmental historians in general will certainly recognize the importance of The Unsettled Plain. But non-specialists interested in interdisciplinary approaches to the study of history also stand to benefit from it.... Indeed, Gratien's book is just the latest to demonstrate how sophisticated the field of Middle East environmental history has become."—Isacar A. Bolaños, Journal of Interdisciplinary History"The Unsettled Plain offers a model for writing environmental history, especially for anyone looking to write histories with rural and ordinary people at their center. Gratien brings together an impressively wide range of evidence, including folklore as well as archival sources in multiple languages, to highlight rural people and places, and the relationships between them.... I hope others will follow Gratien's lead in attending carefully to ordinary people in the countryside in writing histories of the Ottoman and post-Ottoman Middle East."—Camille Lyans Cole, International Journal of Middle East Studies"This study is a microhistory of modern Turkey focusing on Çukurova (Cilicia), a province in the southwest, and how it was transformed through official policies.... Gratien is an excellent historian who brings enviable biomedical knowledge to this study. Recommended."—A. J. Papalas, CHOICE"By consistently incorporating folk songs, laments, and oral accounts, Gratien not only eloquently displays pastoralists' forms of resistance and resilience against the Ottoman reform movement in Çukurova but also masterfully narrates perceptions and worldviews that have been silenced in the state archive. This use of a wide range of unconventional historical sources makesTheUnsettled Plainan innovative environmental history."—Zozan Pehlivan, H-EnvironmentTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Upland Empire: The Indigenous Ecology of Ottoman Cilicia 2. The Stench of Progress: Ecology and Settlement on the Ottoman Frontier, 1856–78 3. Second Nature in the Second Egypt: Capital, Ecology, and Intercommunality in Late Ottoman Cilicia, 1878–1914 4. Fallowed Years: War, Environment, and the End of Empire, 1914–23 5. A Modern Life of Transhumance: Change and Continuity in the Republic of Turkey, 1923–56

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Book SynopsisThe Unsettled Plain studies agrarian life in the Ottoman Empire to understand the making of the modern world. Over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the environmental transformation of the Ottoman countryside became intertwined with migration and displacement. Muslim refugees, mountain nomads, families deported in the Armenian Genocide, and seasonal workers from all over the empire endured hardship, exile, and dispossession. Their settlement and survival defined new societies forged in the provincial spaces of the late Ottoman frontier. Through these movements, Chris Gratien reconstructs the remaking of Çukurova, a region at the historical juncture of Anatolia and Syria, and illuminates radical changes brought by the modern state, capitalism, war, and technology. Drawing on both Ottoman Turkish and Armenian sources, Gratien brings rural populations into the momentous events of the period: Ottoman reform, Mediterranean capitalism, the First World War, and Turkish nation-building. Through the ecological perspectives of everyday people in Çukurova, he charts how familiar facets of quotidian life, like malaria, cotton cultivation, labor, and leisure, attained modern manifestations. As the history of this pivotal region hidden on the geopolitical map reveals, the remarkable ecological transformation of late Ottoman society configured the trajectory of the contemporary societies of the Middle East.Trade Review"The Unsettled Plain is environmental history at its finest: not just a history of rivers, mountains, and soils or climates and diseases, but all of those and something more. Chris Gratien tells the story of an empire, meticulously researched, exceptionally insightful—all grounded in the lives and lands of Çukurova."—Sam White, author of The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire"The Unsettled Plain is a pathbreaking book that takes Ottoman studies to a new level. Chris Gratien's vivid account of how the Çukurova region was settled tackles big questions about the state, capitalism, and environmental factors, without ever losing sight of the individuals who bore the brunt of the consequences."—Reşat Kasaba, author of A Moveable Empire: Ottoman Nomads, Migrants, and Refugees"Chris Gratien charts an important new path for critical environmental history with The Unsettled Plain, which reflects scrupulous research in at least eight countries and multiple languages. A must-read for anyone interested in the dizzyingly complex relations between real people and the environment of which they are part."—Diana Davis, author of The Arid Lands: History, Power, Knowledge"[The Unsettled Plain] is a wonderful contribution to our knowledge of Ottoman history. The author gets us thinking about change as experienced by the non-elite population, and allows us to ask to what extent non-urban populations are shaped by change itself, as well as the shapers of change."—Usman Butt, Middle East MonitorHistorians of the Ottoman Empire and environmental historians in general will certainly recognize the importance of The Unsettled Plain. But non-specialists interested in interdisciplinary approaches to the study of history also stand to benefit from it.... Indeed, Gratien's book is just the latest to demonstrate how sophisticated the field of Middle East environmental history has become."—Isacar A. Bolaños, Journal of Interdisciplinary History"The Unsettled Plain offers a model for writing environmental history, especially for anyone looking to write histories with rural and ordinary people at their center. Gratien brings together an impressively wide range of evidence, including folklore as well as archival sources in multiple languages, to highlight rural people and places, and the relationships between them.... I hope others will follow Gratien's lead in attending carefully to ordinary people in the countryside in writing histories of the Ottoman and post-Ottoman Middle East."—Camille Lyans Cole, International Journal of Middle East Studies"This study is a microhistory of modern Turkey focusing on Çukurova (Cilicia), a province in the southwest, and how it was transformed through official policies.... Gratien is an excellent historian who brings enviable biomedical knowledge to this study. Recommended."—A. J. Papalas, CHOICE"By consistently incorporating folk songs, laments, and oral accounts, Gratien not only eloquently displays pastoralists' forms of resistance and resilience against the Ottoman reform movement in Çukurova but also masterfully narrates perceptions and worldviews that have been silenced in the state archive. This use of a wide range of unconventional historical sources makesTheUnsettled Plainan innovative environmental history."—Zozan Pehlivan, H-EnvironmentTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Upland Empire: The Indigenous Ecology of Ottoman Cilicia 2. The Stench of Progress: Ecology and Settlement on the Ottoman Frontier, 1856–78 3. Second Nature in the Second Egypt: Capital, Ecology, and Intercommunality in Late Ottoman Cilicia, 1878–1914 4. Fallowed Years: War, Environment, and the End of Empire, 1914–23 5. A Modern Life of Transhumance: Change and Continuity in the Republic of Turkey, 1923–56

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Book SynopsisIn contemporary accounts of the Shining Path insurgency and Peru's internal war, the Upper Huallaga Valley has largely been overlooked—despite its former place as the country's main cocaine-producing region. From afar, the Upper Huallaga became a political and legal no-man's-land. Up close, vibrant networks of connection endured despite strict controls on human habitation and movement. This book asks what happens to such a place once prolonged conflict has ostensibly passed. How have ordinary encounters with land, territory, and law, and with the river that runs through them all, been altered in the aftermaths of war? Gathering stories and images to render the experiences of transportation workers who have ferried passengers and things across and along the river for decades, Richard Kernaghan elaborates a notion of legal topographies to understand how landscape interventions shape routes, craft territories, and muddle temporalities. Drawing on personal narratives and everyday practices of transit, this ethnography conveys how prior times of violence have silently accrued: in bridges and roads demolished, then rebuilt; in makeshift moorings that facilitate both licit and illegal trades; and above all through the river, a liquid barrier and current with unstable banks, whose intricate mesh of tributaries partitions terrains now laden with material traces and political effects of a recent yet far from finished past.Trade Review"This is a theoretically sophisticated, beautifully written book. In its lyrical style and its approach to letting stories, objects, and descriptions speak for themselves, the book situates itself with other stylistically innovative ethnographies that eschew a distinction between 'academic' and 'creative' writing. The work is fresh, individual, and makes critical contributions to scholarship on the aftermath of war and post-conflict spaces." —Elizabeth Ferry, Brandeis University"Crossing the Current illustrates how to do situated ethnography while building solid theory. With beautiful sweeping writing, Kernaghan calls on us to reimagine politics from a sensitive plane, and to rethink history as a plot of enduring connections." —Mario Rufer, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Xochimilco

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Book SynopsisOver the last several decades, life in Lahore has been undergoing profound transformations, from rapid and uneven urbanization to expanding state institutions and informal economies. What do these transformations look like if viewed from the lens of waste materials and the lives of those who toil with them? In Lahore, like in many parts of Pakistan and South Asia, waste workers—whether municipal employees or informal laborers—are drawn from low- or noncaste (Dalit) groups and dispose the collective refuse of the city's 11 million inhabitants. Bringing workers into contact with potentially polluting materials reinforces their stigmatization and marginalization, and yet, their work allows life to go on across Lahore and beyond. This historical and ethnographic account examines how waste work has been central to organizing and transforming the city of Lahore—its landscape, infrastructures, and life—across historical moments, from the colonial period to the present. Building upon conversations about changing configurations of work and labor under capitalism, and utilizing a theoretical framework of reproduction, Waqas H. Butt traces how forms of life in Punjab, organized around caste-based relations, have become embedded in infrastructures across Pakistan, making them crucial to numerous processes unfolding at distinct scales. Life Beyond Waste maintains that processes reproducing life in a city like Lahore must be critically assessed along the lines of caste, class, and religion, which have been constitutive features of urbanization across South Asia.Trade Review"This book helps us understand the centrality of caste as a category and the processes of pollution/purity linked as they are to the labyrinths through which waste work is organized in Lahore. It is a path-breaking contribution to the fields of urban studies, informal labor practices and the production of social marginality in Pakistan. It will undoubtedly be a model for future research."—Kamran Asdar Ali, University of Texas, Austin"Life Beyond Waste is a deeply sensitive ethnography of Lahore's waste workers and traders, offering luminous insights on the entanglements of people, matter, and institutions that constitute the city's "waste infrastructure." The book is also distinctive for its historical analysis of how agrarian class and caste inequalities are reproduced in urban Pakistan. A model for urban anthropology and waste studies!"—Vinay Gidwani, University of Minnesota"Butt shows waste infrastructure is about more than where pollution goes and who decides. Combining richly-detailed ethnography with in-depth history on the continuity between colonial governance and recent statecraft, he uncovers the diverse forms of labor that are necessary to reproduce urban life and inequality, whether in Pakistan or in wasted worlds beyond."—Joshua Reno, Binghamton University"How is hate channeled through waste work carried out by Christians as non-Muslims? How do powerlessness and anger touch the lives of those who work with waste materials? Butt's interventions on these critical questions bring to life a story of caste, waste work, and urban life that are not only in a state of flux and transformation but also a site of contestation and struggle."—Nausheen H. Anwar, The Developing EconomiesTable of ContentsPreface 1. Introduction 2. An Order for Urban Life 3. The Appearance of Things 4. Surplus and Its Excess 5. The Unevenness of Intimacy 6. The Possibility of Reproduction 7. Coda

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Book SynopsisCommunity is a central idea in urban studies but remains conceptually vague and empirically difficult to work with. Building on existing theories of community, Talja Blokland offers an important contribution to defining and understanding this key theme. Blokland argues that there has been too much focus on community as a stable construct, formed by durable relationships with kin, friends, social groups or neighbours. She draws attention to the non-durable, fluid encounters that constitute community, theorizing communities as shared urban practices in a globalizing world. The book proposes two core ways of thinking about community: the dimension of familiarity, defined by our ability to construct identities, and the dimension of access, defined by our freedom to enter and leave urban spaces. These dimensions form various urban configurations which enable us to experience and practise community in diverse ways. As this book maintains, community is after all an urban practice, not a fixed state of affairs.Trade Review"Everybody thinks they know what the concept of community means, but it proves increasingly elusive as you try to pin it down. Talja Blokland, one of the most perceptive observers of how we live together in cities, here offers a compelling interpretation that focuses on how we perform communities, especially by drawing their boundaries."—John Mollenkopf, Graduate Center, City University of New York"Talja Blokland's beautful book explains why the search for community retains its importance into the twenty-first century. She provides a wonderful, comprehensive overview of recent research to show that communities are not a nostalgic throwback, but continue to matter as they are produced by ongoing social ties, symbolic identities, and struggles."—Mike Savage, London School of Economics and Political Science"From fluid relations to ritualized, hierarchical performances, Blokland draws on a wide range of cases to show that "community" is neither homogeneous nor permanent, yet it remains a focus of longing in an anxious, urban world. Humans perform community to define society: an effort to find a place between intimacy and anonymity, the public and the private, the home and the world."—Sharon Zukin, Brooklyn College and Graduate Center, City University of New YorkTable of ContentsAcknowledgements 1 Introduction 2 Traditions of Theorizing Community 3 Community as Culture 4 Engagements, Encounters, Social Ties 5 Relational Settings of Belonging 6 Practices of Exclusion 7 Conclusion References

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Book SynopsisOnce marginalized in the world economy, Africa today is a major global supplier of crucial raw materials like oil, uranium and coltan. China's part in this story has loomed particularly large in recent years, and the American military footprint on the continent has also expanded. But a new scramble for resources, markets and territory is now taking place in Africa involving not just state, but non state-actors, including Islamic fundamentalist and other rebel groups. The second edition of Pádraig Carmody's popular book explores the dynamics of the new scramble for African resources, markets, and territory and the impact of current investment and competition on people, the environment, and political and economic development on the continent. Fully revised and updated throughout, its chapters explore old and new economic power interests in Africa; oil, minerals, timber, biofuels, land, food and fisheries; and the nature and impacts of Asian and South African investment in manufacturing and other sectors. The New Scramble for Africa will be essential reading for students of African studies, international relations and resource politics, as well as anyone interested in current affairs.Trade Review"This �new scramble for Africa� provides an excellent overview of the current development and exploitation of Africa�s resources showing how African development is defined by the �paradox of plenty�. This collection is a must for scholars interested in understanding processes of resource grabbing in Africa from colonial times until now, illustrating the variety of forms it has taken and unrevelaing the various root causes." Annelies Zoomers, Utrecht University "Follow the money is a key message of Carmody�s supercharged analysis of the new competitive scramble for Africa�s petroleum and minerals, for its timber, even for its food crops. Few have so well exposed the mechanisms and consequences of this avarice, and particularly of China�s all-encompassing shaping of Africa�s dynamic future. Carmody is a very reliable guide and his second edition is even more definitive than the first." Robert I. Rotberg, Harvard UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction 1 The New Scramble, Geography and Development 2 Old Economic Power Interests and Strategies in Africa 3 Chinese Interests and Strategies in Africa [with Ian Taylor] 4 Other New Economic Power Interests and Relations with Africa 5 Driving the Global Economy: West African and Sahelian Oil 6 The Scramble for Land: The Ugandan Case [with David Taylor] 7 Powering and Connecting the Global Economy through Conflict: Uranium and Coltan 8 Furnishing and Feeding the World? Timber, Biofuels, Plants, Food and Fisheries 9 The Asian Scramble for Investment and Markets: Evidence and Impacts in Zambia [with Godfrey Hampwaye] 10 Can Africans Unscramble the Continent? Conclusion: The New Scramble in Perspective

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Book SynopsisIn the face of the destructive possibilities of resurgent nationalisms, unyielding ethnicities and fundamentalist religious affinities, there is hardly a more urgent task than understanding how humans can learn to live alongside one another. This fascinating book shows how people from various societies learn to live with social diversity and cultural difference, and considers how the concepts of identity formation, diaspora and creolization shed light on the processes and geographies of encounter.Robin Cohen and Olivia Sheringham reveal how early historical encounters created colonial hierarchies, but also how conflict has been creatively resisted through shared social practices in particular contact zones including islands, port cities and the ‘super-diverse’ cities formed by enhanced international migration and globalization. Drawing on research experience from across the world, including new fieldwork in Louisiana, Martinique, Mauritius and Cape Verde, their account provides a balance between rich description and insightful analysis showing, in particular, how identities emerge and merge ‘from below’.Moving seamlessly between social and political theory, history, cultural anthropology, sociology and human geography, the authors point to important new ways of understanding and living with difference, surely one of the key challenges of the twenty-first century.Trade Review"This is one of those rare books which is both erudite, eloquent and existentially engaging. The authors embark on a journey through culturally variegated landscapes, addressing the human condition and the contemporary world as they go along, asking how people are able to live with diversity; and they generously invite the reader to take part in this conversation, which is so crucial for the future of humanity on this shrinking planet of ours."Thomas Hylland Eriksen, University of Oslo "This book offers a fresh perspective in shifting the focus from human conflict to how people 'make a life together'. To navigate the difficult terrain of a diverse world, it provides readers with a pair of carefully articulated concepts as guiding lights: while diaspora looks backwards to shared heritage and homeland, creolization gives weight to the forward-looking, creative energies inherent in culture contact."Brenda S. A. Yeoh, National University of Singapore "With exceptional range of coverage and strong conceptual engagement, alongside a peppering of informative photographs, this book offers something for research, teaching, and general reading alike. [�] an important launchpad for rethinking how we approach the challenging topic of living with, in, despite, and through difference in divided times."Geography "This book is a delightful read. It succeeds because it grounds empirically rich case studies in a well thought-out theoretical framework, moving beyond bland and uninspiring liberal nostrums that �all cultures matter�. The volume demonstrates that understanding cultural encounters necessitates more than simply acknowledging differences, but requires delving into how coexisting identities complement rather than contradict one another."Barney Warf, Social & Cultural GeographyTable of Contents Framing the question: a preamble 1. Shaping the tools: three concepts 2. Exploring difference: early interactions 3. Locating identity formation: contact zones 4. Expressing merged identities: music 5. Celebrating and resisting: carnival 6. Constructing heritage 7. Marking identities: the cultural politics of multiple loyalties 8. Encountering difference: a conclusion

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Book SynopsisIn the face of the destructive possibilities of resurgent nationalisms, unyielding ethnicities and fundamentalist religious affinities, there is hardly a more urgent task than understanding how humans can learn to live alongside one another. This fascinating book shows how people from various societies learn to live with social diversity and cultural difference, and considers how the concepts of identity formation, diaspora and creolization shed light on the processes and geographies of encounter.Robin Cohen and Olivia Sheringham reveal how early historical encounters created colonial hierarchies, but also how conflict has been creatively resisted through shared social practices in particular contact zones including islands, port cities and the ‘super-diverse’ cities formed by enhanced international migration and globalization. Drawing on research experience from across the world, including new fieldwork in Louisiana, Martinique, Mauritius and Cape Verde, their account provides a balance between rich description and insightful analysis showing, in particular, how identities emerge and merge ‘from below’.Moving seamlessly between social and political theory, history, cultural anthropology, sociology and human geography, the authors point to important new ways of understanding and living with difference, surely one of the key challenges of the twenty-first century.Trade Review"This is one of those rare books which is both erudite, eloquent and existentially engaging. The authors embark on a journey through culturally variegated landscapes, addressing the human condition and the contemporary world as they go along, asking how people are able to live with diversity; and they generously invite the reader to take part in this conversation, which is so crucial for the future of humanity on this shrinking planet of ours."Thomas Hylland Eriksen, University of Oslo "This book offers a fresh perspective in shifting the focus from human conflict to how people 'make a life together'. To navigate the difficult terrain of a diverse world, it provides readers with a pair of carefully articulated concepts as guiding lights: while diaspora looks backwards to shared heritage and homeland, creolization gives weight to the forward-looking, creative energies inherent in culture contact."Brenda S. A. Yeoh, National University of Singapore "With exceptional range of coverage and strong conceptual engagement, alongside a peppering of informative photographs, this book offers something for research, teaching, and general reading alike. [�] an important launchpad for rethinking how we approach the challenging topic of living with, in, despite, and through difference in divided times."Geography "This book is a delightful read. It succeeds because it grounds empirically rich case studies in a well thought-out theoretical framework, moving beyond bland and uninspiring liberal nostrums that �all cultures matter�. The volume demonstrates that understanding cultural encounters necessitates more than simply acknowledging differences, but requires delving into how coexisting identities complement rather than contradict one another."Barney Warf, Social & Cultural GeographyTable of Contents Framing the question: a preamble 1. Shaping the tools: three concepts 2. Exploring difference: early interactions 3. Locating identity formation: contact zones 4. Expressing merged identities: music 5. Celebrating and resisting: carnival 6. Constructing heritage 7. Marking identities: the cultural politics of multiple loyalties 8. Encountering difference: a conclusion

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Book SynopsisIncreasingly, many people in democracies are turning to a strongarm politics for reassurance against globalization, uncertainty and precarity. In countries ranging from the US and the UK to Brazil, India and Turkey, support has grown for a nativist politics attacking migrants, minorities, liberals and elites as enemies of the nation. Is there a politics of belonging that progressive forces could mobilize to counteract these trends? After Nativism takes up this question, arguing that disarming nativism will require more than improving the security and wellbeing of the ‘left-behind’. The lines drawn by nativism are of an affective nature about imagined community, with meanings of belonging and voice lying at the heart of popular perceptions of just dues. This, argues Ash Amin, is the territory that progressive forces – liberal, social democratic, socialist – need to reclaim in order to shift public sentiment away from xenophobic intolerance towards one of commonality amid difference as a basis for facing existential risk and uncertainty. The book proposes a relational politics of belonging premised on the encounter, fugitive aesthetics, public interest politics, collaboration over common existential threats, and daily collectives and infrastructures of wellbeing. There is ground for progressives to mount a counter-aesthetics of belonging that will convince the discontents of neoliberal globalization that there is a better alternative to nativism.Trade Review‘Ash Amin's book has the great virtue of explaining the failure of the progressive left to make arguments for renewed democratic politics which match the visceral appeals of the populist right. Amin's solution, which promotes an aesthetic mode of resistance based on tactile and experiential images of belonging, is sure to provoke a rich debate.’Arjun Appadurai, New York UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Grounds of Belonging 2. Street Affinities 3. The Intimate Public Sphere 4. Aesthetics of Nation Coda Bibliography

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Book SynopsisIn Community Benefits, Jovanna P. Rosen explores a new pattern in urban development: local residents and community representatives leveraging large-scale development projects for agreements that promise dedicated local benefits, such as parks and jobs. In general, such development projects have not produced impactful benefits for local residents, and often have contributed to significant community harm, including gentrification and displacement. In response, community activists have launched a fight to control development, using benefits-sharing agreements to ensure that projects produced better outcomes for local residents. While such agreements now exist across the nation, the process of negotiating and enforcing them remains challenging. This book dives deep into four case studies—in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Seattle, and Milwaukee—to answer the following questions: Who ultimately benefits from both the agreements and the projects in question? How do benefits get delivered, and who controls this process? What works for these agreements to successfully produce community outcomes? Rosen shows that, without agreements that promote accountability, developers and other project proponents can walk away from the negotiating table once the agreement is signed and the development moves forward. This disregard for community benefits and priorities can leave community residents solely responsible for benefits delivery during implementation, but with few viable avenues to ensure that outcomes materialize. The cases reveal specific elements that agreements require to achieve success during implementation: community participation, managerial connections, effective partnerships, responsiveness, and vigorous oversight with accountability mechanisms. Although creating these conditions is difficult, sometimes impossible, and contingent on fragile processes, Rosen concludes the book with recommendations for both the agreement negotiation and implementation phases to ensure success.Trade Review"Community Benefits uses four qualitative case studies in the United States to investigate the challenges and opportunities associated with benefits-sharing agreements...The book adeptly leverages the similar-ities and differences between the cases to illustrate common themes and broaden the book’s scope [and] provides a wide-ranging, accessible, and clear accounting of benefits sharing in the United States...[A] worthwhile read for anyone interested in learning about the practical challenges and limits of benefits-sharing agreements." * Journal of the American Planning Association *

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Book SynopsisA collection of previously untranslated writings by Henri Lefebvre on rural sociology, situating his research in relation to wider Marxist workOn the Rural is the first English collection to translate Lefebvre’s crucial but lesser-known writings on rural sociology and political economy, presenting a wide-ranging approach to understanding the historical and rural sociology of precapitalist social forms, their endurance today, and conditions of dispossession and uneven development. In On the Rural, Stuart Elden and Adam David Morton present Lefebvre’s key works on rural questions, including the first half of his book Du rural à l’urbain and supplementary texts, two of which are largely unknown conference presentations published outside France. On the Rural offers methodological orientations for addressing questions of economy, sociology, and geography by deploying insights from spatial political economy to decipher the rural as a terrain and stake of capitalist transformation. By doing so, it reveals the production of the rural as a key site of capitalist development and as a space of struggle. This volume delivers a careful translation—supplemented with extensive notes and a substantive introduction—to cement Lefebvre’s central contribution to the political economy of rural sociology and geography. Trade Review"On the Rural is a remarkable collection. Lefebvre wrote as a historian, a sociologist, a geographer, a political-economist, and a philosopher. This makes for challenging reading at times but there are also brilliant passages that will goad readers on to the next page. "—Cleveland Review of BooksTable of ContentsFrom the Rural to the Urban and the Production of SpaceStuart Elden and Adam David MortonNotes on TranslationAcknowledgments1. Introduction to From the Rural to the Urban (1969)2. Problems of Rural Sociology: The Peasant Community and its Historical-Sociological Problems (1949)3. Social Classes in Rural Areas: Tuscany and the mezzadria classica (1950)4. Perspectives on Rural Sociology (1953)5. Social Relations, Population Phenomena, and Labor Problems in the Agricultural Sector of Underdeveloped Countries (1954)6. The Village Community (1956)7. The Theory of Ground Rent and Rural Sociology (1956)8. The Marxist–Leninist Theory of Ground Rent (1964)9. Introduction to the Psychosociology of Everyday Life (1960)10. The New Urban Complex: Lacq-Mourenx and the Urban Problems of the New Working Class (1960)11. Experimental Utopia: For a New Urbanism (1961)12. The Valley of Campan: A Study in Historical Sociology (1963)Publication HistoryIndex

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Book SynopsisFrom broken-window policing in Detroit to prison-building in Appalachia, exploring the expansion of the carceral state and its oppressive social relations into everyday lifePrison Land offers a geographic excavation of the prison as a set of social relations—including property, work, gender, and race—enacted across various landscapes of American life. Prisons, Brett Story shows, are more than just buildings of incarceration bound to cycles of crime and punishment. Instead, she investigates the production of carceral power at a range of sites, from buses to coalfields and from blighted cities to urban financial hubs, to demonstrate how the organization of carceral space is ideologically and materially grounded in racial capitalism.Story’s critically acclaimed film The Prison in Twelve Landscapes is based on the same research that informs this book. In both, Story takes an expansive view of what constitutes contemporary carceral space, interrogating the ways in which racial capitalism is reproduced and for which police technologies of containment and control are employed. By framing the prison as a set of social relations, Prison Land forces us to confront the production of new carceral forms that go well beyond the prison system. In doing so, it profoundly undermines both conventional ideas of prisons as logical responses to the problem of crime and attachment to punishment as the relevant measure of a transformed criminal justice system.

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Book SynopsisSeeing the camp as a persistent political instrument in Israel–Palestine and beyondThe Common Camp underscores the role of the camp as a spatial instrument employed for reshaping, controlling, and struggling over specific territories and populations. Focusing on the geopolitical complexity of Israel–Palestine and the dramatic changes it has experienced during the past century, this book explores the region’s extensive networks of camps and their existence as both a tool of colonial power and a makeshift space of resistance. Examining various forms of camps devised by and for Zionist settlers, Palestinian refugees, asylum seekers, and other groups, Irit Katz demonstrates how the camp serves as a common thread in shaping lands and lives of subjects from across the political spectrum. Analyzing the architectural and political evolution of the camp as a modern instrument engaged by colonial and national powers (as well as those opposing them), Katz offers a unique perspective on the dynamics of Israel–Palestine, highlighting how spatial transience has become permanent in the ongoing story of this contested territory. The Common Camp presents a novel approach to the concept of the camp, detailing its varied history as an apparatus used for population containment and territorial expansion as well as a space of everyday life and subversive political action. Bringing together a broad range of historical and ethnographic materials within the context of this singular yet versatile entity, the book locates the camp at the core of modern societies and how they change and transform. Trade Review"The Common Camp is truly original and deeply researched. It is a brilliant study that is bound to become a classic read for anyone wishing to understand the camp in all its various manifestations and shifts in power relations between those entrapped and encamped and those external to its borders."—Dawn Chatty, University of Oxford"The Common Camp is a great book, both theoretically and historically, and likely to become a foundational reference. It provides a substantial advance on theorizations of the camp, developing from and critiquing Agamben’s work. The rich discussion of the history and politics of Israel–Palestine is an analysis through the camp as much as of the camp, which opens some valuable and much-needed perspective."—Stuart Elden, author of The Early FoucaultTable of ContentsGlossaryIntroduction: The Common Camp1. The Camp Reconfigured: Modernity’s Versatile Architecture of Power2. Facilitating Double Colonialism: British and Zionist Camps in Mandatory Palestine3. Gathering, Absorbing, and Reordering the Diaspora: Immigrant and Transit Camps of Israel’s Early Statehood4. Forced Pioneering: Settling Israel’s Frontiers5. Unrecognized Order: The Imposed Camp-ness of the Negev/Naqab Bedouin6. Camping, Decamping, Encamping: Palestinian Refugee and Protest Camps and Israeli Settler Camps in the Occupied Territories 7. In the Desert Penal Colony: Holot Detention Camp for African Asylum SeekersConclusion, or Toward an Ever-Emerging Theory of the CampAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisMeth cooks practice late industrial alchemy—transforming base materials, like lithium batteries and camping fuel, into gold Meth alchemists all over the United States tap the occulted potencies of industrial chemical and big pharma products to try to cure the ills of precarious living: underemployment, insecurity, and the feeling of idleness. Meth fires up your attention and makes repetitive tasks pleasurable, whether it’s factory work or tinkering at home. Users are awake for days and feel exuberant and invincible. In one person’s words, they “get more life.” The Alchemy of Meth is a nonfiction storybook about St. Jude County, Missouri, a place in decomposition, where the toxic inheritance of deindustrialization meets the violent hope of this drug-making cottage industry. Jason Pine bases the book on fieldwork among meth cooks, recovery professionals, pastors, public defenders, narcotics agents, and pharmaceutical executives. Here, St. Jude is not reduced to its meth problem but Pine looks at meth through materials, landscapes, and institutions: the sprawling context that makes methlabs possible. The Alchemy of Meth connects DIY methlabs to big pharma’s superlabs, illicit speed to the legalized speed sold as ADHD medication, uniquely implicating the author’s own story in the narrative. By the end of the book, the backdrop of St. Jude becomes the foreground. It could be a story about life and work anywhere in the United States, where it seems no one is truly clean and all are complicit in the exploitation of their precious resources in exchange for a livable present—or even the hope of a future.Trade Review"The Alchemy of Meth is a sui generis masterpiece. Jason Pine's kaleidoscopic vision provides a portrait of the American Dream seen from a place where instead something else flourishes: home methamphetamine production. He depicts both a human tragedy and the socioeconomic pressures that have made tragedy inevitable. The contemporary political moment makes this book particularly timely, but its grace and power will remain timeless."—Anthony Marra, author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena"This is a truly remarkable ethnography of the affects, economies, and materialities of methamphetamine production (and consumption) in the decaying heartlands of the United States. Fearlessly experimental yet compulsively readable, it picks its way through debris-strewn landscapes, interweaving voices, stories, and idioms (from legal documents to poetry), encountering not only ruin and devastation but also strangeness, magic, and even, on occasion, hope."—Stuart McLean, University of Minnesota"Jason Pine’s writing is alchemical. By fusing his tales of ordinary citizens in Missouri cooking meth, he cooks up a story that goes deep and gives us a raw taste of the decaying fabric of American life today."—Norman Ohler, author of Blitzed and The Bohemians"By weaving together vignettes culled from interviews of users, cooks, family members of the affected, enforcement agents, and pharmaceutical company executives, Pine traced the topography of meth as its use expanded dramatically during the early 21st century."—CityLab"The Alchemy of Meth is like the best of person-centred ethnographies: humane, deliberate, and impactful."—Anthropological Forum

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Book SynopsisMeth cooks practice late industrial alchemy—transforming base materials, like lithium batteries and camping fuel, into gold Meth alchemists all over the United States tap the occulted potencies of industrial chemical and big pharma products to try to cure the ills of precarious living: underemployment, insecurity, and the feeling of idleness. Meth fires up your attention and makes repetitive tasks pleasurable, whether it’s factory work or tinkering at home. Users are awake for days and feel exuberant and invincible. In one person’s words, they “get more life.” The Alchemy of Meth is a nonfiction storybook about St. Jude County, Missouri, a place in decomposition, where the toxic inheritance of deindustrialization meets the violent hope of this drug-making cottage industry. Jason Pine bases the book on fieldwork among meth cooks, recovery professionals, pastors, public defenders, narcotics agents, and pharmaceutical executives. Here, St. Jude is not reduced to its meth problem but Pine looks at meth through materials, landscapes, and institutions: the sprawling context that makes methlabs possible. The Alchemy of Meth connects DIY methlabs to big pharma’s superlabs, illicit speed to the legalized speed sold as ADHD medication, uniquely implicating the author’s own story in the narrative. By the end of the book, the backdrop of St. Jude becomes the foreground. It could be a story about life and work anywhere in the United States, where it seems no one is truly clean and all are complicit in the exploitation of their precious resources in exchange for a livable present—or even the hope of a future.Trade Review"The Alchemy of Meth is a sui generis masterpiece. Jason Pine's kaleidoscopic vision provides a portrait of the American Dream seen from a place where instead something else flourishes: home methamphetamine production. He depicts both a human tragedy and the socioeconomic pressures that have made tragedy inevitable. The contemporary political moment makes this book particularly timely, but its grace and power will remain timeless."—Anthony Marra, author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena"This is a truly remarkable ethnography of the affects, economies, and materialities of methamphetamine production (and consumption) in the decaying heartlands of the United States. Fearlessly experimental yet compulsively readable, it picks its way through debris-strewn landscapes, interweaving voices, stories, and idioms (from legal documents to poetry), encountering not only ruin and devastation but also strangeness, magic, and even, on occasion, hope."—Stuart McLean, University of Minnesota"Jason Pine’s writing is alchemical. By fusing his tales of ordinary citizens in Missouri cooking meth, he cooks up a story that goes deep and gives us a raw taste of the decaying fabric of American life today."—Norman Ohler, author of Blitzed and The Bohemians"By weaving together vignettes culled from interviews of users, cooks, family members of the affected, enforcement agents, and pharmaceutical company executives, Pine traced the topography of meth as its use expanded dramatically during the early 21st century."—CityLab"The Alchemy of Meth is like the best of person-centred ethnographies: humane, deliberate, and impactful."—Anthropological Forum

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Book SynopsisNationality is not enough to understand “Latin”-descended populations in the United States LatinX has neither country nor fixed geography. LatinX, according to Claudia Milian, is the most powerful conceptual tool of the Latino/a present, an itinerary whose analytic routes incorporate the Global South and ecological devastation. Milian’s trailblazing study deploys the indeterminate but thunderous “X” as intellectual armor, a speculative springboard, and a question for our times that never stops being asked. LatinX sorts out and addresses issues about the unknowability of social realities that exceed our present knowledge.Forerunners: Ideas FirstShort books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

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Book SynopsisHow contemporary environmental struggles and resistance to pipeline development became populist struggles Stunning Indigenous resistance to the Keystone XL and the Dakota Access pipelines has made global headlines in recent years. Less remarked on are the crucial populist movements that have also played a vital role in pipeline resistance. Kai Bosworth explores the influence of populism on environmentalist politics, which sought to bring together Indigenous water protectors and environmental activists along with farmers and ranchers in opposition to pipeline construction.Here Bosworth argues that populism is shaped by the “affective infrastructures” emerging from shifts in regional economies, democratic public-review processes, and scientific controversies. With this lens, he investigates how these movements wax and wane, moving toward or away from other forms of environmental and political ideologies in the Upper Midwest. This lens also lets Bosworth place populist social movements in the critical geographical contexts of racial inequality, nationalist sentiments, ongoing settler colonialism, and global empire—crucial topics when grappling with the tensions embedded in our era’s immense environmental struggles.Pipeline Populism reveals the complex role populism has played in shifting interpretations of environmental movements, democratic ideals, scientific expertise, and international geopolitics. Its rich data about these grassroots resistance struggles include intimate portraits of the emotional spaces where opposition is first formed. Probing the very limits of populism, Pipeline Populism presents essential work for an era defined by a wave of people-powered movements around the world.Trade Review "Pipeline Populism is an endlessly insightful, generative study of environmental populism as a response to extractivism and neoliberal environmentalism. Sensitive to multiracial populism’s democratic aspirations and its settler colonial desires, Kai Bosworth offers a vital guide to the limits of populist pipeline resistance and its resources for more revolutionary socialist transformation. This is essential reading for those interested in left-wing populism and climate justice alike."—Laura Grattan, author of Populism’s Power: Radical Grassroots Democracy in America "Environmental populism is a genre of white settler politics that may reiterate the worst parts of American hubris and anti-government individualism, but it may also have openings within it for transformation, through solidarity with indigenous people and more radical political action. Kai Bosworth’s wonderful analysis of the ‘affective infrastructures’ of environmental populism helps us see the politics of climate change, and of populism, with a sharper and more nuanced eye. This book is an indispensable guide to many of the problems plaguing left-wing environmental politics, and it also offers us a clearer vision with which to move forward, both as academics and political actors."—Lida Maxwell, author of Insurgent Truth: Chelsea Manning and the Politics of Outsider Truth-Telling "Pipeline’s focus on populism is a unique approach to defining and engaging with the climate movement, bringing together geographical and political concerns to approach questions of community organization and activist movements. "—H-Net Reviews Table of ContentsPreface and AcknowledgmentsAbbreviationsIntroduction: Affective Infrastructures of Populist Environmentalism1. “This Land Is Our Land”: Private Property and Territorialized Resentment2. “Keystone XL Hearing Nearly Irrelevant”: Participation and Resigned Pragmatism3. Canadian Invasion for Chinese Consumption: Foreign Oil and Heartland Melodrama4. The People Know Best: Counter-Expertise and Jaded ConfidenceConclusion: The Desire to Be PopularNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisA timely and provocative discussion of alienation as an intersectional category of life under racial capitalism and white supremacy From the divisiveness of the Trump era to the Covid-19 pandemic, alienation has become an all-too-familiar contemporary concept. In this groundbreaking book, James A. Tyner offers a novel framework for understanding the alienated subject, situating it within racial capitalism and white supremacy. Directly addressing current economic trends and their rhetoric of xenophobia, discrimination, and violence, The Alienated Subject exposes the universal whitewashing of alienation. Drawing insight from a variety of sources, including Marxism, feminism, existentialism, and critical race theory, Tyner develops a critique of both the liberal subject and the alienated subject. Through an engagement with the recent pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement, he demonstrates how the alienated subject is capable of both compassion and cruelty; it is a sadomasochist. Tyner goes on to emphasize the importance of the particular places we find the alienated subject and how the revolutionary transformation of alienation is inherently a spatial struggle. Returning to key interlocutors from Sartre to Fromm, he examines political notions of distance and the spatial practices of everyday life as well as the capitalist conditions that give rise to the alienated subject.For Tyner, the alienated subject is not the iconic, romanticized image of Marx’s proletariat. Here he calls for an affirmation of love as a revolutionary concept, necessary for the transformation of a society marred by capitalism into an emancipated, caring society conditioned by socially just relations.Trade Review"James A. Tyner hits hard on page one and never lets up. His passion for humanity is intense, his concern for the possibilities of humanity deep and penetrating, his disdain for the depths of wayward inhumanity unnerving, and his hope for a meaningful life for all humans compelling. His insightful and incisive analysis is a model of such hope. The world needs this book." —Audrey Kobayashi, Queen’s UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction1. A Flourishing, but Mortal Life2. The Alienated Subject3. The Intersectionality of Alienation4. Whose Lives Matter?5. The Emancipated SubjectAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisA timely and provocative discussion of alienation as an intersectional category of life under racial capitalism and white supremacy From the divisiveness of the Trump era to the Covid-19 pandemic, alienation has become an all-too-familiar contemporary concept. In this groundbreaking book, James A. Tyner offers a novel framework for understanding the alienated subject, situating it within racial capitalism and white supremacy. Directly addressing current economic trends and their rhetoric of xenophobia, discrimination, and violence, The Alienated Subject exposes the universal whitewashing of alienation. Drawing insight from a variety of sources, including Marxism, feminism, existentialism, and critical race theory, Tyner develops a critique of both the liberal subject and the alienated subject. Through an engagement with the recent pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement, he demonstrates how the alienated subject is capable of both compassion and cruelty; it is a sadomasochist. Tyner goes on to emphasize the importance of the particular places we find the alienated subject and how the revolutionary transformation of alienation is inherently a spatial struggle. Returning to key interlocutors from Sartre to Fromm, he examines political notions of distance and the spatial practices of everyday life as well as the capitalist conditions that give rise to the alienated subject.For Tyner, the alienated subject is not the iconic, romanticized image of Marx’s proletariat. Here he calls for an affirmation of love as a revolutionary concept, necessary for the transformation of a society marred by capitalism into an emancipated, caring society conditioned by socially just relations.Trade Review"James A. Tyner hits hard on page one and never lets up. His passion for humanity is intense, his concern for the possibilities of humanity deep and penetrating, his disdain for the depths of wayward inhumanity unnerving, and his hope for a meaningful life for all humans compelling. His insightful and incisive analysis is a model of such hope. The world needs this book." —Audrey Kobayashi, Queen’s UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction1. A Flourishing, but Mortal Life2. The Alienated Subject3. The Intersectionality of Alienation4. Whose Lives Matter?5. The Emancipated SubjectAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisQuestioning the boundaries between politics and economics Jean-Louis Laville’s large body of work has focused on an intellectual history of the concept of solidarity since the Industrial Revolution. In The Solidarity Economy, his most famous distillation of this work, Laville establishes how the formations of economic solidarities (unions, activism, and other forms of associationalism) reveal that the boundaries between politics and economics are porous and structured such that politics, ideally a pure expression of ethics and values, is instead integrated with economic concerns. Exploring the possibilities and long histories of association, The Solidarity Economy identifies the power of contemporary social and solidarity movements and examines the history of postcapitalist practices in which democratic demands invade the heart of the economy. The Solidarity Economy ranges in focus from workers associations in France dating back to the nineteenth century, to associations of African Americans and feminists in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to a Brazilian landless-worker coalition in the twentieth century. Studying solidarity associations over time allows us to examine how we can recombine the economic and political spheres to address dependencies and inequalities. Ultimately, The Solidarity Economy has global scope and inspiring examples of associations that deepen democracy. Trade Review "The practices that can carry us toward a plural economy and a plural democracy already exist; the question is what kind of social change they can bring about." —from the Conclusion

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Book SynopsisExamines how settler colonial and sexist infrastructures and narratives order a resource boom Over the past decade, new oil plays have unsettled U.S. energy landscapes and imaginaries. Settling the Boom studies how the disruptive forces of an oil boom in the northern Great Plains are contained through the extension of settler temporalities, reassertions of heteropatriarchy, and the tethering of life to the volatility of oil and its cruel optimisms.This collection reveals the results of sustained research in Williston, North Dakota, the epicenter of the “Bakken Boom.” While the boom brought a rapid influx of capital and workers, the book questions simple timelines of before and after. Instead, Settling the Boom demonstrates how the unsettling forces of an oil play resolve through normative narratives and material and affective infrastructures that support settler colonialism’s violent extension and its gendered orders of time and space. Considering a wide range of evidence, from urban and regional policy, interviews with city officials, media, photography, and film, these essays analyze the ongoing material, aesthetic, and narrative ways of life and land in the Bakken.Contributors: Morgan Adamson, Macalester College; Kai Bosworth, Virginia Commonwealth U; Thomas S. Davis, Ohio State U; Jessica Lehman, Durham U.

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Book SynopsisExamines how settler colonial and sexist infrastructures and narratives order a resource boom Over the past decade, new oil plays have unsettled U.S. energy landscapes and imaginaries. Settling the Boom studies how the disruptive forces of an oil boom in the northern Great Plains are contained through the extension of settler temporalities, reassertions of heteropatriarchy, and the tethering of life to the volatility of oil and its cruel optimisms.This collection reveals the results of sustained research in Williston, North Dakota, the epicenter of the “Bakken Boom.” While the boom brought a rapid influx of capital and workers, the book questions simple timelines of before and after. Instead, Settling the Boom demonstrates how the unsettling forces of an oil play resolve through normative narratives and material and affective infrastructures that support settler colonialism’s violent extension and its gendered orders of time and space. Considering a wide range of evidence, from urban and regional policy, interviews with city officials, media, photography, and film, these essays analyze the ongoing material, aesthetic, and narrative ways of life and land in the Bakken.Contributors: Morgan Adamson, Macalester College; Kai Bosworth, Virginia Commonwealth U; Thomas S. Davis, Ohio State U; Jessica Lehman, Durham U.

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Book SynopsisAn influential thinker’s fascinating reflections and meditations on reacclimating to his native Senegal as a young academic after years of study abroad The call to morning prayer. A group run at daybreak along the Corniche in Dakar. A young woman shedding tears on a beach as her friends take a boat to Europe. In African Meditations, paths to enlightenment collide with tales of loss and ruminations, musical gatherings, and the everyday sights and sounds of life in West Africa as a young philosopher and creative writer seeks to establish himself as a teacher upon his return to Senegal, his homeland, after years of study abroad. A unique contemporary portrait of an influential, multicultural thinker on a spiritual quest across continents—reflecting on his multiple literary influences along with French, African Francophone, and Senegalese tribal cultural roots in a homeland with a predominantly Muslim culture—African Meditations is a seamless blend of autobiography, journal entries, and fiction; aphorisms and brief narrative sketches; humor and Zen reflections. Taking us from Saint-Louis to Dakar, Felwine Sarr encounters the rhythms of everyday life as well as its disruptions such as teachers’ strikes and power outages while traversing a semi-surrealistic landscape. As he reacclimates to his native country after a life in France, we get candid glimpses, both vibrant and hopeful, sublime and mundane, into his Zen journey to resecure a foothold in his roots and to navigate academia, even while gleaning something of the good life, of joy, amid the struggles of life in Senegal. Trade Review"The following meditations are to be read so as to remind us that thought is not the product of some disincarnated spirit at rest but is rather a practice and activity of a body in movement."—Souleymane Bachir Diagne, from the Foreword"African Meditations speaks of the earth: how we inhabit it and connect to its most elementary forces. It aphoristically reflects on happiness but ponders its fragmentary nature and precariousness. Felwine Sarr shows us the good life and suggests that, in Senegal and beyond, it often takes the path of ‘motionless pilgrimages.’ A wise and richly evocative book."—Pierre-Philippe Fraiture, University of Warwick

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Book SynopsisJulie Ren investigates the motivations and practices of making art spaces in Beijing and Berlin to engage with comparative urbanism as a framework for doing research, beyond its significance as a critical intervention. Across vastly different contexts, where universal theories of modernity or development seem increasingly misplaced, she innovatively explores the ways that art spaces employ creative capital to sustain themselves in a competitive urban landscape. She shows how these art spaces are embedded within a politics of aspiration and demonstrates that aspiration is an important lens through which to understand the nature of, and possibilities for, urban change.Table of ContentsElsewheres Operationalizing Comparative Urbanism Envisioning Art Spaces Making Do Expressions The Capacity to Aspire

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