Urban communities / city life Books
Cornell University Press City of Big Shoulders
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewCondensed yet energetic and substantial history of Chicago. Spinney has a firm sense of historical narrative as well as a keen eye for entertaining and illuminating detail. * Publishers Weekly *A much-needed, brief yet comprehensive analytical history of Chicago. * Journal of Illinois History *Table of Contents1. The Early World of Chigagou, 1600–1750 2. Chigagou Becomes Chicago, 1750–1835 3. Boom, Bust, and Recovery in Early Chicago, 1835–1850 4. Chicago Conquers the Midwest, 1850–1890 5. Life in a City on the Make, 1850–1900 6. The Fire, the Bomb, and the Fair, 1871–1893 7. The New Immigration, 1880–1920 8. Progressivism and Urban Reform, 1890–1915 9. World War I and the Roaring Twenties, 1915–1929 10. The Great Depression, World War II, and Suburban Growth, 1929–1955 11. Richard J. Daley and the City That Works, 1955–1976 12. The Challenges of the Post-Machine Years, 1976–1997 13. Glamorous and Grim: Chicago in the Twenty-First Century
£17.09
Cornell University Press Raceing Fargo
Book SynopsisTracing the history of refugee settlement in Fargo, North Dakota, from the 1980s to the present day, Race-ing Fargo focuses on the role that gender, religion, and sociality play in everyday interactions between refugees from South Sudan and Bosnia-Herzegovina and the dominant white Euro-American population of the city. Jennifer Erickson outlines the ways in which refugees have impacted this small city over the last thirty years, showing how culture, political economy, and institutional transformations collectively contribute to the racialization of white cities like Fargo in ways that complicate their demographics. Race-ing Fargo shows that race, religion, and decorum prove to be powerful forces determining worthiness and belonging in the city and draws attention to the different roles that state and private sectors played in shaping ideas about race and citizenship on a local level. Through the comparative study of white secular Muslim Bosnians and Black ChristTrade ReviewA grounded study of the everyday practices of refugee-serving state and nonprofit agencies and the interpersonal relationships between refugees and the city's dominant white population, this volume offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of how refugees have reshaped local ideas about race, citizenship practices, and belonging. * Choice *Race-ing Fargo contributes to the literature on refugee resettlement, new immigrant destinations, and urban studies and would be of interest to scholars and students in these fields. * Ethnic and Racial Studies *Race-ing Fargo is a meticulously researched study about citizenship and diversity practices among residents and newcomers resulting from refugee resettlement and how those played out in, and transformed, the small global city of Fargo, North Dakota—making important contributions to race, immigration, belonging, welfare, and globalization scholarship. * Social Forces *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Valley to the World 1. Histories, Assemblages, and the City 2. The NGOization of Refugee Resettlement 3. ibling Rivalry: Welfare and Refugee Resettlement 4. Diversity and Inclusion in Fargo 5. Resettled Orientalisms: Bosnian Muslims and Roma in Fargo 6. Beyond Bare Life: Southern Sudanese in Fargo Conclusion: Prairie for the People
£97.20
Cornell University Press The Things of Life
Book SynopsisThe Things of Life is a social and cultural history of material objects and spaces during the late socialist era. It traces the biographies of Soviet things, examining how the material world of the late Soviet period influenced Soviet people''s gender roles, habitual choices, social trajectories, and imaginary aspirations. Instead of seeing political structures and discursive frameworks as the only mechanisms for shaping Soviet citizens, Alexey Golubev explores how Soviet people used objects and spaces to substantiate their individual and collective selves. In doing so, Golubev rediscovers what helped Soviet citizens make sense of their selves and the world around them, ranging from space rockets and model aircraft to heritage buildings, and from home gyms to the hallways and basements of post-Stalinist housing. Through these various materialist fascinations, The Things of Life considers the ways in which many Soviet people subverted the efforts of the Communist regimeTrade ReviewGolubev (Univ. of Houston) has produced a provocative work on materiality in the late Soviet period. The study analyzes the role of material objects and spaces in the development of gender roles, social structures, and the socialist ideal in the last decades of the Soviet Union. * Choice *The Things of Life is an important book and a substantial contribution to the social and cultural history of the USSR, the history of Soviet materiality, and material culture in general. Although it is rather short, the book covers a lot of ground and offers important theoretical insights. It should stimulate scholars to continue the exploration of socialist material culture and other interstices of the Soviet individual and collective experience. * Ab Imperio *Golubev's book contributes to a more nuanced understanding of late-Soviet everyday life. [T]his analytical intervention makes Golubev's book a valuable resource for anthropologists working with materialities and their interfaces with selves and bodies. * Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford *The Things of Life is provocative, tantalizing and stimulating, and it fully achieves its aim of showing the importance and creative potential of centring the material at the heart of human experience. * Slavonic and East European Review *[A] highly readable text and an ideal integration of theory, empiricism, and narrative. This book lends itself well to teaching and is a welcome addition to our knowledge of late Soviet society, thoroughly researched and theorized, yet accessibly written in a lively tone. * The Russian Review *Golubev's book stands in a rich tradition of investigating the social agency of things and the entanglements between humans and objects in Soviet Russia and other European socialist countries. Golubev's book is certainly a welcome addition to the academic literature on (post)soviet materiality. * Technology and Culture *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Elemental Materialism in Soviet Culture and Society 1. Techno-Utopian Visions of Soviet Intellectuals after Stalin 2. Time in 1:72 Scale: The Plastic Historicity of Soviet Models 3. History in Wood: The Search for Historical Authenticity in North Russia 4. When Spaces of Transit Fail Their Designers: Social Antagonisms of Soviet Stairwells and Streets 5. The Men of Steel: Repairing and Empowering Soviet Bodies with Iron 6. Ordinary and Paranormal: The Soviet Television Set Conclusions: Soviet Objects and Socialist Modernity
£32.30
Cornell University Press Vulnerable Communities
Book SynopsisVulnerable Communities examines the struggles of smaller cities in the United States, those with populations between 20,000 and 200,000. Like many larger metropolitan centers, these places are confronting change within a globalized economic and cultural order. Many of them have lost their identities as industrial or commercial centers and face a complex and distinctive mix of economic, social, and civic challenges. Small cities have not only fewer resources but different strengths and weaknesses, all of which differentiate their experiences from those of larger communities.Vulnerable Communities draws together scholars from a broad range of disciplines to consider the present condition and future prospects of smaller American cities. Contributors offer a mix of ground-level analyses and examinations of broader developments that have impacted economically weakened communities and provide concrete ideas for local leaders engaged in redevelopment workTrade ReviewVulnerable Communities belongs on the shelf of any library focused on the future of small cities.[It] makes an important contribution[.] * Journal of Urban Affairs *Table of ContentsVulnerable Communities: An Introduction, by James J. Connolly, Dagney G. Faulk, and Emily J. Wornell Part I: INTERNAL DYNAMICS 1. The Perils of In-Betweenness: Fragmented Growth in a Virginia Small City, by Henry Way 2. Building Civic Infrastructure in Smaller Cities: Lessons from the Boston Fed's Working Cities Challenge on Paving the Way for Economic Opportunity, by Colleen Dawicki 3. Diversity in the Dakotas: Lessons on Intercultural Policies, by Jennifer Erickson 4. Shaking Off the Rust in the America South: Deindustrialization, Abandonment, and Revitalization in Bessemer, Alabama, by William G. Holt Part II: PATTERNS AND STRATEGIES 5. The Economic Fortunes of Small Industrial Cities and Towns: Manufacturing, Place Luck, and the UrbanTransfer Payment Economy, by Alan Mallach 6. Where Do Small Cities Belong? The Case of theMicropolitan Area, by James Matthew Fannin and Vikash Dangal 7. Conceptualizing Shrinking Inner-Ring Suburbs asSmall Cities: Governance in Communities in Transition, by Hannah Lebovits 8. Local Government Responses to Property Tax Caps: An Analysis of Indiana Municipal Governments, by Dagney G. Faulk, Charles Taylor, and Pamela Schaal 9. Asymmetric Local Employment Multipliers, Agglomeration, and the Disappearance of Footloose Jobs, by Michael J. Hicks
£26.59
Cornell University Press Fractured Militancy
Book SynopsisDrawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with activists, Fractured Militancy tells the story of postapartheid South Africa from the perspective of Johannesburg''s impoverished urban Black neighborhoods. Nearly three decades after South Africa''s transition from apartheid to democracy, widespread protests and xenophobic attacks suggest that not all is well in the once-celebrated rainbow nation. Marcel Paret traces rising protests back to the process of democratization and racial inclusion. This process dangled the possibility of change but preserved racial inequality and economic insecurity, prompting residents to use militant protests to express their deep sense of betrayal and to demand recognition and community development. Underscoring remarkable parallels to movements such as Black Lives Matter in the United States, this account attests to an ongoing struggle for Black liberation in the wake of formal racial inclusion.RTrade ReviewOverall, those interested in social movements, political economy, or methodologically rigorous qualitative work, will find Fractured Militancy an engaging and fruitful read. * Sociology of Race and Ethnicity *Table of ContentsIntroduction Part 1: MOBILIZATION 1. National Liberation 2. Betrayal Part 2: FRAGMENTATION 3. Community 4. Nationalism 5. Class Politics Conclusion
£23.39
Cornell University Press Free Culture and the City
Book SynopsisFree Culture and the City examines how and why free software spread beyond the world of hackers and software engineers and became the basis for an urban movement now heralded by scholars as a model for emulation. By the late 1990s, digital activists embraced a philosophy of free software and free culture in order to take control over their cities and everyday lives. Free culture, previously tethered to the digital realm, was cut loose and used to reclaim and resculpt the city. In Madrid the effects were dramatic. Common sights in the city were abandoned as industrial factories turned into autonomous social centers, urban orchards, guerrilla architectural camps, or community hacklabs. Drawing on two decades of ethnographic and historical work with free culture collectives in Madrid, Free Culture and the City shows how, in its journey from the digital to the urban, the practice of liberating culture required the mobilization of, and alliances
£28.49
Cornell University Press Corruption Plots
Book SynopsisWinner of the Anthony Leeds Prize in Urban Anthropology by the American Anthropological AssociationCorruption Plots illuminates how corruption is fundamental to global storytelling about how states and elites abuse entrusted power in late capitalism. The millennial city of the global South is a charged setting for allegations of corruption, with skyscrapers, land grabs, and slum evictions invoking outrage at deepening economic polarization. Drawing on ethnography in Bengaluru and Mumbai and a cross-section of literary and cinematic stories from cities around the world, Malini Ranganathan, David L. Pike, and Sapana Doshi pay close attention to the racial, caste, class, and gender locations of the narrators, spaces, and publics imagined to be harmed by corruption. Corruption Plots demonstrates how corruption talk is leveraged to make sense of unequal spatial change and used opportunistically by those who are themselves implicated in wrongdoing. Offering a wide-ranging analysis of urban w
£26.99
Cornell University Press Governing Neighborhoods in Urban China
Book SynopsisGoverning Neighborhoods in Urban China examines the key mechanisms operating at the grassroots level in China that contribute to urban development and increased public support for the legitimacy and authority of the Chinese state. Beibei Tang uncovers new trends and dynamics of urban neighborhood governance since the 2000s to reveal the significant factors that contribute to regime survival. Tang introduces the concept of hybrid authoritarianism, a governance mechanism an authoritarian state employs to produce governance legitimacy, public support, and regime sustainability. Hybrid authoritarianism is situated in an intermediary governance space between state and society. It accommodates both state and non-state actors, deals with a wide range of governance issues, employs flexible governance strategies, and in this context, ultimately strengthens CCP leadership. Tang documents processes of hybrid authoritarianism through her focus on various types
£35.10
Cornell University Press Mallparks
Book SynopsisIn Mallparks, Michael T. Friedman observes that as cathedrals represented power relations in medieval towns and skyscrapers epitomized those within industrial cities, sports stadiums exemplify urban American consumption at the turn of the twenty-first century. Grounded in Henri Lefebvre and George Ritzer''s spatial theories in their analyses of consumption spaces, Mallparks examines how the designers of this generation of baseball stadiums follow the principles of theme park and shopping mall design to create highly effective and efficient consumption sites. In his exploration of these contemporary cathedrals of sport and consumption, Friedman discusses the history of stadium design, the amenities and aesthetics of stadium spaces, and the intentions and conceptions of architects, team officials, and civic leaders. He grounds his analysis in case studies of Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore; Fenway Park in Boston; Dodger Stadium in LosTrade ReviewFriedman (Univ. of Maryland, College Park) offers a valuable analysis of the relationship between major league baseball parks and spectators over the past 110 years, focusing on the "mallparks" that emerged in the late 20th century. * Choice *Table of ContentsCathedrals OF Consumption 1. Leading Off 2. Producing Consumption Space The Spatial Practices of Baseball Stadiums 3. Grounds, Ballparks, and Superstadiums 4. The Spatial Practices of the Mallpark Conceiving Mallparks 5. Camden Yards: Forever Changing Baseball 6. Fenway Park and Dodger Stadium: The Camdenization of a Ballpark and a Superstadium 7. Nationals Park: A Mallpark of Magnificent Intentions 8. Target Field: Different in the Same Way The Future of Baseball Stadium Design 9. Truist Park: Supercharging the Mallpark 10. Making Baseball Great Again
£39.60
Cornell University Press A Global Idea
Book SynopsisA Global Idea outlines how youthas shown by the Arab Spring uprisings and subsequent state responsesbecame a prominent social and political category during the first two decades of the twenty-first century in the Middle East. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interview data, and textual analysis, Mayssoun Sukarieh explains that the spread of youth as an important category is linked to the operation of a global youth development complex, a diverse transnational network of state, private sector, civil society, and international development aid organizations that worked through key urban areas such as Washington, DC, Amman, and Dubai. In its analysis of the arrival, extension, and embedding of the youth development complex in the Middle East during this period, A Global Idea addresses a broader question that is of global and not just regional concern. How are certain ideas that are central to the working and reproduction of global capitalism able to travel
£97.20
Cornell University Press A Global Idea
Book SynopsisA Global Idea outlines how youthas shown by the Arab Spring uprisings and subsequent state responsesbecame a prominent social and political category during the first two decades of the twenty-first century in the Middle East. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interview data, and textual analysis, Mayssoun Sukarieh explains that the spread of youth as an important category is linked to the operation of a global youth development complex, a diverse transnational network of state, private sector, civil society, and international development aid organizations that worked through key urban areas such as Washington, DC, Amman, and Dubai. In its analysis of the arrival, extension, and embedding of the youth development complex in the Middle East during this period, A Global Idea addresses a broader question that is of global and not just regional concern. How are certain ideas that are central to the working and reproduction of global capitalism able to travel
£18.89
Cornell University Press The Social Lives of Land
Book SynopsisFrom the shaping of new homelands in the Cherokee Nation to the export of sand from Cambodia to shore up urban expansion in Singapore, The Social Lives of Land reveals the dynamics of contemporary social and political change. The editors of this volume bring together contributions from across multiple disciplines and geographic locations. The contributions showcase novel theoretical and empirical insights, analyzing how people are living on, with, and from their land. From Mozambique to India, Indonesia, Ecuador, and the colonial United States, the scholars in this collection uncover histories and retell stories with a focus on the lived experiences of rural and urban land dispossession and repossession.Contributors: Kati Álvarez, Clint Carroll, Flora Lu, Richard Mbunda, Gregg Mitman, Paul Nadasdy, Robert Nichols, Andrew Ofstehage, Laura Schoenberger, Kirsteen Shields, Emmanuel Sulle, Erik Swyngedouw, Gabriela Valdivia, Katherine Verdery, Ca
£97.20
Stanford University Press For the War Yet to Come: Planning Beirut's
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.
£79.20
Stanford University Press Housing the City by the Bay: Tenant Activism,
Book SynopsisSan Francisco has always had an affordable housing problem. Starting in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake and ending with the dot-com boom, Housing the City by the Bay considers the history of one proposed answer to the city's ongoing housing crisis: public housing. John Baranski follows the ebbs and flows of San Francisco's public housing program: the Progressive Era and New Deal reforms that led to the creation of the San Francisco Housing Authority in 1938, conflicts over urban renewal and desegregation, and the federal and local efforts to privatize government housing at the turn of the twenty-first century. This history of public housing sheds light on changing attitudes towards liberalism, the welfare state, and the economic and civil rights attached to citizenship. Baranski details the ways San Francisco residents turned to the public housing program to build class-based political movements in a multi-racial city and introduces us to the individuals—community activists, politicians, reformers, and city employees—who were continually forced to seek new strategies to achieve their aims as the winds of federal legislation shifted. Ultimately, Housing the City by the Bay advances the idea that public housing remains a vital part of the social and political landscape, intimately connected to the struggle for economic rights in urban America.Trade Review"Housing the City by the Bay takes a deeper look at the twentieth-century history of housing—first, the failures of private markets to meet the needs of working people, and then the New Deal intervention in the wake of the Depression, catalyzing a broad expansion of public housing. Combining the half century rise and fall of public housing with the unprecedented inflation of housing prices engendered by the Bay Area tech boom at the dawn of the twenty-first century, John Baranski reveals a Bay Area riven by sharp class divisions, and disarmed before the tidal wave of private interests determined to undermine any efforts to reclaim the basic human right to decent, inexpensive, high quality shelter." -- Chris Carlsson * Co-Director of Shaping San Francisco *"Housing the City by the Bay makes an original contribution to U.S. national political history and California social and urban history. John Baranski provides a sophisticated analysis of the complex ways that housing policy relates to the century long debate between liberals and their critics over how to define and implement citizenship rights." -- Bill Issel * San Francisco State University *"John Baranski's scholarship devastates the 'There Is No Alternative' myth when it comes to for-profit housing and the built environment. Through meticulous research and sharp historical grounding, he shows us the paths that led to the national housing crisis. Housing the City By the Bay lays bare the race and class antagonisms in a liberal city such as San Francisco. It serves as a cautionary tale and a call to action, and makes a monumental contribution to the national discussion around housing and neighborhoods." -- James Tracy * author of Dispatches Against Displacement: Field Notes from San Francisco's Housing Wars *"Anyone wishing to understand the conjoined crises of astronomical housing costs and the legions of homeless in San Francisco must read John Baranski's book, for it gives essential context usually absent from the everyday barbarism now manifest on that city's streets. Baranski reveals a century-long tug-of-war between advocates of housing as a human right and victorious champions of the marketplace. San Francisco's story is that of every American city, only more so." -- Gray Brechin * author of Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin *"[Housing the City by the Bay] adds an important contribution to the debate over public housing....Baranski does an amazing job of documenting this history in San Francisco." -- Pablo Gonzales * Journal of American Ethnic History *"[Housing the City by the Bay] is an excellent addition to the growing literature on the history of public housing in the United States. John Baranski is especially adept at connecting San Francisco's public housing history to national political history." -- Joseph A. Rodriguez * Pacific Historical Review *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractThe introduction presents an overview of the book. The introduction focuses on some of the book's main questions about what public housing meant for San Francisco residents and presents the book's major themes, concepts, and arguments. There is also a discussion about how the book contributes to some of the more important historical themes of urban and welfare state history in the twentieth century. The introduction presents an analysis of liberalism as it relates to public housing, the welfare state, and the economic and civil rights of citizens and suggests ways for the reader to start thinking about these larger issues before moving into the narrative of the book. 1Progressive Era Housing Reform chapter abstractThe first chapter describes the city's working-class neighborhoods that are considered for housing reform during the first half of the twentieth century. The chapter also places the city's reform community—its members, knowledge production, and policy visions—within a larger community of housing reformers in the Atlantic World interested in the labor question. Prompted by the social problems generated by industrial capitalism and urbanization, reformers began to rethink how urban housing and planning was done. Breaking from classical liberal economic ideas, transatlantic reformers proposed an expanded role for all levels of government in the economy. As was common in other parts of the world, San Francisco's housing reformers also used a combination of social science research and moral suasion to pass government building codes and zoning laws. They failed in their attempt to create public housing in part because they failed to inspire the city's workers and tenants. 2The San Francisco Housing Authority and the New Deal chapter abstractt examines the influence of the Great Depression and the New Deal on San Francisco's housing and job needs and how federal housing officials drew on popular movements, four decades of social reforms, and a change in liberalism to guide the expansion of government housing policies. The 1937 United States Housing Act, along with expanded state legislation, permitted San Francisco's residents, including nonwhites, to participate in the creation of the San Francisco Housing Authority (SFHA), which in turn allowed them to build government housing and provide jobs. The SFHA was not a democratic agency or free of racism, but its policies were more inclusive than pre–New Deal housing reform efforts and more responsive to the general welfare than private landlords. From the discussions of the SFHA purpose, the city's residents began to think in new ways about housing, civil and economic rights, and liberalism. 3Public Housing, Race, and Conflicting Visions of Democracy and the State chapter abstractThe chapter examines the war years when the SFHA housing program expanded not only its housing stock, but also its social services at its projects. Urban planners, housing reformers, and labor unions across California began promoting a larger role for public housing authorities in local and regional economic development, achieving full employment, and in expanding economic rights for citizens. The 1948 United Nations General Assembly declaration on civil and economic rights and the 1949 United States Housing Act reflected the growing discussions around these ideas, although in the United States, postwar affluence, the real estate lobby, and the red scare dashed support for enlarging federal public housing and the welfare state. Along with these developments, the chapter follows the growing civil rights movement and how it targeted public housing for integration and ending racial discrimination. 4Prosperity, Development, and Institutional Racism in the Cold War chapter abstractThe chapter outlines the city's housing and neighborhoods most affected by wartime demographic changes and by the tenant selection of private landlords and SFHA staff. The chapter focuses on the ways civil rights activism and the Cold War influenced the SFHA program. Civil rights activists forced the SFHA to desegregate its housing, and the civil rights struggles illustrated the ways housing intersected with economic rights and identity formation. The politically chilling Cold War climate also led many housing officials, like many New Deal liberals, to abandon the idea of expanding government programs to ensure employment and housing, and this shift came at a time when private redevelopment projects became a priority at the federal and local level. The quality of some public housing in San Francisco began to deteriorate in the 1950s, contributing to tenant organizing and activism in the following decades. 5Something to Help Themselves chapter abstractThe chapter examines how the shortages of good jobs and housing and racial discrimination provided fertile ground for tenant mobilization. Taking the idea of participatory policymaking to heart, public housing tenants organized tenant unions at the project and city level. SFHA policies continued to demonstrate how the power built on race, class, and gender privileges stymied participatory policymaking as SFHA tenant attempts to participate in SFHA achieved mixed results. Tenants and allied civic organizations fought federal cuts to government housing and urban renewal projects. Tenant activities sometimes spilled over into surrounding communities as renters in private housing joined hands with public housing tenants in a variety of campaigns. Significantly, this part of the book deepens our understanding of the traditional narrative of the 60s by including the social activism of tenants and challenging the stereotype of public housing tenants as part of an urban underclass. 6Out of Step with Washington chapter abstractThe chapter focuses on how tenants tried to expand their rights through the SFHA and other public agencies. Tenant leaders, who were primarily women, drew on the resources of the SFHA and other public institutions to nurture their tenant organizing. The city's tenants organized for more public housing, useful jobs, and social services. For a short time, tenants even demanded control of public housing funds and SFHA policymaking. Although their desire to fully democratize their housing met opposition, tenant efforts resulted in reforms that made policymaking more inclusive. Their growing influence came at a time when the SFHA program, like many social welfare programs, suffered from federal budget cuts. Federal housing policies began to move away from funding government homes to private sector solutions, and this shift hurt the quality and scope of the city's public housing and tenant organizing. 7All Housing Is Public chapter abstractThe chapter highlights tenant responses to federal cuts in social programs, another wave of urban redevelopment, and rising housing costs. To SFHA tenants, government housing continued to offer not just housing but a host of programs aimed at ensuring a degree of economic security. That housing and those programs allowed tenants to maintain a sense of community. But non-SFHA tenants also turned to the government program in their struggle for housing security. In these ways, the SFHA continued its role in the daily lives of the city's residents. The SFHA's declining resources aligned with the rise of the New Right and the power of neoliberalism to cut federal housing funds further. Tenants continued their struggles over housing. Not everything was oriented around struggle. Public housing tenants expressed their creativity and identity through art and community projects, thus reinforcing their identities through culture, place, and struggle. 8Privatizing the Public in the Dot-Com Era chapter abstractThis chapter examines how demand for housing, cuts to the SFHA program, and federal legislation influenced the direction of housing trends in the city. As housing costs soared, landlords skirted tenant rights and evictions rose; many residents unable to keep or secure housing joined the homeless population or left the city. Some residents resisted and fought for housing rights in an era of gentrification. This housing crisis was not unique to San Francisco. Across the country, tenants were squeezed out of neighborhoods as wages failed to keep up with urban housing costs. Housing legislation continued to shift resources and support to private sector housing solutions rather than public housing. By the twenty-first century, the SFHA was losing its place as the largest affordable housing landlord in the city. Conclusion chapter abstractThe conclusion highlights the key points and themes of San Francisco's housing history and connects those insights to a national and international affordable housing shortage and income, wealth, and racial inequality. The conclusion also proposes recommendations for thinking about public housing as a program that could be used once again to expand the civil and economic rights of citizens and engage residents in the political process. The history of public housing in San Francisco offers insights into how to approach contemporary housing reforms and social movements.
£79.20
Stanford University Press Indigenous Dispossession: Housing and Maya
Book SynopsisFollowing the recent global housing boom, tract housing development became a billion-dollar industry in Mexico. At the national level, neoliberal housing policy has overtaken debates around land reform. For Indigenous peoples, access to affordable housing remains crucial to alleviating poverty. But as palapas, traditional thatch and wood houses, are replaced by tract houses in the Yucatán Peninsula, Indigenous peoples' relationship to land, urbanism, and finance is similarly transformed, revealing a legacy of debt and dispossession. Indigenous Dispossession examines how Maya families grapple with the ramifications of neoliberal housing policies. M. Bianet Castellanos relates Maya migrants' experiences with housing and mortgage finance in Cancún, one of Mexico's fastest-growing cities. Their struggle to own homes reveals colonial and settler colonial structures that underpin the city's economy, built environment, and racial order. But even as Maya people contend with predatory lending practices and foreclosure, they cultivate strategies of resistance—from "waiting out" the state, to demanding Indigenous rights in urban centers. As Castellanos argues, it is through these maneuvers that Maya migrants forge a new vision of Indigenous urbanism.Trade Review"Drawing on her long-term collaboration with indigenous people, M. Bianet Castellanos eloquently critiques the dispossession of Maya in Cancún and illuminates their resistance. Her passion for revealing and dismantling the racial and gender hierarchies embedded in neoliberal projects is compelling. A nuanced contribution to our understanding of settler colonialism." -- Patricia Zavella * University of California, Santa Cruz, author of The Movement for Reproductive Justice: Empowering Women of Color through Social Activism *"In this compelling and timely work, M. Bianet Castellanos has given us a powerful indictment of neoliberalism's perpetuation of the settler project of Indigenous dispossession. She also effectively demonstrates how Indigenous peoples develop strategies of resistance to new technologies of domination like racialized debt, and in the process craft new forms of urban Indigeneity." -- Shannon Speed * University of California, Los Angeles *"A fascinating and highly readable study of how Indigenous Maya experience twenty-first-century rounds of dispossession and esclavitud—this time born of debt tied to housing financing. Focusing upon mortgage-based access to social interest housing in modern-day Cancún, M. Bianet Castellanos' account foregrounds Indigenous voices as they struggle to become homeowners." -- Peter M. Ward * University of Texas at Austin *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: Indigenous Cancún chapter abstractThe central argument of this book is that as Indigenous migrants move to cities, they are no longer treated as Indigenous and instead become deracialized subjects who are disciplined through neoliberal instruments of debt, like mortgage finance and credit cards, leading to greater economic precarity and a loss of autonomy from the state. Through an ethnography of Maya migrants living in Cancún, one of Mexico's fastest growing cities, I show that Maya migrants' struggles to own a home reveal the colonial and settler colonial structures underpinning the city's economy, built environment, and racial order. As they grapple with predatory lending and foreclosure, Maya families cultivate strategies of resistance, from "waiting out" the state to demanding recognition as Indigenous peoples in urban centers. Through these maneuvers, Maya migrants forge a new vision of Indigenous urbanism that counters a discourse of urban malaise and articulates dignity with democracy. 1Before Housing Reform: The Gendering of Urban Property chapter abstractChapter one maps out the history of land policies in Cancún and how they have been shaped by ideologies of family, gender, and citizenship. By excluding migrants who were unmarried and childless from affordable housing and land programs, the state defined citizenship narrowly and encouraged migrants to embrace the nuclear family if they wished to become citizens of this new urban space. In response, Maya women mobilized their status as wives and mothers to lobby for land. 2Promoting Housing Reform: Debt as Patrimony chapter abstractChapter two examines the transformation of Mexico's land distribution policies and property rights through a discursive analysis of the ideologies central to government campaigns promoting "dignified" housing. Analyzing news articles, government campaign documents, and one Maya family's response to these campaigns, I examine the narrative devices and rhetorical strategies used to make housing attractive and to align debt with national ideals. The language of patrimony and suburban domesticity is intended to soften the retreat of the state from land redistribution, and makes palatable and desirable the process of going into debt on a much larger scale than previously possible. 3After Housing Reform: Credit as the New Frontier chapter abstractChapter three analyzes Indigenous migrants' willingness to take on debt. Prior to 2000, Maya aspired to own, but without debt. Homeownership has increased Maya migrants access to credit, making them the "new frontier" of capitalism. But it has concomitantly increased their economic risk. It considers how credit and risk take on a gendered and "moral valence." For male migrants, going into debt to purchase a home is a risky venture that ignores lessons learned from Indigenous experiences with debt servitude. Yet for female migrants, owning a concrete block home has become a sign of progress and security from natural disasters. To tease out this moral, cultural, and gendered dilemma, I examine migrants' experiences with microfinance and credit cards. 4Foreclosure: Waiting Out the State chapter abstractChapter four centers on one Maya family's experience with foreclosure. How do Indigenous peoples cope with this loss and how does it (re)structure their attachments to place, land and nation? Even as housing reform becomes a form of discipline to produce new types of citizens and construct new narratives of progress, debt delinquency, and insecurity, I show how migrants' resistance strategies, from foot dragging to legal suits to postponing foreclosure, are transformed into a process of "waiting out" the state and capital. In so doing, Maya migrants sidestep the bureaucratic measures created to regulate the poor and convert consent into provocative acts of obstruction and defiance. 5Eviction: Invoking Indigenous Resistance chapter abstractChapter five examines the case of Maya migrants who reject social housing and instead opt to live in the squatter settlement of Colonia Mario Villanueva. Social housing, Maya migrants argue, entails great risk (due to mortgage debt) and is rife with social atomization. In contrast, life in Colonia Mario Villanueva is organized around the principles of Indigenous communal land practices. It is centered around the colonia's legal battle to avoid eviction, which was led by Maya women. These women relied on strategies of resistance derived from Indigenous land struggles. Colonias are perfect places to cultivate political subordination, but in the case of Mario Villanueva, they also become spaces of insubordination. Epilogue: A Cautionary Tale of Indebtedness chapter abstractThe book concludes by assessing how Indigenous migrants have fared under housing reform. Galvanized by the parallels between their ancestors' struggle with esclavitud and their own land and housing struggles, Maya migrants demand to be engaged as Indigenous and accorded the rights to land and self-determination. Migrants urge us to engage with a more expansive conception of territoriality, one that is not limited to the land boundaries of rural communities but is broad enough to recognize the peninsula's sacred Maya geography and to encompass Indigenous diasporas in urban centers. Through this articulation, they offer a more dynamic interpretation of Indigenous rights that aims to combat settler tactics of elimination through assimilation and dispossession. In so doing, Maya migrants are forging a new vision of Indigenous urbanism that moves beyond a colonial politics of recognition.
£75.20
Stanford University Press For the War Yet to Come: Planning Beirut's
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.
£21.59
Stanford University Press Reclaiming Community: Race and the Uncertain
Book SynopsisApproximately 2.4 million Black youth participate in after-school programs, which offer a range of support, including academic tutoring, college preparation, political identity development, cultural and emotional support, and even a space to develop strategies and tools for organizing and activism. In Reclaiming Community, Bianca Baldridge tells the story of one such community-based program, Educational Excellence (EE), shining a light on both the invaluable role youth workers play in these spaces, and the precarious context in which such programs now exist. Drawing on rich ethnographic data, Baldridge persuasively argues that the story of EE is representative of a much larger and understudied phenomenon. With the spread of neoliberal ideology and its reliance on racism—marked by individualism, market competition, and privatization—these bastions of community support are losing the autonomy that has allowed them to embolden the minds of the youth they serve. Baldridge captures the stories of loss and resistance within this context of immense external political pressure, arguing powerfully for the damage caused when the same structural violence that Black youth experience in school, starts to occur in the places they go to escape it.Trade Review"A compelling analysis of community-based youth service programs and how their ability to respond to community needs has been impaired by the narrow 'reform' agenda sweeping the country. Baldridge is a keen observer and her insights will help parents, educators, and activists in other communities understand why their work may not be supported by powerful elites, and what they can do about it." -- Pedro A. Noguera, Distinguished Professor of Education * UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies *"The movement across America to adopt a Wall Street-like focus on 'return on investments' (ROI) to measure the impact of after-school programs is a big mistake. Bianca Baldridge offers a brilliant and timely alternative to metric-driven services; her research provides a refreshing and illuminating vision of how those who support youth of color can create more holistic alternatives to youth programming." -- Shawn Ginwright, Professor of Education and African American Studies * San Francisco State University *"Baldridge's powerful and sophisticated work urges us to continue to focus on theorizing the relationship between community-based youth work and schooling. Reclaiming Community is an urgent read for educational organizers and leaders, education scholars from all disciplines, social movement scholars, and organization scholars." -- Ranita Ray * American Journal of Sociology *Table of ContentsContents and Abstracts1Community-Based Youth Work in Uncertain Times chapter abstractChapter 1 introduces readers to Educational Excellence, its history, mission, triumphs, and challenges. Major themes of the book, its goals, the research methodology, and its significance to sociology of education are presented. The story of the organization is discussed within a broader theoretical discussion of market-driven education reform, race, and paternalism to (1) explore the dialectical relationship between community-based spaces and schools and (2) to explore how political imaginings of race and youth shape and inform the construction of community-based educational spaces engaging Black and other minoritized youth. 2"The EE Family:" Framing Race, Youth, and Educational Possibilities chapter abstractChapter 2 describes the history of Educational Excellence and its transformation from a strict after-school academic program steeped in deficit rhetoric to a comprehensive program that includes emotional and social support as well as political education. This chapter discusses the competing framing (asset-based versus deficit) of Black youth among the organization's founder, board members, and current and new staff members in the program and the struggle to reimagine Black youth beyond deficit narratives rampant in the youth development and nonprofit funding world. This chapter discusses how neoliberal restructuring affects the neighborhood Educational Excellence calls home and the schooling experiences of youth in the program. This chapter examines how youth workers become critical advocates and intercessors on behalf of students, assisting them in navigating difficult school, family, cultural, and social barriers. 3"We're Not Saving Anybody:" Refusing Deficit Narratives chapter abstractThis chapter examines how Black youth within after-school support spaces are often framed politically as "broken" and in need of "fixing." This chapter highlights the voices of youth workers as they navigate community-based educational youth work in a national education climate and with new organizational leadership marked by education reform and therefore pressure to frame Black youth from a deficit perspective to compete for funding opportunities, political praise, and public recognition. This chapter describes how the common trend toward deficit framing is linked to the current neoliberal education market, which incentivizes community-based educational spaces to frame marginalized youth as socially, culturally, and intellectually deficient in order to successfully compete with charter schools for funding. 4"Expanding EE's Footprint": Navigating Organizational Change chapter abstractChapter 4 discusses the growing racial, class, and gender tensions between the organization's founder, executive leadership, and Educational Excellence's board members. This chapter examines the changing nature of leadership in the organization and its impact on the practices of youth workers, shifting priorities of the program, and the overall culture of the program. Rapid growth and increase in the number of youth "served" by Educational Excellence became the new language and mode of operation for the organization. Under these new logics, racial and economic discourse about Black youth and educational opportunity within the organization began to drastically disrupt life at Educational Excellence. This chapter discusses how Educational Excellence expanded into another neighborhood without the proper infrastructure, which shifted the organization in an entirely different direction—one that led to damaged relationships and altered the reputation of the organization. 5"The Family Is Dead": Corporatizing After-School chapter abstractAfter a mass exodus of staff members at Educational Excellence, this chapter discusses how remaining youth workers strive to maintain strong and relevant pedagogical practices, familial-like culture, and an asset-rich ideology of youth in a new climate where organizational leadership is primarily concerned with funding, expansion, and greater exposure for the organization—without regard for the consequences for staff or student morale. This chapter discusses the ways that the camaraderie and relationships established between youth workers served as an anchor for accountability in the program. With relationships in jeopardy, accountability for resisting racist and deficit language withered and neoliberal expansion flourished under new leadership. 6"It Was Never Ours": Race and the Politics of Control chapter abstractChapter 6 examines the external pull factors (broader political and economic forces shaping public education) and internal push factors (competing frames of race, control, and paternalism between staff, the founder, and new leadership) that led youth workers away from Educational Excellence. Youth workers share their process for leaving the organization, what they learned during their time in the program, and reflections on challenging and rewarding experiences. Chapter 6 investigates the persistence of racism and neoliberalism within the current era of education that is eroding liberatory community-based spaces engaging Black youth. Conclusion: Reclaiming Community-Based Youth Work in the Neoliberal Era chapter abstractThe conclusion summarizes major research findings and highlights the major triumphs, challenges, and changes the book documented. Within this chapter, the story of Educational Excellence is placed within a historical context of activism in Black communities. Through the lessons learned from Educational Excellence, a path is laid out for community-based leaders and educators of color to identify, name, and resist the complex dynamics of racism, anti-Blackness, and politics threatening their work with youth. The conclusion lays out recommendations that include (1) encouraging more scholarship that theorizes social location of community-based youth work and the deep pedagogical work that can occur within community-based after-school spaces; and (2) considering the potential effects of macroeconomic and social policies, such as education privatization, on after-school community-based spaces and cautioning against the erasure of self-determination within community-based spaces as a result of the neoliberal turn.
£79.20
Stanford University Press Housing the City by the Bay: Tenant Activism,
Book SynopsisSan Francisco has always had an affordable housing problem. Starting in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake and ending with the dot-com boom, Housing the City by the Bay considers the history of one proposed answer to the city's ongoing housing crisis: public housing. John Baranski follows the ebbs and flows of San Francisco's public housing program: the Progressive Era and New Deal reforms that led to the creation of the San Francisco Housing Authority in 1938, conflicts over urban renewal and desegregation, and the federal and local efforts to privatize government housing at the turn of the twenty-first century. This history of public housing sheds light on changing attitudes towards liberalism, the welfare state, and the economic and civil rights attached to citizenship. Baranski details the ways San Francisco residents turned to the public housing program to build class-based political movements in a multi-racial city and introduces us to the individuals—community activists, politicians, reformers, and city employees—who were continually forced to seek new strategies to achieve their aims as the winds of federal legislation shifted. Ultimately, Housing the City by the Bay advances the idea that public housing remains a vital part of the social and political landscape, intimately connected to the struggle for economic rights in urban America.Trade Review"Housing the City by the Bay takes a deeper look at the twentieth-century history of housing—first, the failures of private markets to meet the needs of working people, and then the New Deal intervention in the wake of the Depression, catalyzing a broad expansion of public housing. Combining the half century rise and fall of public housing with the unprecedented inflation of housing prices engendered by the Bay Area tech boom at the dawn of the twenty-first century, John Baranski reveals a Bay Area riven by sharp class divisions, and disarmed before the tidal wave of private interests determined to undermine any efforts to reclaim the basic human right to decent, inexpensive, high quality shelter." -- Chris Carlsson * Co-Director of Shaping San Francisco *"Housing the City by the Bay makes an original contribution to U.S. national political history and California social and urban history. John Baranski provides a sophisticated analysis of the complex ways that housing policy relates to the century long debate between liberals and their critics over how to define and implement citizenship rights." -- Bill Issel * San Francisco State University *"John Baranski's scholarship devastates the 'There Is No Alternative' myth when it comes to for-profit housing and the built environment. Through meticulous research and sharp historical grounding, he shows us the paths that led to the national housing crisis. Housing the City By the Bay lays bare the race and class antagonisms in a liberal city such as San Francisco. It serves as a cautionary tale and a call to action, and makes a monumental contribution to the national discussion around housing and neighborhoods." -- James Tracy * author of Dispatches Against Displacement: Field Notes from San Francisco's Housing Wars *"Anyone wishing to understand the conjoined crises of astronomical housing costs and the legions of homeless in San Francisco must read John Baranski's book, for it gives essential context usually absent from the everyday barbarism now manifest on that city's streets. Baranski reveals a century-long tug-of-war between advocates of housing as a human right and victorious champions of the marketplace. San Francisco's story is that of every American city, only more so." -- Gray Brechin * author of Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin *"[Housing the City by the Bay] adds an important contribution to the debate over public housing....Baranski does an amazing job of documenting this history in San Francisco." -- Pablo Gonzales * Journal of American Ethnic History *"[Housing the City by the Bay] is an excellent addition to the growing literature on the history of public housing in the United States. John Baranski is especially adept at connecting San Francisco's public housing history to national political history." -- Joseph A. Rodriguez * Pacific Historical Review *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractThe introduction presents an overview of the book. The introduction focuses on some of the book's main questions about what public housing meant for San Francisco residents and presents the book's major themes, concepts, and arguments. There is also a discussion about how the book contributes to some of the more important historical themes of urban and welfare state history in the twentieth century. The introduction presents an analysis of liberalism as it relates to public housing, the welfare state, and the economic and civil rights of citizens and suggests ways for the reader to start thinking about these larger issues before moving into the narrative of the book. 1Progressive Era Housing Reform chapter abstractThe first chapter describes the city's working-class neighborhoods that are considered for housing reform during the first half of the twentieth century. The chapter also places the city's reform community—its members, knowledge production, and policy visions—within a larger community of housing reformers in the Atlantic World interested in the labor question. Prompted by the social problems generated by industrial capitalism and urbanization, reformers began to rethink how urban housing and planning was done. Breaking from classical liberal economic ideas, transatlantic reformers proposed an expanded role for all levels of government in the economy. As was common in other parts of the world, San Francisco's housing reformers also used a combination of social science research and moral suasion to pass government building codes and zoning laws. They failed in their attempt to create public housing in part because they failed to inspire the city's workers and tenants. 2The San Francisco Housing Authority and the New Deal chapter abstractt examines the influence of the Great Depression and the New Deal on San Francisco's housing and job needs and how federal housing officials drew on popular movements, four decades of social reforms, and a change in liberalism to guide the expansion of government housing policies. The 1937 United States Housing Act, along with expanded state legislation, permitted San Francisco's residents, including nonwhites, to participate in the creation of the San Francisco Housing Authority (SFHA), which in turn allowed them to build government housing and provide jobs. The SFHA was not a democratic agency or free of racism, but its policies were more inclusive than pre–New Deal housing reform efforts and more responsive to the general welfare than private landlords. From the discussions of the SFHA purpose, the city's residents began to think in new ways about housing, civil and economic rights, and liberalism. 3Public Housing, Race, and Conflicting Visions of Democracy and the State chapter abstractThe chapter examines the war years when the SFHA housing program expanded not only its housing stock, but also its social services at its projects. Urban planners, housing reformers, and labor unions across California began promoting a larger role for public housing authorities in local and regional economic development, achieving full employment, and in expanding economic rights for citizens. The 1948 United Nations General Assembly declaration on civil and economic rights and the 1949 United States Housing Act reflected the growing discussions around these ideas, although in the United States, postwar affluence, the real estate lobby, and the red scare dashed support for enlarging federal public housing and the welfare state. Along with these developments, the chapter follows the growing civil rights movement and how it targeted public housing for integration and ending racial discrimination. 4Prosperity, Development, and Institutional Racism in the Cold War chapter abstractThe chapter outlines the city's housing and neighborhoods most affected by wartime demographic changes and by the tenant selection of private landlords and SFHA staff. The chapter focuses on the ways civil rights activism and the Cold War influenced the SFHA program. Civil rights activists forced the SFHA to desegregate its housing, and the civil rights struggles illustrated the ways housing intersected with economic rights and identity formation. The politically chilling Cold War climate also led many housing officials, like many New Deal liberals, to abandon the idea of expanding government programs to ensure employment and housing, and this shift came at a time when private redevelopment projects became a priority at the federal and local level. The quality of some public housing in San Francisco began to deteriorate in the 1950s, contributing to tenant organizing and activism in the following decades. 5Something to Help Themselves chapter abstractThe chapter examines how the shortages of good jobs and housing and racial discrimination provided fertile ground for tenant mobilization. Taking the idea of participatory policymaking to heart, public housing tenants organized tenant unions at the project and city level. SFHA policies continued to demonstrate how the power built on race, class, and gender privileges stymied participatory policymaking as SFHA tenant attempts to participate in SFHA achieved mixed results. Tenants and allied civic organizations fought federal cuts to government housing and urban renewal projects. Tenant activities sometimes spilled over into surrounding communities as renters in private housing joined hands with public housing tenants in a variety of campaigns. Significantly, this part of the book deepens our understanding of the traditional narrative of the 60s by including the social activism of tenants and challenging the stereotype of public housing tenants as part of an urban underclass. 6Out of Step with Washington chapter abstractThe chapter focuses on how tenants tried to expand their rights through the SFHA and other public agencies. Tenant leaders, who were primarily women, drew on the resources of the SFHA and other public institutions to nurture their tenant organizing. The city's tenants organized for more public housing, useful jobs, and social services. For a short time, tenants even demanded control of public housing funds and SFHA policymaking. Although their desire to fully democratize their housing met opposition, tenant efforts resulted in reforms that made policymaking more inclusive. Their growing influence came at a time when the SFHA program, like many social welfare programs, suffered from federal budget cuts. Federal housing policies began to move away from funding government homes to private sector solutions, and this shift hurt the quality and scope of the city's public housing and tenant organizing. 7All Housing Is Public chapter abstractThe chapter highlights tenant responses to federal cuts in social programs, another wave of urban redevelopment, and rising housing costs. To SFHA tenants, government housing continued to offer not just housing but a host of programs aimed at ensuring a degree of economic security. That housing and those programs allowed tenants to maintain a sense of community. But non-SFHA tenants also turned to the government program in their struggle for housing security. In these ways, the SFHA continued its role in the daily lives of the city's residents. The SFHA's declining resources aligned with the rise of the New Right and the power of neoliberalism to cut federal housing funds further. Tenants continued their struggles over housing. Not everything was oriented around struggle. Public housing tenants expressed their creativity and identity through art and community projects, thus reinforcing their identities through culture, place, and struggle. 8Privatizing the Public in the Dot-Com Era chapter abstractThis chapter examines how demand for housing, cuts to the SFHA program, and federal legislation influenced the direction of housing trends in the city. As housing costs soared, landlords skirted tenant rights and evictions rose; many residents unable to keep or secure housing joined the homeless population or left the city. Some residents resisted and fought for housing rights in an era of gentrification. This housing crisis was not unique to San Francisco. Across the country, tenants were squeezed out of neighborhoods as wages failed to keep up with urban housing costs. Housing legislation continued to shift resources and support to private sector housing solutions rather than public housing. By the twenty-first century, the SFHA was losing its place as the largest affordable housing landlord in the city. Conclusion chapter abstractThe conclusion highlights the key points and themes of San Francisco's housing history and connects those insights to a national and international affordable housing shortage and income, wealth, and racial inequality. The conclusion also proposes recommendations for thinking about public housing as a program that could be used once again to expand the civil and economic rights of citizens and engage residents in the political process. The history of public housing in San Francisco offers insights into how to approach contemporary housing reforms and social movements.
£21.59
Stanford University Press Reclaiming Community: Race and the Uncertain
Book SynopsisApproximately 2.4 million Black youth participate in after-school programs, which offer a range of support, including academic tutoring, college preparation, political identity development, cultural and emotional support, and even a space to develop strategies and tools for organizing and activism. In Reclaiming Community, Bianca Baldridge tells the story of one such community-based program, Educational Excellence (EE), shining a light on both the invaluable role youth workers play in these spaces, and the precarious context in which such programs now exist. Drawing on rich ethnographic data, Baldridge persuasively argues that the story of EE is representative of a much larger and understudied phenomenon. With the spread of neoliberal ideology and its reliance on racism—marked by individualism, market competition, and privatization—these bastions of community support are losing the autonomy that has allowed them to embolden the minds of the youth they serve. Baldridge captures the stories of loss and resistance within this context of immense external political pressure, arguing powerfully for the damage caused when the same structural violence that Black youth experience in school, starts to occur in the places they go to escape it.Trade Review"A compelling analysis of community-based youth service programs and how their ability to respond to community needs has been impaired by the narrow 'reform' agenda sweeping the country. Baldridge is a keen observer and her insights will help parents, educators, and activists in other communities understand why their work may not be supported by powerful elites, and what they can do about it." -- Pedro A. Noguera, Distinguished Professor of Education * UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies *"The movement across America to adopt a Wall Street-like focus on 'return on investments' (ROI) to measure the impact of after-school programs is a big mistake. Bianca Baldridge offers a brilliant and timely alternative to metric-driven services; her research provides a refreshing and illuminating vision of how those who support youth of color can create more holistic alternatives to youth programming." -- Shawn Ginwright, Professor of Education and African American Studies * San Francisco State University *"Baldridge's powerful and sophisticated work urges us to continue to focus on theorizing the relationship between community-based youth work and schooling. Reclaiming Community is an urgent read for educational organizers and leaders, education scholars from all disciplines, social movement scholars, and organization scholars." -- Ranita Ray * American Journal of Sociology *Table of ContentsContents and Abstracts1Community-Based Youth Work in Uncertain Times chapter abstractChapter 1 introduces readers to Educational Excellence, its history, mission, triumphs, and challenges. Major themes of the book, its goals, the research methodology, and its significance to sociology of education are presented. The story of the organization is discussed within a broader theoretical discussion of market-driven education reform, race, and paternalism to (1) explore the dialectical relationship between community-based spaces and schools and (2) to explore how political imaginings of race and youth shape and inform the construction of community-based educational spaces engaging Black and other minoritized youth. 2"The EE Family:" Framing Race, Youth, and Educational Possibilities chapter abstractChapter 2 describes the history of Educational Excellence and its transformation from a strict after-school academic program steeped in deficit rhetoric to a comprehensive program that includes emotional and social support as well as political education. This chapter discusses the competing framing (asset-based versus deficit) of Black youth among the organization's founder, board members, and current and new staff members in the program and the struggle to reimagine Black youth beyond deficit narratives rampant in the youth development and nonprofit funding world. This chapter discusses how neoliberal restructuring affects the neighborhood Educational Excellence calls home and the schooling experiences of youth in the program. This chapter examines how youth workers become critical advocates and intercessors on behalf of students, assisting them in navigating difficult school, family, cultural, and social barriers. 3"We're Not Saving Anybody:" Refusing Deficit Narratives chapter abstractThis chapter examines how Black youth within after-school support spaces are often framed politically as "broken" and in need of "fixing." This chapter highlights the voices of youth workers as they navigate community-based educational youth work in a national education climate and with new organizational leadership marked by education reform and therefore pressure to frame Black youth from a deficit perspective to compete for funding opportunities, political praise, and public recognition. This chapter describes how the common trend toward deficit framing is linked to the current neoliberal education market, which incentivizes community-based educational spaces to frame marginalized youth as socially, culturally, and intellectually deficient in order to successfully compete with charter schools for funding. 4"Expanding EE's Footprint": Navigating Organizational Change chapter abstractChapter 4 discusses the growing racial, class, and gender tensions between the organization's founder, executive leadership, and Educational Excellence's board members. This chapter examines the changing nature of leadership in the organization and its impact on the practices of youth workers, shifting priorities of the program, and the overall culture of the program. Rapid growth and increase in the number of youth "served" by Educational Excellence became the new language and mode of operation for the organization. Under these new logics, racial and economic discourse about Black youth and educational opportunity within the organization began to drastically disrupt life at Educational Excellence. This chapter discusses how Educational Excellence expanded into another neighborhood without the proper infrastructure, which shifted the organization in an entirely different direction—one that led to damaged relationships and altered the reputation of the organization. 5"The Family Is Dead": Corporatizing After-School chapter abstractAfter a mass exodus of staff members at Educational Excellence, this chapter discusses how remaining youth workers strive to maintain strong and relevant pedagogical practices, familial-like culture, and an asset-rich ideology of youth in a new climate where organizational leadership is primarily concerned with funding, expansion, and greater exposure for the organization—without regard for the consequences for staff or student morale. This chapter discusses the ways that the camaraderie and relationships established between youth workers served as an anchor for accountability in the program. With relationships in jeopardy, accountability for resisting racist and deficit language withered and neoliberal expansion flourished under new leadership. 6"It Was Never Ours": Race and the Politics of Control chapter abstractChapter 6 examines the external pull factors (broader political and economic forces shaping public education) and internal push factors (competing frames of race, control, and paternalism between staff, the founder, and new leadership) that led youth workers away from Educational Excellence. Youth workers share their process for leaving the organization, what they learned during their time in the program, and reflections on challenging and rewarding experiences. Chapter 6 investigates the persistence of racism and neoliberalism within the current era of education that is eroding liberatory community-based spaces engaging Black youth. Conclusion: Reclaiming Community-Based Youth Work in the Neoliberal Era chapter abstractThe conclusion summarizes major research findings and highlights the major triumphs, challenges, and changes the book documented. Within this chapter, the story of Educational Excellence is placed within a historical context of activism in Black communities. Through the lessons learned from Educational Excellence, a path is laid out for community-based leaders and educators of color to identify, name, and resist the complex dynamics of racism, anti-Blackness, and politics threatening their work with youth. The conclusion lays out recommendations that include (1) encouraging more scholarship that theorizes social location of community-based youth work and the deep pedagogical work that can occur within community-based after-school spaces; and (2) considering the potential effects of macroeconomic and social policies, such as education privatization, on after-school community-based spaces and cautioning against the erasure of self-determination within community-based spaces as a result of the neoliberal turn.
£21.59
Stanford University Press Panic City: Crime and the Fear Industries in
Book SynopsisDespite the end of white minority rule and the transition to parliamentary democracy, Johannesburg remains haunted by its tortured history of racial segregation and burdened by enduring inequalities in income, opportunities for stable work, and access to decent housing. Under these circumstances, Johannesburg has become one of the most dangerous cities in the world, where the yawning gap between the 'haves' and 'have-nots' has fueled a turn toward redistribution through crime. While wealthy residents have retreated into heavily fortified gated communities and upscale security estates, the less affluent have sought refuge in retrofitting their private homes into safe houses, closing off public streets, and hiring the services of private security companies to protect their suburban neighborhoods. Panic City is an exploration of urban fear and its impact on the city's evolving siege architecture, the transformation of policing, and obsession with security that has fueled unprecedented private consumption of 'protection services.' Martin Murray analyzes the symbiotic relationship between public law enforcement agencies, private security companies, and neighborhood associations, wherein buyers and sellers of security have reinvented ways of maintaining outdated segregation practices that define the urban poor as suspects.Trade Review"South African cities have long been exemplars of the damning effects of fear—and of its exploitation by urban designers and 'security' industries. Post-apartheid hopes of the 'Rainbow Nation' have often unraveled on the back of rampant insecurity and moral panics. In Martin J. Murray's superb book, we learn in forensic detail why and how this has happened. A brilliant and searing critique of the 'hardening' of cities into fortresses, and the mushrooming of a whole array of 'security' industries, this book is an absolute must-read for anyone concerned with our fast-urbanizing world."—Stephen Graham, author of Vertical: The City from Satellites to Bunkers"Panic City shows a grim picture of Johannesburg as paradigm for the 'urbanization of panic.' This very thorough and wide-ranging book focuses on the private security industry, which has become an inextricable part of the social fabric. A must-read for all those who want to know how the future policing of urban space in our dualized societies might look."—Lieven De Cauter, author of The Capsular Civilization: On the City in the Age of Fear"Panic City is an indispensable tool for anyone interested in the politics of crime in South Africa, particularly students, teachers and researchers on post-apartheid Johannesburg. Urban geographers and students of urban studies, environmental psychology, planning, architecture and urban design as well as politicians, policymakers and ordinary residents will find this book revealing and very telling about the ugly stereotypes and gangster proclivities of private security in the suburbs. The book provides its readers with a unique reference point, as well as a stimulus for further research."—Mfaniseni Fana Sihlongonyane, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research"Dystopic, meticulously researched, and brilliantly written, Panic City: Crime and the Fear Industries of Johannesburg engages with a variety of disciplinary fields, including critical criminology, urban geography, bordering, and the sociology of punishment."—Gail Super, American Journal of Sociology
£100.00
Stanford University Press Panic City: Crime and the Fear Industries in
Book SynopsisDespite the end of white minority rule and the transition to parliamentary democracy, Johannesburg remains haunted by its tortured history of racial segregation and burdened by enduring inequalities in income, opportunities for stable work, and access to decent housing. Under these circumstances, Johannesburg has become one of the most dangerous cities in the world, where the yawning gap between the 'haves' and 'have-nots' has fueled a turn toward redistribution through crime. While wealthy residents have retreated into heavily fortified gated communities and upscale security estates, the less affluent have sought refuge in retrofitting their private homes into safe houses, closing off public streets, and hiring the services of private security companies to protect their suburban neighborhoods. Panic City is an exploration of urban fear and its impact on the city's evolving siege architecture, the transformation of policing, and obsession with security that has fueled unprecedented private consumption of 'protection services.' Martin Murray analyzes the symbiotic relationship between public law enforcement agencies, private security companies, and neighborhood associations, wherein buyers and sellers of security have reinvented ways of maintaining outdated segregation practices that define the urban poor as suspects.Trade Review"South African cities have long been exemplars of the damning effects of fear—and of its exploitation by urban designers and 'security' industries. Post-apartheid hopes of the 'Rainbow Nation' have often unraveled on the back of rampant insecurity and moral panics. In Martin J. Murray's superb book, we learn in forensic detail why and how this has happened. A brilliant and searing critique of the 'hardening' of cities into fortresses, and the mushrooming of a whole array of 'security' industries, this book is an absolute must-read for anyone concerned with our fast-urbanizing world."—Stephen Graham, author of Vertical: The City from Satellites to Bunkers"Panic City shows a grim picture of Johannesburg as paradigm for the 'urbanization of panic.' This very thorough and wide-ranging book focuses on the private security industry, which has become an inextricable part of the social fabric. A must-read for all those who want to know how the future policing of urban space in our dualized societies might look."—Lieven De Cauter, author of The Capsular Civilization: On the City in the Age of Fear"Panic City is an indispensable tool for anyone interested in the politics of crime in South Africa, particularly students, teachers and researchers on post-apartheid Johannesburg. Urban geographers and students of urban studies, environmental psychology, planning, architecture and urban design as well as politicians, policymakers and ordinary residents will find this book revealing and very telling about the ugly stereotypes and gangster proclivities of private security in the suburbs. The book provides its readers with a unique reference point, as well as a stimulus for further research."—Mfaniseni Fana Sihlongonyane, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research"Dystopic, meticulously researched, and brilliantly written, Panic City: Crime and the Fear Industries of Johannesburg engages with a variety of disciplinary fields, including critical criminology, urban geography, bordering, and the sociology of punishment."—Gail Super, American Journal of Sociology
£26.99
Stanford University Press Street Sounds: Listening to Everyday Life in
Book SynopsisAs the twentieth century roared on, transformative technologies—from trains, trams, and automobiles to radios and loudspeakers—fundamentally changed the sounds of the Egyptian streets. The cacophony of everyday life grew louder, and the Egyptian press featured editorials calling for the regulation of not only mechanized and amplified sounds, but also the voices of street vendors, the music of wedding processions, and even the traditional funerary wails. Ziad Fahmy offers the first historical examination of the changing soundscapes of urban Egypt, highlighting the mundane sounds of street life, while "listening" to the voices of ordinary people as they struggle with state authorities for ownership of the streets. Interweaving infrastructural, cultural, and social history, Fahmy analyzes the sounds of modernity, using sounded sources as an analytical tool for examining the past. Street Sounds also reveals a political dimension of noise by demonstrating how the growing middle classes used sound to distinguish themselves from the Egyptian masses. This book contextualizes sound, layering historical analysis with a sensory dimension, bringing us closer to the Egyptian streets as lived and embodied by everyday people.Trade Review"With considerable skill, Ziad Fahmy listens to listeners in a place and time wholly underexplored by historians of the senses. In the process, he offers us an important and trenchant interpretation of the sensory definition of modernity." -- Mark Smith * University of South Carolina *"Street Sounds brings the boisterous soundscape of modernizing Egypt to life. Ziad Fahmy has an ear for the noise of history in motion—street hawkers, calls to prayer, braying donkeys, wagon wheels, claxons and screeching tires, recorded song, and the ever-present buzz of electricity. He allows us to hear an Egypt we might otherwise discount." -- Joel Gordon * University of Arkansas *"In this fascinating and highly original study, Ziad Fahmy takes sound seriously as both a primary source and a qualitatively distinct phenomenon of modernity. Street Sounds apprehends sonic and scopic regimes as interrelated aspects of a larger sensorium, thereby pioneering a new and extraordinarily rich form of Middle Eastern cultural history." -- Walter Armbrust * University of Oxford *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: Introduction: Historicizing Sounds and Soundscapes chapter abstractIn the Introduction I briefly examine the importance of the field of sound studies and the need for historians of the Middle East to engage with the sounds of the past. I discuss the importance of "listening" to the sources, in order to mine the archives for sonic events. Finally, Street Sounds proposes that by taking into account the changing sounds of the past, and by examining how people dealt with their daily sounded environment, we can be brought closer to a more embodied microlevel analysis of mundane street life. This is especially true in a period of rapid sonic transition, which exemplified the infrastructural and technological transformations during the first half of the twentieth century. 1Walking the City: Street Voices, Traffic, and the Mundane Sounds of Everyday Life chapter abstractInspired in part by Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life, in Chapter 1, I describe life in early- to mid-twentieth-century Cairo from a pedestrian's perspective. "Walking the City: Street Voices, Traffic, and the Mundane Sounds of Everyday Life" is devoted to the sounds of pedestrians and commuters as I analyze the ways that they used, occupied, and walked through those public spaces to commute, work, sell, and shop, and to entertain and be entertained. The first part of the chapter examines some of the social implications of embodied noises, from jingling anklets and bracelets to footsteps, as ordinary Cairenes were negotiating their way through a rapidly changing city. The second half of the chapter focuses on the calls of street hawkers, entertainers, and merchants who relied on their voices to advertise their goods and services. 2Silencing the Streets: Classism, Fear of the Crowd, and Regulating Sounds and Bodies chapter abstractChapter 2, "Silencing the Streets: Classism, Fear of the Crowd, and Regulating Sounds and Bodies," examines both the Egyptian government's attempts at regulating and silencing public spaces and the class implications of these policies. New anti-begging and anti-homelessness discourses invoked fears of an imminent breakdown of public order and even public health. In this chapter, I also document the interrelated and ever-present class bias in the Egyptian press, especially with regard to its coverage of the urban streets, street hawkers, and the itinerant poor. 3Roads and Tracks: Modern Traffic and the Sensory and Social Impact of Trams and Automobiles chapter abstractChapter 3, "Roads and Tracks: Modern Traffic and the Sensory and Social Impact of Trams and Automobiles," examines the modernization of Egypt's urban infrastructure, especially roads and tramways. The changing sounds and the social impact of growing urban traffic is carefully examined, with an emphasis on the introduction of tramways and motor vehicles. The chapter also documents and elaborates on the sonic impact of new urban spaces from large city squares to bustling transportation hubs. The problems of dramatically increased motor traffic and early attempts at regulating car horn noise are especially investigated. 4The Soundscapes of Modernity: Electricity, Lights and the Sounds of Nightlife chapter abstractChapter 4, "The Soundscapes of Modernity: Electricity, Lights and the Sounds of Nightlife," begins by examining the professional lighting of Egyptian cities by private gas utilities and the introduction of electricity and electric lighting. The sonic implication of electricity was of course enormous as it not only allowed the eventual proliferation of radios, loudspeakers, and tramways, but just as importantly brought the electric lights that forever changed the sounds of the Egyptian night. The growth of a regularly boisterous nightlife and the establishment of newer places of public leisure, from amusement parks to cabarets and movie theaters catering to diverse audiences, are closely examined. 5The Sounds of Weddings and Funerals: From Brass Bands to Wails and Ululations chapter abstractChapter 5 examines the evolving street sounds of traditional Egyptian weddings and funerals, which involved elaborate street processions and a variety of auditory and visual displays. It examines the changing roles of street music, singing, loud funerary grieving, and other important verbal and nonverbal vocalizations. The chapter concludes by examining some of the attacks directed against many of the embodied and auditory aspects of these traditional ceremonies by the government and by both secular and Islamic modernists. The one point all the "modernizing" camps agreed on was their belief in the general ignorance of the vast majority of the population and the urgent need for education, reform, and uplift. The chapter also addresses how many of these vulgarizing discourses played a role in the class distinction of Egypt's growing middle classes as they self-consciously attempted to define and separate themselves from the masses through sensory differentiation. 6Sounding Out State Power: Cannons, Music, and Loudspeakers chapter abstractIn Chapter 6, "Sounding Out State Power: Cannons, Music and Loudspeakers," I examine the Egyptian state's appropriation of large religious and secular celebrations and festivals. The chapter centers exclusively on the official sounds and spectacles performed and sponsored by the Egyptian state in an ongoing effort to legitimize its secular and religious authority in the eyes and ears of the masses. As I demonstrate in this chapter, drums, cannons, and twenty-one gun salutes are as important as uniforms, flags, and propaganda posters. I will particularly focus on the state's use of music, microphones, and radio speeches broadcast over loudspeakers during parades, festivals, and other large public gatherings. Conclusion: Conclusion: Class Distinction and Remembering Lost Sounds chapter abstractThe Conclusion briefly summaries some of the key arguments of the book and delves into the interrelationship between memory, class, nationalism, and the senses. It discusses the contradiction between an apparent nostalgia for street sounds of the past and a simultaneous vulgarization of contemporary street sounds.
£79.20
Stanford University Press The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals: The
Book SynopsisMonster is an adult pit bull, muscular and grey, who is impounded in a large animal shelter in Los Angeles. Like many other dogs at the shelter, Monster is associated with marginalized humans and assumed to embody certain behaviors because of his breed. And like approximately one million shelter animals each year, Monster will be killed. The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals takes us inside one of the country's highest-intake animal shelters. Katja M. Guenther witnesses the dramatic variance in the narratives assigned different animals, including Monster, which dictate their chances for survival. She argues that these inequalities are powerfully linked to human ideas about race, class, gender, ability, and species. Guenther deftly explores internal hierarchies, breed discrimination, and importantly, instances of resistance and agency.Trade Review"In this powerful and timely book, you will meet Gemma, Kali, Monster, Pretty Girl, Jesse, Jake, and many other four-legged beings whose situations in an animal shelter expose overlapping forms of oppression involving race, gender, class, and species. Katja M. Guenther unlocks the shelter door and eloquently explains this complicated and contested multispecies space, as she reflects on issues such as witnessing, vulnerability, advocacy, grievability, compassion, and animal resistance." -- Carol J. Adams * author of The Sexual Politics of Meat *"In this compassionate, incisive ethnography of an animal shelter, Katja M. Guenther illuminates the entangled injustices that shape human relationships with other animals. The emotional, practical, and political contradictions of killing our companions become important sites for understanding exercises of power over others and possibilties for resistance. In addition to providing a conceptual framework for making animal deaths grievable, this book provides important new insights for critical animal studies." -- Lori Gruen * author of Entangled Empathy *"Katja M. Guenther captures the intricate world of animal sheltering and shelter volunteerism in a brilliantly executed multispecies ethnographical work. With the perfect balance of intimacy and analytical depth, the author reminds us of how messy things can get when caring and killing become one, or when the value of the animal companion's life is measured by the race, gender, and zip code of the owner." -- Bénédicte Boisseron * author of Afro-Dog *"Over the past eight years, I've been part of leading three, open-admission government shelters. This remarkable book addresses virtually every systematic issue I've experienced and accurately examines the complexities of the sheltering institution. Katja M. Guenther gets it right. This is a must-read for anyone working or volunteering in an animal shelter. I promise, it will change the way you see your job and make you ask yourself tough questions about where we go from here." -- Kristen Hassen, Director * American Pets Alive! *"The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals is an important read for anyone interested in the social world of animal shelters." -- Michał Piotr Pręgowski * Anthrozoös *"Dr. Guenther's book is an extremely important work that encourages us to be more compassionate and reminds us that the oppressive systems at work in society at large are also at work in the microcosm of the shelter. The book invites us to rethink the entire sheltering system to make it more equitable and humane." -- Community Cats Podcast"Guenther brings a humane perspective to human and animal behavior. In her skillful analysis of the animal shelter's practices and policies, the connections between the marginalization of minority human groups and the marginalization of animals become clear... By investigating the zoological connection between the animal shelter and the community it serves, she vastly expands current notions of intersectionality, democracy, and inclusivity." -- Leslie Irvine * American Journal of Sociology *"Katja Guenther is a radical researcher who wants to change the situation of animals through her research, which is an appeal for a radical transformation of the relationships between humans and animals; it is the call for a revolution." -- Krzysztof T. Konecki * Symbolic Interation *Table of ContentsContents and Abstracts1Monster's World chapter abstractMonster, a muscular gray pit bull, spent the final days of his life at a high-intake animal shelter in southern California, the Pacific Animal Welfare Center (PAW). Monster's fate is the outcome of multiple social processes, including the precarious lives of low-income people in the United States, breed discrimination grounded in racism, the commodification of companion animals, and the human conviction that humans may kill animals as we see fit. This introductory chapter situates the book within the practice of feminist and critical animal studies, the history of animal sheltering in the United States, and contemporary shifts in the animal-sheltering industry, especially the move toward no-kill sheltering. The chapter concludes with a short preview of the chapters that lie ahead. 2Helping/Policing/Killing chapter abstractThis chapter brings readers behind the scenes at PAW to examine how PAW is a hybrid institution that operates as an arm of the welfare state, the carceral state, and the anthroparchal state. PAW blurs the boundaries between providing needed help to stray and unwanted animals (welfare), policing animals and relationships between animals and low-income people of color (carceral), and controlling and killing animals in the name of human needs (anthroparchal). While typically examined as separate systems of state power, welfare, carceral, and anthroparchal states operate together in state settings like PAW to both legitimate and disguise each other. Understanding PAW—and animal shelters more generally—as hybrid institutions is important because doing so reveals the range of their work, the scope of their power, and the conflicts that exist within these institutions from the outset. 3The Myth of the Irresponsible Owner chapter abstractShelter workers, volunteers, and rescuers place responsibility for the large number of companion animals who enter PAW at the feet of one group of people: irresponsible owners. The discourse of irresponsible owners holds that animals come into the shelter because of individual-level human behaviors. Yet the guardians whose dogs end up at PAW are disproportionately lower-income people of color who are subject to population-level conditions of control and power that make them especially vulnerable to losing their animals to the shelter system. The discourse of irresponsible ownership has obscured the structural conditions that facilitate the entry of so many animals from low-income communities into animal shelters, contributes to misguided interventions, and deflects responsibility for what happens to shelter animals away from the institution and the society and back onto the former guardians of the animal. 4The Struggle for Shelter Animal Survival chapter abstractBecause of their different views of shelter killing, animal shelter staff and volunteers routinely come into conflict. Volunteers at PAW—who are almost all women, mostly from middle- and upper-class communities—use their social capital from outside the shelter to challenge and resist the authority of staff within the shelter. In so doing, they reinforce existing social hierarchies of class, race, and gender, while simultaneously challenging PAW's institutional discourse of adoptability, which deems the lives of sick or "stressed" animals to be not worth saving. They thus reject PAW's commitment to upholding anthroparchy vis-à-vis companion animals even as they uphold human hierarchies. 5The Transformative Power of Grief chapter abstractThis chapter centers on grief as a form of resistance. Shelter volunteers employ rituals of mourning to mark the deaths of impounded animals as losses. In so doing, they restore the dead animals' social intelligibility and ultimately transform animals who are otherwise unseen, unrecognized, and unappreciated into animals who have social value. Mourning allows volunteers to draw attention to the problematic practice of shelter killing by making it visible and creating a space for discourse around it. For them, honoring the life of the animal who has died means trying to prevent another animal from being killed at a shelter: each death should be a lesson, a reminder of the need for change, and a push for action against human violence against animals. 6The Peculiar Problem of Pit Bulls chapter abstractPit bulls are the most likely type of dog to come into a shelter and the most likely to die in one. This chapter examines the unique predicament of pit bulls within the context of American conflicts around race, gender, class, and animality. Pit bulls are subject to breed-specific policies and practices in the shelter. Pit bull rescuers—mostly affluent white women— attempt to remake pit bulls so that they shed their identities as companions to Black and poor Latinx men and instead become suitable companions for white, feminized middle-class homes. Disassociation from the dangerousness of Black masculinity and reassociation with white femininity requires that the dog follow a code of behavior, be presented in a particular way, and be deeply immersed in the animal practices of white middle-class people. Rescuers help individual dogs while leaving intact the structures that lead the dogs into the shelter in such high numbers. 7Animals' Resistance to Shelter Rule chapter abstractDrawing parallels to the resistance efforts of other groups that are structurally disadvantaged, I examine impounded animals' resistance to shelter rule. While caging may serve to create an illusion of control and of separation between human and nonhuman animals in the shelter, animals in fact can and do act with agency and engage in resistance. Animals reject efforts at controlling their bodies, use of space, and interactions with staff and other humans. The shelter in turn attempts to control and contain animal resistance through confinement, punishment, and pathologizing, especially through the diagnoses of aggression or of zoochosis (aka "kennel stress"). 8Waiting, Wondering, and Wavering chapter abstractThe shelter's control of time is one key instrument of its power over humans and animals. The shelter's near-exclusive control over how time is spent and who is served at what time reduces the agency of clients, volunteers, and impounded animals. Volunteers, animals, and staff in turn negotiate and resist the shelter's use of time as a mechanism of control. Control over time was one form of domination that neither human nor animal resistance could wrest from the shelter during my fieldwork. The analysis reveals the centrality of time for organizing all activity at PAW, as well as the ways in which powerful actors can manipulate understandings of time to promote acquiescence among those subjected to a particular time line. 9A New Revolution chapter abstractThe proposed "humane communities" approach to animal sheltering radically rethinks how shelters interact with animal and human communities. Drawing on a utopian vision of what a future for companion animals might look like, the humane communities approach works to eliminate homelessness among companion animals and to support strong relationships between humans and companion animals. Key elements include the integration of community members into the management of local animal shelters, meaningful and community-driven needs assessment, the provision of financial and other resources to animal guardians to be able to care for their animals, affordable, animal-friendly housing, and legislation to prohibit insurance-industry discrimination against certain types of companion animals.
£86.40
Stanford University Press Graveyard of Clerics: Everyday Activism in Saudi
Book SynopsisThe inside story of political protest in Saudi Arabia—on the ground, in the suburbs, and in the face of increasing state repression. Graveyard of Clerics takes up two global phenomena intimately linked in Saudi Arabia: urban sprawl and religious activism. Saudi suburbia emerged after World War II as citizens fled crowded inner cities. Developed to encourage a society of docile, isolated citizens, suburbs instead opened new spaces for political action. Religious activists in particular turned homes, schools, mosques, and summer camps into resources for mobilization. With the support of suburban grassroots networks, activists won local elections and found opportunities to protest government actions—until they faced a new wave of repression under the current Saudi leadership. Pascal Menoret spent four years in Saudi Arabia in the places where today's Islamic activism first emerged. With this book, he tells the stories of the people actively countering the Saudi state and highlights how people can organize and protest even amid increasingly intense police repression. This book changes the way we look at religious activism in Saudi Arabia. It also offers a cautionary tale: the ongoing repression by Saudi elites—achieved often with the complicity of the international community—is shutting down grassroots political movements with significant consequences for the country and the world.Trade Review"A distinguished ethnographer, Pascal Menoret excavates the Islamic Awakening in Saudi Arabia with great empathy and understanding. Once again, he demonstrates his ability to penetrate a world often associated with radicalism, bigotry, intolerance and violence, bringing us face to face with the men of the movement, and their rise and demise in the Saudi state." -- Madawi al-Rasheed * London School of Economics, author of Salman's Legacy: The Dilemmas of a New Era in Saudi Arabia *"Pascal Menoret is an intrepid field researcher who gained unique access to communities in Saudi Arabia either closed to or ignored by other Western scholars. His insights into how the physical geography of Riyadh has shaped the development of its various social mobilizations are provocative and enlightening. This book is a fascinating read." -- F. Gregory Gause III * Texas A&M University, author of The International Relations of the Persian Gulf *"There is no doubt that this study will be invaluable to anyone interested in Middle East studies with a focus on Islamic activism, youth recruitment and mobilization, spatial politics and the intersection of urban planning, activism, and state repression. This original work is a much-needed intervention that advocates for the urgency and need for activism that 'may resurface when the conditions are ripe'" -- Jonas Elbousty * International Journal of Middle East Studies *Table of ContentsContents and Abstracts1Part I: The Islamic Awakening chapter abstractThe Islamic Awakening is a political movement created in schools, colleges, and mosques by educators, preachers, and clerics. This part looks at how everyday Saudis become activists, and what type of repression they encounter when organizing and protesting in public. 2Part II: Saudi Suburbia chapter abstractThe Islamic Awakening emerged in the sprawling landscape of the Saudi suburbs, created in the 1960s and 1970s by princes and developers with the help of European urban planners. This part looks at the making of Saudi suburbia and examines the victory of Islamic Awakening candidates in the municipal elections of 2005. 3Part III: Awareness Groups and Summer Camps chapter abstractThe electoral victory of 2005 was the result of the mobilization of myriads of Islamic Awakening groups in local mosques, schools, and summer camps. This part analyzes the everyday structures of the Awakening: a high school Islamic group and the annual summer camps of the movement. It looks at how political repression targets everyday Islamic activism. 4Part IV: Leaving Islamic Activism Behind chapter abstractAs a result of the increased crackdown on Islamic movements, young activists have either tried to reform the Islamic Awakening from within or taken their distances with the movement. This part looks at the consequences of repression on individual mobilization, and analyzes the current state of the Islamic movement in Saudi Arabia.
£19.79
Stanford University Press The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals: The
Book SynopsisMonster is an adult pit bull, muscular and grey, who is impounded in a large animal shelter in Los Angeles. Like many other dogs at the shelter, Monster is associated with marginalized humans and assumed to embody certain behaviors because of his breed. And like approximately one million shelter animals each year, Monster will be killed. The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals takes us inside one of the country's highest-intake animal shelters. Katja M. Guenther witnesses the dramatic variance in the narratives assigned different animals, including Monster, which dictate their chances for survival. She argues that these inequalities are powerfully linked to human ideas about race, class, gender, ability, and species. Guenther deftly explores internal hierarchies, breed discrimination, and importantly, instances of resistance and agency.Trade Review"In this powerful and timely book, you will meet Gemma, Kali, Monster, Pretty Girl, Jesse, Jake, and many other four-legged beings whose situations in an animal shelter expose overlapping forms of oppression involving race, gender, class, and species. Katja M. Guenther unlocks the shelter door and eloquently explains this complicated and contested multispecies space, as she reflects on issues such as witnessing, vulnerability, advocacy, grievability, compassion, and animal resistance." -- Carol J. Adams * author of The Sexual Politics of Meat *"In this compassionate, incisive ethnography of an animal shelter, Katja M. Guenther illuminates the entangled injustices that shape human relationships with other animals. The emotional, practical, and political contradictions of killing our companions become important sites for understanding exercises of power over others and possibilties for resistance. In addition to providing a conceptual framework for making animal deaths grievable, this book provides important new insights for critical animal studies." -- Lori Gruen * author of Entangled Empathy *"Katja M. Guenther captures the intricate world of animal sheltering and shelter volunteerism in a brilliantly executed multispecies ethnographical work. With the perfect balance of intimacy and analytical depth, the author reminds us of how messy things can get when caring and killing become one, or when the value of the animal companion's life is measured by the race, gender, and zip code of the owner." -- Bénédicte Boisseron * author of Afro-Dog *"Over the past eight years, I've been part of leading three, open-admission government shelters. This remarkable book addresses virtually every systematic issue I've experienced and accurately examines the complexities of the sheltering institution. Katja M. Guenther gets it right. This is a must-read for anyone working or volunteering in an animal shelter. I promise, it will change the way you see your job and make you ask yourself tough questions about where we go from here." -- Kristen Hassen, Director * American Pets Alive! *"The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals is an important read for anyone interested in the social world of animal shelters." -- Michał Piotr Pręgowski * Anthrozoös *"Dr. Guenther's book is an extremely important work that encourages us to be more compassionate and reminds us that the oppressive systems at work in society at large are also at work in the microcosm of the shelter. The book invites us to rethink the entire sheltering system to make it more equitable and humane." -- Community Cats Podcast"Guenther brings a humane perspective to human and animal behavior. In her skillful analysis of the animal shelter's practices and policies, the connections between the marginalization of minority human groups and the marginalization of animals become clear... By investigating the zoological connection between the animal shelter and the community it serves, she vastly expands current notions of intersectionality, democracy, and inclusivity." -- Leslie Irvine * American Journal of Sociology *"Katja Guenther is a radical researcher who wants to change the situation of animals through her research, which is an appeal for a radical transformation of the relationships between humans and animals; it is the call for a revolution." -- Krzysztof T. Konecki * Symbolic Interation *Table of ContentsContents and Abstracts1Monster's World chapter abstractMonster, a muscular gray pit bull, spent the final days of his life at a high-intake animal shelter in southern California, the Pacific Animal Welfare Center (PAW). Monster's fate is the outcome of multiple social processes, including the precarious lives of low-income people in the United States, breed discrimination grounded in racism, the commodification of companion animals, and the human conviction that humans may kill animals as we see fit. This introductory chapter situates the book within the practice of feminist and critical animal studies, the history of animal sheltering in the United States, and contemporary shifts in the animal-sheltering industry, especially the move toward no-kill sheltering. The chapter concludes with a short preview of the chapters that lie ahead. 2Helping/Policing/Killing chapter abstractThis chapter brings readers behind the scenes at PAW to examine how PAW is a hybrid institution that operates as an arm of the welfare state, the carceral state, and the anthroparchal state. PAW blurs the boundaries between providing needed help to stray and unwanted animals (welfare), policing animals and relationships between animals and low-income people of color (carceral), and controlling and killing animals in the name of human needs (anthroparchal). While typically examined as separate systems of state power, welfare, carceral, and anthroparchal states operate together in state settings like PAW to both legitimate and disguise each other. Understanding PAW—and animal shelters more generally—as hybrid institutions is important because doing so reveals the range of their work, the scope of their power, and the conflicts that exist within these institutions from the outset. 3The Myth of the Irresponsible Owner chapter abstractShelter workers, volunteers, and rescuers place responsibility for the large number of companion animals who enter PAW at the feet of one group of people: irresponsible owners. The discourse of irresponsible owners holds that animals come into the shelter because of individual-level human behaviors. Yet the guardians whose dogs end up at PAW are disproportionately lower-income people of color who are subject to population-level conditions of control and power that make them especially vulnerable to losing their animals to the shelter system. The discourse of irresponsible ownership has obscured the structural conditions that facilitate the entry of so many animals from low-income communities into animal shelters, contributes to misguided interventions, and deflects responsibility for what happens to shelter animals away from the institution and the society and back onto the former guardians of the animal. 4The Struggle for Shelter Animal Survival chapter abstractBecause of their different views of shelter killing, animal shelter staff and volunteers routinely come into conflict. Volunteers at PAW—who are almost all women, mostly from middle- and upper-class communities—use their social capital from outside the shelter to challenge and resist the authority of staff within the shelter. In so doing, they reinforce existing social hierarchies of class, race, and gender, while simultaneously challenging PAW's institutional discourse of adoptability, which deems the lives of sick or "stressed" animals to be not worth saving. They thus reject PAW's commitment to upholding anthroparchy vis-à-vis companion animals even as they uphold human hierarchies. 5The Transformative Power of Grief chapter abstractThis chapter centers on grief as a form of resistance. Shelter volunteers employ rituals of mourning to mark the deaths of impounded animals as losses. In so doing, they restore the dead animals' social intelligibility and ultimately transform animals who are otherwise unseen, unrecognized, and unappreciated into animals who have social value. Mourning allows volunteers to draw attention to the problematic practice of shelter killing by making it visible and creating a space for discourse around it. For them, honoring the life of the animal who has died means trying to prevent another animal from being killed at a shelter: each death should be a lesson, a reminder of the need for change, and a push for action against human violence against animals. 6The Peculiar Problem of Pit Bulls chapter abstractPit bulls are the most likely type of dog to come into a shelter and the most likely to die in one. This chapter examines the unique predicament of pit bulls within the context of American conflicts around race, gender, class, and animality. Pit bulls are subject to breed-specific policies and practices in the shelter. Pit bull rescuers—mostly affluent white women— attempt to remake pit bulls so that they shed their identities as companions to Black and poor Latinx men and instead become suitable companions for white, feminized middle-class homes. Disassociation from the dangerousness of Black masculinity and reassociation with white femininity requires that the dog follow a code of behavior, be presented in a particular way, and be deeply immersed in the animal practices of white middle-class people. Rescuers help individual dogs while leaving intact the structures that lead the dogs into the shelter in such high numbers. 7Animals' Resistance to Shelter Rule chapter abstractDrawing parallels to the resistance efforts of other groups that are structurally disadvantaged, I examine impounded animals' resistance to shelter rule. While caging may serve to create an illusion of control and of separation between human and nonhuman animals in the shelter, animals in fact can and do act with agency and engage in resistance. Animals reject efforts at controlling their bodies, use of space, and interactions with staff and other humans. The shelter in turn attempts to control and contain animal resistance through confinement, punishment, and pathologizing, especially through the diagnoses of aggression or of zoochosis (aka "kennel stress"). 8Waiting, Wondering, and Wavering chapter abstractThe shelter's control of time is one key instrument of its power over humans and animals. The shelter's near-exclusive control over how time is spent and who is served at what time reduces the agency of clients, volunteers, and impounded animals. Volunteers, animals, and staff in turn negotiate and resist the shelter's use of time as a mechanism of control. Control over time was one form of domination that neither human nor animal resistance could wrest from the shelter during my fieldwork. The analysis reveals the centrality of time for organizing all activity at PAW, as well as the ways in which powerful actors can manipulate understandings of time to promote acquiescence among those subjected to a particular time line. 9A New Revolution chapter abstractThe proposed "humane communities" approach to animal sheltering radically rethinks how shelters interact with animal and human communities. Drawing on a utopian vision of what a future for companion animals might look like, the humane communities approach works to eliminate homelessness among companion animals and to support strong relationships between humans and companion animals. Key elements include the integration of community members into the management of local animal shelters, meaningful and community-driven needs assessment, the provision of financial and other resources to animal guardians to be able to care for their animals, affordable, animal-friendly housing, and legislation to prohibit insurance-industry discrimination against certain types of companion animals.
£23.39
Stanford University Press Street Sounds: Listening to Everyday Life in
Book SynopsisAs the twentieth century roared on, transformative technologies—from trains, trams, and automobiles to radios and loudspeakers—fundamentally changed the sounds of the Egyptian streets. The cacophony of everyday life grew louder, and the Egyptian press featured editorials calling for the regulation of not only mechanized and amplified sounds, but also the voices of street vendors, the music of wedding processions, and even the traditional funerary wails. Ziad Fahmy offers the first historical examination of the changing soundscapes of urban Egypt, highlighting the mundane sounds of street life, while "listening" to the voices of ordinary people as they struggle with state authorities for ownership of the streets. Interweaving infrastructural, cultural, and social history, Fahmy analyzes the sounds of modernity, using sounded sources as an analytical tool for examining the past. Street Sounds also reveals a political dimension of noise by demonstrating how the growing middle classes used sound to distinguish themselves from the Egyptian masses. This book contextualizes sound, layering historical analysis with a sensory dimension, bringing us closer to the Egyptian streets as lived and embodied by everyday people.Trade Review"With considerable skill, Ziad Fahmy listens to listeners in a place and time wholly underexplored by historians of the senses. In the process, he offers us an important and trenchant interpretation of the sensory definition of modernity." -- Mark Smith * University of South Carolina *"Street Sounds brings the boisterous soundscape of modernizing Egypt to life. Ziad Fahmy has an ear for the noise of history in motion—street hawkers, calls to prayer, braying donkeys, wagon wheels, claxons and screeching tires, recorded song, and the ever-present buzz of electricity. He allows us to hear an Egypt we might otherwise discount." -- Joel Gordon * University of Arkansas *"In this fascinating and highly original study, Ziad Fahmy takes sound seriously as both a primary source and a qualitatively distinct phenomenon of modernity. Street Sounds apprehends sonic and scopic regimes as interrelated aspects of a larger sensorium, thereby pioneering a new and extraordinarily rich form of Middle Eastern cultural history." -- Walter Armbrust * University of Oxford *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: Introduction: Historicizing Sounds and Soundscapes chapter abstractIn the Introduction I briefly examine the importance of the field of sound studies and the need for historians of the Middle East to engage with the sounds of the past. I discuss the importance of "listening" to the sources, in order to mine the archives for sonic events. Finally, Street Sounds proposes that by taking into account the changing sounds of the past, and by examining how people dealt with their daily sounded environment, we can be brought closer to a more embodied microlevel analysis of mundane street life. This is especially true in a period of rapid sonic transition, which exemplified the infrastructural and technological transformations during the first half of the twentieth century. 1Walking the City: Street Voices, Traffic, and the Mundane Sounds of Everyday Life chapter abstractInspired in part by Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life, in Chapter 1, I describe life in early- to mid-twentieth-century Cairo from a pedestrian's perspective. "Walking the City: Street Voices, Traffic, and the Mundane Sounds of Everyday Life" is devoted to the sounds of pedestrians and commuters as I analyze the ways that they used, occupied, and walked through those public spaces to commute, work, sell, and shop, and to entertain and be entertained. The first part of the chapter examines some of the social implications of embodied noises, from jingling anklets and bracelets to footsteps, as ordinary Cairenes were negotiating their way through a rapidly changing city. The second half of the chapter focuses on the calls of street hawkers, entertainers, and merchants who relied on their voices to advertise their goods and services. 2Silencing the Streets: Classism, Fear of the Crowd, and Regulating Sounds and Bodies chapter abstractChapter 2, "Silencing the Streets: Classism, Fear of the Crowd, and Regulating Sounds and Bodies," examines both the Egyptian government's attempts at regulating and silencing public spaces and the class implications of these policies. New anti-begging and anti-homelessness discourses invoked fears of an imminent breakdown of public order and even public health. In this chapter, I also document the interrelated and ever-present class bias in the Egyptian press, especially with regard to its coverage of the urban streets, street hawkers, and the itinerant poor. 3Roads and Tracks: Modern Traffic and the Sensory and Social Impact of Trams and Automobiles chapter abstractChapter 3, "Roads and Tracks: Modern Traffic and the Sensory and Social Impact of Trams and Automobiles," examines the modernization of Egypt's urban infrastructure, especially roads and tramways. The changing sounds and the social impact of growing urban traffic is carefully examined, with an emphasis on the introduction of tramways and motor vehicles. The chapter also documents and elaborates on the sonic impact of new urban spaces from large city squares to bustling transportation hubs. The problems of dramatically increased motor traffic and early attempts at regulating car horn noise are especially investigated. 4The Soundscapes of Modernity: Electricity, Lights and the Sounds of Nightlife chapter abstractChapter 4, "The Soundscapes of Modernity: Electricity, Lights and the Sounds of Nightlife," begins by examining the professional lighting of Egyptian cities by private gas utilities and the introduction of electricity and electric lighting. The sonic implication of electricity was of course enormous as it not only allowed the eventual proliferation of radios, loudspeakers, and tramways, but just as importantly brought the electric lights that forever changed the sounds of the Egyptian night. The growth of a regularly boisterous nightlife and the establishment of newer places of public leisure, from amusement parks to cabarets and movie theaters catering to diverse audiences, are closely examined. 5The Sounds of Weddings and Funerals: From Brass Bands to Wails and Ululations chapter abstractChapter 5 examines the evolving street sounds of traditional Egyptian weddings and funerals, which involved elaborate street processions and a variety of auditory and visual displays. It examines the changing roles of street music, singing, loud funerary grieving, and other important verbal and nonverbal vocalizations. The chapter concludes by examining some of the attacks directed against many of the embodied and auditory aspects of these traditional ceremonies by the government and by both secular and Islamic modernists. The one point all the "modernizing" camps agreed on was their belief in the general ignorance of the vast majority of the population and the urgent need for education, reform, and uplift. The chapter also addresses how many of these vulgarizing discourses played a role in the class distinction of Egypt's growing middle classes as they self-consciously attempted to define and separate themselves from the masses through sensory differentiation. 6Sounding Out State Power: Cannons, Music, and Loudspeakers chapter abstractIn Chapter 6, "Sounding Out State Power: Cannons, Music and Loudspeakers," I examine the Egyptian state's appropriation of large religious and secular celebrations and festivals. The chapter centers exclusively on the official sounds and spectacles performed and sponsored by the Egyptian state in an ongoing effort to legitimize its secular and religious authority in the eyes and ears of the masses. As I demonstrate in this chapter, drums, cannons, and twenty-one gun salutes are as important as uniforms, flags, and propaganda posters. I will particularly focus on the state's use of music, microphones, and radio speeches broadcast over loudspeakers during parades, festivals, and other large public gatherings. Conclusion: Conclusion: Class Distinction and Remembering Lost Sounds chapter abstractThe Conclusion briefly summaries some of the key arguments of the book and delves into the interrelationship between memory, class, nationalism, and the senses. It discusses the contradiction between an apparent nostalgia for street sounds of the past and a simultaneous vulgarization of contemporary street sounds.
£21.59
Stanford University Press Indigenous Dispossession: Housing and Maya
Book SynopsisFollowing the recent global housing boom, tract housing development became a billion-dollar industry in Mexico. At the national level, neoliberal housing policy has overtaken debates around land reform. For Indigenous peoples, access to affordable housing remains crucial to alleviating poverty. But as palapas, traditional thatch and wood houses, are replaced by tract houses in the Yucatán Peninsula, Indigenous peoples' relationship to land, urbanism, and finance is similarly transformed, revealing a legacy of debt and dispossession. Indigenous Dispossession examines how Maya families grapple with the ramifications of neoliberal housing policies. M. Bianet Castellanos relates Maya migrants' experiences with housing and mortgage finance in Cancún, one of Mexico's fastest-growing cities. Their struggle to own homes reveals colonial and settler colonial structures that underpin the city's economy, built environment, and racial order. But even as Maya people contend with predatory lending practices and foreclosure, they cultivate strategies of resistance—from "waiting out" the state, to demanding Indigenous rights in urban centers. As Castellanos argues, it is through these maneuvers that Maya migrants forge a new vision of Indigenous urbanism.Trade Review"Drawing on her long-term collaboration with indigenous people, M. Bianet Castellanos eloquently critiques the dispossession of Maya in Cancún and illuminates their resistance. Her passion for revealing and dismantling the racial and gender hierarchies embedded in neoliberal projects is compelling. A nuanced contribution to our understanding of settler colonialism." -- Patricia Zavella * University of California, Santa Cruz, author of The Movement for Reproductive Justice: Empowering Women of Color through Social Activism *"In this compelling and timely work, M. Bianet Castellanos has given us a powerful indictment of neoliberalism's perpetuation of the settler project of Indigenous dispossession. She also effectively demonstrates how Indigenous peoples develop strategies of resistance to new technologies of domination like racialized debt, and in the process craft new forms of urban Indigeneity." -- Shannon Speed * University of California, Los Angeles *"A fascinating and highly readable study of how Indigenous Maya experience twenty-first-century rounds of dispossession and esclavitud—this time born of debt tied to housing financing. Focusing upon mortgage-based access to social interest housing in modern-day Cancún, M. Bianet Castellanos' account foregrounds Indigenous voices as they struggle to become homeowners." -- Peter M. Ward * University of Texas at Austin *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: Indigenous Cancún chapter abstractThe central argument of this book is that as Indigenous migrants move to cities, they are no longer treated as Indigenous and instead become deracialized subjects who are disciplined through neoliberal instruments of debt, like mortgage finance and credit cards, leading to greater economic precarity and a loss of autonomy from the state. Through an ethnography of Maya migrants living in Cancún, one of Mexico's fastest growing cities, I show that Maya migrants' struggles to own a home reveal the colonial and settler colonial structures underpinning the city's economy, built environment, and racial order. As they grapple with predatory lending and foreclosure, Maya families cultivate strategies of resistance, from "waiting out" the state to demanding recognition as Indigenous peoples in urban centers. Through these maneuvers, Maya migrants forge a new vision of Indigenous urbanism that counters a discourse of urban malaise and articulates dignity with democracy. 1Before Housing Reform: The Gendering of Urban Property chapter abstractChapter one maps out the history of land policies in Cancún and how they have been shaped by ideologies of family, gender, and citizenship. By excluding migrants who were unmarried and childless from affordable housing and land programs, the state defined citizenship narrowly and encouraged migrants to embrace the nuclear family if they wished to become citizens of this new urban space. In response, Maya women mobilized their status as wives and mothers to lobby for land. 2Promoting Housing Reform: Debt as Patrimony chapter abstractChapter two examines the transformation of Mexico's land distribution policies and property rights through a discursive analysis of the ideologies central to government campaigns promoting "dignified" housing. Analyzing news articles, government campaign documents, and one Maya family's response to these campaigns, I examine the narrative devices and rhetorical strategies used to make housing attractive and to align debt with national ideals. The language of patrimony and suburban domesticity is intended to soften the retreat of the state from land redistribution, and makes palatable and desirable the process of going into debt on a much larger scale than previously possible. 3After Housing Reform: Credit as the New Frontier chapter abstractChapter three analyzes Indigenous migrants' willingness to take on debt. Prior to 2000, Maya aspired to own, but without debt. Homeownership has increased Maya migrants access to credit, making them the "new frontier" of capitalism. But it has concomitantly increased their economic risk. It considers how credit and risk take on a gendered and "moral valence." For male migrants, going into debt to purchase a home is a risky venture that ignores lessons learned from Indigenous experiences with debt servitude. Yet for female migrants, owning a concrete block home has become a sign of progress and security from natural disasters. To tease out this moral, cultural, and gendered dilemma, I examine migrants' experiences with microfinance and credit cards. 4Foreclosure: Waiting Out the State chapter abstractChapter four centers on one Maya family's experience with foreclosure. How do Indigenous peoples cope with this loss and how does it (re)structure their attachments to place, land and nation? Even as housing reform becomes a form of discipline to produce new types of citizens and construct new narratives of progress, debt delinquency, and insecurity, I show how migrants' resistance strategies, from foot dragging to legal suits to postponing foreclosure, are transformed into a process of "waiting out" the state and capital. In so doing, Maya migrants sidestep the bureaucratic measures created to regulate the poor and convert consent into provocative acts of obstruction and defiance. 5Eviction: Invoking Indigenous Resistance chapter abstractChapter five examines the case of Maya migrants who reject social housing and instead opt to live in the squatter settlement of Colonia Mario Villanueva. Social housing, Maya migrants argue, entails great risk (due to mortgage debt) and is rife with social atomization. In contrast, life in Colonia Mario Villanueva is organized around the principles of Indigenous communal land practices. It is centered around the colonia's legal battle to avoid eviction, which was led by Maya women. These women relied on strategies of resistance derived from Indigenous land struggles. Colonias are perfect places to cultivate political subordination, but in the case of Mario Villanueva, they also become spaces of insubordination. Epilogue: A Cautionary Tale of Indebtedness chapter abstractThe book concludes by assessing how Indigenous migrants have fared under housing reform. Galvanized by the parallels between their ancestors' struggle with esclavitud and their own land and housing struggles, Maya migrants demand to be engaged as Indigenous and accorded the rights to land and self-determination. Migrants urge us to engage with a more expansive conception of territoriality, one that is not limited to the land boundaries of rural communities but is broad enough to recognize the peninsula's sacred Maya geography and to encompass Indigenous diasporas in urban centers. Through this articulation, they offer a more dynamic interpretation of Indigenous rights that aims to combat settler tactics of elimination through assimilation and dispossession. In so doing, Maya migrants are forging a new vision of Indigenous urbanism that moves beyond a colonial politics of recognition.
£19.79
Stanford University Press The Right to Dignity: Housing Struggles, City
Book SynopsisIn the poorest neighborhoods of Santiago, Chile, low-income residents known as pobladores have long lived at the margins—and have long advocated for the right to housing as part of la vida digna (a life with dignity). From 2011 to 2015, anthropologist Miguel Pérez conducted fieldwork among the pobladores of Santiago, where the urban dwellers and activists he met were part of an emerging social movement that demanded dignified living conditions, the right to remain in their neighborhoods of origin, and, more broadly, recognition as citizens entitled to basic rights. This ethnographic account raises questions about state policies that conceptualize housing as a commodity rather than a right, and how poor urban dwellers seek recognition and articulate political agency against the backdrop of neoliberal policies. By scrutinizing how Chilean pobladores constitute themselves as political subjects, this book reveals the mechanisms through which housing activists develop new imaginaries of citizenship in a country where the market has been the dominant force organizing social life for almost forty years. Pérez considers the limits and potentialities of urban movements, framed by poor people's involvement in subsidy-based programs, as well as the capacity of low-income residents to struggle against the commodification of rights by claiming the right to dignity: a demand based on a moral category that would ultimately become the driving force behind Chile's 2019 social uprising.Trade Review"This subtle and complex ethnography of urban citizenship in Chile analyses how poor city-dwellers forge their political subjectivity through collective struggles for dignity and rights to housing. Miguel Pérez deftly weaves ethnographic description and theory together with historical narrative, showing how these contemporary ethico-political projects are both shaped by neoliberal regimes of social rights and deeply grounded in past experience and intergenerational understandings of what it is to be a poblador. This profoundly important study comes at a time when Chile has become the focus of the latest wave of democratization in the region, and helps us understand how that has become possible."—Sian Lazar, University of Cambridge"By focusing on dignity as a central claim of housing struggles in Chile, Miguel Pérez brilliantly demonstrates the emergence of new political subjectivities and a new political language. The moral claim of dignity opens up a new space of contestation that transforms the discourse of rights in the context of the dominance of neoliberal housing policies. Pérez's carefully crafted and cutting-edge analysis has global importance, as countries everywhere adopt these policies and as social movements have to reinvent themselves to articulate their claims in new forms."—Teresa Caldeira, University of California, Berkeley"The Right to Dignity is a book that questions planners and housing policymakers on how urban governance and housing programs are established today. Pérez's reflections are an invitation to address the limitations of transforming the urban debate toward a democratized perspective of planning and to grasp an opportunity to involve communities in the city-making process."—Andrea Urbina Julio, Journal of the American Planning Association"[The] Right to Dignity not only documents a powerful case study of a decades long housing campaign. It presents teachable lessons about urban people power that will inspire other urban movements around the world."—Amanda Tattersall, International Journal of Housing PolicyTable of Contents1. Housing the Poor in a Neoliberal City 2. Peripheral Struggles for Housing: The Pobladores Movement 3. Mobilizing While Waiting: The State-Regulated Comités de Allegados 4. Performances of City Making 5. Politics of Effort: Urban Formulations of Citizenship 6. Toward a Life with Dignity: Ethical Practices, New Political Horizons 7. Conclusion: "Until Dignity Becomes Custom"
£92.80
Stanford University Press Protesting Jordan: Geographies of Power and
Book SynopsisA National Endowment for Democracy Notable Book of 2022 Protest has been a key method of political claim-making in Jordan from the late Ottoman period to the present day. More than moments of rupture within normal-time politics, protests have been central to challenging state power, as well as reproducing it—and the spatial dynamics of protests play a central role in the construction of both state and society. With this book, Jillian Schwedler considers how space and geography influence protests and repression, and, in challenging conventional narratives of Hashemite state-making, offers the first in-depth study of rebellion in Jordan. Based on twenty-five years of field research, Protesting Jordan examines protests as they are situated in the built environment, bringing together considerations of networks, spatial imaginaries, space and place-making, and political geographies at local, national, regional, and global scales. Schwedler considers the impact of time and temporality in the lifecycles of individual movements. Through a mixed interpretive methodology, this book illuminates the geographies of power and dissent and the spatial practices of protest and repression, highlighting the political stakes of competing narratives about Jordan's past, present, and future.Trade Review"Protesting Jordan offers readers of Arab politics and contentious politics alike a narrative of how protest shapes how states reproduce their power and, in turn, reshape protest. Jillian Schwedler blends a deep immersion in the Middle East with a firm grasp of contentious politics theory in this thought-provoking book."—Sidney Tarrow, Cornell University"Superbly researched, Protesting Jordan provides a fascinating and groundbreaking alternative history of Jordan. Jillian Schwedler skillfully unpacks and challenges traditional accounts of state-making in Jordan as a top-down process. An essential read for those seeking to better understand Jordan's history and how protests maintain state power."—Janine Clark, University of Toronto"Schwedler has crafted an extraordinarily rich portrait of the creation of Jordan and the fortunes of the Hashemite monarchy through the lens of those who contested its policies, its institutions, and sometimes even its very existence. In doing so, she demonstrates that protest has been a routine part of politics in Jordan since before the modern state was established."—Lisa Anderson, Foreign Affairs"It's not just the best book I've read about Jordan... but also one of the very best political science books I've read this year... Protesting Jordan should be a must read for scholars of the Middle East and of comparative politics more broadly, as well as for analysts, journalists and policymakers trying to understand the country's politics."—Marc Lynch, Abu Aardvark"[Protesting Jordan] gives a detailed and rich account of Jordan's social and political history, showing how repertoires of protest and repression created, transformed, and continue to afect state and society in Jordan. But the book is also written in a way that makes it essential reading for any scholar interested in protests, repression, and state development – not just in Jordan, but indeed anywhere else."—Curtis R. Ryan, APSA MENA Newsletter"Protesting Jordan is an important contribution to the study of protest. It is a cry and demand not only for scholars to carry on the critical work of studying popular struggle to illuminate its social significance but to forge novel approaches to understand the state, its political economy and urban form."—Deen Sharp, APSA MENA Newsletter"Schwedler's work pushes us to think about the effects of social movements above and beyond narrow conceptions of success or failure; the book traces and convincingly demonstrates the myriad ways that regimes learn from protest activity and deploy repressive state power through the construction (or lack thereof) of cities and communities."—Summer Forester, APSA MENA Newsletter"Protesting Jordan is a wonderful read and an ambitious model for writing contentious politics into political history. ... Schwedler is one of our field's great ethnographic writers, and her keen eye for meaningful details and almost-imperceptible shifts in power relations rendered this routine set of protests into powerful grounds for theorizing about the everyday work of contention."—Chantal Berman, APSA MENA Newsletter"Schwedler's approach is consciously interpretive and inductive....[A]nyone interested in interested in the relationship between popular opposition and state formation in Jordan will find a wealth of new empirical material and fresh analysis here."—Laurie A. Brand, Middle East Journal"Schwedler's scholarship shows how and why in-depth local knowledges are important: certainly to better understand local contexts, but also in order to reflect on 'generalist' scholarship and 'broader' theoretical debates."—Andrea Teti, Mediterranean Politics"Throughout the work, Schwedler challenges readers to rethink the politics of modern protests by interrogating their meaning under Jordan's authoritarian power structure. Protests are not static attacks on normality; they are frequent and normal expressions of commonplace struggles. They enable Jordanians to assert claims and challenge their regime's rules, but they also elicit autocratic responses. Protests represent frontiers where state power is exerted and negotiated and where the state itself becomes seen."—Sean L. Yom, Middle East Research and Information ProjectTable of Contents1. The Shifting Political Stakes of Protest 2. Transforming Transjordan 3. Becoming Amman: From Periphery to Center 4. Jordanization, the Neoliberal State, and the Retreat and Return of Protest 5. An Ethnography of Place and the Politics of Routine Protests 6. Jordan in the Time of the Arab Uprisings 7. The Techniques and Evolving Spatial Dynamics of Protest and Repression 8. Protest and Order in Militarized Spaces 9. Protesting Global Aspirations
£86.40
Stanford University Press The Right to Be Counted: The Urban Poorand the
Book SynopsisIn the last 30 years, Delhi, the capital of India, has displaced over 1.5 million poor people. Resettlement and welfare services are available—but exclusively so, as the city deems much of the population ineligible for civic benefits. The Right to Be Counted examines how Delhi's urban poor, in an effort to gain visibility from the local state, incrementally stake their claims to a house and life in the city. Contributing to debates about the contradictions of state governmentality and the citizenship projects of the poor in Delhi, this book explores social suffering, logistics, and the logic of political mobilizations that emanate from processes of displacement and resettlement. Sanjeev Routray draws upon fieldwork conducted in various low-income neighborhoods throughout the 2010s to describe the process of claims-making as an attempt by the political community of the poor to assert its existence and numerical strength, and demonstrates how this struggle to be counted constitutes the systematic, protracted, and incremental political process by which the poor claim their substantive entitlements and become entrenched in the city. Analyzing various social, political, and economic relationships, as well as kinship networks and solidarity linkages across the political and social spectrum, this book traces the ways the poor work to gain a foothold in Delhi and establish agency for themselves.Trade Review"The Right to Be Counted presents a rich ethnographic analysis of the range of strategies adopted by displaced populations crowding into urban slums to stake their claim to belong to the city. Routray's depiction of 'numerical citizenship' is persuasive and enlightening. This is a valuable addition to the growing literature on popular politics in megacities."—Partha Chatterjee, Columbia University"This is a 'how things work' book of top quality. With deep, analytical, thoughtful scholarship, Routray provides one of the clearest and most accessible accounts of how the poor fight to make a home in Delhi."—Durba Chattaraj, Ashoka University"Routray offers an impressive and authoritative account that displays a remarkable ability to synthesize interdisciplinary ideas from across disciplines and geographies, while always building his theorizing from a deep commitment to a historically informed ethnography. I learned so much about the relationship between housing, politics and citizenship in Delhi, and beyond. I am sure this text will resonate well beyond its origins."—Ryan Powell, Housing Studies"Routray's book highlights how the logics of planning are employed not only by the powerful to suit the interests of global city making but also by marginalized communities to resist processes of uprooting and work to secure the rights of urban citizenship. The author navigates the difficult task of arguing for the agency of Delhi's urban poor while documenting the profound injustice and suffering they endure in the process."—Shoshana Goldstein, Journal of the American Planning Association
£64.80
Stanford University Press The Right to Be Counted: The Urban Poorand the
Book SynopsisIn the last 30 years, Delhi, the capital of India, has displaced over 1.5 million poor people. Resettlement and welfare services are available—but exclusively so, as the city deems much of the population ineligible for civic benefits. The Right to Be Counted examines how Delhi's urban poor, in an effort to gain visibility from the local state, incrementally stake their claims to a house and life in the city. Contributing to debates about the contradictions of state governmentality and the citizenship projects of the poor in Delhi, this book explores social suffering, logistics, and the logic of political mobilizations that emanate from processes of displacement and resettlement. Sanjeev Routray draws upon fieldwork conducted in various low-income neighborhoods throughout the 2010s to describe the process of claims-making as an attempt by the political community of the poor to assert its existence and numerical strength, and demonstrates how this struggle to be counted constitutes the systematic, protracted, and incremental political process by which the poor claim their substantive entitlements and become entrenched in the city. Analyzing various social, political, and economic relationships, as well as kinship networks and solidarity linkages across the political and social spectrum, this book traces the ways the poor work to gain a foothold in Delhi and establish agency for themselves.Trade Review"The Right to Be Counted presents a rich ethnographic analysis of the range of strategies adopted by displaced populations crowding into urban slums to stake their claim to belong to the city. Routray's depiction of 'numerical citizenship' is persuasive and enlightening. This is a valuable addition to the growing literature on popular politics in megacities."—Partha Chatterjee, Columbia University"This is a 'how things work' book of top quality. With deep, analytical, thoughtful scholarship, Routray provides one of the clearest and most accessible accounts of how the poor fight to make a home in Delhi."—Durba Chattaraj, Ashoka University"Routray offers an impressive and authoritative account that displays a remarkable ability to synthesize interdisciplinary ideas from across disciplines and geographies, while always building his theorizing from a deep commitment to a historically informed ethnography. I learned so much about the relationship between housing, politics and citizenship in Delhi, and beyond. I am sure this text will resonate well beyond its origins."—Ryan Powell, Housing Studies"Routray's book highlights how the logics of planning are employed not only by the powerful to suit the interests of global city making but also by marginalized communities to resist processes of uprooting and work to secure the rights of urban citizenship. The author navigates the difficult task of arguing for the agency of Delhi's urban poor while documenting the profound injustice and suffering they endure in the process."—Shoshana Goldstein, Journal of the American Planning Association
£23.39
Stanford University Press Mother Cow, Mother India: A Multispecies Politics
Book SynopsisIndia imposes stringent criminal penalties, including life imprisonment in some states, for cow slaughter, based on a Hindu ethic of revering the cow as sacred. And yet India is among the world's leading producers of beef, leather, and milk, industries sustained by the mass slaughter of bovines. What is behind this seeming contradiction? What do bovines, deemed holy in Hinduism, experience in the Indian milk and beef industries? Yamini Narayanan asks and answers these questions, introducing cows and buffaloes as key subjects in India's cow protectionism, rather than their treatment hitherto as mere objects of political analysis. Emphasizing human–animal hierarchical relations, Narayanan argues that the Hindu framing of the cow as "mother" is one of human domination, wherein bovine motherhood is simultaneously capitalized for dairy production and weaponized by right-wing Hindu nationalists to violently oppress Muslims and Dalits. Using ethnographic and empirical data gathered across India, this book reveals the harms caused to buffaloes, cows, bulls, and calves in dairying, and the exploitation required of the diverse, racialized labor throughout India's dairy production continuum to obscure such violence. Ultimately, Narayanan traces how the unraveling of human domination and exploitation of farmed animals is integral to progressive multispecies democratic politics, speculating on the real possibility of a post-dairy society, based on vegan agricultural policies for livelihoods and food security.Trade Review"A thoroughly researched and highly innovative scholarship at the frontier of new political developments and Anthropocenic challenges. This book will push you to think about those dimensions usually clouded by refracting syllables. The Brahminical nationalist assumptions of dairy as strength and hominid centrism of the globe have received a thorough challenge by Narayanan. Much awaited credit is honored to fellow nonhuman animals who have participated in nation-building by sweat, blood, milk, skin, flesh, and soul for the believers. A successful project that manages to deliver the message with aplomb and sincerity. Narayanan has delivered a timely call to action."—Suraj Yengde, author of Caste Matters"Yamini Narayanan' Mother Cow, Mother India addresses the unsettling questions we have needed, but failed, to ask about connections among race, gender, religion, caste, and species, never losing sight of all the individuals involved. Her devastating critique of the Indian invocation of cow as "mother" exposes how, in the interests of nationalism and capitalism, the idea of mother, like the cow herself, is being continually exploited. Every gift a scholar needs to bring to such demanding and incisive work—compassion, courage, persistence, exhaustive research, and political acumen—Narayanan brings to this amazing and compelling book."—Carol J. Adams, author of The Sexual Politics of Meat"Mother Cow, Mother India is a highly sophisticated and empathetically engaged analysis of the cows, buffaloes, and their calves at the heart of India's cow protection politics. Narayanan skillfully elicits in the reader a deep sensitivity to the animals' whose lives, experiences, and deaths are caught up in the dairy and beef industries within a fraught landscape of human politics and violence. This work is nothing short of groundbreaking. It is truly the first of its kind – a great gift to the worlds of both animal studies and South Asia studies, not to mention the global animal advocacy movement."—Kathryn Gillespie, author of The Cow with Ear Tag #1389"Yamini Narayanan's exposé of the cruelty entrenched within the industrialised capitalist Indian dairy animal-agriculture system and how it is advanced and supported by Hindutva bovine politics is commendable."—Sagari R. Ramdas, The Wire"These analyses underscore the centrality of caste and communal politics to meat-eating practices in India, even while seeking to argue that there are other historical, political and socioeconomic factors involved."—Kaashif Hajee, The CaravanTable of Contents0. Introduction 1. Dairy Politics and India's Milk Nationalisms 2. Breeding Bovine Caste 3. Milking 4. Gaushalas: Making India "Pure" Again 5. "Save Cow, Save India" 6. Trafficking 7. Slaughter 8. Envisioning Post-Dairy Futures
£75.20
Stanford University Press Life Beyond Waste: Work and Infrastructure in
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
£64.80
Stanford University Press City of Sediments: A History of Seoul in the Age
Book SynopsisOnce the capital of the five-hundred-year Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1897) and the Taehan Empire (1897–1910), the city of Seoul posed unique challenges to urban reform and modernization under Japanese colonial rule in the early twentieth century, constrained by the labyrinthian built environment of the old Korean capital. Colonial authorities attempted to employ a strategy of "erasure"—monumental Japanese architecture was, for instance, superimposed upon existing palace structures—to articulate to colonized Korean subjects the transition from the pre-modern to the modern, and the naturalization of colonial rule as inevitable historical change. Drawing from and analyzing a wide range of materials, from architecture and photography to print media and sound recordings, City of Sediments shows how Seoul became a site to articulate a new mode of time—modernity—that defined the place of the colonized in accordance with the progression of history, and how the underbelly of the city, latent places of darkness filled with chatters of the alleyway, challenged this visual language of power. To do so, Se-Mi Oh builds an inventive new model of history where discrete events do not unfold one after the other, but rather one in which histories layer atop each other like sediment, allowing a new map of colonial Seoul to emerge, a map where the material traces of the city are overlapping, with vibrant residues of earlier times defiantly visible among the superimposed signs of modernity and colonial domination.Trade Review"City of Sediments assembles its kaleidoscope of colonial Seoul from ever-more-surprising shards: from renovations and ruins, cacophonous sign boards and comedians' banter, a streetcar's blurring speed and the metronome sound of a night patrol's wooden batons. Oh conjures the lost city while dissolving every prior notion of how history should be written and read, and leaves us with a revivified way of not only meeting the past, but our own place and time."—Susan Choi, author of Trust Exercise and Winner of the 2019 National Book Award"Bold and ambitious, beautifully written and rigorously argued, City of Sediments is a pathbreaking book that provides a new framework to explore the history of Seoul. Crisscrossing the vast range of fields—cultural history, visual arts, architecture, film, and media—it also builds an archive of extraordinarily rich and diverse materials, that include those that experiment with new forms of writing, those that capture the fleeting moments of new experiences, and those that have usually been considered inconsequential and insignificant."—Namhee Lee, author of Memory Construction and the Politics of Time in Neoliberal South Korea"City of Sediments is one of the most sophisticated pieces of scholarship on the colonial period in Korea that has been written in the past two decades. It eloquently captures the nuances and dynamics of the history of colonial life in Seoul through the lens of sedimentary history, paving the way for rethinking how history should be represented and studied."—Albert L. Park, author of Building a Heaven on Earth: Religion, Activism and Protest in Japanese Occupied Korea"City of Sediments does an eloquent job of situating colonial Seoul in various theoretical contexts to scrutinize the uneven textures of urban landscape and the emotional commodification of everyday objects. Se-Mi Oh's voluminous reflections of the past, and her creative analysis of photography, signages, and aural sensibilities, set the gold standard for future historians."—Suk-Young Kim, author of K-pop Live: Fans, Idols, and Multimedia PerformanceTable of ContentsIntroduction: Introduction 1. Figuring History through Architecture: An Urban Synesthesia 2. Ritual, History, Memory: Photographing Kojong's Funeral of 1919 3. Signage and Language: Reading Hanja/Kanji 4. Oral/Aural Community: Sin Pul-ch'ul's Language Play and Deception 5. The City on the Move: The Ordinary and the Infraordinary 6. Nightly Reports: Playing under Surveillance Epilogue: A Time of Rehearsal
£60.80
Stanford University Press Traders and Tinkers: Bazaars in the Global
Book SynopsisThe term "tinker" calls to mind nomadic medieval vendors who operate on the fringe of formal society. Excluded from elite circles and characterized by an ability to leverage minimal resources, these tradesmen live and die by their ability to adapt their stores to the popular tastes of the day. In Delhi in the 21st century, an extensive network of informal marketplaces, or bazaars, has evolved over the course of the city's history, across colonial and postcolonial regimes. Their resilience as an economic system is the subject of this book. Today, instead of mending and selling fabrics and pots, these street vendors are primarily associated with electronic products—computers, cell phones, motherboards, and video games. This book offers a deep ethnography of three Delhi bazaars, and a cast of tinkers, traders, magicians, street performers, and hackers who work there. It is an exploration, and recognition, of the role of bazaars and tinkers in the modern global economy, driving globalization from below. In Delhi, and across the world, these street markets work to create a new information society, as the global popular classes aspire to elite consumer goods they cannot afford except in counterfeit.Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. Bazaar Aesthetics, Commerce, and Commons 2. Bazaar Pricing and Bargaining 3. Bazaar Tinkering, Jugaad, and Popular Knowledge 4. Bazaar Ethics and a Common Human Condition 5. Bazaar Platforms: Encounters with a New Competitor Conclusion
£64.80
Stanford University Press Traders and Tinkers: Bazaars in the Global
Book SynopsisThe term "tinker" calls to mind nomadic medieval vendors who operate on the fringe of formal society. Excluded from elite circles and characterized by an ability to leverage minimal resources, these tradesmen live and die by their ability to adapt their stores to the popular tastes of the day. In Delhi in the 21st century, an extensive network of informal marketplaces, or bazaars, has evolved over the course of the city's history, across colonial and postcolonial regimes. Their resilience as an economic system is the subject of this book. Today, instead of mending and selling fabrics and pots, these street vendors are primarily associated with electronic products—computers, cell phones, motherboards, and video games. This book offers a deep ethnography of three Delhi bazaars, and a cast of tinkers, traders, magicians, street performers, and hackers who work there. It is an exploration, and recognition, of the role of bazaars and tinkers in the modern global economy, driving globalization from below. In Delhi, and across the world, these street markets work to create a new information society, as the global popular classes aspire to elite consumer goods they cannot afford except in counterfeit.Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. Bazaar Aesthetics, Commerce, and Commons 2. Bazaar Pricing and Bargaining 3. Bazaar Tinkering, Jugaad, and Popular Knowledge 4. Bazaar Ethics and a Common Human Condition 5. Bazaar Platforms: Encounters with a New Competitor Conclusion
£23.39
John Wiley and Sons Ltd Community as Urban Practice
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
£45.00
John Wiley and Sons Ltd Improvised Lives: Rhythms of Endurance in an
Book SynopsisThe poor and working people in cities of the South find themselves in urban spaces that are conventionally construed as places to reside or inhabit. But what if we thought of popular districts in more expansive ways that capture what really goes on within them? In such cities, popular districts are the settings of more uncertain operations that take place under the cover of darkness, generating uncanny alliances among disparate bodies, materials and things and expanding the urban sensorium and its capacities for liveliness. In this important new book AbdouMaliq Simone explores the nature of these alliances, portraying urban districts as sites of enduring transformations through rhythms that mediate between the needs of residents not to draw too much attention to themselves and their aspirations to become a small niche of exception. Here we discover an urban South that exists as dense rhythms of endurance that turn out to be vital for survival, connectivity, and becoming.Trade Review“Here, urban worlds – metal scrap, unhinged concrete, electrical waste, slowdowns, and interruptions – emerge with and through secretive human connections. AbdouMaliq Simone narrates the urban as an aesthetics of promise, where the uninhabitable generates districts of improvising communities, collectively living-with, and unsettling, infrastructures of harm.”Katherine McKittrick, Queen's University, Ontario, Canada ‘A brilliant and innovative account of urban life, seen both as confined to place and at the same time enduring and generative, composed through the weaving together of different experiments, connections, gatherings and imaginaries. As ever in his work, Simone provides us with a unique perspective on the city, and a distinctive way of seeing urbanism and speculating on its social, economic and political potentials.’Colin McFarlane, Durham UniversityTable of ContentsAcknowledgements vi 1 The Uninhabitable 1 2 Ensemble Work 34 3 The Mechanics of Improvised Relations 59 4 Inscribing Sociality in the Dark: The Pragmatics of a Legible Home 89 5 The Politics of Peripheral Care 122 References 138 Index 147
£42.75
John Wiley and Sons Ltd Bourdieu in the City: Challenging Urban Theory
Book SynopsisBuilding on three decades of comparative research on marginality, ethnicity, and penality in the postindustrial metropolis, Loïc Wacquant offers a novel interpretation of Pierre Bourdieu as urban theorist. He invites us to explore the city through what he calls the trialectic of symbolic space (the mental categories through which we perceive and organize the world), social space (the distribution of capital in its different forms), and physical space (the built environment). On this reading, Bourdieu's topological sociology gives us the tools both to energize and also to challenge the canon of urban studies and to redraw their theoretical landscape. Compact and incisive, Bourdieu in the City will be of interest to students and scholars in sociology, anthropology, geography, urban studies, urban planning, architecture, and social theory.Trade Review"In this captivating book, Loïc Wacquant excavates Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory for insights that might illuminate the neoliberal metropolis and its contentious power relations. In so doing, he produces an incisive, if deeply disturbing, portrait of contemporary urban marginality and neighborhood-level 'taint', a remarkable interpretive synthesis of his own illustrious pathway of urban inquiry, and a brilliantly creative application of Bourdieu's key concepts and methods to the field of urban social science."—Neil Brenner, University of Chicago "Loïc Wacquant dissects carefully the conceptual framework of Bourdieu, provides a differentiated view of social space from Bourdieu's understanding of relational sociology, and reminds us that marginalization continues to be a main concern for urban scholars. A must-read for anyone interested to see how Wacquant eloquently combines Bourdieu’s work with an urban perspective as well as draws on his own influential work from over the years to sharpen our theoretical and methodological lenses on urban inequality."—Professor Talja Blokland, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin“[A] significant milestone in enhancing urban theory by introducing fresh perspectives.”Journal of Urban AffairsTable of ContentsList of Figures Acknowledgements Taking Bourdieu to Town Prologue 1 Bourdieu in the Urban Crucible 2 The Bitter Taste of Territorial Taint 3 Marginality, Ethnicity and Penality in the Neoliberal Metropolis Epilogue Bourdieu in the City, the City in Bourdieu References
£49.50
University of Pennsylvania Press Social Policy and Social Justice
Book SynopsisThe Penn School of Social Policy and Practice enjoys a reputation as Penn's social justice school, for its faculty actively strives to translate the highest ideals into workable programs that better people's lives. In this election year, as Americans debate issues like immigration, crime, mass incarceration, policing, and welfare reform, and express concerns over increasing inequality, tax policy, and divisions by race, sex, and class, "SP2," as the school is colloquially known, offers its expertise in addressing the pressing matters of our day. The practical solutions on offer in this volume showcase the judgment and commitment of the school's scholars and practitioners, working to change politics from blood sport to common undertakings. Contributors: Cindy W. Christian, Cynthia A. Connolly, Dennis Culhane, Ezekiel Dixon-Román, Malitta Engstrom, Kara Finck, Nancy Franke, Antonio Garcia, Toorjo Ghose, Johanna Greeson, Chao Guo, David Hemenway, Amy Hillier, Roberta Iversen, Alexandra Schepens, Phyllis Solomon, Susan B. Sorenson, Mark Stern, Allison Thompson, Debra Schilling Wolfe.
£23.39
University of Pennsylvania Press University City: History, Race, and Community in
Book SynopsisIn twenty-first-century American cities, policy makers increasingly celebrate university-sponsored innovation districts as engines of inclusive growth. But the story is not so simple. In University City, Laura Wolf-Powers chronicles five decades of planning in and around the communities of West Philadelphia’s University City to illuminate how the dynamics of innovation district development in the present both depart from and connect to the politics of mid-twentieth-century urban renewal. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, Wolf-Powers concludes that even as university and government leaders vow to develop without displacement, what existing residents value is imperiled when innovation-driven redevelopment remains accountable to the property market. The book first traces the municipal and institutional politics that empowered officials to demolish a predominantly Black neighborhood near the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University in the late 1960s to make way for the University City Science Center and University City High School. It also provides new insight into organizations whose members experimented during that same period with alternative conceptions of economic advancement. The book then shifts to the present, documenting contemporary efforts to position university-adjacent neighborhoods as locations for prosperity built on scientific knowledge. Wolf-Powers examines the work of mobilized civic groups to push cultural preservation concerns into the public arena and to win policies to help economically insecure families keep a foothold in changing neighborhoods. Placing Philadelphia’s innovation districts in the context of similar development taking place around the United States, University City advocates a reorientation of redevelopment practice around the recognition that despite their negligible worth in real estate terms, the time, care, and energy people invest in their local environments—and in one another—are precious urban resources. *** Pictured on the book's cover is a luncheon on Melon Street between 37th and 38th Streets in West Philadelphia, May 31, 2014. The community meal was part of Funeral for a Home, a project that honored the life and passing of a house at 3711 Melon Street in Mantua. Photo by Jeffrey Stockbridge. Funeral for a Home was commissioned by Temple Contemporary, Temple University. Original support for Funeral for a Home was provided by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Philadelphia.Trade Review"University City is a significant addition to scholarship concerning innovation districts, megaprojects, citizen participation, and the role of universities in urban redevelopment...and offers an excellent foundation for future comparative research." * Journal of Urban Affairs *"The book’s appeal and approach are interdisciplinary: it speaks to urban planning, uses historical and ethnographic research and engages with topics like power, stigma and local political processes that are relevant to political science, sociology and geography...[Wolf-Powers] challenges universities to attend to the historical events that have shaped their surroundings, where wealth, income, access to education and power are unequally distributed." * Urban Studies *"A powerful interrogation of the ‘innovation district’ as the dominant urban planning model in today’s knowledge economy. Laura Wolf-Powers takes us back to the origins of innovation in West Philadelphia but brilliantly draws our attention to the nonfinancial visions of development created by local residents that have been lost to the planning focus on real estate values. By tracking the enduring harms of past development decisions, University City makes a compelling case for placing reparations at the center of urban planning." * Davarian L. Baldwin, author of In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower *"A long overdue critical look at university-driven urban development in a contemporary knowledge and innovation economy. Laura Wolf-Powers masterfully situates the rise of innovation districts as an outgrowth of the failures of mid-twentieth-century urban renewal policies and practices, specifically. She demonstrates how the emergence of coalitions of public-private interests pursue innovation-driven development, often in tension with legacy communities and predictably at the expense of more equitable and inclusive urban revitalization. This book will be an essential read for scholars who want to understand the changing dynamics of urban growth coalitions." * Sheila Foster, Georgetown University *"Laura Wolf-Powers offers a powerful, forthright accounting of what is owed to urban communities sacrificed for ‘innovation district’ redevelopment—in the twenty-first century as much as the 1950s–60s. Her telling of the story from the community’s perspective is masterful, rooted in rigorous archival research, economic analysis, and direct observation. She delivers profound insights about what residents value, and how universities’ unquestioning pursuit of ‘innovation’ created precarity among their neighbors. University City will enable clearer, more grounded, more searching understandings for all of us implicated in these contests." * Randall F. Mason, University of Pennsylvania *
£50.41
University of Pennsylvania Press Refugee Cities: How Afghans Changed Urban
Book SynopsisSituated between the 1970s Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan and the post–2001 War on Terror, Refugee Cities tells the story of how global wars affect everyday life for Afghans who have been living as refugees in Pakistan. This book provides a necessary glimpse of what ordinary life looks like for a long-term refugee population, beyond the headlines of war, terror, or helpless suffering. It also increases our understanding of how cities—rather than the nation—are important sites of identity-making for people of migrant origins. In Refugee Cities, Sanaa Alimia reconstructs local microhistories to chronicle the lives of ordinary people living in low-income neighborhoods in Peshawar and Karachi and the ways in which they have transformed the cities of which they are a part. In Pakistan, formal citizenship is almost impossible for Afghans to access; despite this, Afghans have made new neighborhoods, expanded city boundaries, built cities through their labor in construction projects, and created new urban identities—and often they have done so alongside Pakistanis. Their struggles are a crucial, neglected dimension of Pakistan’s urban history. Yet given that the Afghan experience in Pakistan is profoundly shaped by geopolitics, the book also documents how, in the War-on-Terror era, many Afghans have been forced to leave Pakistan. This book, then, is also a documentation of the multiple displacements migrants are subject to and the increased normalization of deportation as a part of “refugee management.”Trade Review"Refugee Cities is a micro-history and narrative of lived experiences of Afghan refugees and Pakistani citizens alike. The book covers the struggles of these people in place-making in urban Pakistan and will be of great interest to anyone who wishes to know more about informal settlements and the urban and national politics of the Pakistani state in dealing with the poor and the non-citizens." * Dawn *"Alimia has provided a book that is long overdue, on a topic that has been chronically understudied. Refugee Cities provides detailed ethnographic accounts of Afghans living in the coastal mega city of Karachi and the border city of Peshawar to construct how their lives have been shaped – and more importantly are shaping – urban Pakistan today...The monograph is sublime in how it works from the ground up to create a picture of the functioning of the Pakistani state, and any stakeholder who works in or around the status of Afghans in Pakistan would greatly benefit from it." * Anthropology Book Forum *
£72.00
University of Pennsylvania Press Refugee Cities: How Afghans Changed Urban
Book SynopsisSituated between the 1970s Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan and the post–2001 War on Terror, Refugee Cities tells the story of how global wars affect everyday life for Afghans who have been living as refugees in Pakistan. This book provides a necessary glimpse of what ordinary life looks like for a long-term refugee population, beyond the headlines of war, terror, or helpless suffering. It also increases our understanding of how cities—rather than the nation—are important sites of identity-making for people of migrant origins. In Refugee Cities, Sanaa Alimia reconstructs local microhistories to chronicle the lives of ordinary people living in low-income neighborhoods in Peshawar and Karachi and the ways in which they have transformed the cities of which they are a part. In Pakistan, formal citizenship is almost impossible for Afghans to access; despite this, Afghans have made new neighborhoods, expanded city boundaries, built cities through their labor in construction projects, and created new urban identities—and often they have done so alongside Pakistanis. Their struggles are a crucial, neglected dimension of Pakistan’s urban history. Yet given that the Afghan experience in Pakistan is profoundly shaped by geopolitics, the book also documents how, in the War-on-Terror era, many Afghans have been forced to leave Pakistan. This book, then, is also a documentation of the multiple displacements migrants are subject to and the increased normalization of deportation as a part of “refugee management.”Trade Review"Refugee Cities is a micro-history and narrative of lived experiences of Afghan refugees and Pakistani citizens alike. The book covers the struggles of these people in place-making in urban Pakistan and will be of great interest to anyone who wishes to know more about informal settlements and the urban and national politics of the Pakistani state in dealing with the poor and the non-citizens." * Dawn *"Alimia has provided a book that is long overdue, on a topic that has been chronically understudied. Refugee Cities provides detailed ethnographic accounts of Afghans living in the coastal mega city of Karachi and the border city of Peshawar to construct how their lives have been shaped – and more importantly are shaping – urban Pakistan today...The monograph is sublime in how it works from the ground up to create a picture of the functioning of the Pakistani state, and any stakeholder who works in or around the status of Afghans in Pakistan would greatly benefit from it." * Anthropology Book Forum *"This book is an engaging read for those interested in how multiple structural conditions intersect and how they are positioned vis-à-vis historical periods of colonialism, postcolonial nation building, and global warfare. Whilst being ethnographically situated with Afghans who fled to Pakistan, this book invites the reader to draw acute parallels with the dismantling of hospitality towards refugees in the post-2015 crisis in European refugee reception, the hostile governing of uprooted people who experience oppressions at the intersections of ethnicity and class, and the effects of the nationalist territorialization of spaces across the globe." * Politics, Religion & Ideology *"[A] valuable contribution to the scholarship on urban citizenship, migration, and the politics of belonging. In it, Alimia provides a nuanced and sympathetic account of Afghan lives in urban Pakistan...Refugee Cities is a valuable political intervention in a time when the global policy environment relating to migration is increasingly hostile" * Bloomsbury Pakistan *Table of ContentsContents List of Abbreviations Preface Introduction. Refugee Cities Part I. Background Chapter 1. Ghosts of Empire: The Afghan Question in Pakistan Part II. Claiming Rights Chapter 2. The Right to Water in an Informal Refugee Camp Chapter 3. Bulldozers and Violence in a Pakistani Settlement Chapter 4. Peshawar's Afghan Transformation Part III. Pushing Out Afghans Chapter 5. Surveillance, Documents, and Repatriation Conclusion Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments
£30.60
University of Pennsylvania Press Nation's Metropolis: The Economy, Politics, and
Book SynopsisNation’s Metropolis describes how the national capital region functions as a metropolitan political economy. Its authors distinguish aspects of the Washington region that reflect its characteristics as a national capital from those common to most other metropolitan regions and to other capitals. To do so, they employ an interdisciplinary approach that draws from economics, political science, sociology, geography, and history. Royce Hanson and Harold Wolman focus on four major themes: the federal government as the region’s basic industry and its role in economic, physical, and political development; race as a core force in the development of the metropolis; the mismatch of the governance and economy of the national capital region; and the conundrum of achieving fully democratic governance for Washington, DC. Critical regional issues and policy problems are analyzed in the context of these themes, including poverty, inequality, education, housing, transportation, water supply, and governance. The authors conclude that the institutions and practices that accrued over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are inadequate for dealing effectively with the issues confronting the city and the region in the twenty-first. The accumulation of problems arising from the unique role of the federal government and the persistent problem of racial inequality has been compounded by failure to resolve the conundrum of governance for the District of Columbia. They recommend rethinking the governance of the entire region. While many books are concerned with the city of Washington, DC, Nation’s Metropolis is the only book focused on the development and political economy of the metropolitan region as a whole. It will engage readers interested in the national capital, metropolitan development more generally, and the growing comparative literature on national capitals.Trade Review"This book has created new knowledge and has practical public policy applications...All cities have their unique characteristics while also sharing many common challenges with urban communities across the nation. This is the story of the capital region. But the approach taken here can guide researchers in those communities. Nation’s Metropolis proves the case for the case study." * Journal of Urban Affairs *
£49.30
University of Pennsylvania Press China Urbanizing: Impacts and Transitions
Book SynopsisChina turned majority urban only in the recent decade, a dramatic leap given that less than 20 percent of its population lived in cities before 1980. This book situates China’s urbanization in the interconnected forces of historical legacies, contemporary state interventions, and human and ecological conditions. It captures the complexity of the phenomenon of urbanization in its historical and regional variations, and explores its impact on the country’s socioeconomic welfare, environment and resources, urban form and lifestyle, and population and health. It is also a book about China, in which the contributors provide new perspectives to understand the transitions underway and the gravity of the progress, particularly in the context of demographic shifts and climate change. The chapters in China Urbanizing, written by American and Chinese scholars, achieve three interconnected aims. The first is to explore how the process of urbanization has shaped and been influenced by the social, economic, and physical interactions that take place in and beyond cities, and the state interventions intended to regulate such interactions. The second is to examine the shifts and evolutions emerging in urban China, such as the economic slowdown, population aging and low fertility rates, and how cities interact with the environment and planet given China’s rising role in the global discourse on climate change. The third is to explore new sources of information for conducting research on urban China, such as satellite and street-level imagery data and online listings, to account for the complexity and heterogeneity that characterize contemporary Chinese urbanization. Contributors: Juan Chen, Dean Curran, Deborah Davis, Peilei Fan, Qin Gao, Pierre F. Landry, Shi Li, Shiqi Ma, Justin Remais, Alan Smart, Shin Bin Tan, Jeremy Wallace, Sarah Williams, Binbin Wu, Weiping Wu, Guibin Xiong, Wenfei Xu.Trade Review"Readers can gain a rich and in-depth understanding of China’s recent urbanization through this book. It covers a wide range of urbanization issues including not only well-studied themes such as rural migrant workers, land, urban housing, and segregation but also novel yet important themes such as environment, health, and digital governance....China Urbanizing can inspire readers to explore a variety of additional issues salient to Chinese urbanization: migrants’ children, talent workers, household registration (hukou) and land reforms, urban regeneration, CO2 reduction, COVID-19 impacts, and post-pandemic urbanization. After reading this book, you can understand why China’s urbanization remains an important driver of world development. " * Journal of Urban Affairs *Table of ContentsIntroduction Weiping Wu and Qin Gao 1. Paying for Urbanization: Land Finance and Impacts Weiping Wu 2. Cities for Whom? The 2017 Beijing Demolitions in Context Shiqi Ma and Jeremy Wallace 3. Housing Markets, Residential Sorting, and Spatial Segregation Shin Bin Tan, Wenfei Xu, and Sarah Williams Appendix A. Filtering Criteria Appendix B. Descriptive Statistics for Fang.com Listings Appendix C. Calculating Spatial Exposure/Isolation and Spatial Entropy 4. Has the Economic Situation of Rural Migrant Workers in Urban China Been Improving? An Updated Assessment Shi Li and Binbin Wu 5. Urban Poverty in China: Has Dibao Been an Effective Policy Response? Qin Gao 6. Implementing the National New-Type Urbanization Plan: Regional Variations Juan Chen, Pierre F. Landry, and Deborah Davis 7. Dementia or Anomie: What Explains the Missing Older Adults Phenomenon in China? Guibin Xiong 8. Environmental Impact of Urbanization in Post-Reform China Peilei Fan 9. Shifting Exposures in China’s Urbanization Experience: Implications for Health Justin Remais 10. Prospects and Social Impact of Big Data–Driven Urban Governance in China: Provincializing Smart City Research Alan Smart and Dean Curran List of Contributors Index
£53.60
University of Pennsylvania Press Precarious Lives: Waiting and Hope in Iran
Book SynopsisIn Precarious Lives, Shahram Khosravi attempts to reconcile the paradoxes of Iranians' everyday life in the first decade of the twenty-first century. On the one hand, multiple circumstances of precarity give rise to a sense of hopelessness, shared visions of a futureless tomorrow, widespread home(land)lessness, intense individualism, and a growth of incivilities. On the other, daydreaming and hope, as well as civility and solidarity in political protests, street carnivals, and social movements, continue to persist. Young Iranians describe themselves as being stuck in purposelessness and forced to endure endless waiting, and they are also aware that they are perceived as unproductive and a burden on their society. Despite the aspirations and inspiration they possess, they find themselves forced into petrifying social and spatial immobility. Uncertainty in the present, a seemingly futureless tomorrow: these are the circumstances that Khosravi explores in Precarious Lives. Creating an intricate and moving portrait of contemporary Iranian life, Khosravi weaves together individual stories, government reports, statistics, and cultural analysis of art and literature to depict how Iranians react to the experience of precarity and the possibility of hope. Drawing on extensive ethnographic engagement with youth in Tehran and Isfahan as well as with migrant workers in rural areas, Khosravi examines the complexities and contradictions of everyday life in Iran. Precarious Lives is a vital work of contemporary anthropology that serves as a testament to the shared hardship and hope of the Iranian people.Trade Review"A theoretically well-informed, engaging account... Its comparative approach and theoretical richness will make it a worthwhile read not only for anthropologists of Iran, the Middle East, and Central Asia, but also for those in other disciplines working on such themes as youth culture, under- or unemployment, neoliberalism, inequality, gender and the family, crime and criminalization, and class." * Anthropological Quarterly *"Professor Khosravi has provided detailed, well written accounts of the lives of ordinary Iranians, as well as analysis of some contemporary film and artistic endeavors. His narrative gives welcome prominence to the Iranian middle and lower economic classes, with some additional material from areas outside of Tehran, including his native Bakhtiari region, where members of his family still reside. This book thus departs from other recent works that have focused on more elite populations, with heavy attention to the wealthier residents of northern Tehran." * The Middle East Journal *"Shahram Khosravi's elegant new book weaves together his two substantive areas-urban Iranian youth culture and migration and border studies-to narrate stories of social lives carved out of multiple precarities, ever-present waitings, but also, the need to hope. Dispensing with facile dichotomies that caricature contemporary Iran, Khosravi's rich and granular storytelling breathes life, in all of its complexity and contradiction, into depictions of Iran's most vulnerable populations." * Arzoo Osanloo, University of Washington *"In his second important anthropological accounting of social tensions in contemporary Iran, Shahram Khosravi deftly brings Iran into the conversation about the transformations affecting countries across the globe: precarity and the criminalization of youth; neoliberal practices of 'blaming the victims' of increased poverty; and street-level performances of resistance and demands for rights. Engaging with film, photography, painting, and street performativity, Khosravi shows Iran is not as 'other' as either Western or Iranian media portray it, and calls to mind comparative phenomena such as Japanese shut ins, American incarceration culture, and European migrant detention camps." * Michael M.J. Fischer, author of Mute Dreams, Blind Owls, and Dispersed Knowledges: Persian Poesis in the Transnational Circuitry *"Shahram Khosravi writes brilliantly about the unintended consequences of the Iranian Revolution on the traditional family, on the social lives of young people, on the 'street' as a space of free expression and protest, and on public walls as places of political expression. Precarious Lives is a thoroughly researched analysis of the 'precarious' society that is contemporary Iran, a country at war with its own youth." * Paul Stoller, author of The Sorcerer's Burden and 2013 Anders Retzius Gold Medal Laureate in Anthropology *"There is so much social theory incisively deployed by Shahram Khosravi, and so many pertinent anthropological works about other places used for comparative purposes, that Precarious Lives will appeal to more readers than those interested in Iran, or those interested in the anthropology of time and space." * Ghassan Hage, University of Melbourne *
£19.79
University of Minnesota Press Betting on Macau: Casino Capitalism and China's
Book SynopsisA comprehensive look into how Macau’s recent decades of gambling-related growth produced one of the wealthiest territories on the planetBetting on Macau delves into the radical transformation of what was formerly the last remaining European territory in Asia, returned to the People’s Republic of China in 1999 after nearly half a millennium of Portuguese rule. Examining the unprecedented scale of its development and its key role in China’s economic revolution, Tim Simpson follows Macau’s emergence from historical obscurity to become the most profitable casino gaming locale in the world. Identified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site and renowned for its unique blend of Chinese and Portuguese colonial-era architecture, contemporary Macau has metamorphosed into a surreal, hypermodern urban landscape augmented by massive casino megaresorts, including two of the world’s largest buildings. Simpson situates Macau’s origins as a strategic trading port and its ensuing history alongside the emergence of the global capitalist system, charting the massive influx of foreign investment, construction, and tourism in the past two decades that helped generate the territory’s enormous wealth. Presented through a cross section of postcolonial studies and social theory with extensive insight into the global gambling industry, Betting on Macau uncovers the various roots of the territory’s lucrative casino capitalism. In turn, its trenchant analysis provides a distinctive view into China’s broader project of urbanization, its post-Mao economic reforms, and the continued rise of its consumer culture. Trade Review "In this timely and impressive book, Tim Simpson charts the predicament of Macau—a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China—as a laboratory of consumption, and of planning and architecture as disciplinary technologies, all employed toward prototyping a scholastic program for the production and naturalization of commodity-driven social imaginaries in post-Mao China. A must-read for scholars and practitioners of urban planning and architecture, particularly those working in or studying urbanization in China."—Miodrag Mitrašinović, coeditor of The Emerging Public Realm of the Greater Bay Area: Approaches to Public Space in a Chinese Megaregion "Betting on Macau is a creative, engaging, wide-ranging, and insightful analysis that both dazzles the reader with a litany of the astonishing transformations Macau has undergone in the past two decades and provides a solid conceptual framework for understanding those changes in a world-historical context."—Cathryn H. Clayton, author of Sovereignty at the Edge: Macau and the Question of Chineseness "Presented through a cross section of postcolonial studies and social theory with extensive insight into the global gambling industry, Betting on Macau uncovers the various roots of the territory’s lucrative casino capitalism. In turn, its trenchant analysis provides a distinctive view into China’s broader project of urbanization, its post-Mao economic reforms, and the continued rise of its consumer culture."—Progressive Geographies "Betting on Macau is a worthy introduction to Macau and suitable for anyone, inside and outside academia, interested in a place of exception for Chinese gambling tourists."—Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change "Tim Simpson’s book is a timely contribution to a slender yet growing volume of works that have sought to reposition Macau within a cocktail of national, regional, and global themes."—Current History
£86.40
University of Minnesota Press Globalized Authoritarianism: Megaprojects, Slums, and Class Relations in Urban Morocco
Book SynopsisA rich investigation into Morocco’s urban politics Over the past thirty years, Morocco’s cities have transformed dramatically. To take just one example, Casablanca’s medina is now obscured behind skyscrapers that are funded by global capital and encouraged by Morocco’s monarchy, which hopes to transform this city into a regional leader of finance and commerce. Such changes have occurred throughout Morocco. Megaprojects are redesigning the cityscapes of Rabat, Tangiers, and Casablanca, turning the nation’s urban centers into laboratories of capital accumulation, political dominance, and social control.In Globalized Authoritarianism, Koenraad Bogaert links more abstract questions of government, globalization, and neoliberalism with concrete changes in the city. Bogaert goes deep beneath the surface of Morocco’s urban prosperity to reveal how neoliberal government and the increased connectivity engendered by global capitalism transformed Morocco’s leading urban spaces, opening up new sites for capital accumulation, creating enormous class divisions, and enabling new innovations in state authoritarianism. Analyzing these transformations, he argues that economic globalization does not necessarily lead to increased democratization but to authoritarianism with a different face, to a form of authoritarian government that becomes more and more a globalized affair.Showing how Morocco’s experiences have helped produce new forms of globalization, Bogaert offers a bridge between in-depth issues of Middle Eastern studies and broader questions of power, class, and capital as they continue to evolve in the twenty-first century.Trade Review"Globalized Authoritarianism is a must-read for scholars and political organizers interested in urban neoliberal politics in the Middle East, North Africa, and beyond. Exploring political change through the frame of the city, Koenraad Bogaert traces how the geopolitical concept of the urban comes to take a central place in class and biopolitics in contemporary Morocco, a major shift since the 1970s and an elite response to heightened social struggle from below. Bogaert brilliantly synthesizes Marxist literatures and their critics to show how the urban becomes a central arena of social struggle in a neoliberal period that continues to haunt and afflict the living long past its heyday."—Ahmed Kanna, author of Dubai: The City as Corporation"Bogaert’s Globalized Authoritarianism is an important step in reframing the links between global economy, local politics, and urban projects in North Africa—and thus in the world at large."—Technology and Culture"This is a welcome addition to a growing collection of remarkable books published over the past decade that use the entry point of urbanization and its planning in specific cities of the global South in order to provide powerful insights about broader political change across the globe. Decentring urban analysis from the handful of European and American metropolises that constitute the model for the majority of urban studies, these books combine an engagement with contemporary theory with richly documented and analysed case studies that force critical reconsiderations of the existing theoretical frames through which we understand cities, their residents and planning."—International Journal of Urban and Regional Research"Bogaert brilliantly illustrates how deeply neoliberal globalization and authoritarian rule are entangled in Morocco."—Jadaliyya"The book is well written, the argument is finely articulated throughout the three parts of the book, and the empirical evidence is extensive, thus making this a book that all those interested in urban Africa and in the wider debates on globalization and neo-liberalism ought to read."—Planning Perspectives"Globalized Authoritarianism is welcome and timely."—Urban StudiesTable of ContentsContentsAcronymsPreface and AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Morocco’s Urban RevolutionPart I. Neoliberalism as Projects1. Considering the Global Situation2. An Urban History of Neoliberal Projects in MoroccoPart II. (State-)Crafting Globalization3. Neoliberalism as Class Projects4. Imagineering a New Bouregreg ValleyPart III. Transforming Urban Life5. Changing Methods of Authoritarian Power6. Power and Control through Techniques of SecurityConclusion: A New Geography of PowerNotesBibliographyIndex
£80.00