Description
Book SynopsisStrange Places: The Political Potentials and Perils of Everyday Spaces offers a conceptual framework for thinking politically about place and space in an era in which globalization seems to be destabilizing places and transforming spaces at an unprecedented rate and scale. Responding critically to the tendencies within contemporary political theory to dismiss places as inherently confining spaces, author Alexandra Kogl explores the roles that places play in supporting a democratic politics of efficacy and resistance. Using concrete examples and cases, this interdisciplinary work is accessible to a broad scholarly audience, including political theory, urban affairs, geography and sociology scholars.
Trade ReviewIn wide-ranging and engaging prose, Kogl demonstrates how place matters in democratic politics. Strange Places calls into question critical and celebratory accounts of globalization’s inexorable logic of homogenization (in the process calling into question critical and celebratory accounts of “place” as that fixed or reactionary island that is flooded by globalization’s overwhelming flow). Strange Places makes a convincing case for the local, shorn of nostalgic communitarian trappings. Offering nuanced interpretations and illuminating case studies, it is an excellent example of interdisciplinary work anchored in political theory. -- Leonard Feldman, University of Oregon
Table of ContentsChapter 1 Preface Chapter 2 Chapter 1. Why Place, Why Now? Chapter 3 Chapter 2. The Political Problem of Place Chapter 4 Chapter 3. Place in Capitalist Narratives and Practices Chapter 5 Chapter 4. Rhizomes and the Politics of Fixity and Flow Chapter 6 Chapter 5. From Arendt's Table to Pynchon's Used Car Lot: Relation and Separation in the Place of the Polity Chapter 7 Chapter 6. Making Meaning, Making Place: Place, Values, and Critique of Everyday Spaces Chapter 8 Chapter 7. Changing Places Chapter 9 Chapter 8. The Potentials of Place
