Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation
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Begging as a Path to Progress
Indigenous Women and Children and the Struggle for Ecuador's Urban Spaces
by Kate Swanson
Part 2 of the Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series
In 1992, Calhuasí, an isolated Andean town, got its first road. Newly connected to Ecuador's large cities, Calhuasí experienced rapid social-spatial change, which Kate Swanson richly describes in Begging as a Path to Progress.
Based on nineteen months of fieldwork, Swanson's study pays particular attention to the ideas and practices surrounding youth. While begging seems to be inconsistent with-or even an affront to-ideas about childhood in the developed world, Swanson demonstrates that the majority of income earned from begging goes toward funding Ecuadorian children's educations in hopes of securing more prosperous futures.
Examining beggars' organized migration networks, as well as the degree to which children can express agency and fulfill personal ambitions through begging, Swanson argues that Calhuasí's beggars are capable of canny engagement with the forces of change. She also shows how frequent movement between rural and urban Ecuador has altered both, masculinizing the countryside and complicating the Ecuadorian conflation of whiteness and cities. Finally, her study unpacks ongoing conflicts over programs to "clean up" Quito and other major cities, noting that revanchist efforts have had multiple effects-spurring more dangerous transnational migration, for example, while also providing some women and children with tourist-friendly local spaces in which to sell a notion of Andean authenticity.
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Bloomberg's New York
Class and Governance in the Luxury City
by Julian Brash
Part 6 of the Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series
New York mayor Michael Bloomberg claims to run the city like a business. In Bloomberg's New York, Julian Brash applies methods from anthropology, geography, and other social science disciplines to examine what that means. He describes the mayor's attitude toward governance as the Bloomberg Way-a philosophy that holds up the mayor as CEO, government as a private corporation, desirable residents and businesses as customers and clients, and the city itself as a product to be branded and marketed as a luxury good.
Commonly represented as pragmatic and nonideological, the Bloomberg Way, Brash argues, is in fact an ambitious reformulation of neoliberal governance that advances specific class interests. He considers the implications of this in a blow-by-blow account of the debate over the Hudson Yards plan, which aimed to transform Manhattan's far west side into the city's next great high-end district. Bringing this plan to fruition proved surprisingly difficult as activists and entrenched interests pushed back against the Bloomberg administration, suggesting that despite Bloomberg's success in redrawing the rules of urban governance, older political arrangements-and opportunities for social justice-remain.
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Fitzgerald
Geography of a Revolution
by William Bunge
Part 8 of the Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series
This on-the-ground study of one square mile in Detroit was written in collaboration with neighborhood residents, many of whom were involved with the famous Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute. Fitzgerald, at its core, is dedicated to understanding global phenomena through the intensive study of a small, local place.
Beginning with an 1816 encounter between the Ojibwa population and the neighborhood's first surveyor, William Bunge examines the racialized imposition of local landscapes over the course of European American settlement. Historical events are firmly situated in space-a task Bunge accomplishes through liberal use of maps and frequent references to recognizable twentieth-century landmarks.
More than a work of historical geography, Fitzgerald is a political intervention. By 1967 the neighborhood was mostly African American; Black Power was ascendant; and Detroit would experience a major riot. Immersed in the daily life of the area, Bunge encouraged residents to tell their stories and to think about local politics in spatial terms. His desire to undertake a different sort of geography led him to create a work that was nothing like a typical work of social science. The jumble of text, maps, and images makes it a particularly urgent book-a major theoretical contribution to urban geography that is also a startling evocation of street-level Detroit during a turbulent era.
A Sarah Mills Hodge Fund Publication
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They Saved the Crops
Labor, Landscape, and the Struggle over Industrial Farming in Bracero-Era California
by Don Mitchell
Part 10 of the Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series
At the outset of World War II, California agriculture seemed to be on the cusp of change. Many Californians, reacting to the ravages of the Great Depression, called for a radical reorientation of the highly exploitative labor relations that had allowed the state to become such a productive farming frontier. But with the importation of the first braceros-"guest workers" from Mexico hired on an "emergency" basis after the United States entered the war-an even more intense struggle ensued over how agriculture would be conducted in the state. Esteemed geographer Don Mitchell argues that by delineating the need for cheap, flexible farm labor as a problem and solving it via the importation of relatively disempowered migrant workers, an alliance of growers and government actors committed the United States to an agricultural system that is, in important respects, still with us.
They Saved the Crops is a theoretically rich and stylistically innovative account of grower rapaciousness, worker militancy, rampant corruption, and bureaucratic bias. Mitchell shows that growers, workers, and officials confronted a series of problems that shaped-and were shaped by-the landscape itself. For growers, the problem was finding the right kind of labor at the right price at the right time. Workers struggled for survival and attempted to win power in the face of economic exploitation and unremitting violence. Bureaucrats tried to harness political power to meet the demands of, as one put it, "the people whom we serve." Drawing on a deep well of empirical materials from archives up and down the state, Mitchell's account promises to be the definitive book about California agriculture in the turbulent decades of the mid-twentieth century.
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Faith Based
Religious Neoliberalism and the Politics of Welfare in the United States
by Jason Hackworth
Part 11 of the Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series
Faith Based explores how the Religious Right has supported neoliberalism in the United States, bringing a particular focus to welfare-an arena where conservative Protestant politics and neoliberal economic ideas come together most clearly. Through case studies of gospel rescue missions, Habitat for Humanity, and religious charities in post-Katrina New Orleans, Jason Hackworth describes both the theory and practice of faith-based welfare, revealing fundamental tensions between the religious and economic wings of the conservative movement.
Hackworth begins by tracing the fusion of evangelical religious conservatism and promarket, antigovernment activism, which resulted in what he calls "religious neoliberalism." He argues that neoliberalism-the ideological sanctification of private property, the individual, and antistatist politics-has rarely been popular enough on its own to promote wide change. Rather, neoliberals gain the most traction when they align their efforts with other discourses and ideas. The promotion of faith-based alternatives to welfare is a classic case of coalition building on the Right. Evangelicals get to provide social services in line with Biblical tenets, while opponents of big government chip away at the public safety net.
Though religious neoliberalism is most closely associated with George W. Bush's Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, the idea predates Bush and continues to hold sway in the Obama administration. Despite its success, however, Hackworth contends that religious neoliberalism remains an uneasy alliance-a fusion that has been tested and frayed by recent events.
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Fields and Streams
Stream Restoration, Neoliberalism, and the Future of Environmental Science
by Rebecca Lave
Part 12 of the Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series
Examining the science of stream restoration, Rebecca Lave argues that the neoliberal emphasis on the privatization and commercialization of knowledge has fundamentally changed the way that science is funded, organized, and viewed in the United States.
Stream restoration science and practice is in a startling state. The most widely respected expert in the field, Dave Rosgen, is a private consultant with relatively little formal scientific training. Since the mid-1990s, many academic and federal agency—based scientists have denounced Rosgen as a charlatan and a hack. Despite this, Rosgen's Natural Channel Design approach, classification system, and short-course series are not only accepted but are viewed as more legitimate than academically produced knowledge and training. Rosgen's methods are now promoted by federal agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Natural Resources Conservation Service, as well as by resource agencies in dozens of states.
Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Lave demonstrates that the primary cause of Rosgen's success is neither the method nor the man but is instead the assignment of a new legitimacy to scientific claims developed outside the academy, concurrent with academic scientists' decreasing ability to defend their turf. What is at stake in the Rosgen wars, argues Lave, is not just the ecological health of our rivers and streams but the very future of environmental science.
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Black, White, and Green
Farmers Markets, Race, and the Green Economy
by Alison Hope Alkon
Part 13 of the Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series
Farmers markets are much more than places to buy produce. According to advocates for sustainable food systems, they are also places to "vote with your fork" for environmental protection, vibrant communities, and strong local economies. Farmers markets have become essential to the movement for food-system reform and are a shining example of a growing green economy where consumers can shop their way to social change.
Black, White, and Green brings new energy to this topic by exploring dimensions of race and class as they relate to farmers markets and the green economy. With a focus on two Bay Area markets-one in the primarily white neighborhood of North Berkeley, and the other in largely black West Oakland-Alison Hope Alkon investigates the possibilities for social and environmental change embodied by farmers markets and the green economy.
Drawing on ethnographic and historical sources, Alkon describes the meanings that farmers market managers, vendors, and consumers attribute to the buying and selling of local organic food, and the ways that those meanings are raced and classed. She mobilizes this research to understand how the green economy fosters visions of social change that are compatible with economic growth while marginalizing those that are not.
Black, White, and Green is one of the first books to carefully theorize the green economy, to examine the racial dynamics of food politics, and to approach issues of food access from an environmental-justice perspective. In a practical sense, Alkon offers an empathetic critique of a newly popular strategy for social change, highlighting both its strengths and limitations.
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Development, Security, and Aid
Geopolitics and Geoeconomics at the U.S. Agency for International Development
by Jamey Essex
Part 16 of the Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series
In Development, Security, and Aid Jamey Essex offers a sophisticated study of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), examining the separate but intertwined discourses of geopolitics and geo-economics.
Geopolitics concentrates on territory, borders, and strategic political and military positioning within the international state system. Geo-economics emphasizes economic power, growth, and connectedness within a global, and supposedly borderless, system. Both discourses have strongly influenced the strategies of USAID and the views of American policy makers, bureaucrats, and business leaders toward international development. Providing a unique geographical analysis of American development policy, Essex details USAID's establishment in 1961 and traces the agency's growth from the Cold War into an era of neoliberal globalization up to and beyond 9/11, the global war on terror, and the looming age of austerity.
USAID promotes improvement for millions by providing emergency assistance and support for long-term economic and social development. Yet the agency's humanitarian efforts are strongly influenced, and often trumped, by its mandate to advance American foreign policies. As a site of, a strategy for, and an agent in the making of geopolitics and geo-economics, USAID, Essex argues, has often struggled to reconcile its many institutional mandates and objectives. The agency has always occupied a precarious political position, one that is increasingly marked by the strong influence of military, corporate, and foreign-policy institutions in American development strategy.
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Geographical Diversions
Tibetan Trade, Global Transactions
by Tina Harris
Part 18 of the Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series
Working at the intersections of cultural anthropology, human geography, and material culture, Tina Harris explores the social and economic transformations taking place along one trade route that winds its way across China, Nepal, Tibet, and India.
How might we make connections between seemingly mundane daily life and more abstract levels of global change? Geographical Diversions focuses on two generations of traders who exchange goods such as sheep wool, pang gdan aprons, and more recently, household appliances. Exploring how traders "make places," Harris examines the creation of geographies of trade that work against state ideas of what trade routes should look like. She argues that the tensions between the apparent fixity of national boundaries and the mobility of local individuals around such restrictions are precisely how routes and histories of trade are produced.
The economic rise of China and India has received attention from the international media, but the effects of major new infrastructure at the intersecting borderlands of these nation-states in places like Tibet, northern India, and Nepal-have rarely been covered. Geographical Diversions challenges globalization theories based on bounded conceptions of nation-states and offers a smaller-scale perspective that differs from many theories of macroscale economic change.
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The Politics of the Encounter
Urban Theory and Protest under Planetary Urbanization
by Andy Merrifield
Part 19 of the Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series
The Politics of the Encounter is a spirited interrogation of the city as a site of both theoretical inquiry and global social struggle. The city, writes Andy Merrifield, remains "important, virtually and materially, for progressive politics." And yet, he notes, more than forty years have passed since Henri Lefebvre advanced the powerful ideas that still undergird much of our thinking about urbanization and urban society. Merrifield rethinks the city in light of the vast changes to our planet since 1970, when Lefebvre's seminal Urban Revolution was first published. At the same time, he expands on Lefebvre's notion of "the right to the city," which was first conceived in the wake of the 1968 student uprising in Paris.
We need to think less of cities as "entities with borders and clear demarcations between what's inside and what's outside" and emphasize instead the effects of "planetary urbanization," a concept of Lefebvre's that Merrifield makes relevant for the ways we now experience the urban. The city-from Tahrir Square to Occupy Wall Street-seems to be the critical zone in which a new social protest is unfolding, yet dissenters' aspirations are transcending the scale of the city physically and philosophically. Consequently, we must shift our perspective from "the right to the city" to "the politics of the encounter," says Merrifield. We must ask how revolutionary crowds form, where they draw their energies from, what kind of spaces they occur in-and what kind of new spaces they produce.
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Rethinking the South African Crisis
Nationalism, Populism, Hegemony
by Gillian Hart
Part 20 of the Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series
Since the end of apartheid, South Africa has become an extreme yet unexceptional embodiment of forces at play in many other regions of the world: intensifying inequality alongside "wageless life," proliferating forms of protest and populist politics that move in different directions, and official efforts at containment ranging from liberal interventions targeting specific populations to increasingly common police brutality.
Rethinking the South African Crisis revisits long-standing debates to shed new light on the transition from apartheid. Drawing on nearly twenty years of ethnographic research, Hart argues that local government has become the key site of contradictions. Local practices, conflicts, and struggles in the arenas of everyday life feed into and are shaped by simultaneous processes of de-nationalization and re-nationalization. Together they are key to understanding the erosion of African National Congress hegemony and the proliferation of populist politics.
This book provides an innovative analysis of the ongoing, unstable, and unresolved crisis in South Africa today. It also suggests how Antonio Gramsci's concept of passive revolution, adapted and translated for present circumstances with the help of philosopher and liberation activist Frantz Fanon, can do useful analytical and political work in South Africa and beyond.
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The Empires' Edge
Militarization, Resistance, and Transcending Hegemony in the Pacific
by Sasha Davis
Part 21 of the Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series
In the past decade the Asia-Pacific region has become a focus of international politics and military strategies. Due to China's rising economic and military strength, North Korea's nuclear tests and missile launches, tense international disputes over small island groups in the seas around Asia, and the United States pivoting a majority of its military forces to the region, the islands of the western Pacific have increasingly become the center of global attention. While the Pacific is a current hotbed of geopolitical rivalry and intense militarization, the region is also something else: a homeland to the hundreds of millions of people that inhabit it.
Based on a decade of research in the region, The Empires' Edge examines the tremendous damage the militarization of the Pacific has wrought on its people and environments. Furthermore, Davis details how contemporary social movements in this region are affecting global geopolitics by challenging the military use of Pacific islands and by developing a demilitarized view of security based on affinity, mutual aid, and international solidarity. Through an examination of "sacrificed" islands from across the region-including Bikini Atoll, Okinawa, Hawai'i, and Guam-The Empires' Edge makes the case that the great political contest of the twenty-first century is not about which country gets hegemony in a global system but rather about the choice between perpetuating a system of international relations based on domination or pursuing a more egalitarian and cooperative future.
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Pain, Pride, and Politics
Social Movement Activism and the Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora in Canada
by Amarnath Amarasingam
Part 22 of the Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series
Pain, Pride, and Politics is an examination of diasporic politics based on a case study of Sri Lankan Tamils in Canada, with particular focus on activism between December 2008 and May 2009. Amarnath Amarasingam analyzes the reactions of diasporic Tamils in Canada at a time when the separatist Tamil movement was being crushed by the Sri Lankan armed forces and revises currently accepted analytical frameworks relating to diasporic communities. This book adds to our understanding of a particular diasporic group, while contributing to the theoretical literature in the area.
Throughout, Amarasingam argues that transnational diasporic mobilization is at times determined and driven as much by internal organizational and communal developments as by events in their countries of origin, a phenomenon that has received relatively little attention in the scholarly literature. His work provides an in-depth examination of the ways in which a separatist sociopolitical movement beginning in Sri Lanka is carried forward, altered, and adapted by the diaspora and the struggles that are involved in this process.
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Selling the Serengeti
The Cultural Politics of Safari Tourism
by Benjamin Gardner
Part 23 of the Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series
Situating safari tourism within the discourses and practices of development, Selling the Serengeti examines the relationship between the Maasai people of northern Tanzania and the extraordinary influence of foreign-owned ecotourism and big-game hunting companies. It contrasts two major approaches to community conservation-international NGO and state-sponsored conservation efforts on the one hand and the neoliberal private investment in tourism on the other-and investigates their profound effect on the Maasai's culture and livelihood. It further explores how these changing social and economic forces remake the terms through which state institutions and local people engage with foreign investors, communities, and their own territories. And finally it highlights how the new tourism arrangements change the shape and meaning of the nation-state and the village and in the process remake cultural belonging and citizenship.
Benjamin Gardner's experiences in Tanzania began during a study-abroad trip in 1991. His stay led to a relationship with the nation and the Maasai people in Loliondo lasting almost twenty years; it also marked the beginning of his analysis of and ethnographic research into social movements, market-led conservation, and neoliberal development around the Serengeti.
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Territories of Poverty
Rethinking North and South
by Various Authors
Part 24 of the Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series
Territories of Poverty challenges the conventional North-South geographies through which poverty scholarship is organized. Staging theoretical interventions that traverse social histories of the American welfare state and critical ethnographies of international development regimes, these essays confront how poverty is constituted as a problem. In the process, the book analyzes bureaucracies of poverty, poor people's movements, and global networks of poverty expertise, as well as more intimate modes of poverty action such as volunteerism. From post-Katrina New Orleans to Korean church missions in Africa, this book is fundamentally concerned with how poverty is territorialized.
In contrast to studies concerned with locations of poverty, Territories of Poverty engages with spatial technologies of power, be they community development and counterinsurgency during the American 1960s or the unceasing anticipation of war in Beirut. Within this territorial matrix, contributors uncover dissent, rupture, and mobilization. This book helps us understand the regulation of poverty-whether by globally circulating models of fast policy or vast webs of mobile money or philanthro-capitalist foundations-as multiple terrains of struggle for justice and social transformation.
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Spaces of Danger
Culture and Power in the Everyday
by Various Authors
Part 26 of the Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series
These twelve original essays by geographers and anthropologists offer a deep critical understanding of Allan Pred's pathbreaking and eclectic cultural Marxist approach, with a focus on his concept of "situated ignorance": the production and reproduction of power and inequality by regimes of truth through strategically deployed misinformation, diversions, and silences. As the essays expose the cultural and material circumstances in which situated ignorance persists, they also add a previously underexplored spatial dimension to Walter Benjamin's idea of "moments of danger."
The volume invokes the aftermath of the July 2011 attacks by far-right activist Anders Breivik in Norway, who ambushed a Labor Party youth gathering and bombed a government building, killing and injuring many. Breivik had publicly and forthrightly declared war against an array of liberal attitudes he saw threatening Western civilization. However, as politicians and journalists interpreted these events for mass consumption, a narrative quickly emerged that painted Breivik as a lone madman and steered the discourse away from analysis of the resurgent right-wing racisms and nationalisms in which he was immersed.
The Breivik case is merely one of the most visible recent examples, say editors Heather Merrill and Lisa Hoffman, of the unchallenged production of knowledge in the public sphere. In essays that range widely in topic and setting-for example, brownfield development in China, a Holocaust memorial in Germany, an art gallery exhibit in South Africa-this volume peels back layers of "situated practices and their associated meaning and power relations." Spaces of Danger offers analytical and conceptual tools of a Predian approach to interrogate the taken-for-granted and make visible and legible that which is silenced.
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Shadows of a Sunbelt City
The Environment, Racism, and the Knowledge Economy in Austin
by Eliot M. Tretter
Part 27 of the Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series
Austin, Texas, is often depicted as one of the past half century's great urban success stories-a place that has grown enormously through "creative class" strategies emphasizing tolerance and environmental consciousness. In Shadows of a Sunbelt City, Eliot Tretter reinterprets this familiar story by exploring the racial and environmental underpinnings of the postindustrial knowledge economy. He is particularly attentive to how the University of Texas-working with federal, municipal, and private-sector partners and acquiring the power of eminent domain-expanded its power and physical footprint. He draws attention to how the university's real estate endeavors shaped the local economy and how the expansion and upgrading of the main campus occurred almost entirely at the expense of the more modestly resourced communities of color that lived in its path.
This book challenges Austin's reputation as a bastion of progressive and liberal values, notably with respect to its approach to new urbanism and issues of ecological sustainability. Tretter's insistence on documenting and interrogating the "shadows" of this important city should provoke fresh conversations about how urban policy has contributed to Austin's economy, the way it has developed and changed over time, and for whom it works and why. Joining a growing critical literature about universities' effect on urban environments, this book will be of interest to students at all levels in urban history, political science, economic and political geography, public administration, urban and regional planning, and critical legal studies.
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Beyond the Kale
Urban Agriculture and Social Justice Activism in New York City
by Kristin Reynolds
Part 28 of the Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series
Urban agriculture is increasingly considered an important part of creating just and sustainable cities. Yet the benefits that many people attribute to urban agriculture-fresh food, green space, educational opportunities-can mask structural inequities, thereby making political transformation harder to achieve. Realizing social and environmental justice requires moving beyond food production to address deeper issues such as structural racism, gender inequity, and economic disparities. Beyond the Kale argues that urban agricultural projects focused explicitly on dismantling oppressive systems have the greatest potential to achieve substantive social change.
Through in-depth interviews and public forums with some of New York City's most prominent urban agriculture activists and supporters, Kristin Reynolds and Nevin Cohen illustrate how some urban farmers and gardeners not only grow healthy food for their communities but also use their activities and spaces to disrupt the dynamics of power and privilege that perpetuate inequity. Addressing a significant gap in the urban agriculture literature, Beyond the Kale prioritizes the voices of people of color and women-activists and leaders whose strategies have often been underrepresented within the urban agriculture movement-and it examines the roles of scholarship in advancing social justice initiatives.
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The Long War
CENTCOM, Grand Strategy, and Global Security
by John Morrissey
Part 34 of the Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series
Nowhere has the U.S. military established more bases, lost more troops, or spent more money in the last thirty years than in the Middle East and Central Asia. These regions fall under the purview of United States Central Command (CENTCOM); not coincidentally, they include the most energy-rich places on earth. From its inception, CENTCOM was tasked with the military and economic security of this key strategic area, the safeguarding of commercial opportunities therein, and ultimately the policing of a pivotal yet precarious space in the broader global economy. CENTCOM calls this mission its "Long War." This book tells the story of that long war: a war underpinned by a range of entangled geopolitical and geoeconomic visions and involving the use of the most devastating Western interventionary violence of our time.
Starting with a historical perspective, John Morrissey explores CENTCOM's Cold War origins and evolution, before addressing key elements of the command's grand strategy, including its interventionary rationales and use of the law in war. Engaging a wide range of scholarship on neoliberalism, imperialism, geopolitics, and Orientalism, the book then looks in-depth at the military interventions CENTCOM has spearheaded and critically assesses their consequences in terms of human geography.
Recent books on CENTCOM have focused on command structures, intelligence issues, and interpersonal rivalries. In contrast, The Long War asks critical questions about CENTCOM's leading role in shaping and enacting U.S. foreign policy over the last thirty years. The book positions CENTCOM pivotally in the story of U.S. global ambition over this period by documenting its efforts to oversee a global security strategy defined in military-economic terms and enabled via specific legal-territorial tactics. This is an important new study on the blurring of war and economic aims on a global scale.
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Development Drowned and Reborn
The Blues and Bourbon Restorations in Post-Katrina New Orleans
by Clyde Woods
Part 35 of the Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series
Development Drowned and Reborn is a "Blues geography" of New Orleans, one that compels readers to return to the history of the Black freedom struggle there to reckon with its unfinished business. Reading contemporary policies of abandonment against the grain, Clyde Woods explores how Hurricane Katrina brought long-standing structures of domination into view. In so doing, Woods delineates the roots of neoliberalism in the region and a history of resistance.
Written in dialogue with social movements, this book offers tools for comprehending the racist dynamics of U.S. culture and economy. Following his landmark study, Development Arrested, Woods turns to organic intellectuals, Blues musicians, and poor and working people to instruct readers in this future-oriented history of struggle. Through this unique optic, Woods delineates a history, methodology, and epistemology to grasp alternative visions of development.
Woods contributes to debates about the history and geography of neoliberalism. The book suggests that the prevailing focus on neoliberalism at national and global scales has led to a neglect of the regional scale. Specifically, it observes that theories of neoliberalism have tended to overlook New Orleans as an epicenter where racial, class, gender, and regional hierarchies have persisted for centuries. Through this Blues geography, Woods excavates the struggle for a new society.
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America's Johannesburg
Industrialization and Racial Transformation in Birmingham
by Bobby M. Wilson
Part 46 of the Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series
In some ways, no American city symbolizes the black struggle for civil rights more than Birmingham, Alabama. During the 1950s and 1960s, Birmingham gained national and international attention as a center of activity and unrest during the civil rights movement. Racially motivated bombings of the houses of black families who moved into new neighborhoods or who were politically active during this era were so prevalent that Birmingham earned the nickname "Bombingham."
In this critical analysis of why Birmingham became such a national flashpoint, Bobby M. Wilson argues that Alabama's path to industrialism differed significantly from that of states in the North and Midwest. True to its antebellum roots, no other industrial city in the United States depended as much on the exploitation of black labor so early in its urban development as Birmingham.
A persuasive exploration of the links between Alabama's slaveholding order and the subsequent industrialization of the state, America's Johannesburg demonstrates that arguments based on classical economics fail to take into account the ways in which racial issues influenced the rise of industrial capitalism.
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Transecting Securityscapes
Dispatches from Cambodia, Iraq, and Mozambique
by Till F. Paasche
Part 52 of the Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series
Transecting Securityscapes is an innovative book on the everyday life of security, told via an examination of three sites: Cambodia, the Kurdistan region of Iraq, and Mozambique. The authors' study of how security is enacted differently in these three sites, taking account of the rich layers of context and culture, enables comparative reflections on diversity and commonality in "securityscapes."
In Transecting Securityscapes, Till F. Paasche and James D. Sidaway put into practice a diverse and contextual approach to security that contrasts with the aerial, big-picture view taken by many geopolitics scholars. In applying this grounded approach, they develop a method of urban and territorial transects, combined with other methods and modes of encounter. The book draws on a broad range of traditions, but it speaks mostly to political geography, urban studies, and international relations research on geopolitics, stressing the need for ethnographic, embodied, affective, and place-based approaches to conflict. The result is a sustained theoretical critique of abstract research on geopolitical conflict and security- mainstream as well as academic- that pretends to be able to know and analyze conflict "from above."
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Non-Performing Loans, Non-Performing People
Life and Struggle with Mortgage Debt in Spain
by Melissa García-Lamarca
Part 53 of the Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series
Non-Performing Loans, Non-Performing People tells the previously untold stories of those living with mortgage debt in times of precarity and explores how individualized indebtedness can unite resistance in the struggle toward housing justice. The book builds on several years of Melissa García-Lamarca's engagement with activist research in Barcelona's housing movement, in particular with its most prominent collective, the Platform for Mortgage-Affected People (PAH). What García-Lamarca learned from fellow activists and the movement in Barcelona pushed her to rethink how lived experiences of indebtedness connect to larger political- economic processes related to housing and debt.
The book is also inspired by feminist scholars who integrate the lens of everyday life into explorations of contemporary political economy and by anthropologists who connect macroprocesses to lived experience. Distinctive in how it integrates a racialized, gendered, and decolonial perspective, García-Lamarca's research of mortgaged lives in precarious times explores two principal phenomena: first, how financial speculation is experienced in the day-to-day and differentially embedded in the dynamics of (urban) capital accumulation, and second, how collective action can unleash the liberating possibility of indebtedness.
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Disturbing Development in the Jim Crow South
by Mona Domosh
Part 54 of the Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series
Disturbing Development in the Jim Crow South documents how Black employees of the cooperative extension service of the USDA practiced rural improvement in ways that sustained southern Black farmers' lives and livelihoods in the early decades of the twentieth century, resisting the white supremacy that characterized the Jim Crow South.
Mona Domosh details the various mechanisms-the transformation of home demonstration projects, the development of a movable school, and the establishment of Black landowning communities-through which these employees were able to alter USDA's mandates and redirect its funds. These tweakings and translations of USDA directives enabled these employees to support poor Black farmers by promoting food production, health care, and land and home ownership, thus disturbing a system of plantation agriculture that relied on the devaluing of Black lives.
Through the documentation of these efforts, Domosh uncovers an important and previously unknown episode in the long history of international development that highlights the roots of liberal development schemes in the anti-Black racism that constituted plantation agriculture and illustrates how racist systems can be quietly and subtly resisted by everyday people working within the confines of white supremacy.
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Famine in Cambodia
Geopolitics, Biopolitics, Necropolitics
by James A. Tyner
Part 55 of the Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series
This book examines three consecutive famines in Cambodia during the 1970s, exploring both continuities and discontinuities of all three. Cambodia experienced these consecutive famines against the backdrop of four distinct governments: the Kingdom of Cambodia (1953—1970), the U.S.-supported Khmer Republic (1970—1975), the communist Democratic Kampuchea (1975—1979), and the Vietnamese-controlled People's Republic of Kampuchea (1979—1989).
Famine in Cambodia documents how state-induced famine constituted a form of sovereign violence and operated against the backdrop of sweeping historical transformations of Cambodian society. It also highlights how state-induced famines should not be solely framed from the vantage point in which famine occurs but should also focus on the geopolitics of state-induced famines, as states other than Cambodia conditioned the famine in Cambodia.
Drawing on an array of theorists, including Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Achille Mbembe, James A. Tyner provides a conceptual framework to bring together geopolitics, biopolitics, and necropolitics in an effort to expand our understanding of state-induced famines. Tyner argues that state-induced famine constitutes a form of sovereign violence-a form of power that both takes life and disallows life.
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Well-Intentioned Whiteness
Green Urban Development and Black Resistance in Kansas City
by Chhaya Kolavalli
Part 56 of the Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series
This book documents how whiteness can take up space in U.S. cities and policies through well-intentioned progressive policy agendas that support green urbanism. Through in-depth ethnographic research in Kansas City, Chhaya Kolavalli explores how urban food projects-central to the city's approach to green urbanism-are conceived and implemented and how they are perceived by residents of "food deserts," those intended to benefit from these projects.
Through her analysis, Kolavalli examines the narratives and histories that mostly white local food advocates are guided by and offers an alternative urban history of Kansas City-one that centers the contributions of Black and brown residents to urban prosperity. She also highlights how displacement of communities of color, through green development, has historically been a key urban development strategy in the city.
Well-Intentioned Whiteness shows how a myopic focus on green urbanism, as a solution to myriad urban "problems," ends up reinforcing racial inequity and uplifting structural whiteness. In this context, fine-grained analysis of how whiteness takes up space in our cities-even through progressive policy agendas-is more important. Kolavalli examines this process intimately and, in so doing, fleshes out our understanding of how racial inequities can be (re)created by everyday urban actors.
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Abolishing Poverty
Toward Pluriverse Futures and Politics
by Victoria Lawson
Part 58 of the Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series
Abolishing Poverty argues for a project of relationality that refuses the whiteness of liberal poverty studies and instead centers critiques of the poverty relation and political futures disavowed under liberal governance. In disrupting poverty thinking, the author collective opens space for diverse frameworks for understanding impoverishment and articulating antiracist knowledges and political visions. The book explores new infrastructures of possibilities and political solidarities rooted in accountable relations to each other and from flights to the future that animate diverse communities.
This book is boundary and genre crossing, with broad appeal to scholars of such disciplines as human geography, ethnic studies, decolonial theory, and feminist studies. As a volume, the work is unique in its primary field of human geography in the form of its making, its collective authorship, and its investigation of politics that abolish poverty thinking and engage in activism against the poverty relation produced through settler colonialism, heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalist exploitation.
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Outlaw Capital
Everyday Illegalities and the Making of Uneven Development
by Jennifer L. Tucker
Part of the Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series
With an ethnography of the largest contraband economy in the Americas running through Ciudad del Este, Paraguay, Outlaw Capital shows how transgressive economies and gray spaces are central to globalized capitalism.
A key site on the China-Paraguay-Brazil trade route, Ciudad del Este moves billions of dollars' worth of consumer goods-everything from cell phones to whiskey-providing cheap transit to Asian manufacturers and invisible subsidies to Brazilian consumers. A vibrant popular economy of Paraguayan street vendors and Brazilian "ant contrabandistas" capture some of the city's profits, contesting the social distribution of wealth through an insurgent urban epistemology of use, need, and care. Yet despite the city's centrality, it is narrated as a backward, marginal, and lawless place.
Outlaw Capital contests these sensationalist stories, showing how uneven development and the Paraguayan state made Ciudad de Este a gray space of profitable transgression. By studying the everyday illegalities of both elite traders and ordinary workers, Jennifer L. Tucker shows how racialized narratives of economic legitimacy across scales-not legal compliance-sort whose activities count as formal and legal and whose are targeted for reform or expulsion. Ultimately, reforms criminalized the popular economy while legalizing, protecting, and "whitening" elite illegalities.
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Revolting New York
How 400 Years of Riot, Rebellion, Uprising, and Revolution Shaped a City
by Various Authors
Part of the Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series
A comprehensive guide to New York City's historical geography of social and political movements.
Occupy Wall Street did not come from nowhere. It was part of a long history of uprising that has shaped New York City. From the earliest European colonization to the present, New Yorkers have been revolting. Hard hitting, revealing, and insightful, Revolting New York tells the story of New York's evolution through revolution, a story of near-continuous popular (and sometimes not-so-popular) uprising.
Richly illustrated with more than ninety historical and contemporary images, historical maps, and maps drawn especially for the book, Revolting New York provides the first comprehensive account of the historical geography of revolt in New York, from the earliest uprisings of the Munsee against the Dutch occupation of Manhattan in the seventeenth century to the Black Lives Matter movement and the unrest of the Trump era. Through this rich narrative, editors Neil Smith and Don Mitchell reveal a continuous, if varied and punctuated, history of rebellion in New York that is as vital as the more standard histories of formal politics, planning, economic growth, and restructuring that largely define our consciousness of New York's story.
Contributors: Marnie Brady, Kathleen Dunn, Zultán Gluck, Rachel Goffe, Harmony Goldberg, Amanda Huron, Malav Kanuga, Esteban Kelly, Manissa McCleave Maharawal, Don Mitchell, Justin Sean Myers, Brendan P. O'Malley, Raymond Pettit, Miguelina Rodriguez, Jenjoy Roybal, McNair Scott, Erin Siodmak, Neil Smith, Peter Waldman, and Nicole Watson.
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Spaces of Anticolonialism
Delhi's Urban Governmentalities
by Stephen Legg
Part of the Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series
Spaces of Anticolonialism is the first book-length account of anticolonialism in Delhi, as the capital of Britain's empire in India. It pioneers a spatial governmentality analysis of the networks, mobilizations, and hidden spaces of anticolonial parrhesia, or courageous speech and actions, in the two decades before independence in 1947. Reading across imperial and nationalist archives, newspapers, memoirs, oral histories, and interviews, Stephen Legg exposes subaltern geographies and struggles across both the new and old cities, which have traditionally been neglected in favor of the elite spaces of New Delhi.
Presenting the dual cities as one interconnected political landscape, Legg studies Indian National Congress efforts to mobilize and marshal support between the mass movements of Civil Disobedience (1930–34) and Quit India (1942–43). The book's six chapters compare the two movements in terms of their public spaces of nonviolent anticolonialism, their problematization by violence, and their legacies.
This bottom-up analysis, focused on the streets, bazaars, neighborhoods, homes, and undergrounds of the two cities, foregrounds the significance of physical and political space; it highlights the pioneering role of women in crafting these spaces; and it exposes the microtechniques that Congress used to encourage Gandhi's nonviolence and to tolerate its testing in the face of the rising popularity of the radical left.
Legg's rereading of Michel Foucault's final lectures on parrhesia produces a bold new approach to questions of postcolonialism, resistance, and South Asian governmentalities. This allows anticolonialism to be read not as an outside but as a coherent and bottom-up project of self-transformation and space-making that was elite coordinated but whose sovereignty lay with a disobedient and not always nonviolent public. This book provides an innovative and restive historical geography of spaces of anticolonialism in the capital of contemporary India's 1.4 billion people.
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Migrant Justice in the Age of Removal
Rights, Law, And Resistance Against Territory's Exclusions
by Jacob P. Chamberlain
Part of the Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series
Migrant Justice in the Age of Removal details the story of Migrant Justice, a migrant rights organization led by undocumented workers in a complicated and perhaps unexpected location: Vermont, United States. This compelling story, which includes U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's use of a covert informant to infiltrate the group and deport key members of its community, provides a detailed analysis of the state of immigration enforcement in the country today, alongside an intimate portrait of successful modes of resistance against it.
Migrant Justice has gone on to improve rights for migrants in Vermont and across the country in these incredibly precarious times for migrant activists. This book places Migrant Justice's activism within what is defined as the Age of Removal, or the last three decades in which immigration enforcement in the United States has increasingly used enhanced enforcement mechanisms like the "order of removal," which aids in the confinement, control, and exploitation of migrants. Migrant Justice's work also fits within a growing landscape of migrant rights movements that have arisen during this time, and Jacob P. Chamberlain provides a crucial snapshot of its work to better understand its successful forms of organizing in these contexts. In this confluence of opposing forces, we see egregious abuses against migrant actors, but we also see new and progressively powerful forms of resistance that are posing a specific challenge to bordered and territorially based limitations on rights and democracy. Migrant Justice's work expands rights access to people, regardless of citizenship, which essentially works toward a deterritorialization of rights access-or the opening of sociopolitical belonging to new actors.
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Reinventing the River City
Riparian Infrastructure, Cincinnati Elites, and the Ohio River
by Raymond Pettit
Part of the Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series
As the first major U.S. urban center located west of the Appalachian Mountains, Cincinnati depended on the Ohio River for its early development, eventually becoming one of the country's iconic river cities, with incredible growth during the golden age of steamboats. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the river had lost its shine and became known as the "poor man's highway." The twentieth century ushered in a period of incredible activity concentrated on the Ohio River. Local elites began a series of infrastructural projects focused on transforming both the Ohio River and Cincinnati, bringing to the fore a new kind of river city. Unlike many water management projects that wanted to tame rivers, Cincinnati elites sought to build a sustained relationship with the Ohio River. For its part, the Ohio River actively took part in these projects, becoming a major contributor to the successful realization of elite objectives around urban growth, public health, and white supremacy.
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Cultivating Socialism
Venezuela, ALBA, and the Politics of Food Sovereignty
by Rowan Lubbock
Part of the Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series
Launched in 2004, the Latin American regional institution of ALBA (Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América: Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America) sought to overcome the historical legacies of neocolonial domination by consecrating the values of cooperation, inclusive development, and popular power.
As part of a region-wide effort among states and social movements to break out of the the destructive effects of capitalist agriculture, the elevation of food sovereignty-based on the protection of rural livelihoods, land redistribution, and sustainable agricultural production (agroecology)-became a cornerstone of ALBA's development policy. And yet, these regional aspirations barely saw the light of day, while Venezuela (the beating heart of ALBA) experienced the worst food crisis in its history. How did this come to pass?
Based on extensive fieldwork in Venezuela, where the majority of ALBA's food policies reside, Cultivating Socialism provides the first in-depth study of the ways in which peasants, workers, and states working through ALBA attempted to redress the inequities of commercial agriculture and the limits and contradictions encountered on the road to a regional food sovereignty regime. With his analysis of the politics of food sovereignty within ALBA, Rowan Lubbock offers important lessons about how we might think about emancipatory politics today and in the future.
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High Stakes, High Hopes
Urban Theorizing in Partnership
by Sophie Oldfield
Part of the Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series
High Stakes, High Hopes tracks the building of urban theorizing in a decade-long urban research and teaching partnership in Cape Town, South Africa.An argument for collaborative urbanism, this book reflects on what was at stake in the partnership and its creative, and at times, conflictive, evolution. High Stakes, High Hopes explores what changed in learning when teaching and assessment occurred inuniversity classrooms, township streets, and ordinary people's households.Oldfield explores how research and assessment were reshaped when framed in neighbourhood questions and commitments, and what was reoriented in urban theorizing when community activism and township struggles were recognized as sites of valid knowledge-making.
Oldfield traces the multiple personal and political relationships at play, exploring the shifting patterns of power in this productive, yet always negotiated, collaboration. This innovative methodologyreveals the ways in which activists, residents, students, and the author experienced and reworked the differences between them. High Stakes, High Hopesshares forms of practice, grounded in teaching, to train a next generation of urbanists to engage the city embedded in multiple publics and politics across the city. The book builds upon an archive of alternative kinds of urban knowledges, experiments which work to inspire more varied forms of urban theorizing.
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The Coup and the Palm Trees
Agrarian Conflict and Political Power in Honduras
by Andrés León Araya
Part of the Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series
"If they are going to kill us anyway, we might as well die in our lands." With these words and a shrug of shoulders, a leader of the Unified Peasant Movement of the Aguán (MUCA) explains their decision to occupy more than 20,000 hectares of oil palm plantations in the Bajo Aguán region in Northern Honduras after the military coup that ousted President Manuel Zelaya on June 28, 2009.
The Coup under the Palm Trees interrogates the Honduran present, through an exploration of the country's spatiotemporal trajectory of agrarian change since the mid-twentieth century. It tells the double history of how the Aguán region went from a set of "empty" lands to the centerpiece of the country's agrarian reform in the 1980s and a central site for the palm oil industry and drug trade, while a militarized process of state formation took place between the coups of 1963 and 2009. Rather than a case of failed democratic transition, the book shows how the current Honduran crisis-exemplified by massive outmigration towards the United States, blatant narco-state links, and the 2009 coup-is better understood within longer historical processes in which violence, exclusion, and dispossession became the central organizational principles of the state.
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The Injustice of Property
Homeless Encampments And The Limits Of Liberalism
by Stephen Przybylinski
Part of the Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series
With the rise of homelessness in many U.S. cities, municipal governments are sanctioning organized encampments as an official strategy for sheltering unhoused people. Examining the shortcomings and consequences of these municipal policies, The Injustice of Property explores how unhoused individuals living in self-managed encampments navigate and organize themselves within and against the confines of liberal property systems. Through ethnographic research in Portland, Oregon, a paradigmatic city in advancing this model of homeless shelter, Stephen Przybylinski details the everyday struggles of self-managed encampments to highlight how key contradictions inherent to liberal ideology maintain property as a means of structuring sociopolitical equality. He argues that justice cannot be realized for unhoused communities within the liberal model of private property due to how liberalism and liberal ideology prioritize the rights and values of property over the personal rights of self-governance.
The Injustice of Property is a conceptually robust and empirically rich account of the limits of liberal thinking regarding what "just" property relations look like for unhoused and housed people alike. The book shows that while encampment communities struggle to establish alternative property relationships to the traditional model of private ownership, the injustices that residents of encampments face provoke a necessary reevaluation of how beneficiaries of property systems influence who can become housing stable and on which terms. This insightful book reveals how the injustices surrounding Portland's encampment communities reflect the limits and injustice of liberal property more broadly.
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Dispersed Dispossession
Collective Goods, Appropriation, And Agency In Rural Russia
by Alexander Vorbrugg
Part of the Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series
This book provides a nuanced analysis of rural change in Russia during the 2010s, a crucial and formative phase marked by the consolidation of giant agricultural companies, large land deals, soaring exports, and spectacular failures of investment projects. It contextualizes complex and often ambivalent empirical realities within historical and political-economic frameworks.
Through extensive fieldwork, Alexander Vorbrugg gives rare insights into the operations of large agricultural companies and reveals how the deterioration of material infrastructures, social arrangements, government and local supports, and collective goods erode the conditions of rural inhabitants' well-being and agency. Vorbrugg introduces "dispersed dispossession," a concept that helps to relate gradual degradation to appropriation and agency. The concept captures losses that have been accumulated across Soviet, reform, and state-capitalist phases and stick to places, persons and potentialities. These losses are perpetuated and exploited by businesses and politicians and have profound implications for the conditions for resistance, shaping the range of conceivable alternatives. They are part of a history that is not fully past.
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Infrastructures of Caring Citizenship
Commoning Social Reproduction in Crisis-Ridden Athens, Greece
by Isabel Gutiérrez Sánchez
Part of the Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series
Infrastructures of Caring Citizenship examines instances of collective struggle and (re)organization of social reproduction against the backdrop of the crisis that followed the international banking crash in 2008. Drawing on a long-term engagement with four grassroots initiatives, a social kitchen, a social clinic, and an accommodation center with refugees and a community center, Gutiérrez Sánchez introduces the concept of Infrastructures of Caring Citizenship (ICCs) as a theoretical tool for the examination of spaces of collective resistance where new commons are formed that enable the sustenance of everyday life. Furthermore, the book unpacks how such resistance challenges crisis governmentalities, shedding light on how self-organized groups understand the stakes of their practices and the potential for radical social change embedded in them.
Making a unique contribution to debates connecting care and the commons, this book offers a theoretical framework grounded in a compelling narrative, inspiring insights for a new social imagination and practice beyond the conventional view of chronic crisis.
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All Geographers Should Be Feminist Geographers
Creating Care-Full Academic Spaces
by Lindsay Naylor
Part of the Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series
Although care is a critical component of human life, it has remained on the margins of higher education and theory, heightening unequal relations along gender, race, and class lines. In All Geographers Should Be Feminist Geographers, Lindsay Naylor argues for a feminist approach in geography that is both world-dismantling and world-making, pushing back against a neoliberal academy. Care in this context is examined through labor, social reproduction, relations of exchange, and affect. Care is an everyday practice that takes place in public, private, and liminal spaces.
Naylor unpacks the promise and challenges of feminisms to address the care-less academy and the longstanding violent and exclusionary character of geography. Her fundamental premise: geography is well placed for this moment as we study and explain difference while "writing the earth." This book attends to such matters. While feminist geography has long been a subdiscipline within geography, Lindsay Naylor makes the case that a feminist approach to the academy, and geography specifically, should form the foundation of all the work we do.
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