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Standing in the Need presents an intimate account of an African American family’s ordeal after Hurricane Katrina. Before the storm struck, this family of one hundred fifty members lived in the bayou communities of St. Bernard Parish just outside New Orleans. Rooted there like the wild red iris of the coastal wetlands, the family had gathered for generations to cook and share homemade seafood meals, savor conversation, and refresh their interconnected lives. In this lively narrative, Katherine Browne weaves together voices and experiences from eight years of post-Katrina research. Her story documents the heartbreaking struggles to remake life after everyone in the family faced ruin. Cast against a recovery landscape managed by outsiders, the efforts of family members to help themselves could get no traction; outsiders undermined any sense of their control over the process. In the end, the insights of the story offer hope. Written for a broad audience and supported by an array of photographs and graphics, Standing in the Need offers readers an inside view of life at its most vulnerable.
What do the trickster Rabbit, slave descendants, off-the-books economies, and French citizens have to do with each other? Plenty, says Katherine Browne in her anthropological investigation of the informal economy in the Caribbean island of Martinique. She begins with a question: Why, after more than three hundred years as colonial subjects of France, did the residents of Martinique opt in 1946 to integrate fully with France, the very nation that had enslaved their ancestors? The author suggests that the choice to decline sovereignty reflects the same clear-headed opportunism that defines successful, crafty, and illicit entrepreneurs who work off the books in Martinique today. Browne draws on...
In Economics and Morality, the authors seek to illuminate the multiple kinds of analyses relating morality and economic behavior in particular kinds of economic systems.
Standing in the Need presents an intimate account of an African American family’s ordeal after Hurricane Katrina. Before the storm struck, this family of one hundred fifty members lived in the bayou communities of St. Bernard Parish just outside New Orleans. Rooted there like the wild red iris of the coastal wetlands, the family had gathered for generations to cook and share homemade seafood meals, savor conversation, and refresh their interconnected lives. In this lively narrative, Katherine Browne weaves together voices and experiences from eight years of post-Katrina research. Her story documents the heartbreaking struggles to remake life after everyone in the family faced ruin. Cast against a recovery landscape managed by outsiders, the efforts of family members to help themselves could get no traction; outsiders undermined any sense of their control over the process. In the end, the insights of the story offer hope. Written for a broad audience and supported by an array of photographs and graphics, Standing in the Need offers readers an inside view of life at its most vulnerable.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork at a small Chicago adoption agency specializing in transracial adoption, Contingent Kinship charts the entanglement of institutional structures and ideologies of family, race, and class to argue that adoption is powerfully implicated in the question of who can have a future in the twenty-first-century United States. With a unique focus on the role that social workers and other professionals play in mediating relationships between expectant mothers and prospective adopters, Kathryn A. Mariner develops the concept of “intimate speculation,” a complex assemblage of investment, observation, and anticipation that shapes the adoption process into an elaborate mechanism for creating, dissolving, and exchanging imagined futures. Shifting the emphasis from adoption’s outcome to its conditions of possibility, this insightful ethnography places the practice of domestic adoption within a temporal, economic, and affective framework in order to interrogate the social inequality and power dynamics that render adoption—and the families it produces—possible.
The socio-economic and political uncertainties of Kenya in the 1990s jeopardised what many saw as the promises of modernity. An increasing number of Kenyans migrated, many to Britain, a country that felt familiar from Kenyan history. Based on extensive fieldwork in Kenya and the United Kingdom, Leslie Fesenmyer's work provides a rich, historically nuanced study of the kinship dilemmas that underlie transnational migration and explores the dynamic relationship between those who migrate and those who stay behind. Challenging a focus on changing modes of economic production, 'push-pull' factors, and globalisation as drivers of familial change, she analyses everyday trans-national family life. Relative Distance shows how quotidian interactions, exchanges, and practices transform kinship on a local and global scale. Through the prism of intergenerational care, Fesenmyer reveals that the question of who is responsible for whom is not only a familial matter but is at the heart of relations between individuals, societies, and states.
This timely Research Agenda examines the ways in which public–private partnerships (PPPs) in infrastructure continue to excite policy makers, governments, research scholars and critics around the world. It analyzes the PPP research journey to date and articulates the lessons learned as a result of the increasing interest in improving infrastructure governance. Expert international contributors explore how PPP ideas have spread, transferred and transformed, and propose a range of future research directions.
Did you know that the first paid holiday was introduced by Germany in 1903? Or that Frank L. Baum wrote “The Wizard of Oz” inspired by the march of Ohioan unemployed upon Washington D.C.? Or that, until 1974, married American women could not own a credit card without their husbands’ approval? All these things and many more you can find in the book “A Moral History of Monetary and Fiscal Policies”, written by the National Bank of Romania’s Chief Economist Valentin Lazea. The volume targets specialists in history, economics or sociology, but also lay people. The three parts of the volume finish with three provocative questions: Did the Gold Standard era represent a period of fierce exploitation of the working–class? Did the rise of Nazism represent an inevitable consequence of orthodox macroeconomic policies? Was Nicolae Ceausescu wrong in repaying all Romania’s external debt in the ‘80s?
After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, many high-profile chefs in New Orleans pledged to help their city rebound from the flooding. Several formed their own charitable organizations, including the John Besh Foundation, to help revitalize the region and its restaurant scene. A year and a half after the disaster when the total number of open restaurants eclipsed the pre-Katrina count, it was embraced as a sign that the city itself had survived, and these chefs arguably became the de facto heroes of the city's recovery. Meanwhile, food justice organizations tried to tap into the city's legendary food culture to fundraise, marketing high-end dining events that centered these celebrity chefs. Jeanne K....