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In Domestic Economies, Susanna Rosenbaum examines how two groups of women—Mexican and Central American domestic workers and the predominantly white, middle-class women who employ them—seek to achieve the "American Dream." By juxtaposing their understandings and experiences, she illustrates how immigrant and native-born women strive to reach that ideal, how each group is indispensable to the other's quest, and what a vital role reproductive labor plays in this pursuit. Through in-depth ethnographic research with these women at work, at home, and in the urban spaces of Los Angeles, Rosenbaum positions domestic service as an intimate relationship that reveals two versions of female personhood. Throughout, Rosenbaum underscores the extent to which the ideology of the American Dream is racialized and gendered, exposing how the struggle for personal worth and social recognition is shaped at the intersection of motherhood and paid employment.
Women who migrate into domestic labour and care work are the single largest female occupational group migrating globally at present. Their participation in global migration systems has been acknowledged but remains under-theorized. Specifically, the impacts of women migrating into care work in the receiving as well as the sending societies are profound, altering gendered aspects of both societies. We know that migration systems link the women who migrate and the households and organizations that employ domestic and care workers, but how do these migration systems work, and more importantly, what are their impacts on the sending as well as the receiving societies? How do sending and receiving...
While Indigenous media have gained increasing prominence around the world, the vibrant Aboriginal media world on the Canadian West Coast has received little scholarly attention. As the first ethnography of the Aboriginal media community in Vancouver, Sovereign Screens reveals the various social forces shaping Aboriginal media production including community media organizations and avant-garde art centers, as well as the national spaces of cultural policy and media institutions. Kristin L. Dowell uses the concept of visual sovereignty to examine the practices, forms, and meanings through which Aboriginal filmmakers tell their individual stories and those of their Aboriginal nations and the int...
An incisive look at Hmong religion in the United States, where resettled refugees found creative ways to maintain their traditions, even as Christian organizations deputized by the government were granted an outsized influence on the refugees’ new lives. Every year, members of the Hmong Christian Church of God in Minneapolis gather for a cherished Thanksgiving celebration. But this Thanksgiving takes place in the spring, in remembrance of the turbulent days in May 1975 when thousands of Laotians were evacuated for resettlement in the United States. For many Hmong, passage to America was also a spiritual crossing. As they found novel approaches to living, they also embraced Christianity—c...
Desi Land is Shalini Shankar’s lively ethnographic account of South Asian American teen culture during the Silicon Valley dot-com boom. Shankar focuses on how South Asian Americans, or “Desis,” define and manage what it means to be successful in a place brimming with the promise of technology. Between 1999 and 2001 Shankar spent many months “kickin’ it” with Desi teenagers at three Silicon Valley high schools, and she has since followed their lives and stories. The diverse high-school students who populate Desi Land are Muslims, Hindus, Christians, and Sikhs, from South Asia and other locations; they include first- to fourth-generation immigrants whose parents’ careers vary fro...
This collection of essays considers the ways and extent of Haiti's 'exceptionalisation' - its perception in multiple arenas as definitively unique with respect not only to the countries of the North Atlantic, but also to the rest of the Americas. Painted at once as repulsive and attractive, abject and resilient, singular and exemplary, Haiti has long been framed discursively by an extraordinary epistemological ambivalence. The nation has served at once as cautionary tale, model for humanitarian aid and development projects, and point of origin for general theorizing of the so-called Third World. What to make of this dialectic of exemplarity and alterity? How to pull apart this multivalent na...
Care(ful) Relationships between Mothers and the Caregivers They Hire offers an interdisciplinary and international approach to the complex issues of carework, primarily focusing on childcare. The diverse collection of authors center their examinations of care by interrogating how class, race, and gender interplay to create inequity and potential. The work shared in Care(ful) Relationships draws from various disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, media studies, literary and dramatic analysis, history, and women' s studies while also addressing carework as it is depicted in ages past and contemporary culture. The collection not only seeks to challenge misconceptions and inequity but also examine how the unique personal relationships that form in the labor of care can yield prosocial change.
Aesthetic Practices in African Tourism explores "Rastahood", a community, youth culture, and new tourist art form created by young men on the margins of the Ghanaian economy as they came of age at the turn of the millennium. This book focuses on art, music, and affective experience created within tourism contexts, which enabled young men without educational or class capital to achieve mobility through work with foreigners, transforming the temporal horizon by expanding the geographic one. It traces the path that led young men down the path to Rastahood and investigates how they created an art form in, and of, a particular place and then used it to propel themselves far beyond its confines. T...
Is public transportation a right? Should it be? For those reliant on public transit, the answer is invariably "yes" to both. Indeed, when city officials propose slashing service or raising fares, it is these riders who are often the first to appear at that officials' door demanding their "right" to more service. Rights in Transit starts from the presumption that such riders are justified. For those who lack other means of mobility, transit is a lifeline. It offers access to many of the entitlements we take as essential: food, employment, and democratic public life itself. While accepting transit as a right, this book also suggests that there remains a desperate need to think critically, both about what is meant by a right and about the types of rights at issue when public transportation is threatened. Drawing on a detailed case study of the various struggles that have come to define public transportation in California's East Bay, Rights in Transit offers a direct challenge to contemporary scholarship on transportation equity. Rather than focusing on civil rights alone, Rights in Transit argues for engaging the more radical notion of the right to the city.