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An exploration of how age affects the experience and life prospects of asylum-seekers in Germany. Heartbreaking images of children in distress have propelled some of the most urgent calls for action on immigration crises, and that compassion often affects how state asylum policies are structured. In Germany, for example, the immigration system is engineered to protect minors, which leads to unintended consequences for migrants. In Forever 17, Ulrike Bialas follows young African and Central Asian migrants in Germany as they navigate that system. Without official paperwork or even, in many cases, knowledge of their exact age, migrants must decide how to present their complicated life stories t...
Cities can be seen as geographical imaginaries: places have meanings attributed so that they are perceived, represented and interpreted in a particular way. We may therefore speak of cityness rather than 'the city': the city is always in the making. It cannot be grasped as a fixed structure in which people find their lives, and is never stable, through agents designing courses of interactions with geographical imaginations. This theoretical perspective on cities is currently reshaping the field of urban studies, requiring new forms of theory, comparisons and methods. Meanwhile, mainstream urban studies approaches neighbourhoods as fixed social-spatial units, producing effects on groups of re...
A New York Times Notable Book of 2016 Winner of the Zócalo Public Square Book Prize On March 29, 1516, the city council of Venice issued a decree forcing Jews to live in il geto—a closed quarter named for the copper foundry that once occupied the area. The term stuck. In this sweeping and original account, Mitchell Duneier traces the idea of the ghetto from its beginnings in the sixteenth century and its revival by the Nazis to the present. As Duneier shows, we cannot comprehend the entanglements of race, poverty, and place in America today without recalling the ghettos of Europe, as well as earlier efforts to understand the problems of the American city. Ghetto is the story of the schola...
“A rare and compassionate look into the lives of Americans who go unclaimed when they die and those who dedicate their lives to burying them with dignity.”—Matthew Desmond, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Poverty, by America For centuries, people who died destitute or alone were buried in potters’ fields—a Dickensian end that even the most hard-pressed families tried to avoid. Today, more and more relatives are abandoning their dead, leaving it to local governments to dispose of the bodies. Up to 150,000 Americans now go unclaimed each year. Who are they? Why are they being forgotten? And what is the meaning of life if your death doesn’t matter to others? In this extraord...
In the current moment, ethnography is caught up in a number of debates that have led ethnographers to reflect on classic methodological and ethical dilemmas in new ways. The “replication crisis” had led to a movement for “open science” (e.g., registering hypotheses in advance; sharing codes and data), but it seems unclear that recommended best practices are appropriate to ethnography. It’s even up for debate whether ethnography is more of a social science or a genre. The fact that many ethnographies are widely read invites questions and criticisms from beyond the ivory tower–including our subjects–about the ethics of representation (e.g., who has license to write about whom) an...
Rethinking the contributions of the Manchester School of Social Anthropology for political ethnography, the Politics of Relations elaborates its relational approach to the state along four interlaced axes of research – embeddedness, boundary work, modalities and strategic selectivity – that enable thick comparisons across spatio-temporal scales of power. In Serbia local experiences of self-government, infrastructure and care motivate its citizens to “become the state” while cursing it heartily. While both officials and citizens strive for a state that enables a “normal life,” they navigate the increasingly illiberal politics enacted by national parties and which are tolerated by trans-national donors.
Multistable figures offer an intriguing model for arbitrating conflicting positions. Moving back and forth between different aspects, one recognizes that contradictory descriptions of a situation can be equally valid and that disputes over the correct account can be settled without dissolving differences or establishing a higher synthesis. Yet, the experience of a gestalt switch also offers a model for radical conversions and revolutions, that is, for irreversible leaps to incommensurable alternatives foiling ideals of rational choice while providing the possibility and necessity of decision. Accentuating the temporal dimensions of multistable figures, this multidisciplinary volume illuminates the critical potential and limits of multistability as a complex figure of thought.
Superdiversität erforscht die zunehmenden Diversifizierungsprozesse und die hochkomplexen sozialen Konfigurationen, durch die frühere Formen der Vielfalt in unseren modernen Gesellschaften nochmals potenziert werden. Migration spielt bei diesen Prozessen eine Schlüsselrolle, wie der international führende Sozialwissenschaftler Steven Vertovec in diesem bahnbrechenden Buch zeigt. Sie bringt nicht nur Veränderungen in allen sozialen, kulturellen, religiösen und sprachlichen Bereichen mit sich, sondern auch in der Art und Weise, wie diese mit Faktoren wie Geschlecht, Alter und ökonomischem wie rechtlichem Status zusammenwirken. Im Mittelpunkt des von Vertovec entwickelten Konzepts der »...
Das Buch beschreibt satirisch humorvoll eine Reise durch das deutsche gymnasiale Bildungssystem mit bissigen gesellschaftskritischen Randbemerkungen.