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Delivery As Dispossession
"This book explains why nearly 30 years after the transition to democracy, the South African government continues to evict squatters from urban land. It argues that housing officials view occupiers as threats to the government's housing delivery program, which, they insist, requires order and state control. New occupations are therefore stigmatized as "disorderly" threats, and government actors represent their removal as a precondition for access to housing. Drawing on a decade of sustained ethnographic fieldwork in two such occupations in Cape Town, this study explains why one was evicted, whereas the other was ultimately tolerated, answering a central question in urban studies: how do gove...
The South African Tradition of Racial Capitalism
This book documents the emergence and development of the theory of racial capitalism in apartheid South Africa. It interrogates the specificity of this theory in the South African context and draws lessons for its global applicability. Racism and capitalism have a long history of entanglement. Nowhere is this more evident than in South Africa, where colonial and apartheid regimes used explicit systems of racial hierarchy to shore up profit. It is therefore no surprise that South Africa has represented a key site for thinking about the role that racism plays in shaping state policy, labor markets, patterns of capital accumulation, and working-class struggle. Illuminating these dynamics, this ...
Ethnographies of Power
Working with key concepts from theorist and human geographer Gillian Hart, this book argues for an ethnographic and geographic approach to critically engage contemporary political-economic processes in the context of real world struggles.
Behind the Startup
"As dreams of our technological future have turned into nightmares, some blame harmful algorithms or greedy CEOs for the negative consequences of innovation. Behind the Startup takes a different approach. Drawing on 19 months of participant-observation research inside a successful Silicon Valley startup, this book examines how the company was organized to meet the needs of the venture capital investors who funded it. Investors push startups to 'scale' as quickly as possible to inflate the value of their asset. I show how these demands created organizational problems that managers could only solve by combining high-tech systems with low-wage human labor. With its focus on the financialization of innovation, Behind the Startup explains how the gains generated by Silicon Valley companies are funneled into the pockets of a small cadre of elite investors and entrepreneurs. Readers will come away from the book with the understanding that if we want to promote innovation that benefits the many rather than the few, we need to focus less on fixing the technology and more on changing the financial infrastructure that supports it"--
Elgar Encyclopedia of Environmental Sociology
The Elgar Encyclopedia of Environmental Sociology serves as a repository of insight on the complex interactions, challenges and potential solutions that characterize our shared ecological reality. Presenting innovative thinking on a comprehensive range of topics, expert scholars, researchers, and practitioners illuminate the nuances, complexities and diverse perspectives that define the continually evolving field of environmental sociology.
The Two Faces of Fear
Over the past two decades, increased criminal and state violence has profoundly transformed everyday life in Mexico. In The Two Faces of Fear, Ana Villarreal draws on two years of qualitative fieldwork conducted during a major turf war in Monterrey, Mexico to trace the far-reaching impact of fear and violence on social ties, daily practices, and everyday spaces. Villarreal brings two seemingly contradictory faces of fear into focus--its ability to both isolate and concentrate people and resources, deepening inequality. While all residents of one of Mexico's largest metropolises confronted new threats, the most privileged leveraged vastly unequal resources to spatially concentrate and defend one municipality more fiercely than the rest. Within this defended city, business, nightlife, and public space thrived at the expense of the greater metropolis. The book puts forth a new approach to the study of emotion and provides tangible evidence of how quickly fear worsens inequality beyond Mexico and the "war on drugs."
Southern Resistance in Critical Perspective
From the Arab Uprising, to anti-austerity protests in Europe and the US Occupy Movement, to uprisings in Brazil and Turkey, resistance from below is flourishing. Whereas analysts have tended to look North in their analysis of the recent global protest wave, this volume develops a Southern perspective through a deep engagement with the case of South Africa, which has experienced widespread popular resistance for more than a decade. Combining critical theoretical perspectives with extensive qualitative fieldwork and rich case studies, Southern Resistance in Critical Perspective situates South Africa’s contentious democracy in relation to both the economic insecurity of contemporary global capitalism and the constantly shifting political terrain of post-apartheid nationalism. The analysis integrates worker, community and political party organizing into a broader narrative of resistance, bridging historical divisions between social movement studies, labor studies and political sociology.
Activism Under Fire
Rio de Janeiro's favelas have become well-known sites of gang and police violence. Since the 1970s, dangerous networks between drug traffickers and corrupt state actors have transformed these poor neighborhoods into sites of armed conflict and political repression, limiting residents' ability to speak out against violence or demand their democratic rights. Despite these challenges, nonviolent politics remains an integral element in Cidade de Deus--City of God--one of Rio's most dangerous and famous favelas. In Activism under Fire, Anjuli Fahlberg provides an original account of how conflict activism operates in Cidade de Deus. Drawing on fieldwork, virtual ethnography, and participatory acti...
Origins of the Mass Party
"This book argues that the mass party emerged as the product of two distinct but related 'primitive accumulations' - the dismantling of communal land tenure and the corresponding dispossession of means of local administration. It illustrates this argument by studying the party central to one of the longest regimes of the 20th century - the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) in Mexico, which emerged as a mass party during the 1930s and 1940s. I place the PRI in comparative perspective, studying the failed emergence of Bolivsia's Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR) (1952-1964), attempted under similar conditions as the Mexican case. Why was party emergence successful in one ca...
Bandage, Sort, and Hustle
What is the role of the ambulance in the American city? The prevailing narrative provides a rather simple answer: saving and transporting the critically ill and injured. This is not an incorrect description, but it is incomplete. Drawing on field observations, medical records, and his own experience as a novice emergency medical technician, sociologist Josh Seim reimagines paramedicine as a frontline institution for governing urban suffering. Bandage, Sort, and Hustle argues that the ambulance is part of a fragmented regime that is focused more on neutralizing hardships (which are disproportionately carried by poor people and people of color) than on eradicating the root causes of agony. Whe...
