Materiality of place and politics of placemaking: in conversation with metrocentric urban theories
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Date
2016
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AESOP
Abstract
This presentation draws on my latest book, Global Heartland: Displaced Labor, Transnational Lives and Local Placemaking (Indiana University press, 2016). The book gives an account of diverse, dispossessed, and displaced people brought together in a former sundown town in rural Illinois, called Beardstown, when its meat processing plant recruits workers among African Americans, Mexicans and West Africans. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Illinois, Mexico and Togo, my research for the book unfolds how this workforce is produced for the global labor market; how their transnational lives help them to stay in these jobs; and how these displaced workers renegotiate their relationships with each other across the lines of ethnicity, race, language, and nationality as they make a new home in Illinois. By focusing on the type of locality that is at the heart of capitalism and yet has been largely overlooked in urban scholarship on globalization, the study offers a fresh perspective on materiality and politics of place and placemaking.
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Proceedings of the IV World Planning Schools Congress, July 3-8th, 2016 : Global crisis, planning and challenges to spatial justice in the north and in the south
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