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405 books match the query 'Human Geography' and 29 start with a

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A Community Transplanted

The Trans-Atlantic Experience of a Swedish Immigrant Settlement in the Upper Middle West, 1835-1915

Robert C. Ostergren

University of Wisconsin Press, 1988

"An exceptional work, meticulously researched and woven together with analytic rigor and attention to the particularities of the subject matter. It is written in a style that combines individual narrative histories with systematic empirical inquiry yielding a work that is intellectually sophisticated and at times lyrical. In short, it should not only be read by students of American immigration, but should serve as a model for future research."—International Migration Review

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A Country of Defiance

Mapping the Casamance in Senegal

Mark W. Deets

Ohio University Press, 2023

A historiographical analysis of human geography and a social history of nationalist separatism and cultural identity in southern Senegal. This book is a spatial history of the conflict in Casamance, the portion of Senegal located south of The Gambia. Mark W. Deets traces the origins of the conflict back to the start of the colonial period in a select group of contested spaces and places where the seeds of nationalism and separatism took root. Each chapter examines the development of a different piece of the still unrealized Casamançais nation: river, rice field, forest, school, and stadium. Each of these locations forms a spatial discourse of grievance that transformed space into place, rendering a separatist nation from the pieces where a particular Casamançais identity emerged. However, not every Casamançais identified with these spaces and places in the same way. Many refused to tie their beloved culture and landscape to the project of separatism, revealing a layer of counter-mapping below that of the separatist leaders like Father Augustin Diamacoune Senghor and Mamadou “Nkrumah” Sané. The Casamance conflict began on December 26, 1982. After an oath-taking ceremony in a sacred forest on the edge of Ziguinchor, hundreds of separatists from the Movement of Democratic Forces of the Casamance (MFDC) marched into the town to remove the Senegalese flag in front of the regional governor’s office and replace it with a white flag. The marchers were met by gendarmes who quickly found themselves outnumbered. Government surveillance, arrests, and interrogations followed into the next year, when gendarmes went to the sacred forest to stop another MFDC meeting. This time, the separatists greeted the gendarmes with a burst of violence that left four dead, their bodies mutilated. Senegalese security responded with force, driving the separatists—armed only with improvised rifles, bows and arrows, and machetes—into the forest. The Casamance conflict continues to the present day, so far having left more than five thousand dead, four hundred killed or maimed by land mines, and another eight hundred thousand living in a state of insecurity, with limited possibility for economic development. Ordinary Casamançais—on the Casamance River, in the rice fields, in the forests, in the schools, and in the sports stadiums—have demonstrated a diversity of opinions about the separatist project. Whether by the Senegalese state or by the separatists, these ordinary Casamançais have refused to be mapped. They have made the Casamance “a country of defiance.”

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A Favored Place

San Juan River Wetlands, Central Veracruz, A.D. 500 to the Present

By Alfred H. Siemens

University of Texas Press, 1998

The wetlands of the San Juan Basin in Central Veracruz, Mexico, have been a favored place since the fifth century A.D., when Prehispanic people built an extensive network of canals and raised fields that allowed for almost year-round agriculture. Alfred Siemens' discovery of the remains of this network in the 1970s led him to uncover fifteen centuries of land-use history in the region. This book contains a full record of his findings.

Siemens organizes his history of the San Juan Basin around the question: What relationships exist between Prehispanic agriculture and the production systems of the tropical lowlands in our own time? This focus allows him to chart the changes in human perceptions and uses of the landscape, from the Prehispanic wetland agricultural system to the drained pastures of today's cattle ranches.

Amplified with air oblique photography, maps, and tables, and enriched with data from archaeology and colonial archives, this is an authoritative historical geography of a wetland landscape. Or, in the author's more modest words, "It seems to me that what I have here is a biography of a swamp."

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A Field on Fire

The Future of Environmental History

Edited by Mark D. Hersey and Ted Steinberg

University of Alabama Press, 2019

A frank and engaging exploration of the burgeoning academic field of environmental history

Inspired by the pioneering work of preeminent environmental historian Donald Worster, the contributors to A Field on Fire: The Future of Environmental History reflect on the past and future of this discipline. Featuring wide-ranging essays by leading environmental historians from the United States, Europe, and China, the collection challenges scholars to rethink some of their orthodoxies, inviting them to approach familiar stories from new angles, to integrate new methodologies, and to think creatively about the questions this field is well positioned to answer.

Worster’s groundbreaking research serves as the organizational framework for the collection. Editors Mark D. Hersey and Ted Steinberg have arranged the book into three sections corresponding to the primary concerns of Worster’s influential scholarship: the problem of natural limits, the transnational nature of environmental issues, and the question of method. Under the heading “Facing Limits,” five essays explore the inherent tensions between democracy, technology, capitalism, and the environment. The “Crossing Borders” section underscores the ways in which environmental history moves easily across national and disciplinary boundaries. Finally, “Doing Environmental History” invokes Worster’s work as an essayist by offering self-conscious reflections about the practice and purpose of environmental history.

The essays aim to provoke a discussion on the future of the field, pointing to untapped and underdeveloped avenues ripe for further exploration. A forward thinker like Worster presents bold challenges to a new generation of environmental historians on everything from capitalism and the Anthropocene to war and wilderness. This engaging volume includes a very special afterword by one of Worster’s oldest friends, the eminent intellectual historian Daniel Rodgers, who has known Worster for close to fifty years.

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A Jumble of Needs

Women’s Activism and Neoliberalism in the Colonias of the Southwest

Rebecca Dolhinow

University of Minnesota Press, 2010

Many immigrant communities along the U.S. border with Mexico are colonias, border settlements lacking infrastructure or safe housing. A Jumble of Needs examines the leadership of Mexican women immigrants in three colonias in New Mexico, documenting the role of NGOs in shaping women’s activism in these communities. Ethnographer Rebecca Dolhinow, who worked in the colonias, uncovers why such attempts to exercise political agency are so rarely successful.

Central to the relationship between NGOs and women activists in colonias, Dolhinow argues, is the looming presence of the neoliberal political project. In particular, the discourses of caretaking that NGOs use to recruit women into leadership positions simultaneously naturalize and depoliticize the activist work that these women do in their communities. Dolhinow discovers the connections between colonias as isolated communities and colonia leaders as political subjects who unintentionally reinforce neoliberal policy. In the long run, she finds, any politicization that might take place is limited to the women leaders and seldom involves the community as a whole.

Surprisingly, Dolhinow reveals, many NGOs promote neoliberal ideals, resulting in continued disenfranchisement, despite the women’s activism to better their lives, families, and communities.

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A Little More Freedom

African Americans Enter the Urban Midwest, 1860–1930

Jack S. Blocker

The Ohio State University Press, 2008

Why did African Americans move from the rural South to the metropolitan North? Scholars have shown that African Americans took part in the urbanization of American society between the Civil War and the Great Depression, but the racial dimensions of their migration have remained unclear. A Little More Freedom is the first study to trace African American locational choices during the crucial period when migrants created pathways that would shape mobility through the twentieth century and beyond.This book identifies an "age of the village" for black Midwesterners, when Civil War and postwar migrants distributed themselves evenly across the urban hierarchies of the region. Using four case studies of Washington Court House, Ohio; Springfield, Ohio; Springfield, Illinois; and Muncie, Indiana, Blocker shows what life was like for African Americans in small towns and small cities, thus illuminating the reasons why most blacks ultimately chose to leave such places in favor of metropolitan centers such as Chicago, Indianapolis, and Cleveland. Previous scholars have emphasized the role of racist white violence as the catalyst, but A Little More Freedom takes a more nuanced approach.Emphasis upon racist violence and Jim Crow has inadvertently tended to portray African Americans as victims and their migrations as flight from danger and oppression. While not downplaying white racism, A Little More Freedom tries to recreate the threats and opportunities in urban places of different sizes as seen through the eyes of migrants.

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A Place Called Grand Canyon

Contested Geographies

Barbara J. Morehouse

University of Arizona Press, 1996

For most people, "Grand Canyon" signifies that place of scenic wonder identified with Grand Canyon National Park. Beyond the boundaries of the park, however, extends the greater Grand Canyon, a region that includes five Indian reservations, numerous human settlements, and lands managed by three federal agencies and by the states of Arizona and Utah. Many people have sought to etch their values, economic practices, and physical presence on this vast expanse. Ultimately, all have had to come to terms with the limits imposed by the physical environment and the constraints posed by others seeking to carve out a place for themselves. A Place Called Grand Canyon is an unprecedented survey of how the lands and resources of the greater Grand Canyon have come to be divided in many different ways and for many different reasons. It chronicles the ebb and flow of power --changes in who controls the land and gives it meaning. The book begins with an exploration of the geographies of the native peoples, then examines how the westward expansion of the United States affected their lives and lands. It traces the century of contest and negotiation over the land and its resources that began in the 1880s and concludes with an assessment of contemporary efforts to redefine the region. Along the way, it explores how the spaces of the greater Grand Canyon area came to be defined and used, and how those spaces in turn influenced later contests among the ranchers, loggers, miners, recreationists, preservationists, Native Americans, and others claiming a piece--or all--of the area for their own ends. The story exposes how dynamic the geographical boundaries of the region really are, regardless of the indelibility of the ink with which they were drawn. With visitation to Grand Canyon National Park approaching five million people per year, pressures on resources are intensifying. When the greater Grand Canyon area is considered, environmental management is further complicated by the often-conflicting demands of business, recreation, ecological preservation, and human settlement. Morehouse invites us to look beyond boundaries drawn on maps to discover what Grand Canyon means to different people, and to think more deeply about what living in harmony with the land really entails. Her insights will be of interest to geographers and other social scientists--including anthropologists and environmental historians--and to all who seek a counterpoint to conventional natural histories of the region.

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A Route 66 Companion

Edited by David King Dunaway

University of Texas Press, 2012

Even before there was a road, there was a route. Buffalo trails, Indian paths, the old Santa Fe trace—all led across the Great Plains and the western mountains to the golden oasis of California. America’s insatiable westering urge culminated in Route 66, the highway that ran from Chicago to Los Angeles. Opened in 1926, Route 66 became the quintessential American road. It offered the chance for freedom and a better life, whether you were down-and-out Okies fleeing the Dust Bowl in the 1930s or cool guys cruising in a Corvette in the 1960s. Even though the interstates long ago turned Route 66 into a bylane, it still draws travelers from around the world who long to experience the freedom of the open road.

A Route 66 Companion gathers fiction, poetry, memoir, and oral history to present a literary historical portrait of America’s most storied highway. From accounts of pioneering trips across the western plains to a sci-fi fantasy of traveling Route 66 in a rocket, here are stories that explore the mystique of the open road, told by master storytellers ranging from Washington Irving to Raymond Chandler, Joan Didion, Sylvia Plath, Leslie Marmon Silko, and John Steinbeck. Interspersed among them are reminiscences that, for the first time, honor the varied cultures—Native American, Mexican American, and African American, as well as Anglo—whose experiences run through the Route 66 story like the stripe down the highway. So put the top down, set the cruise control, and “make that California trip” with A Route 66 Companion.

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A Sense of Space

A Local’s Guide to a Flat Earth, the Edge of the Cosmos, and Other Curious Places

John Edward Huth

University of Chicago Press, 2025

From global navigation to natal charts to memory palaces and beyond, a thrilling journey through humanity’s visualization of new spaces.

When you give directions, do you tell someone to go straight ahead and turn left? Or do you suggest that they head north before moving west? Your answer reveals more than you might think.

In A Sense of Space, writer and physicist John Edward Huth uses these two kinds of navigation—either centered on or independent of people—to help readers chart a path through evolving spatial models. In doing so, he offers an astonishing exploration of how changing scientific models of space alter our social perceptions, and vice versa. New visions of space can emanate from human considerations, he argues, and those new visions can in turn spawn new cultural phenomena. With accessible introductions to topics including mental maps, astrology, astronomy, particle physics, and Einstein’s relativity, Huth makes clear that, although our minds have evolved to comprehend space in terrestrial distances, we routinely extend this understanding to realms far removed from our everyday experiences, from cosmological to subatomic scales.

Taking us across the eons from the myth of a flat earth to the mysteries of the multiverse, A Sense of Space is an energetic, thoughtful guide to how we orient ourselves in our world—and beyond.

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A Thousand Pieces of Paradise

Landscape and Property in the Kickapoo Valley

Lynne Heasley

University of Wisconsin Press, 2012

A Thousand Pieces of Paradise is an ecological history of property and a cultural history of rural ecosystems set in one of the Midwest’s most historically significant regions, the Kickapoo River Valley. Whether examining the national war on soil erosion, Amish migration, a Corps of Engineers dam project, or Native American land claims, Lynne Heasley traces the history of modern American property debates. Her book holds powerful lessons for rural communities seeking to reconcile competing values about land and their place in it.

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Aerial Aftermaths

Wartime from Above

Caren Kaplan

Duke University Press, 2018

From the first vistas provided by flight in balloons in the eighteenth century to the most recent sensing operations performed by military drones, the history of aerial imagery has marked the transformation of how people perceived their world, better understood their past, and imagined their future. In Aerial Aftermaths Caren Kaplan traces this cultural history, showing how aerial views operate as a form of world-making tied to the times and places of war. Kaplan’s investigation of the aerial arts of war—painting, photography, and digital imaging—range from England's surveys of Scotland following the defeat of the 1746 Jacobite rebellion and early twentieth-century photographic mapping of Iraq to images taken in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Throughout, Kaplan foregrounds aerial imagery's importance to modern visual culture and its ability to enforce colonial power, demonstrating both the destructive force and the potential for political connection that come with viewing from above.

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African Meditations

Felwine Sarr

University of Minnesota Press, 2022

An influential thinker’s fascinating reflections and meditations on reacclimating to his native Senegal as a young academic after years of study abroad

The call to morning prayer. A group run at daybreak along the Corniche in Dakar. A young woman shedding tears on a beach as her friends take a boat to Europe. In African Meditations, paths to enlightenment collide with tales of loss and ruminations, musical gatherings, and the everyday sights and sounds of life in West Africa as a young philosopher and creative writer seeks to establish himself as a teacher upon his return to Senegal, his homeland, after years of study abroad.

A unique contemporary portrait of an influential, multicultural thinker on a spiritual quest across continents—reflecting on his multiple literary influences along with French, African Francophone, and Senegalese tribal cultural roots in a homeland with a predominantly Muslim culture—African Meditations is a seamless blend of autobiography, journal entries, and fiction; aphorisms and brief narrative sketches; humor and Zen reflections.

Taking us from Saint-Louis to Dakar, Felwine Sarr encounters the rhythms of everyday life as well as its disruptions such as teachers’ strikes and power outages while traversing a semi-surrealistic landscape. As he reacclimates to his native country after a life in France, we get candid glimpses, both vibrant and hopeful, sublime and mundane, into his Zen journey to resecure a foothold in his roots and to navigate academia, even while gleaning something of the good life, of joy, amid the struggles of life in Senegal.

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Afterlives of Discovery

Speculative Geographies in the Settler Colonial Imaginary

heidi andrea restrepo rhodes

Duke University Press, 2025

In Afterlives of Discovery, heidi andrea restrepo rhodes traces global and national histories as they entangle through the concept and material life of Discovery across Colombia’s evolution into a liberal settler colonial state. Rather than seeing Discovery as a singular event or bygone era, rhodes theorizes Discovery as a globally encompassing, racialized formation of domination and geographic speculation that continues to structure settler colonialism. Discovery’s logics, they argue, are rooted in colonial and capitalist fantasies projected onto the racialized space and place of the colonized other. rhodes draws on critical theory, human rights research, and Colombian archives to challenge dominant narratives that maintain the Colombian armed conflict began as a Marxist insurgency in 1964. Instead, rhodes shows that the conflict is an extension of Discovery’s ongoingness via projects of dispossession, extraction, whitening, and epistemic and political hegemony. Given that Colombia’s national past, present, and future are grounded in Discovery, rhodes asks: How is it possible to build futures that escape Discovery’s grasp?

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Age of Concrete

Housing and the Shape of Aspiration in the Capital of Mozambique

David Morton

Ohio University Press, 2019

Age of Concrete is a history of the making of houses and homes in the subúrbios of Maputo (Lourenço Marques), Mozambique, from the late 1940s to the present. Often dismissed as undifferentiated, ahistorical “slums,” these neighborhoods are in fact an open-air archive that reveals some of people’s highest aspirations. At first people built in reeds. Then they built in wood and zinc panels. And finally, even when it was illegal, they risked building in concrete block, making permanent homes in a place where their presence was often excruciatingly precarious.

Unlike many histories of the built environment in African cities, Age of Concrete focuses on ordinary homebuilders and dwellers. David Morton thus models a different way of thinking about urban politics during the era of decolonization, when one of the central dramas was the construction of the urban stage itself. It shaped how people related not only to each other but also to the colonial state and later to the independent state as it stumbled into being.

Original, deeply researched, and beautifully composed, this book speaks in innovative ways to scholarship on urban history, colonialism and decolonization, and the postcolonial state. Replete with rare photographs and other materials from private collections, Age of Concrete establishes Morton as one of a handful of scholars breaking new ground on how we understand Africa’s cities.

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Aging in a Changing World

Older New Zealanders and Contemporary Multiculturalism

Molly George

Rutgers University Press, 2022

This is a story about aging in place in a world of global movement. Around the world, many older people have stayed still but have been profoundly impacted by the movement of others. Without migrating themselves, many older people now live in a far “different country” than the one of their memories. Recently, the Brexit vote and the 2016 election of Trump have re-enforced prevalent stereotypes of “the racist older person”. This book challenges simplified images of the old as racist, nostalgic and resistant to change by taking a deeper, more nuanced look at older people’s complex relationship with the diversity and multiculturalism that has grown and developed around them. Aging in a Changing World takes a look at how some older people in New Zealand have been responding to and interacting with the new multiculturalism they now encounter in their daily lives. Through their unhurried, micro, daily interactions with immigrants, they quietly emerge as agents of the very social change they are assumed to oppose.

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Amazonia in the Anthropocene

People, Soils, Plants, Forests

By Nicholas C. Kawa

University of Texas Press, 2016

Widespread human alteration of the planet has led many scholars to claim that we have entered a new epoch in geological time: the Anthropocene, an age dominated by humanity. This ethnography is the first to directly engage the Anthropocene, tackling its problems and paradoxes from the vantage point of the world’s largest tropical rainforest.

Drawing from extensive ethnographic research, Nicholas Kawa examines how pre-Columbian Amerindians and contemporary rural Amazonians have shaped their environment, describing in vivid detail their use and management of the region’s soils, plants, and forests. At the same time, he highlights the ways in which the Amazonian environment resists human manipulation and control—a vital reminder in this time of perceived human dominance. Written in engaging, accessible prose, Amazonia in the Anthropocene offers an innovative contribution to debates about humanity’s place on the planet, encouraging deeper ecocentric thinking and a more inclusive vision of ecology for the future.

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American Bloodlands

Race and the Making of the Plasma Economy

Kelsey Johnson

Duke University Press, 2027

American Bloodlands tells the story of the commercial blood plasma economy, a $26 billion global market in which human blood plasma is manufactured into lifesaving and lucrative pharmaceutical products. Underpinning this extensive business are millions of American plasma donors who use the money earned to meet the increasingly expensive costs of daily life. Kelsey Johnson traces the roots of this trade back to plantation prisons in the US South in the 1960s and follows how plantation geographies have shaped the industry’s trajectory ever since. Examining the plasma economy as it has expanded into urban and suburban life, she also shows how the flow of blood products back and forth across the Atlantic extends earlier histories of plantation economies, racism and slavery, and the place of the US South as a source of biological material for use elsewhere in the Global North. In American Bloodlands, Johnson shows how regimes of race and nature originating in slavery continue to shape the landscapes of health and wealth today.

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Ancestral Places

Understanding Kanaka Geographies

Katrina-Ann R. Kapa'anaokalaokeola Nakoa Oliveira

Oregon State University Press, 2014

Ancestral Places explores the deep connections that ancestral Kanaka (Native Hawaiians) enjoyed with their environment. It honors the mo‘olelo (historical accounts) of the ancestral places of our kupuna (ancestors), and reveals how these mo‘olelo and our relationships with the ‘aina (land) inform a Kanaka sense of place.

Katrina-Ann R. Kapa‘anaokalaokeola Nakoa Oliveira elucidates a Kanaka geography and provides contemporary scholars with insights regarding traditional culture—including the ways in which Kanaka utilize cartographic performances to map our ancestral places and retain our mo‘olelo, such as reciting creation accounts, utilizing nuances embedded in language, and dancing hula.

A Kanaka by birth, a kumu ‘olelo Hawai‘i (language teacher) by profession, and a geographer by training, Oliveira’s interests intersect at the boundary where words and place-making meet her ancestral land. Thus, Ancestral Places imbues the theoretical with sensual practice. The book’s language moves fluidly between Hawaiian and English, terms are nimbly defined, and the work of the field is embodied: geographic layers are enacted within the text, new understandings created—not just among lexica, but amidst illustrations, charts, terms, and poetry.

In Ancestral Places, Oliveira reasserts both the validity of ancestral knowledge systems and their impact in modernity. Her discussion of Kanaka geographies encompasses the entire archipelago, offering a new framework in Kanaka epistemology.

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Animal Traffic

Lively Capital in the Global Exotic Pet Trade

Rosemary-Claire Collard

Duke University Press, 2020

Parrots and snakes, wild cats and monkeys---exotic pets can now be found everywhere from skyscraper apartments and fenced suburban backyards to roadside petting zoos. In Animal Traffic Rosemary-Claire Collard investigates the multibillion-dollar global exotic pet trade and the largely hidden processes through which exotic pets are produced and traded as lively capital. Tracking the capture of animals in biosphere reserves in Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize; their exchange at exotic animal auctions in the United States; and the attempted rehabilitation of former exotic pets at a wildlife center in Guatemala, Collard shows how exotic pets are fetishized both as commodities and as objects. Their capture and sale sever their ties to complex socio-ecological networks in ways that make them appear as if they do not have lives of their own. Collard demonstrates that the enclosure of animals in the exotic pet trade is part of a bioeconomic trend in which life is increasingly commodified and objectified under capitalism. Ultimately, she calls for a “wild life” politics in which animals are no longer enclosed, retain their autonomy, and can live for the sake of themselves.

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Animate Planet

Making Visceral Sense of Living in a High-Tech Ecologically Damaged World

Kath Weston

Duke University Press, 2017

In Animate Planet Kath Weston shows how new intimacies between humans, animals, and their surroundings are emerging as people attempt to understand how the high-tech ecologically damaged world they have made is remaking them, one synthetic chemical, radioactive isotope, and megastorm at a time. Visceral sensations, she finds, are vital to this process, which yields a new animism in which humans and "the environment" become thoroughly entangled. In case studies on food, water, energy, and climate from the United States, India, and Japan, Weston approaches the new animism as both a symptom of our times and an analytic with the potential to open paths to new and forgotten ways of living.

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Animated Urbanism

Bringing Cities to Smart Digital Life

Gillian Rose

University of Minnesota Press, 2027

A critical examination of the digital imagery and visualization tools that mediate urban life

Animated Urbanism explores the ways urban life is increasingly mediated by digital visualization tools, from elaborate marketing productions to specialized techniques of urban planning that rely on the collection of large datasets. By developing a critical vocabulary for these forms of digital imagery, Gillian Rose investigates the implications of using digital technology to manage the spatial and temporal organization of life in cities.

Pushing back against the so-called smartness mandate, which sees urban existence and its infrastructure as necessarily governed by big data, automation, and artificial intelligence, Animated Urbanism is a nuanced examination of the various types of media structuring urban life and their propensity to replicate highly gendered and racialized forms of human embodiment. From smartphone apps to special effects in movies to sophisticated “fly-through” videos of cities created by urban developers, Rose analyzes the corporate imaginaries that are being created, building on the influential theories of Donna Haraway, among others, concerning the interrelation of technology, power, and human life.

While recent digital analysis often focuses on the political economy of tech platforms or the efficacy of data in smart cities, Rose emphasizes the role of human subjectivity in the shifting configurations of these new urban landscapes. With an incisive, feminist approach to the imagery enabled by software and handheld devices, Animated Urbanism invites us to question how human life emerges from these complex entanglements of technology and visual culture.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

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Answer the Call

Virtual Migration in Indian Call Centers

Aimee Carrillo Rowe

University of Minnesota Press, 2013

What happens over time to Indians who spend their working hours answering phone calls from Americans—and acting like Americans themselves? To find out, the authors of Answer the Call conducted long-term interviews with forty-five agents, trainers, managers, and CEOs at call centers in Bangalore and Mumbai from 2003 to 2012. For nine or ten hours every day, workers in call centers are not quite in India or America but rather in a state of “virtual migration.” Encouraged to steep themselves in American culture from afar, over time the agents come to internalize and indeed perform Americanness for Americans—and for each other.

Call center agents “migrate” through time and through the virtual spaces generated by voice and information sharing. Drawing from their rich interviews, the authors show that the virtual migration agents undergo has no geographically distant point of arrival, yet their perception of moving is not merely abstract. Over the duration of the job, agents’ sense of place and time changes: agents migrate but still remain, leaving them somewhere in between—between India and America, experience and imagination, class mobility and consumption, tradition and modernity, here and there, then and now, past and future.

However tangible and elastic their virtual mobility might seem in these relatively lucrative jobs, it is also suspended within the confines of the very boundaries they migrate across. Having engaged with these vivid and often poignant interviews, readers will never again be indifferent to an Indian agent’s greeting at the other end of a toll-free call: “Hello, my name is Roxanne. How may I help you?”

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