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In 2008, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad invited international investors to the first-ever Palestine Investment Conference, which was designed to jump-start the process of integrating Palestine into the global economy. As Fayyad described the conference, Palestine is “throwing a party, and the whole world is invited.” In this book Kareem Rabie examines how the conference and Fayyad's rhetoric represented a wider shift in economic and political practice in ways that oriented state-scale Palestinian politics toward neoliberal globalization rather than a diplomatic two-state solution. Rabie demonstrates that private firms, international aid organizations, and the Palestinian government in the West Bank focused on large-scale private housing development in an effort toward state-scale economic stability and market building. This approach reflected the belief that a thriving private economy would lead to a free and functioning Palestinian state. Yet, as Rabie contends, these investment-based policies have maintained the status quo of occupation and Palestine's subordinate and suspended political and economic relationship with Israel.

How contemporary environmental struggles and resistance to pipeline development became populist struggles
 

Stunning Indigenous resistance to the Keystone XL and the Dakota Access pipelines has made global headlines in recent years. Less remarked on are the crucial populist movements that have also played a vital role in pipeline resistance. Kai Bosworth explores the influence of populism on environmentalist politics, which sought to bring together Indigenous water protectors and environmental activists along with farmers and ranchers in opposition to pipeline construction.

Here Bosworth argues that populism is shaped by the “affective infrastructures” emerging from shifts in regional economies, democratic public-review processes, and scientific controversies. With this lens, he investigates how these movements wax and wane, moving toward or away from other forms of environmental and political ideologies in the Upper Midwest. This lens also lets Bosworth place populist social movements in the critical geographical contexts of racial inequality, nationalist sentiments, ongoing settler colonialism, and global empire—crucial topics when grappling with the tensions embedded in our era’s immense environmental struggles.

Pipeline Populism reveals the complex role populism has played in shifting interpretations of environmental movements, democratic ideals, scientific expertise, and international geopolitics. Its rich data about these grassroots resistance struggles include intimate portraits of the emotional spaces where opposition is first formed. Probing the very limits of populism, Pipeline Populism presents essential work for an era defined by a wave of people-powered movements around the world.

Labor and labor norms orient much of contemporary life, organizing our days and years and driving planetary environmental change. Yet, labor, as a foundational set of values and practices, has not been sufficiently interrogated in the context of the environmental humanities for its profound role in climate change and other crises. This collection of essays demonstrates the urgent need to rethink models and customs of labor and leisure in the Anthropocene. Recognizing the grave traumas and hazards plaguing planet Earth, contributors expose fundamental flaws in ideas of work and search for ways to redirect cultures toward more sustainable modes of life. These essays evaluate Anthropocene frames of interpretation, dramatize problems and potentials in regimes of labor, and explore leisure practices such as walking and storytelling as modes of recasting life, while a coda advocates reviving notions of work as craft.

In Plantation Worlds, Maan Barua interrogates debates on planetary transformations through the histories and ecologies of plantations. Drawing on long-term research spanning fifteen years, Barua presents a unique ethnography attentive to the lives of both people and elephants amid tea plantations in the Indian state of Assam. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nearly three million people were brought in to Assam’s plantations to work under conditions of indenture. Plantations dramatically altered the region’s landscape, plundered resources, and created fraught worlds for elephants and people. Their extractive logics and colonial legacies prevail as durations, forging the ambit of infrastructures, labor, habitability, and conservation in the present. And yet, as the perspectives of the Adivasi plantation worker community and lifeworlds of elephants show, possibilities for enacting a decolonial imaginary of landscape remain present amid immiseration. From the margins of the Global South, Barua offers an alternative grammar for articulating environmental change. In so doing, he prompts a rethinking of multispecies ecologies and how they are structured by colonialism and race.

Famines and other serious food shortages have been one of the scourges faced by humanity for millennia.

Plants for Desperate Times is an introduction to the diversity of plant foods that have saved millions of lives during lethal food shortages. While not a field guide, it addresses questions about what famine foods are and why they are important. The work highlights one hundred plants. Each entry includes the common and scientific names, botanical family, distribution, use as a famine food and other uses, and nutritional information. The species come from across the botanical kingdom, demonstrating the diversity of life-saving plants and the human ingenuity of making what might seem to be inedible plants edible. Unexpectedly, important famine foods include alternative uses of important crops as well as native plants.

Beyond a study of famine foods, the authors share why keeping an inventory of plant foods of last resort is so important. They help to build an understanding of little-known and underappreciated foods that may have a greater role in provisioning humanity in the future. As much as we may hope that severe food scarcity will never occur again, history suggests otherwise, and Plants for Desperate Times provides invaluable documentation of these vital foods.

 

In Pluriversal Politics Arturo Escobar engages with the politics of the possible and how established notions of what is real and attainable preclude the emergence of radically alternative visions of the future. Reflecting on the experience, philosophy, and practice of indigenous and Afro-descendant activist-intellectuals and on current Latin American theoretical-political debates, Escobar chronicles the social movements mobilizing to defend their territories from large-scale extractive operations in the region. He shows how these movements engage in an ontological politics aimed at bringing about the pluriverse—a world consisting of many worlds, each with its own ontological and epistemic grounding. Such a politics, Escobar contends, is key to crafting myriad world-making stories telling of different possible futures that could bring about the profound social transformations that are needed to address planetary crises. Both a call to action and a theoretical provocation, Pluriversal Politics finds Escobar at his critically incisive best.

In Politics in the Crevices, Sarah El-Kazaz takes readers into the world of urban planning and design practices in Istanbul and Cairo. In this transnational ethnography of neighborhoods undergoing contested rapid transformations, she reveals how the battle for housing has shifted away from traditional political arenas onto private crevices of the city. She outlines how multiple actors—from highly capitalized international NGOs and corporations to city dwellers, bureaucrats, and planning experts—use careful urban design to empower conflicting agendas, whether manipulating property markets to protect affordable housing or corner luxury real estate. El-Kazaz shows that such contemporary politicizations of urban design stem from unresolved struggles at the heart of messy transitions from the welfare state to neoliberalism, which have shifted the politics of redistribution from contested political arenas to design practices operating within market logics, ultimately relocating political struggles onto the city’s most intimate crevices. In so doing, she raises critical questions about the role of market reforms in redistributing resources and challenges readers to rethink neoliberalism and the fundamental ways it shapes cities and polities.

A groundbreaking study of music and musical history in Leeds.

This is the first scholarly volume to focus on popular music in Leeds. It delves into the rich musical history of Leeds and its long tradition of vibrant venues, nightclubs, dance halls, pubs, and other sites of musical entertainment. The contributors use the popular music of Leeds to exemplify and inform understandings of broader cultural and urban changes, the social and historical significance of music as mass media; music and migration; music, racialization, and social equity; and industrial decline, deindustrialization, neoliberalism, and the rise of the twenty-four-hour city. Charting moments of stark musical politicization and de-politicization, while also tracing arguments about heritagizing popular music within discussions about music’s place in museums and in the urban economy, this book contributes to debates about why music matters, has mattered, and continues to matter in Leeds and beyond. 
 

A land of long ago on the brink of tomorrow. That is the Algarve, the southernmost province of Portugal, a land that knew the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Greeks, Romans, Visigoths, Moslems—and yet retained its own distinctive personality. In the 1950s it first felt the impact of industrialization, and from that situation the author developed this book.

In presenting this descriptive geography of the Algarve, Dan Stanislawski offers no thesis, except that geographers, economists, politicians, humanists—all those interested in the way the world is developing—should watch the small, culturally disparate areas of the world, to learn what they have of value to teach, to enjoy the qualities of their independent ways of living, and to observe and evaluate their reaction to modern change. This book, the result of detailed observation of one such region, is a valuable contribution to the knowledge necessary to form sound value judgments on the future development of these areas.

From this account the charm of the Algarve emerges in all of its picturesqueness. With the aid of Stanislawski's vivid descriptions, his eighteen helpful maps and graphs, and his more than ninety photographs, the reader moves leisurely through this appealing, but unpublicized, region: along roadways bordered by rock walls and blooming almonds, traveled by sturdy burros bearing their loads of produce; through colorful landscapes of the Lower Algarve, with their pastel-calcimined dwellings and their intensively cultivated plots of olives, figs, carobs, grain, and vegetables; along the rugged cliff coast near Portimão, and the boat-filled port of Faro; past the canyon gardens of the Caldeirão; along the Arade River with its cork barges; northward past Cape S. Vicente to the area of wind-sheared trees.

Guided by Stanislawski, the reader comes to understand Algarvian problems inherent in soils, topography, climate, location, and history. He sees the Algarvians following the occupational practices that have produced for them, in the midst of difficult conditions, a stable culture: fishing, netmaking, shipbuilding, farming, herding, and so on. He realizes that these people, with their unique cultural background and environment, desire to live, and to change, in their own way. Finally, he learns how it is possible to communicate effectively with the Algarvians and with millions of other people whose peculiar problems tend to isolate them from the rest of the world.

Between 1900 and the late 1950s, Mexican border towns came of age both as tourist destinations and as emerging cities. Commercial photographers produced thousands of images of their streets, plazas, historic architecture, and tourist attractions, which were reproduced as photo postcards. Daniel Arreola has amassed one of the largest collections of these border town postcards, and in this book, he uses this amazing visual archive to offer a new way of understanding how the border towns grew and transformed themselves in the first half of the twentieth century, as well as how they were pictured to attract American tourists.

Postcards from the Río Bravo Border presents nearly two hundred images of five significant towns on the lower Río Bravo—Matamoros, Reynosa, Nuevo Laredo, Piedras Negras, and Villa Acuña. Using multiple images of sites within each city, Arreola tracks changes both within the cities as places and in the ways in which the cities have been pictured for tourist consumption. He makes a strong case that visual imagery has a shaping influence on how we negotiate and think about places, creating a serial scripting or narrating of the place. Arreola also shows how postcard images, when systematically and chronologically arranged, can tell us a great deal about how Mexican border towns have been viewed over time. This innovative visual approach demonstrates that historical imagery, no less than text or maps, can be assembled to tell a compelling geographical story about place and time.

The community of Agua Blanca, deep within the Machalilla National Park on the coast of Ecuador, found itself facing the twenty-first century with a choice: embrace a booming tourist industry eager to experience a preconceived notion of indigeneity, or risk losing a battle against the encroaching forces of capitalism and development. The facts spoke for themselves, however, as tourism dollars became the most significant source of income in the community.

Thus came a nearly inevitable shock, as the daily rhythms of life--rising before dawn to prepare for a long day of maintaining livestock and crops; returning for a late lunch and siesta; joining in a game of soccer followed by dinner in the evening--transformed forever in favor of a new tourist industry and the compromises required to support it. As Practically Invisible demonstrates, for Agua Blancans, becoming a supposedly "authentic" version of their own indigenous selves required performing their culture for outsiders, thus becoming these performances within the minds of these visitors. At the heart of this story, then, is a delicate balancing act between tradition and survival, a performance experienced by countless indigenous groups.

In Predatory Welfare, Erin Torkelson explores how the direct cash transfer program instituted in South Africa revised and reworked post-apartheid racialized and gendered dispossession, despite its promise of ameliorating extreme poverty. Beginning in 2012, she focuses on how poor Black South African women asserted their entitlements to social assistance and responsibilities for familial care against the pressures of expropriation built into the grant payment system. Because the grants did not cover monthly bills, recipients were pushed into predatory loans collateralized by welfare payments. Torkelson finds that the state-sponsored but privately-run program was fundamentally undermined by its reliance on digital financial technologies which encoded wider forces of colonial rule, nationalist politics, and global development. Even when the government assumed control of grant payment in 2018, the neoliberal bent of fiscal policy continued to drive recipients into debt in new ways. Drawing on seven years of ethnographic fieldwork and organization—in grant payment queues, loan offices, grocery stores, Parliament, and the Constitutional Court—Torkelson demonstrates how cash transfers can offer a means to making racial capitalism more acceptable and how recipients can push back to demand reparation.

This persistent prioritization of liberty at the heart of Colorado Springs’s identity, specifically the freedom to conduct business and generate profits in a relatively unconstrained setting, has directed the urban sprawl of the built landscape and molded the region’s political culture. Profiting from the Peak will be of interest to historical and urban geographers, historians of Colorado and the American West, and anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the cultural identity of Colorado Springs.