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Walking connects the rhythms of urban life to the configuration of urban spaces. As the contributors and editors show in Walking in Cities, walking also reflects the systematic inequalities that order contemporary urban life. Walking has different meanings because it can be a way of temporarily “taking possession” of urban space, or it can make the relatively powerless more vulnerable to crime. The essays in Walking in Cities explore how walking intersects with sociological dimensions such as gender, race and ethnicity, social class, and power.

Various chapters explorethe flâneuse, or female urban drifter, in Tehran’s shopping malls; Hispanic neighborhoods in New York, San Diego, and El Paso; and the intra-neighborhood and inter-class dynamics of gentrification in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.The essays in Walking in Cities provide important lessons about urban life.

Contributors consider the interning or policing of citizens of color, the activism of radicals, structural racism, destruction and death in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, and the FBI Counterintelligence Program designed to quash domestic dissent. Among the first-person accounts are an interview with Dhoruba Bin Wahad, a Black Panther and former political prisoner; a portrayal of life in prison by a Plowshares nun jailed for her antinuclear and antiwar activism; a discussion of the Puerto Rican Independence Movement by one of its members, now serving a seventy-year prison sentence for sedition; and an excerpt from a 1970 letter by the Black Panther George Jackson chronicling the abuses of inmates in California’s Soledad Prison. Warfare in the American Homeland also includes the first English translation of an excerpt from a pamphlet by Michel Foucault and others. They argue that the 1971 shooting of George Jackson by prison guards was a murder premeditated in response to human-rights and justice organizing by black and brown prisoners and their supporters.

Contributors. Hishaam Aidi, Dhoruba Bin Wahad (Richard Moore), Marilyn Buck, Marshall Eddie Conway, Susie Day, Daniel Defert, Madeleine Dwertman, Michel Foucault, Carol Gilbert, Sirène Harb, Rose Heyer, George Jackson, Joy James, Manning Marable, William F. Pinar, Oscar Lòpez Rivera, Dylan Rodríguez, Jared Sexton, Catherine vön Bulow, Laura Whitehorn, Frank B. Wilderson III

An eye-opening first-hand account of life in a WWII shipyard from a woman's perspective 

In 1942, Katherine Archibald, a graduate student at Berkeley, left the halls of academe to spend two years working in a nearby Oakland shipyard. She arrived with a host of preconceptions about the American working class, race relations and the prospect for their improvement, and wartime unity. Her experience working in a shipyard where women were seen as intruders, where "Okies" and black migrants from the South were regarded with barely-disguised hatred, and where trade unions preferred protecting their turf to defending workers' rights, threw much of her liberal faith into doubt.  

Archibald's 1947 book about her experiences, Wartime Shipyard: A Study in Social Disunity, remains a classic account of life and labor on the home front. This new edition includes an introduction written by historians Eric Arnesen and Alex Lichtenstein, who explore Archibald's work in light of recent scholarship on women and African Americans in the wartime workplace. 

One of the first longitudinal studies of collective resistance in the developing world, Waves of Protest examines large-scale contentious action in El Salvador during critical eras in the country’s history.

Providing a compelling analysis of the massive waves of protests from the early twentieth century to the present in El Salvador, Paul D. Almeida fully chronicles one of the largest and most successful campaigns against globalization and privatization in the Americas. Drawing on original protest data from newspapers and other archival sources, Almeida makes an impassioned argument that regime liberalization organizes civil society and, conversely, acts of state-sponsored repression radicalize society. He correlates the ebb and flow of protest waves to the changes in regime liberalization and subsequent de-democratization and back to liberalization.

Almeida shows how institutional access and competitive elections create opportunity for civic organizations that become radicalized when authoritarianism increases, resulting at times in violent protest campaigns that escalate to revolutionary levels. In doing so, he brings negative political conditions and threats to the forefront as central forces driving social movement activity and popular contention in the developing world.

Paul D. Almeida is assistant professor of sociology at Texas A&M University. He is coeditor with Hank Johnston of Latin American Social Movements: Globalization, Democratization, and Transnational Networks.

Changes in the global economy have real and contradictory outcomes for the everyday lives of women workers. In 2001, Nancy Plankey-Videla had a rare opportunity to witness these effects firsthand. Having secured access to one of Latin America's top producers of high-end men's suits in Mexico for participant-observer research, she labored as a machine operator for nine months on a shop floor made up, mostly, of women. The firm had recently transformed itself from traditional assembly techniques, to lean, cutting-edge, Japanese-style production methods. Lured initially into the firm by way of increased wages and benefits, workers had helped shoulder the company's increasing debts. When the company's plan for successful expansion went awry and it reneged on promises it had made to the workforce, women workers responded by walking out on strike.

What makes women sick? To an Ecuadorean woman, it’s nervios from constant worry about her children’s illnesses. To a woman working in a New Mexico electronics factory, it’s the solvents that leave her with a form of dementia. To a Ugandan woman, it’s HIV from her husband's sleeping with the widow of an AIDS patient. To a Bangladeshi woman, it’s a fatal infection following an IUD insertion. What they all share is a recognition that their sickness is somehow caused by  situations they face every day at home and at work.

In this clearly written and compelling book, Lesley Doyal investigates the effects of social, economic, and cultural conditions on women’s health. The “fault line” of gender that continues to divide all societies has, Doyal demonstrates, profound and pervasive consequences for the health of women throughout the world. Her broad synthesis highlights variations between men and women in patterns of health and illness, and it identifies inequalities in medical care that separate groups of women from each other. Doyal’s wide-ranging arguments, her wealth of data, her use of women’s voices from many cultures—and her examples of women mobilizing to find their own solutions—make this book required reading for everyone concerned with women’s health.

When Pain Strikes was first published in 1998. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

When pain strikes, do you raid the medicine cabinet? Read a self-help manual? Hit the roof? How we in North America respond to pain-what we think about it, what we say, and what we do-is the subject of this collection of writings and images.

The book's five sections contain a myriad of complex reactions to the occurrence of pain: "Measure It" discusses biomedical responses; "Scream and Yell" explores therapeutic solutions; "Cut It Open" takes up surgical interventions; "Take a Pill" looks at pharmacology; and "Intensify It" examines positions that embrace pain. Each section comprises original artwork, scholarly analyses, poetic and literary texts, and discussions by activists. Hailing from the university, the gallery, and the community organization, the authors—as TV watchers, recreational drug users, recipients of medical attention, caregivers, midwives, or the HIV positive—inhabit and reconfigure our contemporary painscape, offering a new approach to the puzzle of pain.

Contributors: Charles R. Acland; Barbara McGill Balfour; Isabelle Brabant; Stephen Busby; Millie Chen; Michael Fernandes; Bob Flanagan; Thyrza Nichols Goodeve; Marie-Paule Macdonald; Ronald Melzack; Margaret Morse; Celeste Olalquiaga; John O'Neill; Gerard Päs; Elsie Petch; D. L. Pughe; Julia Scher; Cathy Sisler; Johanne Sloan; Jana Sterbak; Fred Tomaselli; Patrick D. Wall; Theodore Wan; Gregory Whitehead; Fred Wilson.

When Pain Strikes is published in collaboration with the Banff Centre for the Arts.

In postwar America, not everyone wanted to move out of the city and into the suburbs. For decades before World War II, New York's tenants had organized to secure renters' rights. After the war, tenant activists raised the stakes by challenging the newly-dominant ideal of homeownership in racially segregated suburbs. They insisted that renters as well as owners had rights to stable, well-maintained homes, and they proposed that racially diverse urban communities held a right to remain in place--a right that outweighed owners' rights to raise rents, redevelop properties, or exclude tenants of color.  Further, the activists asserted that women could participate fully in the political arenas where these matters were decided. 

Grounded in archival research and oral history, When Tenants Claimed the City: The Struggle for Citizenship in New York City Housing shows that New York City's tenant movement made a significant claim to citizenship rights that came to accrue, both ideologically and legally, to homeownership in postwar America. Roberta Gold emphasizes the centrality of housing to the racial and class reorganization of the city after the war; the prominent role of women within the tenant movement; and their fostering of a concept of "community rights" grounded in their experience of living together in heterogeneous urban neighborhoods.

In a bold work that cuts across racial, ethnic, cultural, and national boundaries, Sheila Smith McKoy reveals how race colors the idea of violence in the United States and in South Africa—two countries inevitably and inextricably linked by the central role of skin color in personal and national identity.
    Although race riots are usually seen as black events in both the United States and South Africa, they have played a significant role in shaping the concept of whiteness and white power in both nations. This emerges clearly from Smith McKoy's examination of four riots that demonstrate the relationship between the two nations and the apartheid practices that have historically defined them: North Carolina's Wilmington Race Riot of 1898; the Soweto Uprising of 1976; the Los Angeles Rebellion in 1992; and the pre-election riot in Mmabatho, Bhoputhatswana in 1994. Pursuing these events through narratives, media reports, and film, Smith McKoy shows how white racial violence has been disguised by race riots in the political and power structures of both the United States and South Africa.
    The first transnational study to probe the abiding inclination to "blacken" riots, When Whites Riot unravels the connection between racial violence—both the white and the "raced"—in the United States and South Africa, as well as the social dynamics that this connection sustains.