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Transnational Labor and Place Making in the Rustbelt US: Implications for Theorizing Place and Politics of Place in the Global Era

18 March, 2015 @ 3:00 pm - 4:30 pm SAST

ACC is excited to host Prof Faranak Miraftab in the first of our academic Seminar Series for 2015. In this seminar ‘Transnational Labor and Place Making in the Rustbelt US: Implications for Theorizing Place  and Politics of Place in the Global Era’, Prof Miraftab will be presenting from her forthcoming book (2016) entitled Making a Home in the Heartland: Immigration and Global Labor Mobility.

Abstract

As a point observation I take an industrial town in rural rustbelt of the United States, and study the rapid social transformation of this space due to transnational labor recruitment by the meat processing industry. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Illinois, Mexico and Togo, I unfold the global production and social reproduction of migrant workers; how they make place globally and locally; and how they renegotiate inter-racial relations to make a former sundown town their new home in Illinois.

Focusing on an often overlooked space in urban scholarship of globalization and taken-for-granted processes of global labor mobility, this study recovers voices and stories often hidden, made invisible or left out of the picture, to theorize place and place making relationally and stress the difference that place makes. Spanning urban studies, human geography, immigration and transitional studies, Making a Home in the Heartland makes important intervention in the theorization of urban, production and social reproduction of transnational migrants, politics of place and place making.

Biography

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Faranak Miraftab is Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. A native of Iran, she did her undergraduate studies at the Tehran University; while in political asylum she earned her Master’s degree in Norway and later moved to the US and completed her doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley. Her interdisciplinary ethnographic work crosses planning, geography and transnational studies and is empirically based in cities of Latin America, Africa and North America. As an urban scholar of globalization she is interested in the global and local development processes and contingencies involved in the formation of the city and citizens’ struggles to access dignified livelihood. She was named as a 2014-15 University Scholar, a prestigious award bestowed on faculty at the University of Illinois campuses. Her most recent and forthcoming publications include Cities of the Global South Reader (Miraftab and Kudva, Routledge 2014); Cities and Inequalities in a Global and Neoliberal World (eds. Miraftab, Wilson and Salo, Routledge April 2015), and Making a Home in the Heartland: Immigration and Global Labor Mobility (Miraftab, Indiana University Press, January 2016). Her presentation will draw on the latter, a multi-sited ethnography concerning global production and social reproduction of migrant labor and how this makes for local development in the heartland US.

 

Details

Date:
18 March, 2015
Time:
3:00 pm - 4:30 pm SAST
Event Category:

Organizer

Rike Sitas

Other

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Location

Venue

Studio 5
Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus
Cape Town, South Africa
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