Description
Global Heartland is the account of diverse, dispossessed, and displaced people brought together in a former sundown town in Illinois. Recruited to work within the local meat-processing plant, African Americans, Mexicans, and West Africans re-create the town in unexpected ways. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in the United States, Mexico, and Togo, Faranak Miraftab shows how this group of workers is produced for the worldwide labor market; how the displaced workers’ transnational lives assist them stay in these jobs; and how they negotiate their relationships with each and every other around the lines of ethnicity, race, language, and nationality as they make a new home. Beardstown isn’t an exception but an example of local-global connections that make for local development. Specializing in a locality in a non-metropolitan region, this work contributes to urban scholarship on globalization by offering a fresh standpoint on politics and materialities of placemaking.
- Winner: Davidoff Book Award, Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP)
- Winner: Global & Transnational Sociology section Book Award, American Sociological Association (ASA)
- Finalist: C. Wright Mills Book Award, Society for Study of Social Problems (SSSP)