Contemporary politics, this book contends, depend upon the turbulent struggles and strategies around scale. Consisting of contributions from anthropologists, geographers and cultural studies scholars, this volume explores theoretical issues around contested temporal and spatial scales, and around variations in scale from the body to the global.
Donald M. Nonini, Professor of Anthropology, University of North
Carolina, Chapel Hill, has undertaken research in Malaysia, Australia, and the
United States on citizenship in the Chinese diaspora; U.S. local politics; and
on the commons. His latest book is "Getting by": Class and State Formation
among Chinese in Malaysia (Cornell University Press, 2015).
Ida Susser, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College
and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, has published on
popular mobilizations, social movements, and the urban commons in the
United States, Europe, and Southern Africa. Her books include Norman
Street: Poverty and Politics in an Urban Neighborhood (Oxford University Press,
2012) and the co- edited volumes, Rethinking America (CRC Press, 2009) and
Wounded Cities (Berg, 2003).
1. Introduction - The Tumultuous Politics of Scale: History, Class, and Agency Revisited [Donald M. Nonini and Ida Susser] Part I. Scales of Domination: Transnational Migration and its Discontents 2. The Making and Un-Making of Border Scales: European Union Migration Control in North and West Africa [Sebastian Cobarrubias] 3. The Temporalities in Migration: Women and Reproduction in the Affective Economies of Late Capitalism [Winnie Lem] Part II. Problematizing the Nation and the Nation-State 4. Political Violence, Criminal Law, and Shifting Scales of Justice [Ruchi Chaturvedi] 5. Networked Flows through a "Porous" State: A Scalar Energo-political Account of the Greek Debt Crisis [Sandy Smith-Nonini] Part III. Rescaling Sovereignty: The Case of the European Union and Its Outside Insiders 6. Making the Eastern Scale: Class, Contradiction, and the Rise of the 'illiberal' Right in Post-socialist Central Europe [Don Kalb] 7. Reimagining Scale, Space and Sovereignty: The United Kingdom and "Brexit" [John Clarke] Part IV. The Longue Durée 8. Interrogating the Agrarian Question Then and Now in Terms of Uneven and Combined Development [Gavin Smith] 9. Dispossession and Emancipation: Reframing Labor's Political Question for the Neoliberal Era [August Carbonella] Part V. Social Movements: Transforming the Scales s of Conflict 10. Downscaled "Local Food" Movements from Below and the Corporate Food Movement from Above: What's at Stake? [Donald M. Nonini] 11. Localism in One Local: Labor and Scale at the Saturn Automobile Factory [Sharryn Kasmir] 12. Popular Mobilization: Rescaling As a Consequence of Nuit Debout/Occupy [Ida Susser]