Global Heartland

Faranak Miraftab is Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is author of Women's Empowerment: Participation in Shelter Strategies at the Community Level in Urban Informal Settlements and editor(with David Wilson and Ken Salo) of Cities and Inequalities in a Global and Neoliberal World, (with Neema Kudva) Cities of the Global South Reader, and (with Victoria A. Beard and Chris Silver) Planning and Decentralization: Contested Spaces for Public Action in the Global South.

In Faranak Miraftab's book, Global Heartland, the life of the meatpacker is vividly brought to life. Miraftab studies the lived-realities of meatpacking laborers to understand how the industry has influenced the economic revitalization and social transformation of the small, rural community of Beardstown, Illinois, while arguing that the thriving economy and cultural diversity successes of the area obscure larger narratives about the unequal global ties that enabled these changes.(Antipode) Faranak Miraftab's powerful and, at times, very personal study of the meat-packing industry in Beardstown, Illinois, offers an exemplary analysis of the relational character of place. The book challenges us to think seriously about places that are all too often located at the periphery of mainstream urban theory.(AAG Review of Books) The depth and breadth of this book show it was a decade in the making. Miraftab has carried out a rich multi-sited ethnography to help us understand the transbordering factors and relations that produce and revitalize Beardstown, a meatpacking town in Illinois. (International Journal of Urban and Regional Research)

• IntroductionPart I. Beardstown: A Place in the World1. Welcome to Porkopolis2. It All Changed OvernightPart II. Displaced Labor3. "Michoacán's Largest Export is People"4. "Winning the Lotto in Togo"5. Detroit: "The First Third World City of the U.S."Part III. Outsourced Lives6. Global Restructuring of Social ReproductionPart IV. We Wanted Workers, We Got People7. We Wanted Workers8. We Got PeopleConclusion: The Global in my BackyardAppendix 1: Population and Labor TablesAppendix 2: Schedule and Profile of IntervieweesNotesReferencesIndex