Culture, Humanity, and Urban Life – serie

Urban Mountain Beings is an ethnographic and historically grounded study of recognition strategies and ethnogenesis carried out on the flanks of Mt. Pichincha in Quito, Ecuador. Kathleen S. Fine-Dare employs feminist geographical and Indigenous pedagogical frameworks to illustrate how histories of exclusion have created attitudes and policies that treat Native peoples as “out of place and time” in cities. Fine-Dare concentrates on two overlapping contexts for Indigenous vindication: the Yumbada of Cotocollao, an ancestral performance through which mountain and other spirits are called into the urban plaza; and Casa Kinde (Hummingbird House), a cultural organization that engages in workshops, filmmaking, photography, commerce, community education, and the formation of alliances with anthropologists, activists, filmmakers, engineers, and teachers.

Black and Brown Education in America: Integration in Schools, Neighborhoods, and Communities is a decade long ethnographic study of Maywood, Illinois, and the impact of its recent demographic shift from a historically Black middle-class suburb outside of Chicago with roots in the Black Panther Party to, now, a community with a growing Latinx population. It explores the intersection of race, culture, and language—and the ensuing Black-Brown identity politics—as well as the role of community organizations such as interracial faith-based churches and embattled school boards. Against a backdrop of racial tensions and heightened violence, the book also addresses transformative, liminal spaces where coalition building and collaboration bring the Black and Latinx communities together around common causes and unified goals.

Black and Brown Education in America: Integration in Schools, Neighborhoods, and Communities is a decade long ethnographic study of Maywood, Illinois, and the impact of its recent demographic shift from a historically Black middle-class suburb outside of Chicago with roots in the Black Panther Party to, now, a community with a growing Latinx population. It explores the intersection of race, culture, and language—and the ensuing Black-Brown identity politics—as well as the role of community organizations such as interracial faith-based churches and embattled school boards. Against a backdrop of racial tensions and heightened violence, the book also addresses transformative, liminal spaces where coalition building and collaboration bring the Black and Latinx communities together around common causes and unified goals.

The Everyday Life of Urban Inequality explores how steadily increasing inequality and the spectacular pace of urbanization frame daily life for city residents around the world. Ethnographic case studies from five continents highlight the impact of place, the tools of memory, and the power of collective action as communities interact with centralized processes of policy and capital. By focusing on situated experiences of displacement, belonging, and difference, the contributors to this collection illustrate the many ways urban inequalities take shape, combine, and are perpetuated.

In Belfast Imaginary: Art and Urban Reinvention, Katharine Keenan argues for the reimagining of place in Belfast, Northern Ireland in the context of Brexit. This deeply researched ethnography depicts the work of artists and policy makers as they imagine and perform a new urban identity for Belfast in the liminal time between the Good Friday Agreement and Brexit.

In Belfast Imaginary: Art and Urban Reinvention, Katharine Keenan argues for the reimagining of place in Belfast, Northern Ireland in the context of Brexit. This deeply researched ethnography depicts the work of artists and policy makers as they imagine and perform a new urban identity for Belfast in the liminal time between the Good Friday Agreement and Brexit.

In Metropolitan Intimacies: An Ethnography on the Poetics of Daily Life, Francisco Cruces examines intimacy and meaning-making in metropolitan residents’ daily lives. An ethnography based on rich micro-stories, Cruces situates life poetics amongst other metropolitan processes in three major cities—Madrid, Montevideo, and Mexico City—to reveal the complex meanings around modern urbanity.