Cities of Strangers

Cities of Strangers PDF Author: Miri Rubin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110848123X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
Explores how medieval towns and cities received newcomers, and the process by which these 'strangers' became 'neighbours' between 1000 and 1500.

Cities of Strangers

Cities of Strangers PDF Author: Miri Rubin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110848123X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
Explores how medieval towns and cities received newcomers, and the process by which these 'strangers' became 'neighbours' between 1000 and 1500.

City of Strangers

City of Strangers PDF Author: Andrew M. Gardner
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801462193
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
In City of Strangers, Andrew M. Gardner explores the everyday experiences of workers from India who have migrated to the Kingdom of Bahrain. Like all the petroleum-rich states of the Persian Gulf, Bahrain hosts an extraordinarily large population of transmigrant laborers. Guest workers, who make up nearly half of the country's population, have long labored under a sponsorship system, the kafala, that organizes the flow of migrants from South Asia to the Gulf states and contractually links each laborer to a specific citizen or institution. In order to remain in Bahrain, the worker is almost entirely dependent on his sponsor's goodwill. The nature of this relationship, Gardner contends, often leads to exploitation and sometimes violence. Through extensive observation and interviews Gardner focuses on three groups in Bahrain: the unskilled Indian laborers who make up the most substantial portion of the foreign workforce on the island; the country's entrepreneurial and professional Indian middle class; and Bahraini state and citizenry. He contends that the social segregation and structural violence produced by Bahrain's kafala system result from a strategic arrangement by which the state insulates citizens from the global and neoliberal flows that, paradoxically, are central to the nation's intended path to the future. City of Strangers contributes significantly to our understanding of politics and society among the states of the Arabian Peninsula and of the migrant labor phenomenon that is an increasingly important aspect of globalization.

Strangers in the City

Strangers in the City PDF Author: Li Zhang
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804779341
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
With rapid commercialization, a booming urban economy, and the relaxation of state migration policies, over 100 million peasants, known as China’s “floating population,” have streamed into large cities seeking employment and a better life. This massive flow of rural migrants directly challenges Chinese socialist modes of state control. This book traces the profound transformations of space, power relations, and social networks within a mobile population that has broken through the constraints of the government’s household registration system. The author explores this important social change through a detailed ethnographic account of the construction, destruction, and eventual reconstruction of the largest migrant community in Beijing. She focuses on the informal privatization of space and power in this community through analyzing the ways migrant leaders build their power base by controlling housing and market spaces and mobilizing social networks. The author argues that to gain a deeper understanding of recent Chinese social and political transformations, one must examine not only to what extent state power still dominates everyday social life, but also how the aims and methods of late socialist governance change under new social and economic conditions. In revealing the complexities and uncertainties of the shifting power and social relations in post-Mao China, this book challenges the common notion that sees recent changes as an inevitable move toward liberal capitalism and democracy.

A World of Strangers

A World of Strangers PDF Author: Lyn H. Lofland
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
In traditional human societies, the stranger was a threat, to be disarmed at once by an act of force or by a ritual of hospitality. Under no conditions could a stranger be ignored or taken for granted. Yet in all great cities today, human beings seem to live out their entire lives in a world of strangers. How did it become possible for millions of people to do this? How is city life possible? The unique value of A World of Strangers lies in Loflands expert use of rich historical and anthropological sources to answer these questions. She demonstrates that a potentially chaotic and meaningless world of strangers was transformed into a knowable and predictable world of strangers by the same mechanism humans always use to make their world livable: it was ordered. Lofland offers a brilliant analysis of the various devices used at different times in history to create social and psychological order in cities, concluding with an analysis of the contemporary city, in which the location of the encounter between strangers has come to replace personal appearance as a means of evaluating others. Lofland also describes how city people initially learn and then act upon the ordering principles dominant in their society. A World of Strangers is a wonderfully wise and readable account of how we have come to live as we do.

Migrants and Strangers in an African City

Migrants and Strangers in an African City PDF Author: Bruce Whitehouse
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253000750
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
In cities throughout Africa, local inhabitants live alongside large populations of "strangers." Bruce Whitehouse explores the condition of strangerhood for residents who have come from the West African Sahel to settle in Brazzaville, Congo. Whitehouse considers how these migrants live simultaneously inside and outside of Congolese society as merchants, as Muslims in a predominantly non-Muslim society, and as parents seeking to instill in their children the customs of their communities of origin. Migrants and Strangers in an African City challenges Pan-Africanist ideas of transnationalism and diaspora in today's globalized world.

Strangers at the Gates

Strangers at the Gates PDF Author: Roger Waldinger
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520230934
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
These essays look at U.S. immigration and the nexus between urban realities and immigrant destinies. They argue that immigration today is fundamentaly urban and that immigrants are flocking to places where low-skilled workers are in trouble.

Cities I've Never Lived In

Cities I've Never Lived In PDF Author: Sara Majka
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 1555979246
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
In subtle, sensuous prose, the stories in Sara Majka's debut collection explore distance in all its forms: the emotional spaces that open up between family members, friends, and lovers; the gaps that emerge between who we were and who we are; the gulf between our private and public selves. At the center of the collection is a series of stories narrated by a young American woman in the wake of a divorce; wry and shy but never less than open to the world, she recalls the places and people she has been close to, the dreams she has pursued and those she has left unfulfilled. Interspersed with these intimate first-person stories are stand-alone pieces where the tight focus on the narrator's life gives way to closely observed accounts of the lives of others. A book about belonging, and how much of yourself to give up in the pursuit of that, Cities I've Never Lived In offers stories that reveal, with great sadness and great humor, the ways we are most of all citizens of the places where we cannot be. Cities I've Never Lived In is the second book in Graywolf's collaboration with the literary magazine A Public Space.

The City of Strangers

The City of Strangers PDF Author: Michael Russell
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
ISBN: 0007460074
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 498

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Book Description
The SUNDAY TIMES top 20 bestseller! Shortlisted for the CWA Endeavour Historical Dagger Award New York, 1939: A city of hope. A city of opportunity. A city hiding dark secrets ...

City of Strangers

City of Strangers PDF Author: Louise Millar
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476760152
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
From the author of Accidents Happen, The Hidden Girl, and The Playdate—called “a supremely accomplished debut thriller by a writer to watch” (Booklist, starred review)—comes a new, heart-pounding novel about a journalist set on discovering the identity of a stranger who has turned her life upside down. When Grace and her childhood sweetheart Mac come home from their honeymoon in Thailand, they’re shocked to find a dead body beside their pile of unopened wedding presents. The police are unable to ID the man, so it is assumed that he was a burglar who died from natural causes. Little do they know that evidence for a rather different story is hidden right beneath their apartment… Three months later, Grace finds a card that, in place of well wishes, bears the message: “That man was Lucian Grabole.” A newspaper reporter fearing for her job, Grace lands on an idea that could answer some questions, and save her career as well. She’ll pitch a story to her boss called “Who was the man in my kitchen?” Soon Grace is trekking across Europe, talking to strangers and piecing together clues as she tries to unravel the mystery of who Lucian Grabole was, and why he met such a macabre end. Suddenly, with two more deaths linked to the case, it becomes clear that Grabole most certainly did not die a natural death. And the answer to the mystery of who the killer is, and why, lies back in Grace’s apartment...

New York City's Hart Island

New York City's Hart Island PDF Author: Michael T. Keene
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 1439668221
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
The story of the nation’s largest mass graveyard and the nearly one million people buried there—based on new documents and advances in DNA technology. Once a Civil War prison and training site and later a psychiatric hospital, among other incarnations, Hart Island, just off the coast of the Bronx in the Long Island Sound, eventually became the repository for New York City’s unclaimed dead. The island’s mass graves are a microcosm of New York history, from the 1822 burial crisis to casualties of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire and victims of multiple epidemics. Among the indigent and forgotten, important artists who died in poverty have also been discovered to be interred there, including Disney star Bobby Driscoll and playwright Leo Birinski. In this wide-ranging exploration touching on many aspects of the city’s past, Michael T. Keene reveals the history of New York’s potter’s field—and the stories of some of its lost souls. Includes photographs