Citizenship is frequently invoked both as an instrument and goal of immigrant integration. Yet, in migration contexts, citizenship also marks a distinction between members and outsiders based on their different relations to particular states. A migration perspective highlights the boundaries of citizenship and political control over entry and exit as well as the fact that foreign residents rema…
Migrant protest has proliferated worldwide in the last two decades, explicitly posing questions of identity, rights, and equality in a globalized world. Nonetheless, such mobilizations are considered anomalies in social movement studies, and political sociology more broadly, due to 'weak interests' and a particularly disadvantageous position of 'outsiders' to claim rights connected to citizensh…
Gentrification is reshaping cities worldwide, resulting in seductive spaces and exclusive communities that aspire to innovation, creativity, sustainability, and technological sophistication. Gentrification is also contributing to growing social-spatial division and urban inequality and precarity. In a time of escalating housing crisis, unaffordable cities, and racial tension, scholars speak of …
How do new media affect the question of social memory? Social memory is usually described as enacted through ritual, language, art, architecture, and institutions ? phenomena whose persistence over time and capacity for a shared storage of the past was set in contrast to fleeting individual memory. But the question of how social memory should be understood in an age of digital computing, instan…
In 1989 news broadcasts all over the world were dominated for weeks by images of East Germans crossing the Berlin Wall to West Germany. But what did the East Germans expect to find when they excitedly broke through the Wall? And what did they actually find when they made it over to the other side? This study draws on fifteen months of research into both the lives of East Germans before the fall…
Never before in history was the interaction between people and their natural environment as complex and problematic as it is today. A proliferation of scientific research has yielded valuable insights into various aspects of this interaction from the angle of many disciplines - the natural sciences, the social sciences, archaeology and history, ecological studies. The diversity of approaches ha…
Hindu devotional traditions have long been recognized for their sacred geographies as well as the sensuous aspects of their devotees’ experiences. Largely overlooked, however, are the subtle links between these religious expressions. Based on intensive fieldwork conducted among worshippers in Bengal’s Navadvip Mayapur sacred complex, this book discusses the diverse and contrasting ways in w…
To say that technology is male comes as no surprise, but the claim that its history is a short one strikes a new note. Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women, and Modern Machines in America, 1870-1945 maps the historical process through which men laid claims to technology as their exclusive terrain. It also explores how women contested this ascendancy of the male discourse and engineered alter…
The complexion of labour migration in the European Union (EU) has altered in recent years. Not only has there been a shift in the length of time labour migrants spend abroad, but the nature, scale and direction of the migration flows have also changed dramatically. The enlargements of the EU in 2004 and 2007 were influential in this respect. A growing economy and large wage gaps encouraged a la…
Since the rise of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, the traditional Islamic schools known as the madrasa have frequently been portrayed as hotbeds of terrorism. For much longer, the madrasa has been considered by some as a backward and petrified impediment to social progress. However, for an important segment of the poor Muslim populations of Asia, madrasas constitute the only accessible form of educat…