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Globalized urban precarity in Berlin and Abidjan examines urban youth’s practices of making do in digital economies, to understand how precarious working conditions reverberate in the coming of age in contemporary cities. Through a comparative analysis of the perspectives of young men working as airtime sellers in Abidjan and food delivery riders in Berlin, the book provides innovative analytical lenses to understand urban inequalities against the backdrop of current digital urban developments. Essentially, this ethnography challenges the easy conflation of instability with insecurity, and overcomes the centrality of wage labour in research on urban livelihood, by looking at a broader set of economic practices and relational mechanisms. The analysis shows how accruing symbolic capital, a feel for the game in contexts of ambiguity, and access to care are fundamental for explaining the unequal distribution of risks for socio-material insecurities in unstable work settings.
Anthropology after Gluckman places the intimate circle around Max Gluckman, his Manchester School, in the vanguard of modern social anthropology. The book discloses the School’s intense, argument-rich collaborations, developing beyond an original focus in south and central Africa. Where outsiders have seen dominating leadership by Gluckman, a common stock of problems, and much about conflict, Richard Werbner highlights how insiders were drawn to explore many new frontiers in fieldwork and in-depth, reflexive ethnography, because they themselves, in class and gender, ethnicity and national origins, were remarkably inclusive. Characteristically different anthropologists, their careers met the challenges of being a public intellectual, an international celebrity, an institutional good citizen, a social and political activist, an advocate of legal justice. Their living legacies are shown, for the first time, through interlinked social biography and intellectual history to reach broadly across politics, law, ritual, semiotics, development studies, comparative urbanism, social network analysis and mathematical sociology. Innovation – in research methods and techniques, in documenting people’s changing praxis and social relations, in comparative analysis and a destabilizing strategy of re-analysis within ethnography – became the School’s hallmark. Much of this exploration confronted troubling times in Africa, colonial and postcolonial, which put the anthropologists and their anthropological knowledge at risk. The resurgence of debate about decolonization makes the accounts of fierce, End of Empire argument and recent postcolonial anthropology all the more topical. The lessons, even in activism, for social scientists, teachers as well as graduate and undergraduate students are compelling for our own troubled times.
urban rural divide remained acute. The average rate for the nineteen town districts, with populations over 10,000, was 59.8 per cent greater than that for the remainder of the country: 128.1 deaths per 1,000 births compared to 69.1 deaths. 72 Table 1.2 Comparative urban infant mortality in Dublin, Belfast, London and Glasgow (1912
housing, formal middle-class housing and state-subsidised housing for the urban poor. The project used diverse methods and activities in order to gather data. It has primarily adopted a mixed qualitative methods approach, underpinned by ideas of comparative urbanism on the one hand and a commitment to seeing the peripheries from the ‘everyday’ perspectives of those who live within them, on the other. The research activities encompassed solicited diaries, auto-photography and interviews with residents in case study sites, accompanied by surveys of a
–6 . Reardon , T. , Timmer , P. , and Berdegue , J. ( 2004 ). The rapid rise of supermarkets in developing countries: Induced organizational, institutional, and technological change in agrifood systems . Electronic Journal of Agricultural and Development Economics , 1 ( 2 ): 168–83 . Resnick , D. ( 2011 ). I n the shadow of the city: Africa’s urban poor in opposition strongholds . The Journal of Modern African Studies , 49 ( 1 ): 141–66 . Riley , L. , and Legwegoh A. ( 2014 ). Comparative urban food geographies in Blantyre and Gaborone . African
. Robinson , J. 2022 . Comparative urbanism: Tactics for global urban studies . London : Wiley . Roy , A. 2009 . The 21st century metropolis: New geographies of theory . Regional Studies
Balkans ( Oxford : Oxford University Press ). Tuvikene , T. ( 2016 ), Strategies for comparative urbanism: post-socialism as a de-territorialized concept . International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 40 : 132–146 . Vandertop , C. ( 2016 ), The colonies in concrete: Walter Benjamin, urban form and the dreamworlds of empire . Interventions
the 1920s and the 1950s.78 More recently, Selina Todd has demonstrated how the changing economic circumstances of young women in the inter-war years placed them at the forefront of many cultural changes, particularly in the 1930s, as radically changed employment patterns in retail and clerical work, the service sector and light manufacturing significantly influenced their behaviour and aspirations.79 David M. Pomfret’s work has also opened up a useful comparative urban-element dimension by contrasting age relations in Nottingham and Saint-Etienne, France between the