Geographies of Privilege

How are social inequalities experienced, reproduced and challenged in local, global and transnational spaces? What role does the control of space play in distribution of crucial resources and forms of capital (housing, education, pleasure, leisure, social relationships)?

The case studies in Geographies of Privilege demonstrate how power operates and is activated within local, national, and global networks. Twine and Gardener have put together a collection that analyzes how the centrality of spaces (domestic, institutional, leisure, educational) are central to the production, maintenance and transformation of inequalities. The collected readings show how power--in the form of economic, social, symbolic, and cultural capital--is employed and experienced.

The volume’s contributors take the reader to diverse sites, including brothels, blues clubs, dance clubs, elite schools, detention centers, advocacy organizations, and public sidewalks in Canada, Italy, Spain, United Arab Emirates, Mozambique, South Africa, and the United States. Geographies of Privilege is the perfect teaching tool for courses on social problems, race, class and gender in Geography, Sociology and Anthropology.

France Winddance Twine is Professor of Sociology at the University of California Santa Barbara. She is an ethnographer, a critical race theorist and a documentary filmmaker who earned her degree at the University of California- Berkeley. She has published more than 60 books, journal articles, book reviews and essays. She is the author and an editor of 8 books including Geographies of Privilege (forthcoming, 2013) A White Side of Black Britain: interracial intimacy and racial literary (2010), Outsourcing the Womb: race, class and gestational surrogacy in a global market (Routledge, 2011a), Retheorizing Race and Whiteness in the 21st Century (with Charles Gallagher, 2011b) and Feminism and Antiracism: international struggles for justice (New York University Press, 2000). She has served as Deputy Editor of American Sociological Review: the official journal of the American Sociological Association. Twine currently serves on the international editorial boards of the journals Ethnic and Racial Studies, Sociology: the official journal of the British Sociological Association and Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power.

Bradley Gardener earned his Ph.D. in the Earth and Environmental Sciences Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. He has taught at several CUNY schools and has been employed as writing fellow at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, New York. His research focuses on the intersections between race, migration, place, and identity.