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Through an ethnographic exploration of everyday life infused with Marxist urbanism and critical theory, this work charts out the changes taking place in Muslim neighbourhoods in Delhi in the backdrop of rapid urbanization and capitalist globalization. It argues that there is an implicit materialist logic in prejudice and segregation experienced by Muslims. Further, it finds that different classes within Muslims are treated differentially in the discriminatory process. The resultant spatial ‘diversity’ and differentiation this gives rise to among the Muslim neighbourhoods creates an illusion of ‘choice’ but in reality, the flexibility of the confining boundaries only serve to make these stronger and shatterproof. It is asserted that while there is no attempt at integration of Muslims socially and spatially, from within the structures of urban governance, it would be a fallacy to say that the state is absent from within these segregated enclaves. The disciplinary state, neo-liberal processes of globalization, and the discursive practices such as news media, cinema, social science research, combine together to produce a hegemonic effect in which stereotyped representations are continually employed uncritically and erroneously to prevent genuine attempts at developing specific and nuanced understanding of the situation of urban Muslims in India. The book finds that the exclusion of Muslims spatially and socially is a complex process containing contradictory elements that have reduced Indian Muslims to being ‘normative’ non-citizens and homo sacer whose legal status is not an equal claim to citizenship. The book also includes an account of the way in which residents of these segregated Muslim enclaves are finding ways to build hope in their lives.

At a time when lower-income Americans face a desperate struggle to find affordable rental housing in many cities, After the Projects investigates the contested spatial politics of public housing development and redevelopment. Public housing practices differ markedly from city to city and, collectively, reveal deeply held American attitudes about poverty and how the poorest should be governed. The book exposes the range of outcomes from the US federal government’s HOPE VI program for public housing transformation, focused on nuanced accounts of four very different ways of implementing this same national initiative—in Boston, New Orleans, Tucson, and San Francisco. It draws upon more than two hundred interviews, analysis of internal documents about each project, and nearly fifteen years of visits to these neighborhoods. The central aim is to understand how and why some cities, when redeveloping public housing, have attempted to minimize the presence of the poorest residents in their new mixed-income communities, while other cities have instead tried to serve the maximum number of extremely low-income households. The book shows that these socially and politically revealing decisions are rooted in distinctly different kinds of governance constellations—each yielding quite different sorts of community pressures. These have been forged over many decades in response to each city’s own struggle with previous efforts at urban renewal. In contrast to other books that have focused on housing in a single city, this volume offers comparative analysis and a national picture, while also discussing four emblematic communities with an unprecedented level of detail.

This book is about how Donald Trump, who had no prior public service, became president of the United States. It argues that Trump capitalized on a wave of increasing public discontent that stemmed from the demise of the country’s Golden Age of prosperity. This involved decades-long trends in the American economy, race relations, ideology, and political polarization, all of which fueled rising discontent across America. It reached a tipping point by the time Barack Obama was elected president. When the 2008 financial crisis hit and Obama was elected the first African American president, he tried to resolve the crisis and fix the nation’s ailing health care system. But in doing so he pushed rising discontent over the edge. Political gridlock in Washington resulted. Discontent skyrocketed. Americans were fed up and looked for a savior. Trump was lucky to be in the right place at the right time and rode that wave of discontent all the way to the White House.

This book revisits the Black Seventh Ward neighborhood and residents of W. E. B. DuBois’s The Philadelphia Negro over the course of the twentieth century. Through the dual lens of political agency and critical historical events, this book follows the transformation of the neighborhood from being predominantly black at the beginning of the twentieth century into a largely white upper-middle-class and commercial neighborhood by the century’s conclusion. Employing the insights of an array of scholars such as Robin D. G. Kelley, James Scott, Cathy Cohen, William Julius Wilson, and Mary Pattillo, the book argues that black Philadelphians were by no means mere victims of large-scale socioeconomic, structural, and political changes such as deindustrialization of the local and national economy, urban renewal, and the growing federal intervention into urban America following World War II. As the book shows, black Americans framed their own understandings of urban social change, forging dynamic inter- and intraracial alliances that allowed them to shape their own migration from the old Black Seventh Ward to emergent black urban enclaves throughout Philadelphia. Whereas most urban studies analyze multiple facets of black life over the span of a few decades, the book extends the chronology to nearly a century, capturing events such as banking and tenement collapses, housing activism, black-led antiurban renewal mobilization, and the changing politics emergent in post–civil rights Philadelphia.

André Béteille’s Caste, Class and Power has grown out of his fieldwork in Sripuram in Thanjavur District, Tamil Nadu. The book’s main strengths are the clarity of its descriptive analysis of the three caste groups and agrarian classes, as well as the interactions between them; and the force of its theoretical argument about the relationship between the caste structure, the class system and the distribution of political power. Its thesis about correspondence among the caste, class and political systems is considerably less convincing for the middling majority than for either the Brahmins or Adi-Dravidas. It is also an important historical source about the social structure of Indian villages in the early decades following Independence. Additionally, it is a model of ethnographic and theoretical analysis.

An unrelenting prison boom, marked by large racial disparities in the risk of incarceration, characterized the latter third of the 20th century. Drawing on broadly representative survey data and qualitative interviews, Children of the Prison Boom describes the devastating effects of America’s experiment in mass incarceration for a generation of vulnerable children. Parental imprisonment has been transformed from an event affecting only the unluckiest of children—children of parents whose involvement in crime would have been quite serious—to one that is remarkably common, especially for black children. Even for children at high risk of problems, Children of the Prison Boom shows that paternal incarceration makes a bad situation worse and substantially increases family instability and racial inequality in child well-being.

Data-driven criminal justice operations creates millions of criminal records each year in the United States. Documenting everything from a police stop to a prison sentence, these records take on a digital life of their own as they are collected and posted by police, courts, and prisons; reposted on social media, online news, and mugshot galleries; and bought and sold by data brokers as an increasingly valuable data commodity. The result is “digital punishment,” where mere suspicion or a brush with the law can have lasting consequences. This analysis describes the transformation of criminal records into millions of data points; the commodification of these data into a valuable digital resource; and the impact of this shift on people, society, and public policy. The consequences of digital punishment, as described in hundreds of interviews detailed in this book, lead people to purposefully opt out of society as they cope with privacy and due process violations.

‘Maids’ have become an inseparable part of the daily lives of ‘middle-class’ urban households in India. Despite the fact that increasing numbers of poor women are joining this profession, very little has been written about them, especially the part-time domestic workers, each of whom services a number of households at a time. They are not accorded their rightful status as workers either by the employers, their own families, the government or the traditional trade unions. Isolated in the privacy of employers’ homes, the problem of recognizing their work or organizing them is the same one as for women isolated in their own homes. Another important reason is that most such women are rendered voiceless by their social location: unlettered; staying in ‘illegal’ settlements; migrants; working to survive; performing ‘feminine’ work, both paid and unpaid, and both devalued. This book is, therefore, about making the unheard heard. It draws from personal narratives of part-time women domestic workers residing in two slum settlements of Kolkata, who speak about their work, lives, dreams, and despairs. By moving between the workplace and the homes of the workers, this book makes a departure from general accounts of labour and instead talks about labouring lives. The book also discusses public policy and politics which have historically neglected this section of workers as well as the recent efforts to give them visibility and voice.

Equity and Access attempts to unravel the complex narrative of why inequities in the health sector are growing and access to basic health care is worsening, and the underlying forces that contribute to this situation. It draws attention to the way globalization has influenced India’s development trajectory as health care issues have assumed significant socio-economic and political significance in contemporary India. The volume explains how state and market forces have progressively heightened the iniquitous health care system and the process through which substantial burden of meeting health care needs has fallen on the individual households. Twenty-eight scholars comprising social scientists, medical experts, public health experts, policy makers, health activists, legal experts, and gender specialists have delved into the politics of access for different classes, castes, gender, and other categories to contribute to a new field of ‘health care studies’ in this volume. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach within a broader political-economy framework, the volume is useful for understanding power relations within social groups and complex organizational systems.

When cash-strapped local governments don’t provide adequate services, and planning policies prioritize economic development over community needs, what is a concerned citizen to do? In the help-yourself city, you do it yourself. The Help-Yourself City presents the results of nearly five years of in-depth research on people who take urban planning into their own hands with unauthorized yet functional and civic-minded “do-it-yourself urban design” projects. Examples include homemade traffic signs and public benches, guerrilla gardens and bike lanes, even citizen development “proposals,” all created in public space without permission but in forms analogous to official streetscape design elements. With research across 17 cities and more than 100 interviews with do-it-yourselfers, professional planners, and community members, the book explores who is creating these unauthorized improvements, where, and why. In doing so, it demonstrates the way uneven development processes are experienced and responded to in everyday life. Yet the democratic potential of this increasingly celebrated trend is brought into question by the privileged characteristics of typical do-it-yourself urban designers, the aesthetics and cultural values of the projects they create, and the relationship between DIY efforts and mainstream planning and economic development. Despite its many positive impacts, DIY urban design is a worryingly undemocratic practice, revealing the stubborn persistence of inequality in participatory citizenship and the design of public space. The book thus presents a needed critical analysis of an important trend, connecting it to research on informality, legitimacy, privilege, and urban political economy.

In a conversation about youth agency, the most common discourses that come up are of acts of liberation, resistance, and deviance. However, this perspective is fairly narrow and runs the risk of reinforcing pervasive and often polarizing depictions of youth. In order to broaden the understanding of young people’s collective actions and their potential social implications, it is necessary to ask: What types of agency do young people demonstrate? This book aims to scrutinize some of the conceptual ideas that underlie prevalent visions of youth as agents of social change and as a source of hope for a better future. As a part of the Education and Society in South Asia series, it provides insightful accounts of students’ daily routines on and around a public university campus in Kathmandu, Nepal, and calls attention to a group of non-elite university students who have remained less visible in scholarly and public debates about student activism, youth unemployment, and international migration. By placing different strands of literature on youth, aspiration, and mobility into conversation, In Search of a Future unveils new and important perspectives on how young people navigate competing social expectations, educational inequalities, and limited job prospects.

This book takes a comprehensive look at the Kamar tribe, an aboriginal tribe located within the Central Province (present day Chhattisgarh) of India. It presents an anthropological monograph on the tribe, starting with a basic description of its location, population, and organization. The rest of the book is devoted to several aspects of the Kamar culture, including tribal law, its myths and rituals, attitudes towards marriage and sex, and religious ceremonies and rituals. The final part of the book focuses on the various changes that have occurred within the Kamar tribe due to the influences of other castes, tribes, and cultures. In order to clearly demonstrate the tribal organization, physical appearance, and sources of livelihood of the Kamars, several photographs and illustrations have been provided throughout the book.

India is being widely seen as an emerging economic and political power on the global scene. Despite having the largest population of chronically poor in the world today, it is home to a sizeable number of thriving rich and flourishing middle classes. They are reshaping the country’s popular image and its self-imagination. Equally important are its political dynamics. With increasing participation of erstwhile-marginalized sections in the electoral process, the social profile of India’s political elite has been changing, making way for those coming from the middle and lower strata of the traditional social order, thus broadening the social base of political power. Mapping the Elite seeks to expand the understanding of processes of formations and transformations of the Indian elite. The contributors explore the emergent elite spaces, the new idioms of power and inequality, the diverse strategies in which symbolic boundaries of privilege are traced in everyday lives, as well as the class mobilities in an age of proclaimed meritocracy. They do so by using the sociological frames of caste, class, gender, community, and their intersections. Exploring India’s Elite: This series provides a platform to scholars working on elite dynamics in India. It seeks to enable an understanding of the nuances of inequality, power, and other emerging social structures.

Despite India’s three decades of economic liberalization, access to quality education, well-paying jobs, and high standards of living align with prior class and caste advantages, leaving many poor and working-class people stuck in place and obligated to seek handouts from the rich. The study draws on ten years of ethnographic fieldwork at three private golf clubs in Bangalore, India’s Silicon Valley, to explore the ties of dependence wealthy club members generate with the poor lower-caste golf caddies who carry their bags, and in a manner that reproduces their positions of privilege and authority. The caddies are not employees, and yet neither do they have complete control over their rates and schedules. Making $3–5 for a five- or six-hour round, caddies deploy acts servility and deference to yield additional money for healthcare, children’s school fees, and other household expenses. While a rare few caddies win sufficient support to put them and their families on a path of social mobility, most struggle to make ends meet, living in less-than-secure housing, going without food in some cases, and sending their children to low-quality schools that all but guarantee they will take up similar work as their fathers. The necessity but ultimate limitation of such relationships between the rich and poor underscores the failure of India’s development strategy, which favors private over public interests, and has yet to establish well-funded healthcare, education, and basic social services that would improve chances of social mobility and independence among the poor.

Negotiating Opportunities reveals that the middle-class advantage in school is, at least in part, a negotiated advantage. Essentially, this means that middle-class students secure advantages not only by complying with teachers’ expectations but also by requesting (and successfully securing) support in excess of what is fair or required. This book traces that negotiated advantage from its origins at home to its consequences at school. It follows a group of middle-class and working-class students from third to seventh grade and draws on observations and interviews with children, parents, and teachers. The middle-class students learned to negotiate advantages from their parents’ coaching at home. Teachers tended to grant those requests, even when they wanted to say “no.” As a result, middle-class students received the bulk of teachers’ assistance, accommodations, and positive attention. That extra support gave middle-class students advantages over their working-class peers, including more correct answers on tests, more time to complete assignments, more opportunities for creativity, and more recognition for their ideas. The book concludes with a discussion of these findings and their implications for scholars, educators, parents, and policymakers. It argues that teaching working-class students to act like their middle-class peers will not be enough to alleviate inequalities because middle-class families will find new ways to negotiate advantages that keep them one step ahead.

Does the burgeoning Indian Information Technology (IT) sector represent a deviation from the historical arc of caste inequality or has it become yet another site of discrimination? Those who claim that the sector is caste-free believe that IT is an equal opportunity employer, and that the small Dalit footprint is due to the want of merit. But they fail to consider how caste inequality sneaks in by being layered on socially constructed ‘pure merit’, which favours upper castes and other privileged segments, but handicaps Dalits and other disadvantaged groups. In this book, Fernandez describes how the practice of pure and holistic merit are deeply embedded in the social, cultural, and economic privileges of the dominant castes and classes, and how caste filtering has led to the reproduction of caste hierarchies and consequently the small Dalit footprint in Indian IT.

This book presents an examination of a scenario that appears likely to be played out again and again as federal budget policies result in reduced services for urban areas across the United States. Based on a three-year study conducted in Brooklyn's Greenpoint/Williamsburg section, the book is a detailed description of life in a multi-ethnic working class neighborhood during New York City's fiscal crisis of 1975–78. Updated with a new introduction to address the changes and events of the thirty years since the book's original publication, its lessons continue to demonstrate the impact of political and economic changes on everyday lives. Relating local events to national policy, this book deals directly with issues and problems that face industrial cities nationwide: ethnic and race relations are analyzed within the context of community organization and local politics; the impact of landlord/tenant relations, housing discrimination, and red-lining are examined; and the effects on the urban poor of gentrification are documented. Since neighborhood issues are often of primary concern to women, much of the book concerns the role of women as community organizers and their integration of this role with domestic responsibilities.

This book advances the notion that intimate life—marriage and ideas of how to best live—is closely linked to the class in which individuals were raised. Arguing against the notion that class is a meaningless category or that college degrees erase childhood inequalities, this book describes the ways that the class of individuals’ past influences their identities and marriages. Drawing on interview data, the book reveals that not only are adults’ class origins linked to their ideas of who is a desirable spouse, but class origin is also tied to ideas of how to use money, attend to work, engage in leisure, organize time, divide household duties, raise children, and express emotions. Couples in which each partner was raised in a different class must then contend with their different ideas of how to live—ideas that they rarely realize are related to the class of their past.

Privilege at Play is a book about inequalities, social hierarchies, and privilege in contemporary Mexico. Based on ethnographic research conducted in exclusive golf clubs and in-depth interviews with upper-middle-class and upper-class golfers, as well as working-class employees, the book focuses on the class, racial, and gender dynamics that underpin privilege. This study makes use of rich qualitative data to demonstrate how social hierarchies are relations reproduced through a multitude of everyday practices. The vast disparities between club members and workers, for example, are built on traditional class indicators, such as wealth, and on more subtle expressions of class, such as notions of fashion, sense of humor, perceptions about competition, and everyday oral interactions. The book incorporates race and gender perspectives into the study of inequalities, illustrating the multilayer condition of privilege. Although Mexicans commonly attributed racial relations a marginal role in the continuation of inequities, the book explains how affluent individuals frequently express racialized ideas to describe and justify the impoverished condition of workers. In doing so, Privilege at Play demonstrates the necessity of considering the role of racialized dynamics when studying social inequalities in Mexico. An analysis of gender relations shows how men maintain a dominant position over their fellow female golfers despite the similar upper-class origins of both male and female golf club members. This book pays particular attention to the spatial dynamics that reinforce social inequalities, arguing that the apparent triviality of space makes it a highly effective way to mark social inequalities and, hence, emphasize privilege.

One in two white youth born into the upper-middle class will fall from it. Drawing upon 10 years of longitudinal interviews with over 100 American youth, this book shows which upper-middle-class youth are most likely to fall, how they fall, and why they do not see it coming. The book shows that upper-middle-class youth inherit different amounts of academic knowledge, institutional insights, and money from their parents. Those raised with more of these resources enter class reproduction pathways, while those raised with fewer of these resources enter downwardly mobile paths. Of course, upper-middle-class youth whose families give them few resources could switch courses by acquiring these resources from their community. They rarely do. Instead, they internalize identities that reflect their resource weaknesses and encourage them to maintain them. Those who fall are then youth raised with resource weaknesses, and they fall by internalizing identities that discourage them from gaining more resources. They are often surprised by their downward mobility as they observed other time periods in which their resources and identities kept them or their parents in their social class.