Loisaida as Urban Laboratory is the first in-depth analysis of the network of Puerto Rican community activism in New York City’s Lower East Side from 1964 to 2001. Combining social history, cultural history, Latino studies, ethnic studies, studies of social movements, and urban studies, Timo Schrader uncovers the radical history of the Lower East Side. As little scholarship exists on the roles of institutions and groups in twentieth and twenty-first-century Puerto Rican community activism, Schrader enriches a growing discussion around alternative urbanisms. Loisaida was among a growing number of neighborhoods that pioneered a new form of urban living. The term Loisaida was coined, and then widely adopted, by the activist and poet Bittman “Bimbo” Rivas in an unpublished 1974 poem called “Loisaida” to refer to a part of the Lower East Side. Using this Spanglish version instead of other common labels honors the name that the residents chose themselves to counter real estate developers who called the area East Village or Alphabet City in an attempt to attract more artists and ultimately gentrify the neighborhood. Since the 1980s, urban planners and scholars have discussed strategies of urban development that revisit the pre–World War II idea of neighborhoods as community-driven and ecologically conscious entities. These “new urbanist” ideals are reflected in Schrader’s rich historical and ethnographic study of activism in Loisaida, telling a vivid story of the Puerto Rican community’s struggles for the right to stay and live with dignity in its home neighborhood.

Transecting Securityscapes is an innovative book on the everyday life of security, told via an examination of three sites: Cambodia, the Kurdistan region of Iraq, and Mozambique. The authors’ study of how security is enacted differently in these three sites, taking account of the rich layers of context and culture, enables comparative reflections on diversity and commonality in “securityscapes.” In Transecting Securityscapes, Till F. Paasche and James D. Sidaway put into practice a diverse and contextual approach to security that contrasts with the aerial, big-picture view taken by many geopolitics scholars. In applying this grounded approach, they develop a method of urban and territorial transects, combined with other methods and modes of encounter. The book draws on a broad range of traditions, but it speaks mostly to political geography, urban studies, and international relations research on geopolitics, stressing the need for ethnographic, embodied, affective, and place-based approaches to conflict. The result is a sustained theoretical critique of abstract research on geopolitical conflict and security—mainstream as well as academic—that pretends to be able to know and analyze conflict “from above.”

This book examines three consecutive famines in Cambodia during the 1970s, exploring both continuities and discontinuities of all three. Cambodia experienced these consecutive famines against the backdrop of four distinct governments: the Kingdom of Cambodia (1953-1970), the U.S.-supported Khmer Republic (1970-1975), the communist Democratic Kampuchea (1975-1979), and the Vietnamese-controlled People's Republic of Kampuchea (1979-1989). Famine in Cambodia documents how state-induced famine constituted a form of sovereign violence and operated against the backdrop of sweeping historical transformations of Cambodian society. It also highlights how state-induced famines should not be solely framed from the vantage point in which famine occurs but should also focus on the geopolitics of state-induced famines, as states other than Cambodia conditioned the famine in Cambodia. Drawing on an array of theorists, including Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Achille Mbembe, James A. Tyner provides a conceptual framework to bring together geopolitics, biopolitics, and necropolitics in an effort to expand our understanding of state-induced famines. Tyner argues that state-induced famine constitutes a form of sovereign violence-a form of power that both takes life and disallows life.

Abolishing Poverty argues for a project of relationality that refuses the whiteness of liberal poverty studies and instead centers critiques of the poverty relation and political futures disavowed under liberal governance. In disrupting poverty thinking, the author collective opens space for diverse frameworks for understanding impoverishment and articulating antiracist knowledges and political visions. The book explores new infrastructures of possibilities and political solidarities rooted in accountable relations to each other and from flights to the future that animate diverse communities. This book is boundary and genre crossing, with broad appeal to scholars of such disciplines as human geography, ethnic studies, decolonial theory, and feminist studies. As a volume, the work is unique in its primary field of human geography in the form of its making, its collective authorship, and its investigation of politics that abolish poverty thinking and engage in activism against the poverty relation produced through settler colonialism, heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalist exploitation.

With an ethnography of the largest contraband economy in the Americas running through Ciudad del Este, Paraguay, Outlaw Capital shows how transgressive economies and gray spaces are central to globalized capitalism. A key site on the China-Paraguay-Brazil trade route, Ciudad del Este moves billions of dollars' worth of consumer goods-everything from cell phones to whiskey-providing cheap transit to Asian manufacturers and invisible subsidies to Brazilian consumers. A vibrant popular economy of Paraguayan street vendors and Brazilian "ant contrabandistas" capture some of the city's profits, contesting the social distribution of wealth through an insurgent urban epistemology of use, need, and care. Yet despite the city's centrality, it is narrated as a backward, marginal, and lawless place. Outlaw Capital contests these sensationalist stories, showing how uneven development and the Paraguayan state made Ciudad de Este a gray space of profitable transgression. By studying the everyday illegalities of both elite traders and ordinary workers, Jennifer L. Tucker shows how racialized narratives of economic legitimacy across scales-not legal compliance-sort whose activities count as formal and legal and whose are targeted for reform or expulsion. Ultimately, reforms criminalized the popular economy while legalizing, protecting, and "whitening" elite illegalities.

Freedom Is a Place gives readers a snapshot of everyday life in the 1967 oPt (occupied Palestinian territories). A project of subaltern geopolitics, it helps both new and seasoned scholars of the region better understand occupation: its purpose, varied manifestations, and on-the-ground functions. This personal study brings to light how large-scale geopolitics play havoc with the lives of ordinary people and how people resist and endure. Using data collected over a decade of fieldwork, Ron J. Smith situates the everyday realities of the occupation within the larger project of Zionism. He explores the attempts to codify a temporary condition like occupation into permanency. Smith insists that occupation be understood as a changing process, not a singular event, and to explain its longevity, he argues that we must uncover the particular geographical and political dynamism at hand. Through careful use of interviews and participant observation, Smith reveals how the varied practices of occupation transform daily life into a prison. He also helps bring to light everyday narratives illustrating how people mobilize claims to freedom and sovereignty to maintain life under occupation. Freedom Is a Place uncovers how lessons from Israel's seventy-plus-years occupation are used by other states to oppress restive populations. At the same time, Smith identifies how these lessons also can be mobilized to create new spaces and strategies toward achieving liberation.

Non-Performing Loans, Non-Performing People tells the previously untold stories of those living with mortgage debt in times of precarity and explores how individualized indebtedness can unite resistance in the struggle toward housing justice. The book builds on several years of Melissa García-Lamarca’s engagement with activist research in Barcelona’s housing movement, in particular with its most prominent collective, the Platform for Mortgage-Affected People (PAH). What García-Lamarca learned from fellow activists and the movement in Barcelona pushed her to rethink how lived experiences of indebtedness connect to larger political- economic processes related to housing and debt. The book is also inspired by feminist scholars who integrate the lens of everyday life into explorations of contemporary political economy and by anthropologists who connect macroprocesses to lived experience. Distinctive in how it integrates a racialized, gendered, and decolonial perspective, García-Lamarca’s research of mortgaged lives in precarious times explores two principal phenomena: first, how financial speculation is experienced in the day-to-day and differentially embedded in the dynamics of (urban) capital accumulation, and second, how collective action can unleash the liberating possibility of indebtedness.