France Winddance Twine - Geographies of Privilege

What role does space play in the control and distribution of resources such as housing, education, leisure, sex, and safety? Geographies of Privilege presents case studies from around the globe that provide analyses of power as it operates within local, national, and global networks. How are social inequalities (racial, sexual, economic, occupational) experienced, reproduced and challenged in local, global and transnational spaces?

Twine and Gardener have given us an interdisciplinary collection that provides empirically grounded case studies that reveal the ways that a nuanced analysis of space (domestic, institutional, transnational) is crucial in analyses of intersecting social inequalities. The contributors to this volume analyze how power is transferred and transformed into economic, social, symbolic, and cultural capital.

The volume's contributors take the reader to compelling global and local sites including brothels, blues clubs, dance clubs, elite schools, detention centers, advocacy organizations, and public sidewalks in Scotland, Italy, Spain, United Arab Emirates, Mozambique, South Africa, the United States, and the European Union. Geographies of Privilege is the perfect teaching tool for courses on social inequality in Geography, Sociology, Anthropology, American Studies, European Studies, and Global Studies.

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 inter national 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.

This compilation of inter-disciplinary, trans-national research reveals the fundamental connections between space and privilege through richly contextualized ethnographic and qualitative data. Examining diverse institutional settings, from neighborhoods to civil rights organizations to schools, Geographies of Privilege elucidates how the social reproduction of privilege occurs in geographies of land, identity and the body. A must read for all who study privilege and inequality!

Wendy Leo Moore, Sociology, Texas A&M University

Geographies of Privilege is an innovative treatment of how privilege gets reproduced through space and how space shapes privilege. The essays are must-read material for those interested in inequality, power and privilege.

Joyce M. Bell, Sociology, University of Pittsburgh