Precarious Modernities : Assembling State, Space and Society on the Urban Margins in Morocco"Using rich ethnographic detail, Precarious Modernities offers an immersive account of the multiple scales and entangled actors involved in the objectification and instrumentalization of Casablanca's margins as part of ongoing and contingent processes of 'modernization'. Through a focus on the everyday lives and spatial materialities of Hay Mohammadi's inhabitants, and their interaction with heritage activists, international development agendas, and technocratic planning regimes, the book documents how the depoliticization of the urban margins aids the consolidation of deeply unequal social, spatial, and economic orders. The result is a unique account of the political continuities, security logics, economic ideologies and competing forces that shape the possibilities open to precarious communities in a storied and sprawling metropolis. As marginalized inhabitants develop pragmatic ways of appropriating or resisting powerful statist and developmentalist agendas, unanticipated and novel forms of political engagement emerge, signaling the revival and reconfiguration of notions of class through creative and alternative spatial practices and their attendant vocabularies"
Related Guides
Boston's Annexed Towns and Some Neighborhood Resources (BPL)Boston is known as a city of neighborhoods. Some were formerly cities and towns on their own, and were later annexed to Boston. This guide exists to gather together resources to help in the study of the former towns that make up Boston. Material on the neighborhoods as they exist today is also presented.
Ethnographic Video Online, Vol. I-II: Foundational Films contains classic and contemporary ethnographies, documentaries and shorts from every continent, providing teachers visual support to introduce and contextualize hundreds of cultural groups and practices around the world.
Films in the Boston University Libraries catalog are licensed to Boston University for educational and research use only, for BU students, faculty, and staff.
Featured Resources on COVID-19 in Urban Settings
Quarantine Urban Ecologies (Society for Cultural Anthropology)As of April 2020, billions of people around the world are living under differing degrees of physical confinement due to the Covid-19 pandemic, reshaping the ways in which we represent, affect, and sense urban space. Covid-19 has altered the mobilities and ordinary affects of human and nonhuman animal life in unprecedented ways.