This book delves into the multifaceted concept of solidarity, exploring its historical roots, contemporary manifestations, and future potential. It examines various forms of solidarity, from labor movements to community-based initiatives, highlighting their impact on social and political change. The authors analyze the challenges and opportunities associated with building and sustaining solidarity in diverse contexts, offering insights into its role in creating more just and equitable societies. The book also explores the evolving nature of solidarity in the face of globalization and technological advancements, providing a comprehensive overview of this crucial concept. It encourages readers to consider the transformative power of solidarity in addressing global challenges and building a more just world.
Solidarity Cities explores the often-overlooked role of cooperative networks in fostering social and economic justice. The book maps these networks across three American cities, highlighting their commitment to cooperation, democracy, and inclusion. It examines how these initiatives address basic needs like food security, housing, and fair credit, demonstrating their potential to create more equitable communities. The authors use mapping and spatial analysis to reveal the extensive reach of solidarity economies and their impact on combating gentrification and economic exclusion. The book ultimately argues for the importance of these initiatives as vital components of a more just and livable future.
In this episode, Maliha Safri, Marianna Pavlovskaya, Stephen Healy, and Craig Borowiak talk about their new co-authored book Solidarity Cities: Confronting Racial Capitalism, Mapping Transformation (University of Minnesota Press, 2024). This volume is part of the Diverse Economies and Livable Worlds series.
Solidarity economies, characterized by diverse practices of cooperation and mutual support, have long played pivotal but largely invisible roles in fostering shared survival and envisioning alternatives to racial capitalism globally and in the United States. This book maps the thriving existence of these cooperative networks in three differently sized American cities, highlighting their commitment to cooperation, democracy, and inclusion and demonstrating the desire—and the pressing need—to establish alternative foundations for social and economic justice.
Collectively authored by four social scientists, Solidarity Cities analyzes the deeply entrenched racial and economic divides from which cooperative networks emerge as they work to provide unmet basic needs, including food security, affordable housing, access to fair credit, and employment opportunities. Examining entities such as community gardens, credit unions, cooperatives, and other forms of economic solidarity, the authors highlight how relatively small yet vital interventions into public life can expand into broader movements that help bolster the overall well-being of their surrounding communities.
Bringing together insights from geography, political economy, and political science with mapping and spatial analysis methodologies, surveys, and in-depth interviews, Solidarity Cities illuminates the extensive footprints of solidarity economies and the roles they play in communities. The authors show how these initiatives act as bulwarks against gentrification, exploitation, and economic exclusion, helping readers see them as part of the past, present, and future of more livable and just cities. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.
This episode is hosted by Elena Sobrino. Elena is a lecturer in Anthropology at Tufts University. Her research explores volunteer work, union histories, and environmentalism in the Flint water crisis. She is currently writing about the politics of fatigue and crisis, and teaching classes on science and technology studies, ethnographies of crisis, and global racisms. You can read more about her work at elenasobrino.site.
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New Books in Sociology