Kian Goh, "Form and Flow: The Spatial Politics of Urban Resilience and Climate Justice" (MIT Press, 2021)

02/17/22 • 34 min

Cities around the world are formulating plans to respond to climate change and adapt to its impact. Often, marginalized urban residents resist these plans, offering “counterplans” to protest unjust and exclusionary actions. In Form and Flow: The Spatial Politics of Urban Resilience and Climate Justice (MIT Press, 2021), Kian Goh examines climate change response strategies in three cities—New York, Jakarta, and Rotterdam—and the mobilization of community groups to fight the perceived injustices and oversights of these plans. Looking through the lenses of urban design and socioecological spatial politics, Goh reveals how contested visions of the future city are produced and gain power.

Goh describes, on the one hand, a growing global network of urban environmental planning organizations intertwined with capitalist urban development, and, on the other, social movements that themselves often harness the power of networks. She explores such initiatives as Rebuild By Design in New York, the Giant Sea Wall plan in Jakarta, and Rotterdam Climate Proof, and discovers competing narratives, including community resiliency in Brooklyn and grassroots activism in the informal “kampungs” of Jakarta. Drawing on participatory fieldwork and her own background in architecture and urban design, Goh offers both theoretical explanations and practical planning and design strategies. She reframes the critical concerns of urban climate change responses, presenting a sociospatial typology of urban adaptation and considering the notion of a “just” resilience. Finally, she proposes a theoretical framework for designing equitable and just urban climate futures.

Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Assistant Professor at Alfred State College and has served as the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture.

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Kate Henley Averett, "The Homeschool Choice: Parents and the Privatization of Education" (NYU Press, 2021)

Homeschooling has skyrocketed in popularity in the United States: in 2019, a record-breaking 2.5 million children were being homeschooled, within an increasingly diverse subset of American families.

In The Homeschool Choice: Parents and the Privatization of Education (NYU Press, 2021), sociologist Kate Henley Averett examines the reasons why parents homeschool and how homeschooling, as a growing practice, has changed the roles that families, schools, and the state play in children’s lives.

Drawing on in-depth interviews, surveys and close ethnographic observation of homeschooling conferences, Averett paints a rich picture of parental decision-making in a period dominated by a neoliberal discourse of school ‘choice’.

This book is essential reading not only for those interested in homeschooling, but for anyone concerned about the current state and the future of public education.

Kate Henley Averett is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, and an affiliate of the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, at the University at Albany, SUNY.

-- Dr Alice Garner, educator and historian, Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne, Australia.

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Michelle Christine Smith, "Utopian Genderscapes: Rhetorics of Women's Work in the Early Industrial Age" (Southern Illinois UP, 2021)

Utopian Genderscapes: Rhetorics of Women's Work in the Early Industrial Age (Southern Illinois UP, 2021) focuses on three prominent yet understudied intentional communities—Brook Farm, Harmony Society, and the Oneida Community—who in response to industrialization experimented with radical social reform in the antebellum United States. Foremost among the avenues of reform was the place and substance of women’s work. Author Michelle C. Smith seeks in the communities’ rhetorics of teleology, choice, and exceptionalism the lived consequences of the communities' lofty goals for women members.

This feminist history captures the utopian reconfiguration of women’s bodies, spaces, objects, and discourses and delivers a needed intervention into how rhetorical gendering interacts with other race and class identities. The attention to each community’s material practices reveals a gendered ecology, which in many ways squared unevenly with utopian claims. Nevertheless, this volume argues that this utopian moment inaugurated many of the norms and practices of labor that continue to structure women’s lives and opportunities today: the rise of the factory, the shift of labor from home spaces to workplaces, the invention of housework, the role of birth control and childcare, the question of wages, and the feminization of particular kinds of labor.

An impressive and diverse array of archival and material research grounds each chapter’s examination of women’s professional, domestic, or reproductive labor in a particular community. Fleeting though they may seem, the practices and lives of those intentional women, Smith argues, pattern contemporary divisions of work along the vibrant and contentious lines of gender, race, and class and stage the continued search for what is possible.

Jeannette Cockroft is an associate professor of history and political science at Schreiner University.

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