ethnographic study in the US Midwest, Togo, and Mexico. It focuses on the local-global connections of the immigrant labor force at a meat-processing plant in Beardstown, Illinois —a former sundown town and KKK hub. The book shows how the transnational lives of immigrants revitalize the US rustbelt and in the process create new intercultural and interracial dynamics. Global Heartland corrects misconceptions in the urban scholarship of globalization and contributes to immigration and feminist urban scholarship in three interconnected areas. 

First, it challenges the metro-centrism of globalization literature theorizing based on social and spatial dynamics of metropolitan areas (i.e., global cities). The book theorizes small-town urbanism in its own right and pays careful attention to those dynamics, bringing to light the political and scholarly gaps in our understanding of small-town America, as further evidenced by the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. 

Second, it challenges formal notions of citizenship and examines the complexity of race and integration by showing the importance of place in how diverse communities (re)negotiate their inter-racial and intercultural relations. 

Third, it exposes the transnational practices of care that I theorize as the “global restructuring of social reproduction.” The invisible care work of families and public institutions in displaced workers’ communities of origin allows them to take low-wage, high-risk jobs. This outsourcing and restructuring of care work during “unproductive” stages of the life cycle (childhood and old age) subsidizes the immigrants’ US-based employers while at the same time revitalizes their communities of destination.

Global Heartland is widely read and taught in anthropology, geography, planning, and sociology as well as global studies, feminist studies, and migration studies. It received the Davidoff Book Award, from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP); the Global & Transnational Sociology Book Award, from the American Sociological Association (ASA); and was a finalist for the C. Wright Mills Book Award, from Society for Study of Social Problems (SSSP).

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For reviews of Global Heartland see:

Good Reads;

IJURR (PDF); 

Antipode (PDF); 

Urban Studies (PDF); 

AAG Annals (PDF); 

Contemporary Sociology (PDF) and 

Social Forces (PDF).