In this noon hour presentation Miraftab will share with us aspects of her most recent book titled Global Heartland: Displaced Labor, Transnational Lives, and Local Placemaking (Indiana University Press, 2016). Global Heartland is the account of diverse, dispossessed, and displaced people from Mexico, Togo and Detroit brought together for work at a meatpacking factory in Illinois. It examines how displaced workers are produced for world labor markets; how workers’ transnational lives and “outsourced social reproduction” subsidize their wages to maintain them in those jobs; and how diverse displaced Africans, African-Americans, and Latinos renegotiate their relations with each other and with whites through processes of in-placement and placemaking.
Flyer