Fitting into Place? : Class and Gender Geographies and Temporalities

Fitting into Place adopts a multi-dimensional interdisciplinary approach to explore shifting geographies and temporalities that re-constitute ''city publics'' - and the place of the ''public sociologist''. Class, race and gender (dis)advantages are situated in relation to urban-rural contrasts, where ''future selves'' are reconfigured in and through ''local'' and ''global'' sites: people inhabit shifting times and places, from industrial landscapes of the ''past'', to a current present and (imagined) ''cosmopolitan'' ''regenerated'' future. The rhetorics and vocabularies of place, as affective and material, suggest a more complex ''fit'' than the language of masculine ''crisis'' for past-times, or ''feminised'' fit into new-futures, suggests. Across the generations, women''s labour is still effaced as maps of loyalty hold up families as reference points of belonging and ''fitting in''; such architecture of place complicates reified ''geographies of choice'' which centre a middle-class mobile subject. Based upon funded empirical research, this book will be of interest to sociologists and geographers.