In recent decades, women living in border cities have taken on new roles and have become one of the most vulnerable population groups; experiencing the effects of the economic crisis of the early 21st century and the consequent increase in social inequality and violence. This situation is particularly evident for the northern borderlands of Mexico and Morocco. The geopolitical position of these regions is defined by their strong existing asymmetry with their neighbouring countries: the United States, in the case of Mexico, and the Mediterranean European countries, in the case of Morocco. This book contributes to the understanding of current changes in the workplace, in family, in sexuality and sexual violence within the setting of the borderlands, through various studies addressing the manner in which these transformations are interpreted and experienced by women in everyday life and in their individual and collective agency.

Transgender Migrations brings together a top-notch collection of emerging and established scholars to examine the way that the term "migration" can be used not only to look at the way trans bodies migrate from one gender to the (an?) other, but the way that trans people migrate in the larger geopolitical contexts of immigration reform, the war on terror, the war on drugs, and the increased policing of national borders. The book centers trans-ing experiences, identities, and politics, and treats these identities as inextricably intertwined with other social identities, institutions, and discourses of sexuality, nationality, race and ethnicity, globalization, colonialism, and terrorism. The chapter authors explore not only the movement of bodies in, through, and across spaces and borders, but also chart the metamorphoses of these bodies in relation to migration and mobility. Transgender Migrations takes the theory documented in The Transgender Studies Reader and blows it up to a global scale. It is the logical next step for scholarship in this dynamic, emerging field.

The study of borders has recently undergone significant transitions, reflecting the transformation of the world political map as well as the changes in the ways boundaries themselves function. In Gendering Border Studies sixteen established scholars from a variety of disciplines examine how the issue of gender and borders has been approached in their field and describe what they expect from future research. This book will be of interest to scholars of border studies, gender studies, social anthropology, international politics, comparative literature, and Welsh studies.

This comparative study examines the processes of development and the configurations of export industries in northern Morocco and on the northern border of Mexico. As the contributors explore the similar characteristics of these two borders, they also examine how the global economy circulates around “places of production”—sites advantageous to the development of export industries. Focusing on transnational firms and the working conditions, settlement processes, and migratory flows they engender, this volume considers if a convergence toward a global culture is inevitable in places of production, or if local resistance emerges in response to the impact of the global.

This innovative Research Agenda uncovers links between different levels of border-making processes, or bordering, from the political to the cognitive, and connects everyday processes and experiences of border-making to the wider social world. It addresses the question of how everyday bordering practices and discourses can be productively linked to different aspects of social relations.

Compelling and accessible, this Very Short Introduction challenges the perception of borders as passive lines on a map, revealing them instead to be integral forces in the economic, social, political, and environmental processes that shape our lives. Highlighting the historical development and continued relevance of borders, Alexander Diener and Joshua Hagen offer a powerful counterpoint to the idea of an imminent borderless world, underscoring the impact borders have on a range of issues, such as economic development, inter- and intra-state conflict, global terrorism, migration, nationalism, international law, environmental sustainability, and natural resource management. Diener and Hagen demonstrate how and why borders have been, are currently, and will undoubtedly remain hot topics across the social sciences and in the global headlines for years to come. This compact volume will appeal to a broad, interdisciplinary audience of scholars and students, including geographers, political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, international relations and law experts, as well as lay readers interested in understanding current events.

Drawing on extensive and carefully designed ethnographic fieldwork in the Ferghana Valley region, where the state borders of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikizstan and Uzbekistan intersect, Madeleine Reeves develops new ways of conceiving the state as a complex of relationships, and of state borders as socially constructed and in a constant state of flux. She explores the processes and relationships through which state borders are made, remade, interpreted and contested by a range of actors including politicians, state officials, border guards, farmers and people whose lives involve the crossing of the borders. In territory where international borders are not always clearly demarcated or consistently enforced, Reeves traces the ways in which states' attempts to establish their rule create new sources of conflict or insecurity for people pursuing their livelihoods in the area on the basis of older and less formal understandings of norms of access. As a result the book makes a major new and original contribution to scholarly work on Central Asia and more generally on the anthropology of border regions and the state as a social process. Moreover, the work as a whole is presented in a lively and accessible style. The individual lives whose tribulations and small triumphs Reeves so vividly documents, and the relationships she establishes with her subjects, are as revealing as they are engaging. Border Work is a well-deserved winner of this year’s Alexander Nove Prize.

Using a gender-sensitive political economy approach, this book analyzes the emergence of new migration patterns between Central Mexico and the East Coast of the United States in the last decades of the twentieth century, and return migration during and after the global economic crisis of 2007. Based on ethnographic research carried out over a decade, details of the lives of women and men from two rural communities reveal how neoliberal economic restructuring led to the deterioration of livelihoods starting in the 1980s. Similar restructuring processes in the United States opened up opportunities for Mexican workers to labor in US industries that relied heavily on undocumented workers to sustain their profits and grow. When the Great Recession hit, in the context of increasingly restrictive immigration policies, some immigrants were more likely to return to Mexico than others. This longitudinal study demonstrates how the interconnections among class and gender are key to understanding who stayed and who returned to Mexico during and after the global economic crisis. Through these case studies, the authors comment more widely on how neoliberalism has affected the livelihoods and aspirations of the working classes. This book will be of key interest to scholars, students and practitioners in migration studies, gender studies/politics, and more broadly to international relations, anthropology, development studies, and human geography.

This book takes an explicitly feminist approach to studying gender and social inequalities in island settings while deliberating on ‘islandness’ as part of the intersectional analysis. Though there is a wealth of recent literature on islands and island studies, most of this literature focuses on islands as objects of study rather than as contexts for exploring gender relations and local gendered developments. Taking Karides’ ‘Island feminism’ as a starting point and drawing from the wider literature on island studies as well as gender and place, this book bridges this gap by exploring gender, gender relations, affect and politics in various island settings spanning a great variety of global locations, from the Faroe Islands and Greenland in the north to Tasmania in south. Insights on recent developments and gendered contestations in these locations provide rich food for thought on the intricate links between gender and place in a local/global world. This text will be of key interest to students and scholars of gender and feminist studies, cultural studies, Island studies, anthropology, and more broadly to sociology, geography, diversity and social justice studies, global democracy, and international relations.

Borders of Belonging investigates a pressing but previously unexplored aspect of immigration in America—the impact of immigration policies and practices not only on undocumented migrants, but also on their family members, some of whom possess a form of legal status. Heide Castañeda reveals the trauma, distress, and inequalities that occur daily, alongside the stratification of particular family members' access to resources like education, employment, and health care. She also paints a vivid picture of the resilience, resistance, creative responses, and solidarity between parents and children, siblings, and other kin. Castañeda's innovative ethnography combines fieldwork with individuals and family groups to paint a full picture of the experiences of mixed-status families as they navigate the emotional, social, political, and medical difficulties that inevitably arise when at least one family member lacks legal status. Exposing the extreme conditions in the heavily-regulated U.S./Mexico borderlands, this book presents a portentous vision of how the further encroachment of immigration enforcement would affect millions of mixed-status families throughout the country.