It’s real! My new book is in the University of Chicago Press spring 2018 catalog. Pre-orders have already started! It’s been a load of work along with rewarding collaborations. http://www.press.uchicago.edu/books/catalogs.html

EFSP_Flyer

I’m excited that my dear colleague and friend Massimo Bressan is presenting our co-authored paper at the Council for European Studies conference in Paris! The paper is titled “‘Fistful of Tears’: Encounters with Transnational Affect, Chinese Immigrants and Italian Fast Fashion.” http://councilforeuropeanstudies.org/conferences/2015-ces-conference

Looking forward to showing solidarity with young parents at this digital storytelling screening, November 5, 7-8:30 p.m., Boylston Hall, 5 Harvard Yard, Cambridge, MA!

http://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/article/%E2%80%98hear-our-stories%E2%80%99-present-young-parents%E2%80%99

I’m just back from a year as a fellow at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, N.C. What a fantastic place to spend a sabbatical! I was so lucky to have a chance to share work space with 35 fellows and associates across the humanities and have such an amazingly nurturing staff. They were so supportive in helping me to reconnect with my intellectual and writerly self. I was able to get three articles out, all on different projects with different co-authors, as well as make substantial headway toward completing my book manuscript, “Tight Knit: A Biography of Globalization.” It tells the story of how families, individuals, and institutions cope with globalization. I encountered lots of surprises. The project allows me to tell a story about how local practices and individual lives create the living biography of globalization.

Tight Knit: Two Familisms in One Country

My current research seeks to illuminate how families negotiate the terms of transnational capitalism and the novel models of social organization and practices that underwrite its dynamics in one region of southern Europe. Here, a demographic “crisis” of very low fertility collides with an economic “crisis” of globalization. The “family” as a social unit has become politically charged. An industrial district in Central Italy serves as an ethnographic laboratory to explore how two populations contend with the structural inequalities, power dynamics and governing strategies of globalization. My new project focuses on relations between and within local Italian and transnational Chinese families in Prato, Italy, where small- to medium-sized firms predominate. Each of these populations has specific histories of flexibility and networking strategies moored in familistic regimes. The project seeks to understand how different varieties of familism persist or morph. It pursues three interrelated lines of inquiry: 1) How do meanings and practices related to familism manifest and matter within and between Chinese and Italian textile entrepreneurs and workers? 2) How do Italian and Chinese families recollect and deploy diverse histories of flexibility and deep values of trust, reciprocity and obligation to negotiate globalization? and 3) How do these familistic regimes respond to local-global formations and conditions, such as new forms of surveillance, intervention, and discipline directed at the body?

http://www.umass.edu/family/scholars.htm

Cultural Anthropology has launched its new website on social class and citizenship. It’s a great site! I’m honored to have it feature my work on Italian reproductive politics.
http://www.culanth.org/?q=node/303

About the cover art: Original painting by Quinto Martini, Donne di campagna – Trecciaiole che dormono (Country women – Straw weavers sleeping), 1925

Amherst Books is hosting a book launch party Wednesday, Sept. 30, at 5:30 p.m. to celebrate the release of my new book, Unraveled. Jazz Sketches will provide tunes.