Fitting into Place?

Book excerpt: 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.