Global Heartland: Displaced Labor, Transnational Lives, and Local Placemaking (Framing the Global)

Global Heartland is the account of diverse, dispossessed, and displaced people brought together in a former sundown town in Illinois. Recruited to work in the local meat-processing plant, African Americans, Mexicans, and West Africans re-create the town in unexpected ways. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in the US, Mexico, and Togo, Faranak Miraftab shows how this workforce is produced for the global labor market; how the displaced workers’ transnational lives help them stay in these jobs; and how they negotiate their relationships with each other across the lines of ethnicity, race, language, and nationality as they make a new home. Beardstown is not an exception but an example of local-global connections that make for local development. Focusing on a locality in a non-metropolitan region, this work contributes to urban scholarship on globalization by offering a fresh perspective on politics and materialities of placemaking.

• Winner: Davidoff Book Award, Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP)


• Winner: Global & Transnational Sociology section Book Award, American Sociological Association (ASA)


• Finalist: C. Wright Mills Book Award, Society for Study of Social Problems (SSSP)

• True Wealth: How and Why Millions of Americans Are Creating a Time-Rich, Ecologically Light, Small-Scale, High-Satisfaction Economy
• Farming for Us All: Practical Agriculture and the Cultivation of Sustainability (Rural Studies)
• Those Who Work, Those Who Don't
• Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place, 20th Anniversary Edition, With a New Preface
• Microeconomics in Context, 3rd Edition
• The End of Policing
• A Brief History of Neoliberalism
• A Man of the People
• Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right
• Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza