Description: "What do confrontations over beach use--the various restrictions, justifications, and access conflicts-tell us about contemporary politics? They remind us that shorelines-especially their most coveted parts, sandy beaches-are a reflection-and refraction-of contemporary political and economic struggles. In the most general terms, this book focuses on these struggles-especially as they are grounded in a particular time and space-that is, beach "politics.""--
Brief description:
Setha Low is Distinguished Professor of Environmental Psychology, Geography, Anthropology, and Women's Studies, and Director of the Public Space Research Group at The Graduate Center, City University of New York.
She has been awarded a Getty Fellowship, a NEH fellowship, a Fulbright Senior Fellowship, a Future of Places Fellowship and a Guggenheim for her ethnographic research on public space in Latin America and the United States. Her most recent books are Spatializing Culture: The Ethnography of Space and Place, Anthropology and the City, Spaces of Security (with M. Maguire), and Why Public Space Matters.
Review Quotes: "There is no other book like Beach Politics, a welcome and long overdue contribution to scholarship on the politics and inequities of public space. Expansively interdisciplinary and global in scope, the chapters across this volume provide an unmatched exploration of the histories and political economies that shape, limit, privatize, regulate, racialize, and surveil transnational seashores from Argentina's urban beaches to South Africa's waterfront vacation spaces to Albuquerque's recreational lakes."--Karla Slocum, author of Black Towns, Black Futures: The Enduring Allure of a Black Place in the American West