"Wasson and her coeditors offer a useful, wide-ranging collection of papers from applied anthropologists treating a range of themes connected to globalization and specific policy issues. The chapters offer sustained ethnographic attention to the US/Mexico border, Somali migrants in Minnesota, Uzbek sex trafficking in Armenia, migrants and aging in the US, and more comparative or multi-sited considerations of themes, including infectious disease management, climate change, child welfare, and health leadership training. The volume features a brief critical introduction and conclusion, which restate the critique that "communities" are not the bounded and self-sustaining entities they were once considered, and that ethnographic attention to the complex interplay between local and global issues--especially when it comes to issues of policy work in the context of neoliberal regimes of power--is clearly warranted. While not overly ambitious in terms of theory, the range and detail of the cases considered will be of interest, especially to practitioners.
Summing Up: Recommended."
- CHOICE
"Once in a generation
comes a shift in the practice of anthropology, or perhaps a shift in our
perspective on the place of practice in the discipline and in the world.
Here is a harbinger of such change -- the book we have all been waiting for --
taking us to the cutting-edge of an anthropological practice that is ‘glocalized’,
hybridized with other disciplines, technology-infused, and on the go
24/7. A remarkable collection, this volume provides prospective and
retrospective views of the agglomerative power of anthropology in the halls of
global practice -- influencing policy on global climate change, gendering our
knowledge of mobility around the world, explaining the reason for technology ‘grey
markets’ in developing nations, revealing the concept of ‘plastic time’ and so
much more. It will challenge what you thought you knew about ‘applied
anthropology’.
"
- Marietta L. Baba, Dean and Professor, Michigan State University’s College of Social Science
" This wide-ranging collection achieves something new and significant for anthropology and for the policy sciences, by bringing the best insights and methods of the anthropology of migration, diaspora and transnationalism to the debate about key public policy issues in the United States, including those of housing, health and public finance. It will therefore bring many different disciplines into a dialogue that tells us something new about how globalization can be harnessed for the purposes of meaningful local change.
"
- Arjun Appadurai, Goddard Professor of Media, Culture and Communication, New York University