Social Sciences and Humanities

Gillian Hart is dean of the Center for African Studies and Chair of the undergraduate major in Development Studies. A native of South Africa, she is author of a number of publications on comparative development in her native country and globally. Her book Disabling Globalization: Places of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa (University of California Press, 2002) traces divergent post-apartheid dynamics in two towns and adjacent townships, and their connections with East Asia. She has also published numerous papers on critical ethnographies of power and neoliberal globalization, as well as on rural-urban linkages. Most notably, this includes the paper “Beyond the Urban-Rural Divide: Linking Land, Labour, and Livelihoods,” Transformation (55) 2004 (with Ari Sitas).

Peter Evans is well known for his work examining the role of the state in industrialization in the global South. Key works on this topic include Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation (Princeton University Press, 1995), and his collection of papers on State-Society Synergy in which he describes the dependencies between state, private, and public agents and the criteria for successful development states. Evans also explores the possibilities for synergy in urban environmental issues in his book Livable Cities: Urban Struggles for Livelihood and Sustainability (University of California Press, 2002). This acclaimed work deftly identifies “agents” of urban livability i.e. individuals, institutions, and organizations that have strived to improve environmental conditions in Asia and Latin America. Evans is also co-chair of the new Global Metropolitan Studies Center (2006). The center will investigate questions about the drivers of metropolitan growth and change, the role of the global economy and global consumer culture in shaping metropolitan development, which institutions most effectively meet the needs and preferences of urban populations, how global metropolitan change increases political, economic and spatial segregation, what infrastructure is most efficient and equitable at the metropolitan scale and most responsive to environmental problems, and metropolitan growth impacts on long-term health for people and the natural environment.

Manuel Castells was one of the intellectual founders of what came to be known as the New Urban Sociology. His main publications in this field are The City and the Grassroots, a comparative study of urban social movements and community organizations based on his field work in France, Spain, Latin America, and California, that received the C.Wright Mills Award in 1983, and The Informational City (Blackwell, 1989), an analysis of the urban and regional changes brought about by information technology and economic restructuring in the United States. In 1983 Castells undertook the study of economic and social transformations associated with the information technology revolution. The results of this work were published in his trilogy The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture (Blackwell): 1st volume, The Rise of the Network Society (1996, revised edition 2000); 2nd volume, The Power of Identity (1997); 3rd volume, End of Millennium (1998, revised edition 2000). The trilogy is translated into Spanish, French, Swedish, Chinese, Portuguese, Russian, Korean, Japanese, Croatian, Bulgarian, Turkish, and German. In 1998, Manuel Castells received the Robert and Helen Lynd Award from the American Sociological Association for his lifelong contribution in the field of community and urban sociology.