An Everyday Geography of the Global South (Hardcover)

Most geographical studies of the 'Third World' - or the Global South - focus their attention on the challenge of promoting development and explaining why the Third World is also the Poor World. This text extracts the Global South from the shadow of development and examines people's lives and livelihoods in their own terms. It takes as its point of departure the need to reveal the myriad ways that people 'get by' in the day-to-day sense of the term and how modernization is re-working the human landscape.

An Everyday Geography of the Global South focuses on local spaces, individual experiences, household strategies and the power and role of agency over structure in terms of explanation. Taking a broad perspective of livelihoods, it draws on more than 90 case studies from 36 countries across Asia, Africa and Latin America to examine how people are engaging and living with modernity. This extends from changes in the ways that households operate, to how and why people take on new work and acquire new skills, how migration and mobility are become increasingly common features of existence, and how aspirations and expectations are being reworked under the influence of modernisation.

To date, there is no book which takes such an approach to building an understanding of the Global South. In focusing on the Global South but not on development, in beginning with the personal and the everyday, in using the experience of the non-Western world to illuminate and inform mainstream debates in geography, and in beginning from the lived experiences of 'ordinary' people, this book will provide an alternative and different insight into a range of geographical debates. For students, theusefulness of the book will lie in its clarity of argument, its use of detailed case studies to inform and substantiate the general argument and in providing a geography text which engages with the majority world that is the Global South.