Flip-Flop: A Journey Through Globalisation's Backroads (Anthropology, Culture and Society) - Hardcover

Knowles, Caroline

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0745334121 ISBN 13: 9780745334127

Publisher: Pluto Press, 2014

Synopsis

This book follows the global trail of one of the world’s most unremarkable and ubiquitous objects – flip-flops. Through this unique lens, Caroline Knowles takes a ground level view of the lives and places of globalisation’s back roads, providing new insights that challenge contemporary accounts of globalisation.

Rather than orderly product chains, the book shows that globalisation along the flip-flop trail is a tangle of unstable, shifting, ad hoc and contingent connections. This book displays both the instabilities of the ‘chains’ and the complexities, personal topographies and skills with which people navigate these global uncertainties.

Flip-Flop provides new ways of thinking about globalisation from the vantage point of the shifting landscape crossed by a seemingly ordinary and everyday commodity.

About this title

About the Author:

Caroline Knowles is Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the coauthor of Hong Kong: Migrant Lives, Landscapes and Journeys (2009).

Review:

'If you are invited to Davos, shiny shoes, high heels or ski boots may be in order. For understanding much of the rest of the world, Caroline Knowles shows, you think better with flip-flops' -- Ulf Hannerz, Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University 'A journey through globalisation's backroads ... Innovative, insightful, and by turns disturbing and inspiring' -- Professor Craig Calhoun, Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science

About this edition

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0745334121
• ISBN 13: 9780745334127
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224