Leslie Kanes Weisman: Discrimination by Design: A Feminist Critique of the Man-Made Environment (1992)

“Discrimination by Design is a fascinating account of the complex social processes and power struggles involved in building and controlling space. Leslie Kanes Weisman offers a new framework for understanding the spatial dimensions of gender and race as well as class. She traces the social and architectural histories of the skyscraper, maternity hospital, department store, shopping mall, nuclear family dream house, and public housing high rise. Her vivid prose is based on exhaustive research and documents how each setting, along with public parks and streets, embodies and transmits the privileges and penalties of social caste.

In presenting feminist themes from a spatial perspective, Weisman raises many new and important questions. When do women feel unsafe in cities, and why? Why do so many homeless people prefer to sleep on the streets rather than in city-run shelters? Why does the current housing crisis pose a greater threat to women than to men? How would dwellings, communities, and public buildings look if they were designed to foster relationships of equality and environmental wholeness? And how can we begin to imagine such a radically different landscape?

In exploring the answers, the author introduces us to the people, policies, architectural innovations, and ideologies working today to shape a future in which all people matter. Richly illustrated with photographs and drawings, Discrimination by Design is an invaluable and pioneering contribution to our understanding of the issues of our time–health care for the elderly and people with AIDS, homelessness, racial justice, changing conditions of work and family life, affordable housing, militarism, energy conservation, and thepreservation of the environment. This thoroughly readable book provides practical guidance to policymakers, architects, planners, and housing activists. It should be read by all who are interested in understanding how the built environment shapes the experiences of their daily lives and the cultural assumptions in which they are immersed.” (from the back cover)

Publisher University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1992
ISBN 0252063996, 9780252063992
x+190 pages

Reviews: Gail Lee Dubrow (Journal of Planning Education and Research, 1993), Esther da Costa Meyer (NWSA Journal, 1993), Diane Favro (Journal of American History, 1994), Joanne K. Guilfoil (Journal of Social Theory in Art Education, 1994), Irene Nierhaus (L’Homme, 1994, DE), Nancy M. Somerick (Public Relations Review, 1995).
Commentary: Spatial Agency (n.d.).

Publisher
WorldCat

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Neda Atanasoski, Kalindi Vora: Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures (2019)

“In Surrogate Humanity Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora trace the ways in which robots, artificial intelligence, and other technologies serve as surrogates for human workers within a labor system entrenched in racial capitalism and patriarchy. Analyzing myriad technologies, from sex robots and military drones to sharing-economy platforms, Atanasoski and Vora show how liberal structures of antiblackness, settler colonialism, and patriarchy are fundamental to human—machine interactions, as well as the very definition of the human. While these new technologies and engineering projects promise a revolutionary new future, they replicate and reinforce racialized and gendered ideas about devalued work, exploitation, dispossession, and capitalist accumulation. Yet, even as engineers design robots to be more perfect versions of the human—more rational killers, more efficient workers, and tireless companions—the potential exists to develop alternative modes of engineering and technological development in ways that refuse the racial and colonial logics that maintain social hierarchies and inequality.”

Publisher Duke University Press, Durham, NC, March 2019
Perverse Modernities series
ISBN 9781478003861, 1478003863
x+240 pages

Interview with authors: Lesia Pagulich, Tatsiana Shchurko (Feminist Critique, 2019).

Reviews:Sibille Merz (Ethnic & Racial Studies, 2019), Barbara Herr Harthorn (American Ethnologist, 2020), Anita Lam (Surveillance & Society, 2020), Andrea Flores (Information & Culture, 2020), Raquel Bosó Pérez (Sociology of Health & Illness, 2020), Nina Trige Andersen (Modern Times, c.2020), Kevin Pabst (Security Journal, 2020).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF

Radical Black Women of Harlem Tour (2019)

“Harlem is both an idea and a place. What became known as the ‘Black Mecca’ began as a farming village inhabited first by the Lenape and then by the Dutch. The first Black people in Harlem, both freed and enslaved, worked on farms in the area known as Niew Haarlem. New Haarlem was formally established as a settlement by Peter Stuyvesant in 1658 and was named after the Dutch city of Haarlem. For generations, the sole connection between Niew Haarlem and Niew Amsterdam was a diagonal road built on an old Native path: a street we now call Broadway…

Learn more about this history and the extraordinary contributions of radical Black women who built community, fought for freedom, and imagined other futures, including Williana Jones Burroughs, Regina Anderson Andrews, Ella Baker, Claudia Jones, Lorraine Hansberry, Salaria Kee, Madame C.J. Walker, A’Lelia Walker, Victoria Earle Matthews, Zora Neale Hurston, Louise Thompson Patterson, Dorothy Height, Pauli Murray, Amy Ashwood Garvey, Billie Holiday, Audre Lorde, Madame Stephanie St. Clair, Marvel Cooke, Eslanda Goode Robeson, Una Mulzac, Grace Campbell, and Willie Mae Mallory.

The Radical Black Women of Harlem Walking Tour offers an important contribution to the effort to uplift Black women’s intellectual, social and political work. We encourage community members, students, and educators to use this guidebook to organize tours in New York City, or as inspiration to design guidebooks in other neighborhoods and cities.”

Research and Writing by Asha Futterman and Mariame Kaba
Published in New York, May 2019
20 pages
HT jul

Author
Publisher

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