Ananya Roy is professor of city and regional planning and Distinguished Chair in Global Poverty and Practiceat the University of California, Berkeley. Emma Shaw Crane is a doctoral student in American Studies in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, USA. She was previously a research fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies at the University of California, Berkeley, USA.
This book offers a springboard that hopefully will help us move beyond the Global South label given to countries that...are considered less developed than those in the Global North.--Journal of Planning Education and Research This innovative collection of essays seeks to enact a new way of thinking about poverty research, welfare policy, and development practice. It does so by drawing into explicit conversation two distinct traditions of research -American-based scholarship on the histories and practices of modern welfare systems, and critical ethnographies of development in the global South. . . . For any one book to do one of these three things would be commendable enough; for it to succeed across all three areas is what makes this book more than a mere collection but an essential reference point for an emerging field of inquiry into the historical geographies of problematizations.--Space and Polity Most noteworthy in the Territories of Poverty project is the incorporation of detailed local ethnographies in a global context displaying the bewildering variety of capitalism's many faces, be it in post-Katrina disaster relief, city planning in war-torn Beirut, securitizing of debt through microfinance in Bangladesh, or Korean evangelizing in East Africa. This is the biggest strength of the book, making it a must read in any graduate seminar on poverty.--Economic Geography