Places
Geographic Entry Points
Each place is a way of entering larger questions. Not a destination — a perspective.
Paraguay · Capital District
Asunción
Paraguay’s capital, where chef Paola Benítez waited through a November 2026 afternoon for wedding savings frozen when digital lender Ueno was ordered into resolution — and where protests accompanied the collapse.
Thailand · Central Thailand
Ayutthaya
A central Thai province of irrigated rice paddies where farm water pumps and harvest machinery depend on diesel that arrives through global energy markets.
United States · Louisiana (Kilpatrick place) / later Texas
Black River
A Louisiana plantation landscape on the Black River where WPA interviewee Mary Reynolds located her childhood enslavement before wartime upheaval and later years in Texas.
Australia · Central Highlands / Capricorn Highway
Bluff
A small central Queensland highlands township on the Capricorn Highway where cattle country meets open-cut metallurgical coal leases — including the Bluff coalmine footprint beside long-held family paddocks.
Egypt · Greater Cairo / Giza Nile islands
Cairo
A megacity on the Nile where island fishing communities sit a ferry ride from downtown banks — and where declining river catches have pushed fishers toward collecting plastic for pay.
United States · Greater Boston / Arlington Street
Chelsea
A Massachusetts mill-and-tenement city where late-19th-century immigrant households split children’s days between free public school and paid workshop labor.
Albania · Mat
Derjan
A Mat-country village on Albania’s Tower Trail, where 91-year-old Hajrija Qerimi described the kulla hospitality she was taught — never fewer than ten at the table — as surrounding villages empty to one or two families.
India · Indian-administered Kashmir / Bandipora / Gurez
Gurez
A high Himalayan valley near the Line of Control, cut off each winter when Razdan Pass closes — home to Dard-Shin communities and potato fields that once relied on underground khraw pits for seed and food.
Uganda · Southern Uganda
Kabale
A highland town in southern Uganda, where water engineer Kyokushaba Shine described watching her mother’s onion harvests fail for lack of water — and building solar irrigation so that other smallholders might count on a yield.
Mauritius · southeast coast / Grand Port
La Vallée de Ferney
A nature reserve and agri-hub on Mauritius’s southeast coast near fishing villages hit by the 2020 MV Wakashio oil spill — where women from Cité la Chaux and nearby communities secured land and built an organic collective farm.
United States · New England port city (memoir)
Little Italy waterfront
An early-20th-century immigrant quarter near the docks where tenement flats, market stalls, and subway excavation sat within walking distance of middle-class suburbs.
United Kingdom · Norfolk, England
Marsham
A small Norfolk parish east of Norwich where mid-19th-century farm-labour wages, cottage crowding, and children’s field work set the terms of rural life.
Sri Lanka · Western Province / Negombo lagoon & Pamunugama coast
Negombo
A west-coast lagoon town where fish farms and fishing grounds open into the Indian Ocean — still contending with plastic nurdles five years after the May 2021 X-Press Pearl spill.
United States · Manhattan boarding-house / want-ad city
New York
Turn-of-the-century New York as experienced by boarding-house working girls who hunted wages through newspaper HELP WANTED columns and factory offices.
India · Haryana
Panipat
A Haryana city known for textile recycling — processing discarded clothing from abroad into yarn, rags, and blankets. Work, dust, and household livelihood meet on the factory floor.
United States · Goodhue County / Minnesota Territory
Red Wing
A Mississippi River landing that in the early 1850s sat at the edge of prairie and timber where Swedish immigrants walked inland to stake farm claims near what became Vasa.
China · Northeast
Shenyang
Once the iron heart of Chinese socialist industry. After the layoffs, a city reckoning with what remains.
United States · Ohio / Clark County
Springfield
A struggling Ohio city of about 60,000 where Haitian immigrants have filled blue-collar jobs for about eight years — and where, after temporary protected status ended in 2026, ICE detentions and community marches became part of daily life.
Kenya · Meru / Mount Kenya slopes
Timau
A highland horticultural town of about 10,000 on the Mount Kenya slopes in Meru County, where decades of export flower and vegetable farms have been an economic lifeline — and where former workers now allege pesticide-related illness.