Erin Taylor

Lecturer

Room 235, RC Mills Building A26
+61 2 9351 6678

I conducted my PhD fieldwork in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. My interests include poverty and inequality, urban studies, space and place, moral geographies, globalisation and transnationalism, experiences of modernity, the historical imagination and aspirations for the future. My dissertation explores how residents of Santo Domingo¹s poor barrios respond to their poverty and low social status through placemaking. While the middle class experience increasing mobility resulting from skill demands and capital flows, the poor remain bound to their social position and locality. Although the city offers greater mobility for the poor than the countryside, it is also the site at which socioeconomic stratification is most profoundly experienced. I examine how residents who have limited material and symbolic resources invest value in place to survive in the urban milieu and attain a measure of socioeconomic mobility. I argue that control over space and the ability to invest it with value is essential to the poor in their attempts to contest a stratified global order as well as find a place within it.