CANCELLED: Boomtown. Runaway Globalisation on the Queensland Coast

In August 2018, Thomas Hylland Eriksen launches his latest book
Boomtown. Runaway Globalisation on the Queensland Coast (Pluto Press). We are very pleased to invite all interested to this book launch.

About the book

Sitting next to the Great Barrier Reef, steeped in coal and gas, the industrial boomtown of Gladstone, Australia embodies many of the contradictions of the “overheated” world: prosperous yet polluted, growing and developing, yet always on the precipice of crisis.

Capturing Gladstone at the peak of its accelerated growth in 2013–14, Thomas Hylland Eriksen dissects here the boomtown phenomenon in all its profound ambivalence. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the book examines local identity, family life, infrastructure, and local services and explores the tensions and resentments surrounding migrant workers.

Writ large in Boomtown are the clashes of scale at the heart of the town’s contradictions, where the logic of big industry and the state compete with those of the individual and the local community and ecology, crystallizing the current crisis of political legitimacy that is unfurling all over the world.

All are welcome to this book bath. A light lunch will be served.