“Faranak Miraftab draws on ethnographic research in Beardstown, Mexico, and Togo to analyze a space that is often overlooked in scholarship on globalization. Tracing the global processes that produce displaced workers and the social relationships that maintain them, she offers a fresh perspective on place and placemaking.”

“"[V]ery accessible, and yet [it] teaches us an original way to think about the issues of globalization, labor and work, provincialism, and cultural-social reproduction within and across ethnic communities. . . . [E]xtremely readable, cogent, beautifully told, and thought-provoking." ”
 — Michael Goldman, author of Imperial Nature: The World Bank and Struggles for Social Justice in the Age of Globalizati

“The depth and breadth of this book show it was a decade in the making. Miraftab has carried out a rich multi-sited ethnography to help us understand the transbordering factors and relations that produce and revitalize Beardstown, a meatpacking town in Illinois. ”
 — International Journal of Urban and Regional Research

“In Faranak Miraftab’s book, Global Heartland, the life of the meatpacker is vividly brought to life. Miraftab studies the lived-realities of meatpacking laborers to understand how the industry has influenced the economic revitalization and social transformation of the small, rural community of Beardstown, Illinois, while arguing that the thriving economy and cultural diversity successes of the area obscure larger narratives about the unequal global ties that enabled these changes.”
 — Antipode

“Faranak Miraftab’s powerful and, at times, very personal study of the meat-packing industry in Beardstown, Illinois, offers an exemplary analysis of the relational character of place. The book challenges us to think seriously about places that are all too often located at the periphery of mainstream urban theory.”
 — AAG Review of Books