Books
Discover the latest from Ken Kolb, PhD, on community development, retail inequality, gentrification, and more.
Retail Inequality: Reframing the Food Desert Debate
Retail Inequality examines the failure of recent efforts to improve Americans' diets by increasing access to healthy food. Based on exhaustive research, this book by Kenneth H. Kolb, PhD, documents the struggles of two Black neighborhoods in Greenville, South Carolina.
For decades, outsiders ignored residents' complaints about the unsavory retail options on their side of town—until the well-intentioned but flawed "food desert" concept took hold in popular discourse. Soon after, new allies arrived to help, believing that grocery stores and healthier options were the key to better health.
These efforts, however, did not change neighborhood residents' food consumption practices. Retail Inequality explains why and also outlines the history of deindustrialization, urban public policy, and racism that are the cause of unequal access to food today.
Kolb identifies retail inequality as the crucial concept to understanding today’s debates over gentrification and community development. As this book makes clear, the battle over food deserts was never about food—it was about equality.
Moral Wages: The Emotional Dilemmas of Victim Advocacy and Counseling
Moral Wages offers the reader a vivid depiction of what it is like to work inside an agency that assists victims of domestic violence and sexual assault.
Based on over a year of fieldwork by a man in a setting many presume to be hostile to men, this ethnographic account is unlike most research on the topic of violence against women.
Instead of focusing on the victims or perpetrators of abuse, Moral Wages focuses exclusively on the service providers in the middle.
It shows how victim advocates and counselors―who don't enjoy extrinsic benefits like pay, power, and prestige―are sustained by a different kind of compensation. As long as they can overcome a number of workplace dilemmas, they earn a special type of emotional reward reserved for those who help others in need: moral wages.
As their struggles mount, though, it becomes clear that their jobs often put them in impossible situations―requiring them to aid and feel for vulnerable clients, yet giving them few and feeble tools to combat a persistent social problem.
