Past Projects

Mapping the transformative personal journeys of the displaced.

The travel writing genre has long been associated with a certain kind of privileged and autonomous journey, encouraged by society and geared toward individual growth. Presenting an important counterpoint to this tradition, Invisible Exile considers a diverse set of narratives that explore travel undertaken as a result of displacement. In this creative work of cultural geography, Kimberley Kinder sheds light on the transformative accounts of those who must navigate across and within spatial boundaries due to marginalization and violence.

Unfolding as an extended trip, with each chapter marking out the next phase of one imaginatively constructed itinerary, Invisible Exile analyzes forty works in which the authors grapple with themes of loss and alienation. Kinder emphasizes the aspect of travel writing that posits spatial movement as a means of reinventing oneself, showcasing the personal insight and renewal these travelers find on their paths into, through, and partially out of, exile.

By foregrounding the experiences of forced and reluctant migrants and refugees, Invisible Exile poses a critical challenge to the existing genre of travel literature, expanding its scope. Examining a vast range of twenty-first-century writings, Kinder crafts a moving, episodic journey that carries readers through displacement, transformation, and redemption.

Kinder, Kimberley. Forthcoming, 2025. Invisible Exile: The Travel Writing of Displacement. University of Minnesota Press.

Honorable Mention for the American Association of Geographers’ Meridian Book Award, 2021.

How does social change happen? It requires an identified problem, an impassioned and committed group, a catalyst, and a plan. In this deeply researched consideration of seventy-seven stores and establishments, Kimberley Kinder argues that activists also need autonomous space for organizing, and that these spaces are made, not found. She explores the remarkably enduring presence of radical bookstores in America and how they provide infrastructure for organizing—gathering places, retail offerings that draw new people into what she calls “counterspaces.”

Kinder focuses on brick-and-mortar venues where owners approach their businesses primarily as social movement tools. These may be bookstores, infoshops, libraries, knowledge cafes, community centers, publishing collectives, thrift stores, or art installations. They are run by activist-entrepreneurs who create centers for organizing and selling books to pay the rent. These spaces allow radical and contentious ideas to be explored and percolate through to actual social movements, and serve as crucibles for activists to challenge capitalism, imperialism, white privilege, patriarchy, and homophobia. They also exist within a central paradox: participating in the marketplace creates tensions, contradictions, and shortfalls. Activist retail does not end capitalism; collective ownership does not enable a retreat from civic requirements like zoning; and donations, no matter how generous, do not offset the enormous power of corporations and governments. 

In this timely and relevant book, Kinder presents a necessary, novel, and apt analysis of the role these retail spaces play in radical organizing, one that demonstrates how such durable hubs manage to persist, often for decades, between the spikes of public protest. 

Kinder, Kimberley. 2021. The Radical Bookstore: Counterspace for Social Movements. University of Minnesota Press. https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517909185/the-radical-bookstore/ 

Finalist for the Urban Communication Foundation’s Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Book Award, 2016.

For ten years James Robertson walked the twenty-one-mile round-trip from his Detroit home to his factory job; when his story went viral, it brought him an outpouring of attention and support. But what of Robertson’s Detroit neighbors, likewise stuck in a blighted city without services as basic as a bus line? What they’re left with, after decades of disinvestment and decline, is DIY urbanism—sweeping their own streets, maintaining public parks, planting community gardens, boarding up empty buildings, even acting as real estate agents and landlords for abandoned homes.

DIY Detroit describes a phenomenon that, in our times of austerity measures and market-based governance, has become woefully routine as inhabitants of deteriorating cities “domesticate” public services in order to get by. The voices that animate this book humanize Detroit’s troubles—from a middle-class African American civic activist drawn back by a crisis of conscience; to a young Latina stay-at-home mom who has never left the city and whose husband works in construction; to a European woman with a mixed-race adopted family and a passion for social reform, who introduces a chicken coop, goat shed, and market garden into the neighborhood. These people show firsthand how living with disinvestment means getting organized to manage public works on a neighborhood scale, helping friends and family members solve logistical problems, and promoting creativity, compassion, and self-direction as an alternative to broken dreams and passive lifestyles.

Kimberley Kinder reveals how the efforts of these Detroiters and others like them create new urban logics and transform the expectations residents have about their environments. At the same time she cautions against romanticizing such acts, which are, after all, short-term solutions to a deep and spreading social injustice that demands comprehensive change.

Kinder, Kimberley. 2016. DIY Detroit : Making Do in a City without Services. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. https://www.upress.umn.edu/9780816697090/diy-detroit/

Finalist for the best book in European Planning History, International Planning History Society Book Prize, 2016

Fifty years ago, urban waterfronts were industrial, polluted, and diseased. Today, luxury homes and shops line riverbanks, harbors, and lakes across Europe and North America. The visual drama of physical reconstruction makes this transition look swift and decisive, but reimaging water is a slow process, punctuated by small cultural shifts and informal spatial seizures that change the meaning of wet urban spaces. In The Politics of Urban Water, Kimberley Kinder explores how active residents in Amsterdam deployed their cityscape when rallying around these concerns, turning space into a vehicle for social reform.

While market dynamics certainly contributed to the transformation of Amsterdam’s shorelines, squatters, partiers, artists, historians, environmentalists, tourists, reporters, and government officials also played crucial roles in bringing waterscapes to life. Their interventions pulled water in new directions, connecting it to political discussions about affordable housing, cultural tolerance, climate change, and national identity. Over time, these political valences have become embedded in laws, norms, symbols, markets, and landscapes, bringing rich undercurrents of friction to urban shores. Amsterdam’s development serves as both an inspiration and a cautionary tale for cities across Europe and North America where rapid new growth creates similar pressures and anxieties.

Kinder, Kimberley. 2015. The Politics of Urban Water: Changing Waterscapes in Amsterdam. University of Georgia Press. https://ugapress.org/book/9780820347950/the-politics-of-urban-water/ 

Kinder, Kimberley. "Reshaping the gray spaces: resident self-provisioning and urban form in Detroit." In Why Detroit Matters: Decline, Renewal and Hope in a Divided City, pp. 117-134. Policy Press, 2017. https://doi.org/10.51952/9781447327899.ch006

Kinder, Kimberley. “Technologies of Translocality: Vegetables, Meat, and Dresses in Arab Muslim Detroit.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 40, no. 5 (2016): 899-917. https://doi-org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/10.1111/1468-2427.12414

Kinder, Kimberley. “Guerrilla-Style Defensive Architecture in Detroit: A Self-Provisioned Security Strategy in a Neoliberal Space of Disinvestment.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38, no. 5 (2014): 1767-1784. https://doi-org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/10.1111/1468-2427.12158

Kinder, Kimberley. “Planning by Intermediaries: Making Cities Make Nature in Amsterdam.” Environment and Planning A 43, no. 10 (2011): 2435-2451. https://doi-org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/10.1068/a4464