Searching for a Different Future

“Cohen's book is definitely an interesting case study that captures many aspects of social change in a city from the global south by looking at the changing relationships among the nation, the state, the market, the community, and the citizen in contemporary globalized Morocco.” - Zakia Salime , Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East

"[T]his well-documented study [is] worthy of the attention of students not only of [Morocco], but also of the many others currently undergoing one stage or another of the globalization experience." - Kenneth J. Perkins , The Historian

"Timely. . . . [Cohen] concocts a rich theoretical brew to tackle a phenomenon with structural, cultural, and psychological dimensions. . . . A new and important contribution to the understanding of contemporary social and cultural processes in cities of the Arab world and beyond." - Lisa Taraki , H-Gender-MidEast, H-Net Reviews

“Searching for a Different Future is superb. Shana Cohen’s work provides an outstanding example for all scholars who take seriously the productive potential of work that is at once theoretical and empirical, objectivist and subjectivist, economically sophisticated and culturally savvy, regionally situated and unabashedly global.” - Jonathan Cutler, coeditor of Post-Work: The Wages of Cybernation

“Shana Cohen is making a significant contribution to understandings of how insertion into the world economy feels to those on the global margins and how their search for a new form of identity shapes their relations to religion, the state, and each other. This is not only an important book but one with literary value as well: we come as close as we can to understanding individual struggles and the resulting complications.” - Miguel Centeno, Princeton University