Book Review: Roth, Claudia (2012)†, Willemijn de Jong, Manfred Perlik, Noemi Steuer, and Heinzpeter Znoj (eds) (2018), Urban Dreams. Transformations of Family Life in Burkina Faso

The book Urban Dreams was published as an edited volume posthumous- ly by four close colleagues of Claudia Roth and reunites selected articles she had written for different academic publications over the span of a 20-year time period. Roth's long-term ethnographic involvement in the same neighbourhood in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso, her repeated interviews with the same interlocutors, and also the fact that she looked at the same research topic - how people manage to secure their liveli- hoods - from a number of different angles makes her work particularly dense. The theoretical lenses through which Roth looked at her diverse research interests are gender studies, anthropologically oriented social security studies, and practice theory (Bourdieu). She also shows in her work how everything is interconnected: the economy, politics, history, and of course tradition, lived out daily. As a welcome side effect, Urban Dreams provides a walk through the canon of publication conventions of the past two decades.