Marina Peterson's work focuses on performance, the relation between the city and the state, spatial processes, and emergent social formations in the context of globalization.

Her book, Sound, Space, and the City: Civic Performance in Downtown Los Angeles, is an ethnography of a free summer concert series. It explores how the public concert audience is constituted as a multicultural urban public through spatial and sonic processes.

Global Downtowns (co-edited with Gary McDonogh) includes discussions of downtowns around the world, including those of Beijing, Havana, Los Angeles, and Zanzibar. Drawing on ethnographic research, the case studies address features of downtowns that are shared internationally and consider how downtowns look to each other as
models for making themselves global.

Her current research is on shipping containers and their spaces of movement.

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Performance, cities and citizenship, music and society, globalization and transnationalism, production
of space, social theory, Chicago, Los Angeles, Singapore.

SELECT PUBLICATIONS

Forthcoming Global Downtowns. Co-edited with Gary McDonogh. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.

2010 Sound, Space, and the City: Civic Performance in Downtown Los Angeles. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.

http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/14742.html

2007 Translocal Civilities: Chinese Modern Dance at Downtown Los Angeles Public Concerts. In Deciphering the Global: Its Scales, Spaces and Subjects. Saskia Sassen, ed. Pp. 41-58. New York: Routledge.

2006 Patrolling the Plaza: Privatized Public Space and the Neoliberal State In Downtown Los Angeles. Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development.
35(4):355-386.