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Chronicles of a Radical Criminologist
Working the Margins of Law, Power, and Justice
Gregg Barak
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Over the past five decades, prominent criminologist Gregg Barak has worked as an author, editor, and book review editor; his large body of work has been grounded in traditional academic prose. His new book, Chronicles of a Radical Criminologist, while remaining scholarly in its intent, departs from the typical academic format. The book is a a first-person account that examines the linkages between one scholar's experiences as a criminologist from the late 1960s to the present and the emergence and evolution of radical criminology as a challenge to developments in mainstream criminology. Barak draws upon his own experiences over this half-century as a window into the various debates and issues among radical, critical, and technocratic criminologies. In doing so, he revisits his own seminal works, showing how they reflect those periods of criminological development.
 
What holds this book together is the story of how resisting the crimes of the powerful while struggling locally for social justice is the essence of critical criminology. His seven chapters are divided into three parts—academic freedom, academic activism, and academic praxis—and these connected stories link the author's own academic career in Berkeley, California; Las Vegas, Nevada; Chicago; Alabama; Ann Arbor, Michigan; and across the United States. Barak's eventful scholarly life involved efforts to overcome laws against abortion and homosexuality; to formalize protective practices for women from domestic violence and sexual assault; to oppose racism and classism in the criminal justice system; to challenge the wars on gangs, drugs, and immigrants; and to confront the policies of mass incarceration and the treatment of juvenile offenders.
 
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Chronicles of a Two-Front War
Civil Rights and Vietnam in the African American Press
Lawrence Allen Eldridge
University of Missouri Press, 2011
During the Vietnam War, young African Americans fought to protect the freedoms of Southeast Asians and died in disproportionate numbers compared to their white counterparts. Despite their sacrifices, black Americans were unable to secure equal rights at home, and because the importance of the war overshadowed the civil rights movement in the minds of politicians and the public, it seemed that further progress might never come.  For many African Americans, the bloodshed, loss, and disappointment of war became just another chapter in the history of the civil rights movement.  Lawrence Allen Eldridge explores this two-front war, showing how the African American press grappled with the Vietnam War and its impact on the struggle for civil rights.
Written in a clear narrative style, Chronicles of a Two-Front War is the first book to examine coverage of the Vietnam War by black news publications, from the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964 to the final withdrawal of American ground forces in the spring of 1973 and the fall of Saigon in the spring of 1975.

Eldridge reveals how the black press not only reported the war but also weighed its significance in the context of the civil rights movement.
The author researched seventeen African American newspapers, including the Chicago Defender, the Baltimore Afro-American, and the New Courier, and two magazines, Jet and Ebony.  He augmented the study with a rich array of primary sources—including interviews with black journalists and editors, oral history collections, the personal papers of key figures in the black press, and government documents, including those from the presidential libraries of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford—to trace the ups and downs of U.S. domestic and wartime policy especially as it related to the impact of the war on civil rights.

Eldridge examines not only the role of reporters during the war, but also those of editors, commentators, and cartoonists. Especially enlightening is the research drawn from extensive oral histories by prominent journalist Ethel Payne, the first African American woman to receive the title of war correspondent. She described a widespread practice in black papers of reworking material from major white papers without providing proper credit, as the demand for news swamped the small budgets and limited staffs of African American papers.  The author analyzes both the strengths of the black print media and the weaknesses in their coverage.

The black press ultimately viewed the Vietnam War through the lens of African American experience, blaming the war for crippling LBJ’s Great Society and the War on Poverty.  Despite its waning hopes for an improved life, the black press soldiered on.
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Chronological Analysis of Tsegi Phase Sites in Northeastern Arizona
Jeffrey S. Dean
University of Arizona Press, 1970
The research reported here was conducted under the auspices of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, The University of Arizona, Tucson, and presents findings based on intensive dendrochronological analyses of individual archaeological sites. Fieldwork, supported by the National Park Service and the Arizona State Museum, took place on lands belonging to Navajo National Monument and on the Navajo Indian Reservation.
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The Chronological Position of the Hopewellian Culture in the Eastern United States
James B. Griffin
University of Michigan Press, 1958
James B. Griffin reports on a series of radiocarbon dates from sites thought to be part of the Hopewellian complex. Material tested came from a broad area, including Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, New York, and Ontario, Canada.
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Chronologies in Old World Archaeology
Third Edition
Edited by Robert W. Ehrich
University of Chicago Press, 1992

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Chuj (Mayan) Narratives
Folklore, History, and Ethnography from Northwestern Guatemala
Nicholas A. Hopkins
University Press of Colorado, 2020
The Chuj of northwestern Guatemala are among the least studied groups of the Mayan family, and their relative isolation has preserved a strong indigenous tradition of storytelling. In Chuj (Mayan) Narratives, Nicholas Hopkins analyzes six narratives that illustrate the breadth of the Chuj storytelling tradition, from ancient mythology to current events and from intimate tales of local affairs to borrowed stories, such as an adaptation of Oedipus Rex.
 
The book illustrates the broad range of stories people tell each other, from mythological and legendary topics to procedural discussions and stories borrowed from European and African societies. Hopkins provides context for the narratives by introducing the reader to Chuj culture and history, conveying important events as described by indigenous participants. These events include customs and practices related to salt production as well as the beginnings of the disastrous civil war of the last century, which resulted in the destruction of several villages from which the narratives in this study originated. Hopkins also provides an analytical framework for the strategies of the storytellers and presents the narratives with Chuj text and English translation side-by-side.
 
Chuj (Mayan) Narratives analyzes the strategies of storytelling in an innovative framework applicable to other corpora and includes sufficient grammatical information to function as an introduction to the Chuj language. The stories illustrate the persistence of Classic Maya themes in contemporary folk literature, making the book significant to Mesoamericanists and Mayanists and an essential resource for students and scholars of Maya linguistics and literary traditions, storytelling, and folklore.
 
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Churches and Charity in the Immigrant City
Religion, Immigration, and Civic Engagement in Miami
Stepick, Alex
Rutgers University Press, 2009
In addition to being a religious country--over ninety percent of Americans believe in God--the United States is also home to more immigrants than ever before. Churches and Charity in the Immigrant City focuses on the intersection of religion and civic engagement among Miami's immigrant and minority groups. The contributors examine the role of religious organizations in developing social relationships and how these relationships affect the broader civic world. Essays, for example, consider the role of leadership in the promotion and creation of "civic social capital" in a Haitian Catholic church, transnational ties between Cuban Catholics in Miami and Havana, and several African American congregations that serve as key comparisons of civic engagement among minorities. This book is important not only for its theoretical contributions to the sociology of religion, but also because it gives us a unique glimpse into immigrants' civic and religious lives in urban America.
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Churches EA and E at Sardis
Hans Buchwald
Harvard University Press, 2015

Sardis was home to one of the earliest known Christian communities, appearing among the Seven Churches of Asia in the mid-first century AD. Between 1962 and 1973, the Archaeological Exploration of Sardis excavated two superimposed churches at the ancient site, one early Christian, one Byzantine. This richly illustrated volume documents the architecture and history of these buildings from the fourth to the sixteenth century.

The early Christian church, an aisled basilica with narthex and atrium, both decorated with floor mosaics, had a long and complicated history, starting in the fourth century and continuing into the ninth century. Built over its remains is a Byzantine church dating to the little-known Lascarid period, when Constantinople had fallen to the Fourth Crusade and western Asia Minor was home to an independent Christian empire. This building’s standing remains, scattered domes, and vaulting fragments support the reconstruction of an inscribed-cross church with six columns and five domes, enriched on the exterior by a variety of brick and terracotta decoration. Together, these buildings cast new light on a millennium of Christian worship at Sardis, from the first official recognition of Christianity until the end of the Byzantine era.

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The Churching of America, 1776-2005
Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy
Finke, Roger
Rutgers University Press, 2005
Although many Americans assume that religious participation has declined in America, Finke and Stark present a different picture. In 1776, fewer than 1 in 5 Americans were active in church affairs. Today, church membership includes about 6 out of 10 people.

But, as Finke and Stark show, not all denominations benefited. They explain how and why the early nineteenth-century churches began their descent, while two newcomer sects, the Baptists and the Methodists, gained ground. They also analyze why the Methodists then began a long, downward slide, why the Baptists continued to succeed, how the Catholic Church met the competition of ardent Protestant missionaries, and why the Catholic commitment has declined since Vatican II. The authors also explain why ecumenical movements always fail

In short, Americans are not abandoning religion; they have been moving away from established denominations. A "church-sect process" is always under way, Finke and Stark argue, as successful churches lose their organizational vigor and are replaced by less worldly groups.

Some observers assert that the rise in churching rates indicates increased participation, not increased belief. Finke and Stark challenge this as well. They find that those groups that have gained the greatest numbers have demanded that their followers accept traditional doctrines and otherworldliness. They argue that religious organizations can thrive only when they comfort souls and demand sacrifice. When theology becomes too logical, or too secular, it loses people.
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Chutes and Ladders
Navigating the Low-Wage Labor Market
Katherine S. Newman
Harvard University Press, 2006

Now that the welfare system has been largely dismantled, the fate of America's poor depends on what happens to them in the low-wage labor market. In this timely volume, Katherine S. Newman explores whether the poorest workers and families benefited from the tight labor markets and good economic times of the late 1990s. Following black and Latino workers in Harlem, who began their work lives flipping burgers, she finds more good news than we might have expected coming out of a high-poverty neighborhood. Many adult workers returned to school and obtained trade certificates, high school diplomas, and college degrees. Their persistence paid off in the form of better jobs, higher pay, and greater self-respect. Others found union jobs and, as a result, brought home bigger paychecks, health insurance, and a pension. More than 20 percent of those profiled in Chutes and Ladders are no longer poor.

A very different story emerges among those who floundered even in a good economy. Weighed down by family obligations or troubled partners and hindered by poor training and prejudice, these "low riders" moved in and out of the labor market, on and off public assistance, and continued to depend upon the kindness of family and friends.

Supplementing finely drawn ethnographic portraits, Newman examines the national picture to show that patterns around the country paralleled the findings from some of New York's most depressed neighborhoods. More than a story of the shifting fortunes of the labor market, Chutes and Ladders asks probing questions about the motivations of low-wage workers, the dreams they have for the future, and their understanding of the rules of the game.

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The Cigarette
A Political History
Sarah Milov
Harvard University Press, 2019

Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist
Winner of the Willie Lee Rose Prize
Winner of the PROSE Award in United States History
Hagley Prize in Business History Finalist
A Smithsonian Best History Book of the Year


“Vaping gets all the attention now, but Milov’s thorough study reminds us that smoking has always intersected with the government, for better or worse.”
New York Times Book Review

From Jamestown to the Marlboro Man, tobacco has powered America’s economy and shaped some of its most enduring myths. The story of tobacco’s rise and fall may seem simple enough—a tale of science triumphing over corporate greed—but the truth is more complicated.

After the Great Depression, government officials and tobacco farmers worked hand in hand to ensure that regulation was used to promote tobacco rather than protect consumers. As evidence of the connection between cigarettes and cancer grew, scientists struggled to secure federal regulation in the name of public health. What turned the tide, Sarah Milov reveals, was a new kind of politics: a movement for nonsmokers’ rights. Activists took to the courts, the streets, city councils, and boardrooms to argue for smoke-free workplaces and allied with scientists to lobby elected officials. The Cigarette puts politics back at the heart of tobacco’s rise and fall, dramatizing the battles over corporate influence, individual choice, government regulation, and science.

“A nuanced and ultimately devastating indictment of government complicity with the worst excesses of American capitalism.”
New Republic

“An impressive work of scholarship evincing years of spadework…A well-told story.”
Wall Street Journal

“If you want to know what the smoke-filled rooms of midcentury America were really like, this is the book to read.”
Los Angeles Review of Books

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The Cincinnati Human Relations Commission
A History, 1943–2013
Phillip J. Obermiller
Ohio University Press, 2018

In the summer of 1943, as World War II raged overseas, the United States also faced internal strife. Earlier that year, Detroit had erupted in a series of race riots that killed dozens and destroyed entire neighborhoods. Across the country, mayors and city councils sought to defuse racial tensions and promote nonviolent solutions to social and economic injustices. In Cincinnati, the result of those efforts was the Mayor’s Friendly Relations Committee, later renamed the Cincinnati Human Relations Commission (CHRC).

The Cincinnati Human Relations Commission: A History, 1943–2013, is a decade-by-decade chronicle of the agency: its accomplishments, challenges, and failures. The purpose of municipal human relations agencies like the CHRC was to give minority groups access to local government through internal advocacy, education, mediation, and persuasion—in clear contrast to the tactics of lawsuits, sit-ins, boycotts, and marches adopted by many external, nongovernmental organizations.

In compiling this history, Phillip J. Obermiller and Thomas E. Wagner have drawn on an extensive base of archival records, reports, speeches, and media sources. In addition, archival and contemporary interviews provide first-person insight into the events and personalities that shaped the agency and the history of civil rights in this midwestern city.

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Cinderella
A Casebook
Alan Dundes
University of Wisconsin Press, 1988

Covering a period of more than one hundred years of work by renowned folklorists, these enlightening essays explore the timeless tale of Cinderella. In addition to the most famous versions of the story (Basile’s Pentamerone, Perrault’s Cendrillon, and the Grimm’s Aschenputtel), this casebook includes articles on other versions of the tale from Russian, English, Chinese, Greek and French folklore. The volume concludes with several interpretive essays, including a psychoanalytic view from Dundes and a critique of the popularization of Cinderella in America.

“Folklorists, scholars of children’s literature, and feminists should appreciate particularly the wide scope of this collection .  .  .  now in paperback with an updated Bibliographical Addendum. . . . Most helpful are the two-page introductions to each variant and to each essay which include a brief overview of the historical times as well as suggested additional sources for more discussion.”—Danny Rochman, Folklore Forum

“A milestone, a near complete source of primary and secondary materials.  .  .  .  The selected analytical writing include definitive classic and new discoveries, covering the whole range of methodological modes and theoretical perspectives from early forms and typology to myth-ritual, social-historical, anthropological, and psychoanalytical readings.  The annotated bibliography is most helpful, illuminating, and comprehensive, encompassing publications in other Western languages and works by Asianists.”—Chieko Mulhern, Asian Folklore Studies

“One can imagine several dimensions on which psychoanalysts might find such a collection interesting: as examples of applied psychoanalysis, in relation to philosophical and cultural examination of imaginative material, in relation to child development, and in the correlations between folktales of a particular culture and individual histories.”—Kerry Kelly Novick, Psychoanalytic Quarterly

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Cine-Ethnography
Jean Rouch
University of Minnesota Press, 2003
One of the most influential figures in documentary and ethnographic filmmaking, Jean Rouch has made more than one hundred films in West Africa and France. In such acclaimed works as Jaguar, The Lion Hunters, and Cocorico, Monsieur Poulet, Rouch has explored racism, colonialism, African modernity, religious ritual, and music. He pioneered numerous film techniques and technologies, and in the process inspired generations of filmmakers, from New Wave directors, who emulated his cinema verité style, to today’s documentarians.Ciné-Ethnography is a long-overdue English-language resource that collects Rouch's key writings, interviews, and other materials that distill his thinking on filmmaking, ethnography, and his own career. Editor Steven Feld opens with a concise overview of Rouch’s career, highlighting the themes found throughout his work. In the four essays that follow, Rouch discusses the ethnographic film as a genre, the history of African cinema, his experiences of filmmaking among the Songhay, and the intertwined histories of French colonialism, anthropology, and cinema. And in four interviews, Rouch thoughtfully reflects on each of his films, as well as his artistic, intellectual, and political concerns. Ciné-Ethnography also contains an annotated transcript of Chronicle of a Summer—one of Rouch's most important works—along with commentary by the filmmakers, and concludes with a complete, annotated filmography and a bibliography. The most thorough resource on Rouch available in any language, Ciné-Ethnography makes clear this remarkable and still vital filmmaker's major role in the history of documentary cinema. Jean Rouch was born in Paris in 1917. He studied civil engineering before turning to film and anthropology in response to his experiences in West Africa during World War II. Rouch is the recipient of numerous awards, including the International Critics Award at Cannes for the film Chronicle of a Summer in 1961. Steven Feld is professor of music and anthropology at Columbia University.
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Cinema 16
Documents Toward History Of Film Society
Scott MacDonald
Temple University Press, 2002
As the most successful and influential film society in American history, Cinema 16 was a crucial organization for the creation of a public space for the full range of cinema achievement in the years following World War II. A precursor of the New York Film Festival, Cinema 16 screenings became a gathering place for New Yorkers interested not only in cinema, but in the use of media in the development of a more complete, effective democracy. For seventeen years, many of the leading intellectuals and artists of the time came together as part of a membership society of thousands to experience the creative programming of Cinema 16 director, Amos Vogel. What audiences saw at Cinema 16 changed their lives and had an enduring impact not only on the New York City cultural scene, but nationwide. Vogel's distribution of landmark documentary and avant-garde films helped make a place for many films that could never have had commercial release, given the pressures of commercialism and censorship during the postwar era.

Vogel's commitment to the broadest range of cinema practice led him to develop a programming strategy, inherited from the European cine-club movement, that involved confronting audiences with such a wide range of cinematic forms that viewers left the theater considering not only the often remarkable films Vogel showed, but the place of Cinema itself in modern life.

Cinema 16: Documents Toward a History of the Film Society is the first book on Cinema 16. Scott MacDonald provides a sense of the life and work of the society, using the complete Cinema 16 program announcements, selected letters between Vogel and the filmmakers whose films he showed; selections from the program notes that accompanied Cinema 16 screenings, theoretical essays by Vogel on curating independent cinema; conversations between MacDonald and Cinema 16 members; photographs and stills; and a variety of other documents.
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Cinema '62
The Greatest Year at the Movies
Stephen Farber
Rutgers University Press, 2024

Lawrence of Arabia, The Miracle Worker, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Manchurian Candidate, Gypsy, Sweet Bird of Youth, The Longest Day, The Music Man, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane, and more.

Most conventional film histories dismiss the early 1960s as a pallid era, a downtime between the heights of the classic studio system and the rise of New Hollywood directors like Scorsese and Altman in the 1970s. It seemed to be a moment when the movie industry was floundering as the popularity of television caused a downturn in cinema attendance. Cinema ’62 challenges these assumptions by making the bold claim that 1962 was a peak year for film, with a high standard of quality that has not been equaled since.
 
Stephen Farber and Michael McClellan show how 1962 saw great late-period work by classic Hollywood directors like John Ford, Howard Hawks, and John Huston, as well as stars like Bette Davis, James Stewart, Katharine Hepburn, and Barbara Stanwyck. Yet it was also a seminal year for talented young directors like Sidney Lumet, Sam Peckinpah, and Stanley Kubrick, not to mention rising stars like Warren Beatty, Jane Fonda, Robert Redford, Peter O’Toole, and Omar Sharif. Above all, 1962—the year of To Kill a Mockingbird and The Manchurian Candidate—gave cinema attendees the kinds of adult, artistic, and uncompromising visions they would never see on television, including classics from Fellini, Bergman, and Kurosawa. Culminating in an analysis of the year’s Best Picture winner and top-grossing film, Lawrence of Arabia, and the factors that made that magnificent epic possible, Cinema ’62 makes a strong case that the movies peaked in the Kennedy era.

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Cinema and Landscape
Edited by Graeme Harper and Jonathan Rayner
Intellect Books, 2010

The notion of landscape is a complex one, but it has been central to the art and artistry of the cinema. After all, what is the French New Wave without Paris? What are the films of Sidney Lumet, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, and Spike Lee without New York? Cinema and Landscape frames contemporary film landscapes across the world, in an exploration of screen aesthetics and national ideology, film form and cultural geography, cinematic representation and the human environment. Written by well-known cinema scholars, this volume both extends the existing field of film studies and stakes claims to overlapping, contested territories in the humanities and social sciences.

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Cinema between Latin America and Los Angeles
Origins to 1960
Horak, Jan-Christopher
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Historically, Los Angeles and its exhibition market have been central to the international success of Latin American cinema. Not only was Los Angeles a site crucial for exhibition of these films, but it became the most important hub in the western hemisphere for the distribution of Spanish language films made for Latin American audiences. Cinema between Latin America and Los Angeles builds upon this foundational insight to both examine the considerable, ongoing role that Los Angeles played in the history of Spanish-language cinema and to explore the implications of this transnational dynamic for the study and analysis of Latin American cinema before 1960. The volume editors aim to flesh out the gaps between Hollywood and Latin America, American imperialism and Latin American nationalism in order to produce a more nuanced view of transnational cultural relations in the western hemisphere. 
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Cinema Civil Rights
Regulation, Repression, and Race in the Classical Hollywood Era
Scott, Ellen C
Rutgers University Press, 2015
From Al Jolson in blackface to Song of the South, there is a long history of racism in Hollywood film. Yet as early as the 1930s, movie studios carefully vetted their releases, removing racially offensive language like the “N-word.” This censorship did not stem from purely humanitarian concerns, but rather from worries about boycotts from civil rights groups and loss of revenue from African American filmgoers.

Cinema Civil Rights presents the untold history of how Black audiences, activists, and lobbyists influenced the representation of race in Hollywood in the decades before the 1960s civil rights era. Employing a nuanced analysis of power, Ellen C. Scott reveals how these representations were shaped by a complex set of negotiations between various individuals and organizations. Rather than simply recounting the perspective of film studios, she calls our attention to a variety of other influential institutions, from protest groups to state censorship boards.

Scott demonstrates not only how civil rights debates helped shaped the movies, but also how the movies themselves provided a vital public forum for addressing taboo subjects like interracial sexuality, segregation, and lynching. Emotionally gripping, theoretically sophisticated, and meticulously researched, Cinema Civil Rights presents us with an in-depth look at the film industry’s role in both articulating and censoring the national conversation on race.
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Cinema is the Strongest Weapon
Race-Making and Resistance in Fascist Italy
Lorenzo Fabbri
University of Minnesota Press, 2023

A deep dive into Italian cinema under Mussolini’s regime and the filmmakers who used it as a means of antifascist resistance
 

Looking at Italy’s national film industry under the rule of Benito Mussolini and in the era that followed, Cinema Is the Strongest Weapon examines how cinema was harnessed as a political tool by both the reigning fascist regime and those who sought to resist it. Covering a range of canonical works alongside many of their neglected contemporaries, this book explores film’s mutable relationship to the apparatuses of state power and racial capitalism. 

 

Exploiting realism’s aesthetic, experiential, and affective affordances, Mussolini’s biopolitical project employed cinema to advance an idealized vision of life under fascism and cultivate the basis for a homogenous racial identity. In this book, Lorenzo Fabbri crucially underscores realism’s susceptibility to manipulation from diametrically opposed political perspectives, highlighting the queer, Communist, Jewish, and feminist filmmakers who subverted Mussolini’s notion that “cinema is the regime’s strongest weapon” by developing film narratives and film forms that challenged the prevailing ethno-nationalist ideology. 

 

Focusing on an understudied era of film history and Italian cultural production, Fabbri issues an important recontextualization of Italy’s celebrated neorealist movement and the structural ties it shares with its predecessor. Drawing incisive parallels to contemporary debates around race, whiteness, authoritarianism, and politics, he presents an urgent examination into the broader impact of visual media on culture and society.

 

 

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The Cinema of Barbara Stanwyck
Twenty-Six Short Essays on a Working Star
Catherine Russell
University of Illinois Press, 2023
From The Lady Eve, to The Big Valley, Barbara Stanwyck played parts that showcased her multidimensional talents but also illustrated the limits imposed on women in film and television. Catherine Russell’s A to Z consideration of the iconic actress analyzes twenty-six facets of Stanwyck and the America of her times. Russell examines Stanwyck’s work onscreen against the backdrop of costuming and other aspects of filmmaking. But she also views the actress’s off-screen performance within the Hollywood networks that made her an industry favorite and longtime cornerstone of the entertainment community. Russell’s montage approach coalesces into an engrossing portrait of a singular artist whose intelligence and savvy placed her center-stage in the production of her films and in the debates around women, femininity, and motherhood that roiled mid-century America.

Original and rich, The Cinema of Barbara Stanwyck is an essential and entertaining reexamination of an enduring Hollywood star.

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Cinema of Crushing Motherhood
A New Feminist Cinema
Olivia Landry
University of Illinois Press, 2025
Twenty-first century contemporary films like Emily Atef’s Das Fremde in mir and Savannah Leaf’s Earth Mama portray motherhood as a source of regret, exhaustion, rage, shame, guilt, and disgust. Olivia Landry analyzes this new feminist cinema and the ways it embraces and explores the crushing burden of mothering children. Landry surveys films released in North America, Europe, and Australia over a period beginning in 2007. As she shows, revelation and the expression of negative feelings upend the traditional image of the perfect, self-sacrificial, and happy mother. Landry tracks how radical positions like maternal regret and family abolition have replaced age-old tropes while also going beyond portrayals of maternal ambivalence. Her feminist method casts off psychoanalysis and renounces pathological approaches to motherhood to show how a generation of filmmakers have insisted on the subjective position and experience of the mother rather than that of the child. Bold and groundbreaking, Cinema of Crushing Motherhood looks at taboo-breaking films and illuminates the emotions and affects that make them so powerful.
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The Cinema of Isolation
A History of Physical Disability in the Movies
Norden, Martin F
Rutgers University Press, 1994
Filmmakers have often encouraged us to regard people with physical disabilities in terms of pity, awe, humor, or fearas "Others" who somehow deserve to be isolated from the rest of society. In this first history of the portrayal of physical disability in the movies, Martin Norden examines hundreds of Hollywood movies (and notable international ones), finds their place within mainstream society, and uncovers the movie industry's practices for maintaining the status quokeeping people with disabilities dependent and "in their place."

Norden offers a dazzling array of physically disabled characters who embody or break out of the stereotypes that have both influenced and been symptomatic of societys fluctuating relationship with its physically disabled minority. He shows us "sweet innocents" like Tiny Tim, "obsessive avengers" like Quasimodo, variations on the disabled veteran, and many others. He observes the arrival of a new set of stereotypes tied to the growth of science and technology in the 1970s and 1980s, and underscores movies like My Left Foot and The Waterdance that display a newfound sensitivity. Nordens in-depth knowledge of disability history makes for a particularly intelligent and sensitive approach to this long-overlooked issue in media studies.
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The Cinema of Robert Rodriguez
By Frederick Luis Aldama
University of Texas Press, 2014

Robert Rodriguez stands alone as the most successful U.S. Latino filmmaker today, whose work has single-handedly brought U.S. Latino filmmaking into the mainstream of twenty-first-century global cinema. Rodriguez is a prolific (eighteen films in twenty-one years) and all-encompassing filmmaker who has scripted, directed, shot, edited, and scored nearly all his films since his first breakout success, El Mariachi, in 1992. With new films constantly coming out and the launch of his El Rey Network television channel, he receives unceasing coverage in the entertainment media, but systematic scholarly study of Rodriguez’s films is only just beginning.

The Cinema of Robert Rodriguez offers the first extended investigation of this important filmmaker’s art. Accessibly written for fans as well as scholars, it addresses all of Rodriguez’s feature films through Spy Kids 4 and Machete Kills, and his filmmaking process from initial inspiration, to script, to film (with its myriad visual and auditory elements and choices), to final product, to (usually) critical and commercial success. In addition to his close analysis of Rodriguez’s work, Frederick Luis Aldama presents an original interview with the filmmaker, in which they discuss his career and his relationship to the film industry. This entertaining and much-needed scholarly overview of Rodriguez’s work shines new light on several key topics, including the filmmaker’s creative, low-cost, efficient approach to filmmaking; the acceptance of Latino films and filmmakers in mainstream cinema; and the consumption and reception of film in the twenty-first century.

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The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man
Edgar Morin
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
When The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man first appeared in 1956, the movies and the moviegoing experience were generally not regarded as worthy of serious scholarly consideration. Yet, French critic and social theorist Edgar Morin perceived in the cinema a complex phenomenon capable of illuminating fundamental truths about thought, imagination, and human nature - which allowed him to connect the mythic universe of gods and spirits present within the most primitive societies to the hyperreality emanating from the images projected on the screen. Now making its English-language debut, this audacious, provocative work draws on insights from poets, filmmakers, anthropologists, and philosophers to restore to the cinema the sense of magic first enjoyed at the dawn of the medium. Morin's inquiry follows two veins of investigation. The first focuses on the cinematic image as the nexus between the real and the imaginary; the second examines the cinema's re-creation of the archaic universe of doubles and ghosts and its power to possess, to bewitch, to nourish dreams, desires, and aspirations. "We experience the cinema in a state of double consciousness," Morin writes, "an astonishing phenomenon where the illusion of reality is inseparable from the awareness that it is really an illusion."
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Cinemachismo
Masculinities and Sexuality in Mexican Film
By Sergio de la Mora
University of Texas Press, 2006

After the modern Mexican state came into being following the Revolution of 1910, hyper-masculine machismo came to be a defining characteristic of "mexicanidad," or Mexican national identity. Virile men (pelados and charros), virtuous prostitutes as mother figures, and minstrel-like gay men were held out as desired and/or abject models not only in governmental rhetoric and propaganda, but also in literature and popular culture, particularly in the cinema. Indeed, cinema provided an especially effective staging ground for the construction of a gendered and sexualized national identity.

In this book, Sergio de la Mora offers the first extended analysis of how Mexican cinema has represented masculinities and sexualities and their relationship to national identity from 1950 to 2004. He focuses on three traditional genres (the revolutionary melodrama, the cabaretera [dancehall] prostitution melodrama, and the musical comedy "buddy movie") and one subgenre (the fichera brothel-cabaret comedy) of classic and contemporary cinema. By concentrating on the changing conventions of these genres, de la Mora reveals how Mexican films have both supported and subverted traditional heterosexual norms of Mexican national identity. In particular, his analyses of Mexican cinematic icons Pedro Infante and Gael García Bernal and of Arturo Ripstein's cult film El lugar sin límites illuminate cinema's role in fostering distinct figurations of masculinity, queer spectatorship, and gay male representations. De la Mora completes this exciting interdisciplinary study with an in-depth look at how the Mexican state brought about structural changes in the film industry between 1989 and 1994 through the work of the Mexican Film Institute (IMCINE), paving the way for a renaissance in the national cinema.

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Cinemal
The Becoming-Animal of Experimental Film
Tessa Laird
University of Minnesota Press, 2025

A foray through the wilds where experimental films and animals collide
 

Like the flash of a tropical bird’s iridescent wing, cinema can be furtive and intensely beautiful—and it can leave a viewer craving more. Cinemal is Tessa Laird’s passionate inquiry into the ways that films mimic the majesty, mystery, and movements of animals,her field notes from countless hair-raising encounters with films in their natural habitat.

 

Part of a growing focus on nonhuman animals in film, Cinemal ventures to the “furry underbelly” of global experimental film practice, focusing on films from New Zealand, Australia, and South America. Laird examines how animals are depicted in film and analyzes the various animal qualities of cinema, like scratching and sniffing, vibrant colors, and voices (barking, howling, or echolocation). Burrowing into the work of filmmakers such as Arthur and Corinne Cantrill, Sriwhana Spong, and Ana Vaz, Laird’s energetic prose embodies the films she discusses, seamlessly combining personal anecdotes with art theory and philosophy to spread a wide sensory buffet.

 

Lively and optimistic, Laird uses cinematic animal tropes to encourage readers to rethink what it means to be human. She argues that, in a time of ecological collapse, such an impulse is a necessary means of imagining other, healthier ways of being in this world. Connecting us with the more-than-human, Cinemal lures us toward the beastly becomings of film and, ultimately, our own animal natures.

 

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

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Cinemas of Bisexual Transgression
Jacob Engelberg
Duke University Press, 2026
In Cinemas of Bisexual Transgression, Jacob Engelberg makes the case for radically recalibrating queer film studies, taking as a starting point those cinematic figures who resist categorization within the gay-straight binary. Engelberg’s engagement with bisexual transgression on film illuminates the mutability and instability of sexuality, and of sociocultural structures more broadly by resisting the censure of images as politically harmful as well as the celebration of transgression as inherently subversive. Instead, Engelberg understands bisexual transgression as a process whereby sociocultural rules are made knowable by being contested. From 1970s vampire films to 1990s erotic thrillers, from lesbian imaginings of female bisexuality to European art cinema’s reckonings with HIV/AIDS, bisexual figures on film embody anxieties around the precarity of binary sexuality while revealing the contingencies of sexuality’s cinematic signification. Revivifying the underexploited contributions of bisexual theory, Cinemas of Bisexual Transgression proposes a new mode of film theorization and analysis that examines the rich space between and beyond dominant categories of sexual organization, where sexual unpredictability, the allure of the forbidden, and the precarity of sexual signification are illuminated.
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Cinema's Original Sin
D.W. Griffith, American Racism, and the Rise of Film Culture
Paul McEwan
University of Texas Press, 2022

For over a century, cinephiles and film scholars have had to grapple with an ugly artifact that sits at the beginnings of film history. D. W. Griffith’s profoundly racist epic, The Birth of a Nation, inspired controversy and protest at its 1915 release and was defended as both a true history of Reconstruction (although it was based on fiction) and a new achievement in cinematic art. Paul McEwan examines the long and shifting history of its reception, revealing how the film became not just a cinematic landmark but also an influential force in American aesthetics and intellectual life.

In every decade since 1915, filmmakers, museums, academics, programmers, and film fans have had to figure out how to deal with this troublesome object, and their choices have profoundly influenced both film culture and the notion that films can be works of art. Some critics tried to set aside the film’s racism and concentrate on the form, while others tried to relegate that racism safely to the past. McEwan argues that from the earliest film retrospectives in the 1920s to the rise of remix culture in the present day, controversies about this film and its meaning have profoundly shaped our understandings of film, race, and art.

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The Cinematic Footprint
Lights, Camera, Natural Resources
Bozak, Nadia
Rutgers University Press, 2011

Film is often used to represent the natural landscape and, increasingly, to communicate environmentalist messages. Yet behind even today’s “green” movies are ecologically unsustainable production, distribution, and consumption processes. Noting how seemingly immaterial moving images are supported by highly durable resource-dependent infrastructures, The Cinematic Footprint traces the history of how the “hydrocarbon imagination” has been central to the development of film as a medium.

Nadia Bozak’s innovative fusion of film studies and environmental studies makes provocative connections between the disappearance of material resources and the emergence of digital media—with examples ranging from early cinema to Dziga Vertov’s prescient eye, from Chris Marker’s analog experiments to the digital work of Agnès Varda, James Benning, and Zacharias Kunuk. Combining an analysis of cinema technology with a sensitive consideration of film aesthetics, The Cinematic Footprint offers a new perspective on moving images and the natural resources that sustain them.

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The Cinematic Griot
The Ethnography of Jean Rouch
Paul Stoller
University of Chicago Press, 1992
The most prolific ethnographic filmmaker in the world, a pioneer of cinéma vérité and one of the earliest ethnographers of African societies, Jean Rouch (1917-) remains a controversial and often misunderstood figure in histories of anthropology and film. By examining Rouch's neglected ethnographic writings, Paul Stoller seeks to clarify the filmmaker's true place in anthropology.

A brief account of Rouch's background, revealing the ethnographic foundations and intellectual assumptions underlying his fieldwork among the Songhay of Niger in the 1940s and 1950s, sets the stage for his emergence as a cinematic griot, a peripatetic bard who "recites" the story of a people through provocative imagery. Against this backdrop, Stoller considers Rouch's writings on Songhay history, myth, magic and possession, migration, and social change. By analyzing in depth some of Rouch's most important films and assessing Rouch's ethnography in terms of his own expertise in Songhay culture, Stoller demonstrates the inner connection between these two modes of representation.

Stoller, who has done more fieldwork among the Songhay than anyone other than Rouch himself, here gives the first full account of Rouch the griot, whose own story scintillates with important implications for anthropology, ethnography, African studies, and film.
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Cinematic Hamlet
The Films of Olivier, Zeffirelli, Branagh, and Almereyda
Patrick J. Cook
Ohio University Press, 2011

Hamlet has inspired four outstanding film adaptations that continue to delight a wide and varied audience and to offer provocative new interpretations of Shakespeare’s most popular play. Cinematic Hamlet contains the first scene-by-scene analysis of the methods used by Laurence Olivier, Franco Zeffirelli, Kenneth Branagh, and Michael Almereyda to translate Hamlet into highly distinctive and remarkably effective films.

Applying recent developments in neuroscience and psychology, Patrick J. Cook argues that film is a medium deploying an abundance of devices whose task it is to direct attention away from the film’s viewing processes and toward the object represented. Through careful analysis of each film’s devices, he explores the ways in which four brilliant directors rework the play into a radically different medium, engaging the viewer through powerful instinctive drives and creating audiovisual vehicles that support and complement Shakespeare’s words and story.

Cinematic Hamlet will prove to be indispensable for anyone wishing to understand how these films rework Shakespeare into the powerful medium of film.

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The Cinematic Life of the Gene
Jackie Stacey
Duke University Press, 2010
What might the cinema tell us about how and why the prospect of cloning disturbs our most profound ideas about gender, sexuality, difference, and the body? In The Cinematic Life of the Gene, the pioneering feminist film theorist Jackie Stacey argues that as a cultural technology of imitation, cinema is uniquely situated to help us theorize “the genetic imaginary,” the constellation of fantasies that genetic engineering provokes. Since the mid-1990s there has been remarkable innovation in genetic engineering and a proliferation of films structured by anxieties about the changing meanings of biological and cultural reproduction. Bringing analyses of several of these films into dialogue with contemporary cultural theory, Stacey demonstrates how the cinema animates the tropes and enacts the fears at the heart of our genetic imaginary. She engages with film theory; queer theories of desire, embodiment, and kinship; psychoanalytic theories of subject formation; and debates about the reproducibility of the image and the shift from analog to digital technologies.

Stacey examines the body-horror movies Alien: Resurrection and Species in light of Jean Baudrillard’s apocalyptic proclamations about cloning and “the hell of the same,” and she considers the art-house thrillers Gattaca and Code 46 in relation to ideas about imitation, including feminist theories of masquerade, postcolonial conceptualizations of mimicry, and queer notions of impersonation. Turning to Teknolust and Genetic Admiration, independent films by feminist directors, she extends Walter Benjamin’s theory of aura to draw an analogy between the replication of biological information and the reproducibility of the art object. Stacey suggests new ways to think about those who are not what they appear to be, the problem of determining identity in a world of artificiality, and the loss of singularity amid unchecked replication.

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Cinematic Prophylaxis
Globalization and Contagion in the Discourse of World Health
Kirsten Ostherr
Duke University Press, 2005
A timely contribution to the fields of film history, visual cultures, and globalization studies, Cinematic Prophylaxis provides essential historical information about how the representation of biological contagion has affected understandings of the origins and vectors of disease. Kirsten Ostherr tracks visual representations of the contamination of bodies across a range of media, including 1940s public health films; entertainment films such as 1950s alien invasion movies and the 1995 blockbuster Outbreak; television programs in the 1980s, during the early years of the aids epidemic; and the cyber-virus plagued Internet. In so doing, she charts the changes—and the alarming continuities—in popular understandings of the connection between pathologized bodies and the global spread of disease.

Ostherr presents the first in-depth analysis of the public health films produced between World War II and the 1960s that popularized the ideals of world health and taught viewers to imagine the presence of invisible contaminants all around them. She considers not only the content of specific films but also their techniques for making invisible contaminants visible. By identifying the central aesthetic strategies in films produced by the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control, and other institutions, she reveals how ideas about racial impurity and sexual degeneracy underlay messages ostensibly about world health. Situating these films in relation to those that preceded and followed them, Ostherr shows how, during the postwar era, ideas about contagion were explicitly connected to the global circulation of bodies. While postwar public health films embraced the ideals of world health, they invoked a distinct and deeply anxious mode of representing the spread of disease across national borders.

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Cine-Mobility
Twentieth-Century Transformations in Korea’s Film and Transportation
Han Sang Kim
Harvard University Press, 2022

In 1916, a group of Korean farmers and their children gathered to watch a film depicting the enthronement of the Japanese emperor. For this screening, a unit of the colonial government’s news agency brought a projector and generator by train to their remote rural town. Before the formation of commercial moviegoing culture for colonial audiences in rural Korean towns, many films were sent to such towns and villages as propaganda. The colonial authorities, as well as later South Korean postcolonial state authorities, saw film as the most effective medium for disseminating their political messages. In Cine-Mobility, Han Sang Kim argues that the force of propaganda films in Korea was derived primarily not from their messages but from the new mobility of the viewing position.

From the first film shot in Korea in 1901 through early internet screen cultures in late 1990s South Korea, Cine-Mobility explores the association between cinematic media and transportation mobility, not only in diverse and discrete forms such as railroads, motorways, automobiles, automation, and digital technologies, but also in connection with the newly established rules and restrictions and the new culture of mobility, including changes in gender dynamics, that accompanied it.

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The Circle of Mountains
A Basque Shepherding Community
Sandra Ott
University of Nevada Press, 1993

Ott provides an excellent ethnography of a French Basque agrarian and sheepherding community. The commune of Sainte-Engrâce extends along a mountain valley in the southeastern corner of Soule, one of the three Basque provences in France. In The Circle of Mountains, Sandra Ott examines the importance of cooperation and reciprocity as the essential basis for the main institutions within this community. These French Basques visualize their community as a circle, and their vision of living in "the circle of mountians," rather than in a valley, reflects their perspective on the society in which they live. The first half of the book incorporates material on history, ecology and economy, and delves deeply into the domestic organization, kinship, and neighborliness of this Basque community. In the second half of the book, the author introduces the males' customary roles as shepherds and cheesemakers. Following a detailed commentary on these vocations, Ott suggests that these seemingly prosaic activities represent the male attempt at symbolic fulfillment of the female procreative and nurturing roles. In a new afterword, Ott discusses developments that have impacted life in the pastoral community of Sainte-Engrâce since the original publication of the book—including the acquisition of telephones and the construction of roads to nearly every home.The Circle of Mountains will be of interest not only to social anthropologists but also to those concerned with the Basque language and culture and to scholars and students of ethnology, international studies, and political science.

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A Circle of Trust
Remembering SNCC
Greenberg, Cheryl L
Rutgers University Press, 1998
Activists and historians reflect together on the civil rights movement and its meanings, and on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's place in American history.

"The reminiscences and reflections voiced at the SNCC reunion remind us of the remarkable vision and courageous dedication of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Framed by Cheryl Greenberg's eloquent and probing introduction, the SNCC veterans' comments about the triumphs and limitations of their movement represent a major contribution to the historical literature on race and power in modern America." --Raymond Arsenault, University of South Florida

On the occasion of the SNCC's 25th anniversary, more than 500 people gathered at Trinity College in Connecticut to both celebrate and critique its accomplishments. More than 40 SNCC members tell their stories and reflect on the contributions, limits and legacies of the movement in A Circle of Trust. Engaging in spirited debate with each other, with historians of the movement, and with contemporary political culture more broadly, these former and perpetual activists speak of their vision of a just society and what still remains to be done. With increasing racial tension and the continued debate over integration and separatism in America in the 1990s, the content of this conference is more relevant than ever.

Cheryl Lynn Greenberg begins with an overview of SNCC and introduces each of the chapters of oral history. Participants explore the origins of SNCC, its early adoption of nonviolent protest, its ultimate renunciation of liberal integration and embrace of militant black radicalism, its refusal to repudiate far-left organizations, and controversies over the roles of women in SNCC and society at large. The result is a thoughtful, moving, sometimes acrimonious, sometimes celebratory account of one of the most significant civil rights organizations and its successes and failures.

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Circles of Fantasy
Convention in the Plays of Chikamatsu
C. Andrew Gerstle
Harvard University Press, 1986

The vibrant merchant culture of Tokugawa Japan gave rise to many new forms of art, none more fascinating than the puppet theater, Jōruri, created chiefly by Chikamatsu Monzaemon, the foremost playwright of popular Japanese drama. In this analysis of Chikamatsu's artistry, Dr. Gerstle focuses on features hitherto neglected by Western scholars the musical structure of Jōruri, integral to the form, mood, and movement of the drama. For extensive translations from the various types of Chikamatsu's dramas, Gerstle supplies the musical notations, which illuminate the sophisticated conventions of this unique and timeless artistic form.

Chikamatsu's art, combining puppets, text, samisen music, and chanting/narration, encompasses three major types of drama--history, contemporary-life, and love-suicide plays--each with distinct structural features. Gerstle shows how the music of Jōruri, a mixture of the samisen and chanting/narration, supplements the texts and expresses a dramatized action or emotion through complex changes in pitch, tempo, and style of delivery.

Richly illustrated with woodblock prints, this is a fascinating study, which will be welcomed by scholars of Japanese culture, literature, and musicology.

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Circling Dixie
Contemporary Southern Culture through a Transatlantic Lens
Helen Taylor
Rutgers University Press, 2000
For Europeans looking across the Atlantic, American culture is often the site of desire, fascination, and envy. In Britain, the rich culture of the American South has made a particularly strong impact. Helen Taylor explores the ways in which contemporary Southern culture has been enthusiastically produced and reproduced in a British context.

Taylor examines some of the South's most significant cultural exports in discussions that range across literature, music, film, television, theater, advertising, and tourism to focus on how and why Southern themes and icons have become so deeply embedded in British cultural life. The enduring legacy of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind can be seen today in the popularity of sequels, revisions, and reworkings of the novel. The conversation between these cultures is further explored in British responses to Alex Haley's Roots, the British theater's special affection for Tennessee Williams's plays, and the marketing of New Orleans as a preferred destination for European tourists. The transformation of Southern culture--itself a hybrid of the European, African, and American--as it circulates back across the Atlantic suggests not only new views of the history, racial politics, music and art of both Britain and the American South, but also an enhanced understanding of the dynamic flow of culture itself.
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Circuits of Culture
Media, Politics, and Indigenous Identity in the Andes
Jeff D. Himpele
University of Minnesota Press, 2007

Set against the background of Bolivia’s prominent urban festival parades and the country’s recent appearance on the front lines of antiglobalization movements, Circuits of Culture is the first social analysis of Bolivian film and television, their circulation through the social and national landscape, and the emergence of the country’s indigenous video movement.

At the heart of Jeff Himpele’s examination is an ethnography of the popular television program, The Open Tribunal of the People. The indigenous and underrepresented majorities in La Paz have used the talk show to publicize their social problems and seek medical and legal assistance from the show’s hosts and the political party they launched. Himpele studies the program in order to identify the possibilities of the mass media as a site for political discourse and as a means of social action.

Charting as well the history of Bolivia’s media culture, Himpele perceptively investigates cinematic media as sites for understanding the modernization of Bolivia, its social movements, and the formation of indigenous identities, and in doing so provides a new framework for exploring the circulation of culture as a way of creating publics, political movements, and producing media.

Jeff D. Himpele is associate director for the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning at Princeton University. He is an anthropologist and documentary filmmaker; his films include the award-winning Incidents of Travel in Chichen Itza and Taypi Kala: Six Visions of Tiwanaku.

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Circuits of the Sacred
A Faggotology in the Black Latinx Caribbean
Carlos Ulises Decena
Duke University Press, 2023
In Circuits of the Sacred Carlos Ulises Decena examines transnational black Latinx Caribbean immigrant queer life and spirit. Decena models what he calls a faggotology—the erotic in the divine as found in the disreputable and the excessive—as foundational to queer black critical and expressive praxis of the future. Drawing on theoretical analysis, memoir, creative writing, and ethnography of Santería/Lucumí in Santo Domingo, Havana, and New Jersey, Decena moves between languages, locations, pronouns, and genres to map the itineraries of blackness as a “circuit,” a multipronged and multisensorial field. A feminist pilgrimage and extended conversation with the dead, Decena’s study is a provocative work that transforms the academic monograph into a gathering of stories, theoretical innovation, and expressive praxis to channel voices, ancestors, deities, theorists, artists, and spirits from the vantage point of radical feminism and queer-of-color thinking.
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Circular Villages of the Monongahela Tradition
Bernard K. Means
University of Alabama Press, 2007
Between A.D. 1000 and 1635, the inhabitants of southwestern Pennsylvania and portions of adjacent states—known to archaeologists as the Monongahela Culture or Tradition—began to reside regularly in ring-shaped village settlements. These circular settlements consisted of dwellings around a central plaza. A cross-cultural and cross-temporal review of archaeological, ethnohistorical, and ethnographic cases demonstrates that this settlement form appeared repeatedly and independently worldwide, including throughout portions of the Eastern Woodlands, among the Plains Indians, and in Central and South America.
 
Specific archaeological cases are drawn from Somerset County, Pennsylvania, that has the largest number of completely excavated Monongahela villages. Most of these villages, excavated in the 1930s as federal relief projects, were recently dated. Full analysis of the extensive excavations reveals not only the geometric architectural patterning of the villages, but enables an analysis of the social groupings, population estimates, and economic status of residents who inhabited the circular villages. Circular patterning can be revealed at less fully excavated archaeological sites. Focused test excavations can help confirm circular village plans without extensive and destructive excavations.
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Circulating Queerness
Before the Gay and Lesbian Novel
Natasha Hurley
University of Minnesota Press, 2018

A new history of the queer novel shows its role in constructing gay and lesbian lives

The gay and lesbian novel has long been a distinct literary genre with its own awards, shelving categories, bookstore spaces, and book reviews. But very little has been said about the remarkable history of its emergence in American literature, particularly the ways in which the novel about homosexuality did not just reflect but actively produced queer life.

Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s insight that the history of society is connected to the history of language, author Natasha Hurley charts the messy, complex movement by which the queer novel produced the very frames that made it legible as a distinct literature and central to the imagination of queer worlds. Her vision of the queer novel's development revolves around the bold argument that literary circulation is the key ingredient that has made the gay and lesbian novel and its queer forebears available to its audiences.

Challenging the narrative that the gay and lesbian novel came into view in response to the emergence of homosexuality as a concept, Hurley posits a much longer history of this novelistic genre. In so doing, she revises our understanding of the history of sexuality, as well as of the processes of producing new concepts and the evolution of new categories of language.

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The Circulation of Children
Kinship, Adoption, and Morality in Andean Peru
Jessaca B. Leinaweaver
Duke University Press, 2008
In this vivid ethnography, Jessaca B. Leinaweaver explores “child circulation,” informal arrangements in which indigenous Andean children are sent by their parents to live in other households. At first glance, child circulation appears tantamount to child abandonment. When seen in that light, the practice is a violation of international norms regarding children’s rights, guidelines that the Peruvian state relies on in regulating legal adoptions. Leinaweaver demonstrates that such an understanding of the practice is simplistic and misleading. Her in-depth ethnographic analysis reveals child circulation to be a meaningful, pragmatic social practice for poor and indigenous Peruvians, a flexible system of kinship that has likely been part of Andean lives for centuries. Child circulation may be initiated because parents cannot care for their children, because a childless elder wants company, or because it gives a young person the opportunity to gain needed skills.

Leinaweaver provides insight into the emotional and material factors that bring together and separate indigenous Andean families in the highland city of Ayacucho. She describes how child circulation is intimately linked to survival in the city, which has had to withstand colonialism, economic isolation, and the devastating civil war unleashed by the Shining Path. Leinaweaver examines the practice from the perspective of parents who send their children to live in other households, the adults who receive them, and the children themselves. She relates child circulation to international laws and norms regarding children’s rights, adoptions, and orphans, and to Peru’s history of racial conflict and violence. Given that history, Leinaweaver maintains that it is not surprising that child circulation, a practice associated with Peru’s impoverished indigenous community, is alternately ignored, tolerated, or condemned by the state.

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Circumcision and Medicine in Modern Turkey
Oyman Basaran
University of Texas Press, 2023

An investigation of how the expansion of modern medicine in Turkey transformed young boys’ experiences of circumcision.

In Turkey, circumcision is viewed as both a religious obligation and a rite of passage for young boys, as communities celebrate the ritual through gatherings, gifts, and special outfits. Yet the procedure is a potentially painful and traumatic ordeal. With the expansion of modern medicine, the social position of sünnetçi (male circumcisers) became subject to the institutional arrangements of Turkey’s evolving health care and welfare system. In the transition from traditional itinerant circumcisers to low-ranking health officers in the 1960s and hospital doctors in the 1990s, the medicalization of male circumcision has become entangled with state formation, market fetishism, and class inequalities.

Based on Oyman Başaran’s extensive ethnographic and historical research, Circumcision and Medicine in Modern Turkey is a close examination of the socioreligious practice of circumcision in twenty-five cities and their outlying towns and villages in Turkey. By analyzing the changing subjectivity of medical actors who seek to alleviate suffering in male circumcision, Başaran offers a psychoanalytically informed alternate approach to the standard sociological arguments surrounding medicalization and male circumcision.

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Circus Queen and Tinker Bell
The Memoir of Tiny Kline
Tiny Kline. Edited by Janet M. Davis
University of Illinois Press, 2008

This engaging memoir follows the life and career of circus performer Tiny Kline (1891-1964) from the burlesque house to the circus tent, and on to Disneyland and the silver screen. While working for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, Kline became well known for her signature "slide for life" stunt, an "iron jaw" act in which she slid to the ground while dangling from trapeze rigging by her teeth. Kline renewed her spectacular acrobatics at the age of seventy when she played Tinker Bell in the "Fantasy in the Sky" fireworks show at Disneyland. In that same year, she also began writing her life story.

Extensively annotated by Janet M. Davis, this memoir documents twentieth-century changes in popular amusements, while providing fresh insight into circus personalities such as John Ringling, acrobat Lillian Leitzel, and big cat trainer Mabel Stark, as well as mainstream entertainers like Florenz Ziegfeld, John Philip Sousa, and others. Kline also provides intimate details about the daily machinations at the circus, including fascinating accounts of its sexual politics, racial dynamics, risky nature, and labor relations.

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Cisgender
Disorienting a Category
Perry Zurn
Duke University Press, 2026

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Cistem Failure
Essays on Blackness and Cisgender
Marquis Bey
Duke University Press, 2022
In Cistem Failure Marquis Bey meditates on the antagonistic relationship between blackness and cisgender. Bey asks, What does it mean to have a gender that “matches” one’s sex---that is, to be cisgender---when decades of feminist theory have destroyed the belief that there is some natural way to be a sex? Moving from the The Powerpuff Girls to the greeting “How ya mama’n’em?” to their own gender identity, Bey finds that cisgender is too flat as a category to hold the myriad ways that people who may or may not have undergone gender-affirmative interventions depart from gender alignment. At the same time, blackness, they contend, strikes at the heart of cisgender’s invariable coding as white: just as transness names a non-cis space, blackness implies a non-cis space. By showing how blackness opens up a way to subvert the hegemonic power of the gender binary, Bey makes a case for an antiracist gender abolition project that rejects cisgender as a regulatory apparatus.
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Cities and Citizenship
James Holston, ed.
Duke University Press, 1998
Cities and Citizenship is a prize-winning collection of essays that considers the importance of cities in the making of modern citizens. For most of the modern era the nation and not the city has been the principal domain of citizenship. This volume demonstrates, however, that cities are especially salient sites for examining the current renegotiations of citizenship, democracy, and national belonging.
Just as relations between nations are changing in the current phase of global capitalism, so too are relations between nations and cities. Written by internationally prominent scholars, the essays in Cities and Citizenship propose that “place” remains fundamental to these changes and that cities are crucial places for the development of new alignments of local and global identity. Through case studies from Africa, Europe, Latin America, and North America, the volume shows how cities make manifest national and transnational realignments of citizenship and how they generate new possibilities for democratic politics that transform people as citizens. Previously published as a special issue of Public Culture that won the 1996 Best Single Issue of a Journal Award from the Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers, the collection showcases a photo essay by Cristiano Mascaro, as well as two new essays by James Holston and Thomas Bender.
Cities and Citizenship will interest students and scholars of anthropology, geography, sociology, planning, and urban studies, as well as globalization and political science.

Contributors. Arjun Appadurai, Etienne Balibar, Thomas Bender, Teresa P. R. Caldeira, Mamadou Diouf, Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, James Holston, Marco Jacquemet, Christopher Kamrath, Cristiano Mascaro, Saskia Sassen, Michael Watts, Michel Wieviorka


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Cities and Economic Development
From the Dawn of History to the Present
Paul Bairoch
University of Chicago Press, 1988
When and how were cities born? Does urbanization foster innovation and economic development? What was the level of urbanization in traditional societies? Did the Industrial Revolution facilitate urbanization? Has the growth of cities in the Third World been a handicap or an asset to economic development?

In this revised translation of De Jéricho à Mexico, Paul Bairoch seeks the answers to these questions and provides a comprehensive study of the evolution of the city and its relation to economic life. Bairoch examines the development of cities from the dawn of urbanization (Jericho) to the explosive growth of the contemporary Third World city. In particular, he defines the roles of agriculture and industrialization in the rise of cities.

"A hefty history, from the Neolithic onward. It's ambitious in scope and rich in subject, detailing urbanization and, of course, the links between cities and economies. Scholarly, accessible, and significant."—Newsday

"This book offers a path-breaking synthesis of the vast literature on the history of urbanization."—John C. Brown, Journal of Economic Literature

"One leaves this volume with the feeling of positions intelligently argued and related to the existing state of theory and knowledge. One also has the pleasure of reading a book unusually well-written. It will long both be a standard and stimulate new thought on the central issue of urban and economic growth."—Thomas A. Reiner, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science

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Cities and Nature in the American West
Char Miller
University of Nevada Press, 2010
In less than a century, the American West has transformed from a predominantly rural region to one where most people live in metropolitan centers. Cities and Nature in the American West offers provocative analyses of this transformation. Each essay explores the intersection of environmental, urban, and western history, providing a deeper understanding of the com- plex processes by which the urban West has shaped and been shaped by its sustaining environment. The book also considers how the West’s urban development has altered the human experience and perception of nature, from the administration and marketing of national parks to the consumer roots of popular environ- mentalism; the politics of land and water use; and the challenges of environmental inequities. A number of essays address the cultural role of wilderness, nature, and such activities as camping. Others examine the increasingly per- vasive power of the West’s urban areas and urbanites to redefine the very foundations and future of the American West.
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Cities Beyond Crisis
Race, Affect, and Urban Culture in Twenty-First-Century Iberia
Catalina Iannone
Vanderbilt University Press, 2025
This book is freely available in an open-access edition thanks to the generous support of The Ohio State University Libraries.

In Cities Beyond Crisis, Catalina Iannone studies the rapid evolution of Iberian urban centers in the years following the 2008 financial crisis, identifying how this event catalyzed a protracted period of unraveling and reorganization in the region. Arguing that the affects and effects of the crisis are best understood when embedded within local environments, Cities Beyond Crisis focuses on how textual, visual, and spatial interventions both drove and contested change in two racially diverse, historically marginalized neighborhoods in the capital cities of Spain and Portugal—Madrid’s Lavapiés and Lisbon’s Mouraria. Through a critical examination of the narratives shaping public perception of these spaces, whether promoting their development and consumption or challenging market-oriented trends, Iannone demonstrates how the stories that stakeholders across the ideological spectrum told about these districts illuminate enduring attachments and aspirations in each nation’s relationship to race. By approaching the study of space as a contested and contingent social product, this book takes an interdisciplinary approach, drawing from both humanistic and social science theories and practices to show how cultural production shapes and is shaped by the built environment.
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Cities for Life
How Communities Can Recover from Trauma and Rebuild for Health
Jason Corburn
Island Press, 2021
Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA) Place Book Award Winner (2022)

What if cities around the world actively worked to promote the health and healing of all of their residents? Cities contribute to the traumas that cause unhealthy stress, with segregated neighborhoods, insecure housing, few playgrounds, environmental pollution, and unsafe streets, particularly for the poor and residents who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.

Some cities around the world are already helping their communities heal by investing more in peacemaking and parks than in policing; focusing on community decision-making instead of data surveillance; changing regulations to permit more libraries than liquor stores; and building more affordable housing than highways. These cities are declaring racism a public health and climate change crisis, and taking the lead in generating equitable outcomes.                

In Cities for Life, public health expert Jason Corburn shares lessons from three of these cities: Richmond, California; Medellín, Colombia; and Nairobi, Kenya. Corburn draws from his work with citizens, activists, and decision-makers in these cities over a ten-year period, as individuals and communities worked to heal from trauma—from gun violence, housing and food insecurity, and poverty. Corburn shows how any community can rebuild their social institutions, practices, and policies to be more focused on healing and health. This means not only centering those most traumatized in decision-making, Corburn explains, but confronting historically discriminatory, exclusionary, and racist urban institutions, and promoting healing-focused practices, place-making, and public policies.
  
Cities for Life is essential reading for urban planning, design, healthcare, and public health professionals as they work to reverse entrenched institutional practices through new policies, rules, norms, and laws that address their damage and promote health and healing.
 
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Cities From Scratch
Poverty and Informality in Urban Latin America
Brodwyn Fischer, Bryan McCann, Javier Auyero, eds.
Duke University Press, 2014
This collection of essays challenges long-entrenched ideas about the history, nature, and significance of the informal neighborhoods that house the vast majority of Latin America's urban poor. Until recently, scholars have mainly viewed these settlements through the prisms of crime and drug-related violence, modernization and development theories, populist or revolutionary politics, or debates about the cultures of poverty. Yet shantytowns have proven both more durable and more multifaceted than any of these perspectives foresaw. Far from being accidental offshoots of more dynamic economic and political developments, they are now a permanent and integral part of Latin America's urban societies, critical to struggles over democratization, economic transformation, identity politics, and the drug and arms trades. Integrating historical, cultural, and social scientific methodologies, this collection brings together recent research from across Latin America, from the informal neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro and Mexico City, Managua and Buenos Aires. Amid alarmist exposés, Cities from Scratch intervenes by considering Latin American shantytowns at a new level of interdisciplinary complexity.

Contributors. Javier Auyero, Mariana Cavalcanti, Ratão Diniz, Emilio Duhau, Sujatha Fernandes, Brodwyn Fischer, Bryan McCann, Edward Murphy, Dennis Rodgers
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Cities in the Anthropocene
New Ecology and Urban Politics
Ihnji Jon
Pluto Press, 2021

Climate change is real, and extreme weather events are its physical manifestations. These extreme events affect how we live and work in cities, and subsequently the way we design, plan, and govern them. Taking action ‘for the environment’ is not only a moral imperative; instead, it is activated by our everyday experience in the city.

Based on the author’s site visits and interviews in Darwin (Australia), Tulsa (Oklahoma), Cleveland (Ohio), and Cape Town (South Africa), this book tells the story of how cities can lead a transformative pro-environment politics.

National governments often fail to make binding agreements that bring about radical actions for the environment. This book shows how cities, as local sites of mobilizing a collective, political agenda, can be frontiers for activating the kind of environmental politics that appreciates the role of ‘nature’ in the everyday functioning of our urban life.

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Cities in the Anthropocene
New Ecology and Urban Politics
Ihnji Jon
Pluto Press, 2021

Climate change is real, and extreme weather events are its physical manifestations. These extreme events affect how we live and work in cities, and subsequently the way we design, plan, and govern them. Taking action ‘for the environment’ is not only a moral imperative; instead, it is activated by our everyday experience in the city.

Based on the author’s site visits and interviews in Darwin (Australia), Tulsa (Oklahoma), Cleveland (Ohio), and Cape Town (South Africa), this book tells the story of how cities can lead a transformative pro-environment politics.

National governments often fail to make binding agreements that bring about radical actions for the environment. This book shows how cities, as local sites of mobilizing a collective, political agenda, can be frontiers for activating the kind of environmental politics that appreciates the role of ‘nature’ in the everyday functioning of our urban life.

[more]

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Cities in the Urban Age
A Dissent
Robert A. Beauregard
University of Chicago Press, 2018
We live in a self-proclaimed Urban Age, where we celebrate the city as the source of economic prosperity, a nurturer of social and cultural diversity, and a place primed for democracy. We proclaim the city as the fertile ground from which progress will arise. Without cities, we tell ourselves, human civilization would falter and decay. In Cities in the Urban Age, Robert A. Beauregard argues that this line of thinking is not only hyperbolic—it is too celebratory by half.

For Beauregard, the city is a cauldron for four haunting contradictions. First, cities are equally defined by both their wealth and their poverty. Second, cities are simultaneously environmentally destructive and yet promise sustainability. Third, cities encourage rule by political machines and oligarchies, even as they are essentially democratic and at least nominally open to all. And fourth, city life promotes tolerance among disparate groups, even as the friction among them often erupts into violence. Beauregard offers no simple solutions or proposed remedies for these contradictions; indeed, he doesn’t necessarily hold that they need to be resolved, since they are generative of city life. Without these four tensions, cities wouldn’t be cities. Rather, Beauregard argues that only by recognizing these ambiguities and contradictions can we even begin to understand our moral obligations, as well as the clearest paths toward equality, justice, and peace in urban settings.
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Cities Made of Boundaries
Mapping Social Life in Urban Form
Benjamin N. Vis
University College London, 2018
Cities Made of Boundaries presents the theoretical foundation and concepts for a new social scientific urban morphological mapping method, Boundary Line Type (BLT) mapping. Its vantage is a plea to establish a frame of reference for radically comparative urban studies positioned between geography and archaeology. Based in multidisciplinary social and spatial theory, a critical realist understanding of the boundaries that compose built space is operationalized by a mapping practice utilizing Geographical Information Systems (GIS).
Benjamin N. Vis gives a precise account of how BLT mapping can be applied to detailed historical, reconstructed, contemporary, and archaeological urban plans, exemplified by sixteenth to twenty-first-century Winchester and Classic Maya Chunchucmil. This account demonstrates how the functional and experiential difference between compact western and tropical dispersed cities can be explored.

The methodological development of Cities Made of Boundaries will appeal to readers interested in the comparative social analysis of built environments, and those seeking to expand the evidence-base of design options to structure urban life and development.
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Cities of Farmers
Urban Agricultural Practices and Processes
Julie C. Dawson and Alfonso Morales
University of Iowa Press, 2016
Full-scale food production in cities: is it an impossibility? Or is it a panacea for all that ails urban communities? Today, it’s a reality, but many people still don’t know how much of an impact this emerging food system is having on cities and their residents. This book showcases the work of the farmers, activists, urban planners, and city officials in the United States and Canada who are advancing food production. They have realized that, when it’s done right, farming in cities can enhance the local ecology, foster cohesive communities, and improve the quality of life for urban residents.

Implementing urban agriculture often requires change in the physical, political, and social-organizational landscape. Beginning with a look at how and why city people grew their own food in the early twentieth century, the contributors to Cities of Farmers examine the role of local and regional regulations and politics, especially the creation of food policy councils, in making cities into fertile ground for farming. The authors describe how food is produced and distributed in cities via institutions as diverse as commercial farms, community gardens, farmers’ markets, and regional food hubs. Growing food in vacant lots and on rooftops affects labor, capital investment, and human capital formation, and as a result urban agriculture intersects with land values and efforts to build affordable housing. It also can contribute to cultural renewal and improved health.

This book enables readers to understand and contribute to their local food system, whether they are raising vegetables in a community garden, setting up a farmers’ market, or formulating regulations for farming and composting within city limits.

CONTRIBUTORS
Catherine Brinkley, Benjamin W. Chrisinger, Nevin Cohen, Michèle Companion, Lindsey Day-Farnsworth, Janine de la Salle, Luke Drake, Sheila Golden, Randel D. Hanson, Megan Horst, Nurgul Fitzgerald, Becca B. R. Jablonski, Laura Lawson, Kara Martin, Nathan McClintock, Alfonso Morales, Jayson Otto, Anne Pfeiffer, Anne Roubal, Todd M. Schmit, Erin Silva, Michael Simpson, Lauren Suerth, Dory Thrasher, Katinka Wijsman
 
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Cities, Sagebrush, and Solitude
Urbanization and Cultural Conflict in the Great Basin
Dennis R. Judd
University of Nevada Press, 2015
Cities, Sagebrush, and Solitude explores the transformation of the largest desert in North America, the Great Basin, into America’s last urban frontier. In recent decades Las Vegas, Reno, Salt Lake City, and Boise have become the anchors for sprawling metropolitan regions. This population explosion has been fueled by the maturing of Las Vegas as the nation’s entertainment capital, the rise of Reno as a magnet for multitudes of California expatriates, the development of Salt Lake City’s urban corridor along the Wasatch Range, and the growth of Boise’s celebrated high-tech economy and hip urban culture.

The blooming of cities in a fragile desert region poses a host of environmental challenges. The policies required to manage their impact, however, often collide with an entrenched political culture that has long resisted cooperative or governmental effort. The alchemical mixture of three ingredients--cities, aridity, and a libertarian political outlook--makes the Great Basin a compelling place to study. This book addresses a pressing question: are large cities ultimately sustainable in such a fragile environment?
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Cities, Sin, and Social Reform in Imperial Germany
Andrew Lees
University of Michigan Press, 2002
Cities, Sin, and Social Reform in Imperial Germany breaks new ground in the history of social thought and action in Imperial Germany, focusing on socially liberal efforts to counteract perceived problems in the area of moral behavior.
Thematically and methodologically wide-ranging and innovative, this volume considers a broad spectrum of responses not only to the supposed breakdown of social cohesion but also to specific forms of deviant behavior. It draws on large numbers of writings from the period by clergymen, jurists, medical doctors, educators, social workers, and others. This literature illuminates the histories not only of urbanization and cities but also of sexuality and Christianity, crime and criminology, leisure and education, youth and women, charity and social work, and the welfare state as well as local government.
Focusing on positive instead of escapist responses to the challenges that inhered in urban society, this work can be read as part of an ongoing reassessment of the German Empire that points away from the idea that Germans were traveling an antimodernist Sonderweg, or special path, that led inevitably to National Socialism and the Third Reich. Although intended primarily for scholars and students of modern Germany, this book should speak to a variety of readers, among them anyone who cares about the history of cities, deviant behavior, or social reform.
Andrew Lees is Professor of History, Rutgers University.
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Citizen Brown
Race, Democracy, and Inequality in the St. Louis Suburbs
Colin Gordon
University of Chicago Press, 2019
The 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, ignited nationwide protests and brought widespread attention police brutality and institutional racism. But Ferguson was no aberration. As Colin Gordon shows in this urgent and timely book, the events in Ferguson exposed not only the deep racism of the local police department but also the ways in which decades of public policy effectively segregated people and curtailed citizenship not just in Ferguson but across the St. Louis suburbs.

Citizen Brown uncovers half a century of private practices and public policies that resulted in bitter inequality and sustained segregation in Ferguson and beyond. Gordon shows how municipal and school district boundaries were pointedly drawn to contain or exclude African Americans and how local policies and services—especially policing, education, and urban renewal—were weaponized to maintain civic separation. He also makes it clear that the outcry that arose in Ferguson was no impulsive outburst but rather an explosion of pent-up rage against long-standing systems of segregation and inequality—of which a police force that viewed citizens not as subjects to serve and protect but as sources of revenue was only the most immediate example. Worse, Citizen Brown illustrates the fact that though the greater St. Louis area provides some extraordinarily clear examples of fraught racial dynamics, in this it is hardly alone among American cities and regions.

Interactive maps and other companion resources to Citizen Brown are available at the 
book website.
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Citizen, Invert, Queer
Lesbianism and War in Early Twentieth-Century Britain
Deborah Cohler
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
In late nineteenth-century England, “mannish” women were considered socially deviant but not homosexual. A half-century later, such masculinity equaled lesbianism in the public imagination. How did this shift occur? Citizen, Invert, Queer illustrates that the equation of female masculinity with female homosexuality is a relatively recent phenomenon, a result of changes in national and racial as well as sexual discourses in early twentieth-century public culture.
 
Incorporating cultural histories of prewar women’s suffrage debates, British sexology, women’s work on the home front during World War I, and discussions of interwar literary representations of female homosexuality, Deborah Cohler maps the emergence of lesbian representations in relation to the decline of empire and the rise of eugenics in England. Cohler integrates discussions of the histories of male and female same-sex erotics in her readings of New Woman, representations of male and female suffragists, wartime trials of pacifist novelists and seditious artists, and the interwar infamy of novels such as Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.
 
By examining the shifting intersections of nationalism and sexuality before, during, and after the Great War, this book illuminates profound transformations in our ideas about female homosexuality.
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Citizen of the World
The Late Career and Legacy of W. E. B. Du Bois
Edited by Phillip Luke Sinitiere
Northwestern University Press, 2019
In his 1952 book In Battle for Peace, published when W. E. B. Du Bois was eighty-three years old, the brilliant black scholar announced that he was a “citizen of the world.” Citizen of the World chronicles selected chapters of Du Bois’s final three decades between the 1930s and 1960s. It maps his extraordinarily active and productive latter years to social, cultural, and political transformations across the globe.

From his birth in 1868 until his death in 1963, Du Bois sought the liberation of black people in the United States and across the world through intellectual and political labor. His tireless efforts documented and demonstrated connections between freedom for African-descended people abroad and black freedom at home.

In concert with growing scholarship on his twilight years, the essays in this volume assert the fundamental importance of considering Du Bois’s later decades not as a life in decline that descended into blind ideological allegiance to socialism and communism but as the life of a productive, generative intellectual who responded rationally, imaginatively, and radically to massive mid-century changes around the world, and who remained committed to freedom’s realization until his final hour.
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Citizen Power
A Citizen Leadership Manual Introducing the Art of No-Blame Problem Solving
Harry S. Pozycki
Rutgers University Press, 2020
The Citizens Campaign, co-founded by the author and his wife, Caroline B. Pozycki, offers citizen leadership training and citizen leadership service opportunities for regular citizens. CITIZEN POWER gives all Americans the know how to become no-blame problem solvers and be part of what is emerging as a new model for a citizen driven national public service.
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Citizen Speak
The Democratic Imagination in American Life
Andrew J. Perrin
University of Chicago Press, 2006

When we think about what constitutes being a good citizen, routine activities like voting, letter writing, and paying attention to the news spring to mind. But in Citizen Speak, Andrew J. Perrin argues that these activities are only a small part of democratic citizenship—a standard of citizenship that requires creative thinking, talking, and acting.

For Citizen Speak, Perrin met with labor, church, business, and sports organizations and proposed to them four fictive scenarios: what if your senator is involved in a scandal, or your police department is engaged in racial profiling, or a local factory violates pollution laws, or your nearby airport is slated for expansion? The conversations these challenges inspire, Perrin shows, require imagination. And what people can imagine doing in response to those scenarios depends on what’s possible, what’s important, what’s right, and what’s feasible. By talking with one another, an engaged citizenry draws from a repertoire of personal and institutional resources to understand and reimagine responses to situations as they arise. Building on such political discussions, Citizen Speak shows how a rich culture of association and democratic discourse provides the infrastructure for a healthy democracy.

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Citizen Voices
Performing Public Participation in Science and Environment Communication
Edited by Louise Phillips, Anabela Carvalho, and Julie Doyle
Intellect Books, 2012
This volume explores the ways in which citizen voices on science and environmental issues are articulated, heard, marginalized, and silenced in mass media, policymaking, and other public venues. In a range of case studies from countries across Europe and North America, contributors offer empirical insights about the articulation of citizen voices, as well as citizens’ scope for action in different national, cultural, and institutional contexts. Drawing on science and technology, environmental studies, and media and communication studies, they also present methods for foregrounding the role of communication in scientific and environmental governance.
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Citizens against Crime and Violence
Societal Responses in Mexico
Trevor Stack
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Mexico has become notorious for crime-related violence, and the efforts of governments and national and international NGOs to counter this violence have proven largely futile. Citizens against Crime and Violence studies societal responses to crime and violence within one of Mexico’s most affected regions, the state of Michoacán. Based on comparative ethnography conducted over twelve months by a team of anthropologists and sociologists across six localities of Michoacán, ranging from the most rural to the most urban, the contributors consider five varieties of societal responses: local citizen security councils that define security and attempt to influence its policing, including by self-defense groups; cultural activists looking to create safe 'cultural' fields from which to transform their social environment; organizations in the state capital that combine legal and political strategies against less visible violence (forced disappearance, gender violence, anti-LGBT); church-linked initiatives bringing to bear the church’s institutionality, including to denounce 'state capture'; and women’s organizations creating 'safe' networks allowing to influence violence prevention.
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Citizens and Groups in Contemporary China
Victor C. Falkenheim, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 1987
Citizens and Groups in Contemporary China began with two symposia held in 1977 and 1978. The first, a workshop on “The Pursuit of Interest in China,” was held in August 1977 at the University of Michigan, and was organized by Michel Oksenberg and Richard Baum. It was supported by a grant from the Joint Committee on Contemporary China of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies, using funds provided by the Andrew Mellon Foundation. Its principal goal was to use detailed case studies to explore the relevance of interest group approaches to the study of Chinese politics. The second, a panel organized by the editor for the 1978 Chicago meeting of the Association of Asian Studies, sought to apply participatory approaches to the role of social groups in the Chinese political process. The striking degree of overlap in the focus, methodology, and participants in both meetings suggested to a number of the paper writers that there was a need for a more eclectic approach which would focus simultaneously on individual and group actors. The recognition that a volume based on such an approach might serve the needs of students and scholars seeking to examine the dynamics of informal influence and power in China was the stimulus for publishing the studies presented here in book form. [ix]
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Citizens and Paupers
Relief, Rights, and Race, from the Freedmen's Bureau to Workfare
Chad Alan Goldberg
University of Chicago Press, 2008
There was a time when America’s poor faced a stark choice between access to social welfare and full civil rights—a predicament that forced them to forfeit their citizenship in exchange for economic relief. Over time, however, our welfare system improved dramatically. But as Chad Alan Goldberg here demonstrates, its legacy of disenfranchisement persisted. Indeed, from Reconstruction onward, welfare policies have remained a flashpoint for recurring struggles over the boundaries of citizenship.

Citizens and Paupers explores this contentious history by analyzing and comparing three major programs: the Freedmen’s Bureau, the Works Progress Administration, and the present-day system of workfare that arose in the 1990s. Each of these overhauls of the welfare state created new groups of clients, new policies for aiding them, and new disputes over citizenship—conflicts that were entangled in racial politics and of urgent concern for social activists.

This combustible mix of racial tension and social reform continues to influence how we think about welfare, and Citizens and Paupers is an invaluable analysis of the roots of the debate.
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Citizens, Cops, and Power
Recognizing the Limits of Community
Steve Herbert
University of Chicago Press, 2006
Politicians, citizens, and police agencies have long embraced community policing, hoping to reduce crime and disorder by strengthening the ties between urban residents and the officers entrusted with their protection. 

That strategy seems to make sense, but in Citizens, Cops, and Power, Steve Herbert reveals the reasons why it rarely, if ever, works. Drawing on data he collected in diverse Seattle neighborhoods from interviews with residents, observation of police officers, and attendance at community-police meetings, Herbert identifies the many obstacles that make effective collaboration between city dwellers and the police so unlikely to succeed. At the same time, he shows that residents’ pragmatic ideas about the role of community differ dramatically from those held by social theorists.

Surprising and provocative, Citizens, Cops, and Power provides a critical perspective not only on the future of community policing, but on the nature of state-society relations as well.
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Citizens for Decency
Antipornography Crusades as Status Defense
By Louis A. Zurcher, Jr. and R. George Kirkpatrick
University of Texas Press, 1976

Throughout the United States, groups of individuals have been confronting the issues surrounding sexually explicit materials. Many have concurred in their perceptions of what is pornographic, have assessed pornography to be a problem our society must deal with, and have made organized efforts within their communities to stop or restrict the commercial availability of such materials. Citizens for Decency is an examination of two antipornography crusades, one in the Midwest and the other in the Southwest. It examines the evolution and impact of such crusades, the satisfaction derived from participating, and the relevant characteristics of the participants and their opponents. It is the first systematic, comprehensive, and theory-oriented study of antipornography crusades and one of the few studies that analyze movements to resist change.

The book begins with the assumption that the term pornography is a value judgment and that the labeling of sexually explicit materials as “pornographic” can be adequately understood only in the wider context of sociological and psychological structures and processes. In approaching the antipornography crusades, Louis A. Zurcher and R. George Kirkpatrick gathered data by observation and document search and by interviews with persons well informed about and central to the crusades. Their examination of the organizations that directed the two movements is particularly extensive, and their comparative analysis of the two organizations allows them to determine which features are the most important, how these characteristics interact, and what their relationship is to the symbolic crusade.

Among their important findings, the authors show that antipornography crusaders are people discontent with their status who have mobilized to protect the dominance and prestige of their traditional life styles. The participants in the crusades are shown to differ from their opponents in a number of significant ways. In the final chapters, the authors analyze their findings with reference to social movement theory and offer predictions concerning future symbolic crusades.

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Citizens in the Present
Youth Civic Engagement in the Americas
Maria de los Angeles Torres, Irene Rizzini, and Norma Del Rio
University of Illinois Press, 2013
Although media coverage often portrays young people in urban areas as politically apathetic or disruptive, this book provides an antidote to such views through narratives of dedicated youth civic engagement and leadership in Chicago, Mexico City, and Rio de Janeiro. This innovative comparative study provides nuanced accounts of the personal experiences of young people who care deeply about their communities and are actively engaged in a variety of public issues. Drawing from extensive interviews and personal narratives from the young activists themselves, Citizens in the Present presents a vibrant portrait of a new, politically involved generation.

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Citizens’ Media against Armed Conflict
Disrupting Violence in Colombia
Clemencia Rodríguez
University of Minnesota Press, 2011

For two years, Clemencia Rodríguez did fieldwork in regions of Colombia where leftist guerillas, right-wing paramilitary groups, the army, and drug traffickers made their presence felt in the lives of unarmed civilians. Here, Rodríguez tells the story of the ways in which people living in the shadow of these armed intruders use community radio, television, video, digital photography, and the Internet to shield their communities from armed violence’s negative impacts.

Citizens’ media are most effective, Rodríguez posits, when they understand communication as performance rather than simply as persuasion or the transmission of information. Grassroots media that are deeply embedded in the communities they serve and responsive to local needs strengthen the ability of community members to productively react to violent incursions. Rodríguez demonstrates how citizens’ media privilege aspects of community life not hijacked by violence, providing people with the tools and the platform to forge lives for themselves and their families that are not entirely colonized by armed conflict and its effects.

Ultimately, Rodríguez shows that unarmed civilian communities that have been cornered by armed conflict can use community media to repair torn social fabrics, reconstruct eroded bonds, reclaim public spaces, resolve conflict, and sow the seeds of peace and stability.

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Citizens of Fear
Urban Violence in Latin America
Rotker, Susana
Rutgers University Press, 2004
Citizens in Latin American cities live in constant fear, amidst some of the most dangerous conditions on earth. In that vast region, 140 thousand people die violently each year, and one out of three citizens have been directly or indirectly victimized by violence. In Venezuela, adults are on average targets of crime seventeen crimes in their lifetimes, four of which are violent. In Mexico, 97 percent of all reported crimes go unpunished. Crime, in effect, is an undeclared war. Citizens of Fear, in part, assembles survey results of social scientists who document the pervasiveness of violence. But the numbers tell only part of the story. Other contributors present moving testimonials by the victimized and by journalists covering the scene. A third group of essayists explores the implications of the resulting fear for both thought and behavior. As Susana Rotker writes, "The city has been transformed into a space of vulnerability and danger...What I am interested in narrating here is...the generalized sensation of insecurity that taints the Latin American capitals, the sensation that has changed the ways people relate to urban space, to other human beings, to the state, and to the very concept of citizenship. "
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Citizens of Memory
Affect, Representation, and Human Rights in Postdictatorship Argentina
Silvia R. Tandeciarz
Bucknell University Press, 2026
Citizens of Memory explores efforts at recollection in post-dictatorship Argentina and the hoped-for futures they set in motion. The sites, images, narratives, and practices it analyzes address the dark years of state repression (1976-1983) while engaging ongoing debates about how this traumatic past should be transmitted to future generations. This insightful study approaches cultural recall via two theoretical principles—the first understands memory as a social construct that is as much about the past as it is of the present, and the second observes that what distinguishes memory from history is affect. Understanding recollection and storytelling as practices that can help constitute communities of belonging, Tandeciarz suggests that by inciting deep reflection and an active engagement with the legacies of state violence, interventions like those studied here may advance transitional justice and contribute to the construction of less violent futures.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Citizens of Photography
The Camera and the Political Imagination
Edited by Christopher Pinney with the PhotoDemos Collective (Naluwembe Binaisa, Vindhya Buthpitiya, Konstantinos Kalantzis, Christopher Pinney, Ileana L. Selejan, and Sokphea Young)
Duke University Press, 2023
Citizens of Photography explores how photography offers access to forms of citizenship beyond those available through ordinary politics. Through contemporary ethnographic investigations of photographic practice in Nicaragua, Nigeria, Greece, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Cambodia, the PhotoDemos Collective traces the resonances between political representation and photographic representation. The authors emphasize photography as lived practice and how photography’s performative, transformative, and transgressive possibilities facilitate the articulation of new identities. They analyze photography ranging from family albums and social media to state and public archives, showing how it points to new destinations in the context of social movements, the aftermath of atrocity and civil war, and the legacies of past injustices. By foregrounding photography’s open-ended and contingent nature and its ability to subvert and reconfigure conventional political identifications, this volume demonstrates that as much as photography looks to the past, it points to the future, acting in advance of social reality.
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Citizenship and Crisis
Arab Detroit After 9/11
Detroit Arab American Study Group
Russell Sage Foundation, 2009
Is citizenship simply a legal status or does it describe a sense of belonging to a national community? For Arab Americans, these questions took on new urgency after 9/11, as the cultural prejudices that have often marginalized their community came to a head. Citizenship and Crisis reveals that, despite an ever-shifting definition of citizenship and the ease with which it can be questioned in times of national crisis, the Arab communities of metropolitan Detroit continue to thrive. A groundbreaking study of social life, religious practice, cultural values, and political views among Detroit Arabs after 9/11, Citizenship and Crisis argues that contemporary Arab American citizenship and identity have been shaped by the chronic tension between social inclusion and exclusion that has been central to this population's experience in America. According to the landmark Detroit Arab American Study, which surveyed more than 1,000 Arab Americans and is the focus of this book, Arabs express pride in being American at rates higher than the general population. In nine wide-ranging essays, the authors of Citizenship and Crisis argue that the 9/11 backlash did not substantially transform the Arab community in Detroit, nor did it alter the identities that prevail there. The city's Arabs are now receiving more mainstream institutional, educational, and political support than ever before, but they remain a constituency defined as essentially foreign. The authors explore the role of religion in cultural integration and identity formation, showing that Arab Muslims feel more alienated from the mainstream than Arab Christians do. Arab Americans adhere more strongly to traditional values than do other Detroit residents, regardless of religion. Active participants in the religious and cultural life of the Arab American community attain higher levels of education and income, yet assimilation to the American mainstream remains important for achieving enduring social and political gains. The contradictions and dangers of being Arab and American are keenly felt in Detroit, but even when Arab Americans oppose U.S. policies, they express more confidence in U.S. institutions than do non-Arabs in the general population. The Arabs of greater Detroit, whether native-born, naturalized, or permanent residents, are part of a political and historical landscape that limits how, when, and to what extent they can call themselves American. When analyzed against this complex backdrop, the results of The Detroit Arab American Study demonstrate that the pervasive notion in American society that Arabs are not like "us" is simply inaccurate. Citizenship and Crisis makes a rigorous and impassioned argument for putting to rest this exhausted cultural and political stereotype.
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Citizenship and Governance in a Changing City
Somerville, MA
Susan Ostrander
Temple University Press, 2013
Overcoming a past of deteriorating homes, empty storefronts, and corrupt city administrations, Somerville, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston, today proudly defines itself as a longtime immigrant city, a historically blue collar town, and a hip new urban center with a progressive city government.

In Citizenship and Governance in a Changing City, Susan Ostrander shows how beneath current high levels of engagement by Somerville residents lies a struggle about who should be the city's elected leaders and how they should conduct the city's affairs. It is a struggle waged between diverse residents--relatively new immigrants and a new middle class-trying to gain a foothold in democratic participation, and the city's political "old guard." 

Citizenship and Governance in a Changing City informs current debates about the place of immigrants in civic and political life, and the role of voluntary associations in local politics and government. In the process, Ostrander provides useful lessons for many midsize urban communities.
 
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Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany
Rogers Brubaker
Harvard University Press, 1992
The difference between French and German definitions of citizenship is instructive—and, for millions of immigrants from North Africa, Turkey, and Eastern Europe, decisive. Rogers Brubaker shows how this difference—between the territorial basis of the French citizenry and the German emphasis on blood descent—was shaped and sustained by sharply differing understandings of nationhood, rooted in distinctive French and German paths to nation-statehood.
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Citizenship and Those Who Leave
The Politics of Emigration and Expatriation
Edited by Nancy L. Green and Fran‡ois Weil
University of Illinois Press, 2006

Exit, like entry, has helped define citizenship over the last two centuries, yet little attention has been given to the politics of emigration. How have countries impeded or facilitated people leaving?  How have they perceived and regulated those who leave?  What relations do they seek to maintain with their citizens abroad and why? Citizenship and Those Who Leave reverses the immigration perspective to examine how nations define themselves not just through entry but through exit as well.  

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Citizenship Debates
A Reader
Gershon Shafir
University of Minnesota Press, 1998

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Citizenship, Democracy and Belonging in Suburban Britain
Making the Local
David Jeevendrampillai
University College London, 2021
Examines how suburbanites form community in the face of neoliberal isolation.
 
An activist group in outer London’s Surbiton suburb, the Seething Villagers commemorate a fictional local history through tongue-in-cheek community festivals. These admittedly “stupid” gatherings celebrate a mythical village of Seething and its many adventures, including a run-in with a mountain-crushing giant. Citizenship, Democracy and Belonging in Suburban Britain explores how the Seething Villagers and other suburbanite fantasies fashion community in the face of neoliberal isolation. By taking the artists’ playfulness seriously, David Jeevendrampillai demonstrates how suburbanites develop fellow-feeling without access to traditional community centers.
 
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Citizenship, Faith, and Feminism
Jewish and Muslim Women Reclaim Their Rights
Jan Feldman
Brandeis University Press, 2011
Religious women in liberal democracies are “dual citizens” because of their contrasting status as members of both a civic community (in which their gender has no impact on their constitutional guarantee of equal rights) and a traditional religious community (which distributes roles and power based on gender). This book shows how these “dual citizens”—Orthodox Jewish women in Israel, Muslim women in Kuwait, and women of both those faiths in the U.S.—have increasingly deployed their civic citizenship rights in attempts to reform and not destroy their religions. For them, neither “exit” nor acquiescence to traditional religious gender norms is an option. Instead, they use the narrative of civic citizenship combined with a more authentic, if alternative reading of their faith tradition to improve their status.
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Citizenship from Below
Erotic Agency and Caribbean Freedom
Mimi Sheller
Duke University Press, 2012
Citizenship from Below boldly revises the history of the struggles for freedom by emancipated peoples in post-slavery Jamaica, post-independence Haiti, and the wider Caribbean by focusing on the interplay between the state, the body, race, and sexuality. Mimi Sheller offers a new theory of "citizenship from below" to describe the contest between "proper" spaces of legitimate high politics and the disavowed politics of lived embodiment. While acknowledging the internal contradictions and damaging exclusions of subaltern self-empowerment, Sheller roots out from beneath the historical archive traces of a deeper freedom, one expressed through bodily performances, familial relationships, cultivation of the land, and sacred worship.

Attending to the hidden linkages among intimate realms and the public sphere, Sheller explores specific struggles for freedom, including women's political activism in Jamaica; the role of discourses of "manhood" in the making of free subjects, soldiers, and citizens; the fiercely ethnonationalist discourses that excluded South Asian and African indentured workers; the sexual politics of the low-bass beats and "bottoms up" moves in the dancehall; and the struggle for reproductive and LGBT rights and against homophobia in the contemporary Caribbean. Through her creative use of archival sources and emphasis on the connections between intimacy, violence, and citizenship, Sheller enriches critical theories of embodied freedom, sexual citizenship, and erotic agency in all post-slavery societies.


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Citizenship in Cold War America
The National Security State and the Possibilities of Dissent
Andrea Friedman
University of Massachusetts Press, 2014
In the wake of 9/11, many Americans have deplored the dangers to liberty posed by a growing surveillance state. In this book, Andrea Friedman moves beyond the standard security/liberty dichotomy, weaving together often forgotten episodes of early Cold War history to reveal how the obsession with national security enabled dissent and fostered new imaginings of democracy.

The stories told here capture a wide-ranging debate about the workings of the national security state and the meaning of American citizenship. Some of the participants in this debate—women like war bride Ellen Knauff and Pentagon employee Annie Lee Moss—were able to make their own experiences compelling examples of the threats posed by the national security regime. Others, such as Ruth Reynolds and Lolita Lebrón, who advocated an end to American empire in Puerto Rico, or the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, who sought to change the very definition of national security, were less successful. Together, however, they exposed the gap between democratic ideals and government policies.

Friedman traverses immigration law and loyalty boards, popular culture and theoretical treatises, U.S. court-rooms and Puerto Rican jails, to demonstrate how Cold War repression made visible in new ways the unevenness and limitations of American citizenship. Highlighting the ways that race and gender shaped critiques and defenses of the national security regime, she offers new insight into the contradictions of Cold War political culture.
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Citizenship in Question
Evidentiary Birthright and Statelessness
Benjamin N. Lawrance and Jacqueline Stevens, editors
Duke University Press, 2017
Citizenship is often assumed to be a clear-cut issue—either one has it or one does not. However, as the contributors to Citizenship in Question demonstrate, citizenship is not self-evident; it emerges from often obscure written records and is interpreted through ambiguous and dynamic laws. In case studies that analyze the legal barriers to citizenship rights in over twenty countries, the contributors explore how states use evidentiary requirements to create and police citizenship, often based on fictions of racial, ethnic, class, and religious differences. Whether examining the United States’ deportation of its own citizens, the selective use of DNA tests and secret results in Thailand, or laws that have stripped entire populations of citizenship, the contributors emphasize the political, psychological, and personal impact of citizenship policies. Citizenship in Question incites scholars to revisit long-standing political theories and debates about nationality, free movement, and immigration premised on the assumption of clear demarcations between citizens and noncitizens.
 
Contributors. Alfred Babo, Jacqueline Bhabha, Jacqueline Field, Amanda Flaim, Sara L. Friedman, Daniel Kanstroom, Benjamin N. Lawrance, Beatrice McKenzie, Polly J. Price, Rachel E. Rosenbloom, Kim Rubenstein, Kamal Sadiq, Jacqueline Stevens, Margaret D. Stock
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Citizenship, Political Engagement, and Belonging
Immigrants in Europe and the United States
Reed-Danahay, Deborah
Rutgers University Press, 2008

Immigration is continuously and rapidly changing the face of Western countries. While newcomers are harbingers of change, host nations also participate in how new populations are incorporated into their social and political fabric.

Bringing together a transcontinental group of anthropologists, this book provides an in-depth look at the current processes of immigration, political behavior, and citizenship in both the United States and Europe. Essays draw on issues of race, national identity, religion, and more, while addressing questions, including: How should citizenship be defined? In what ways do immigrants use the political process to achieve group aims? And, how do adults and youth learn to become active participants in the public sphere?

Among numerous case studies, examples include instances of racialized citizenship in “Algerian France,” Ireland’s new citizenship laws in response to asylum-seeking mothers, the role of Evangelical Christianity in creating a space for the construction of an identity that transcends state borders, and the Internet as one of the new public spheres for the expression of citizenship, be it local, national, or global.

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Citizenship, Politics, Difference
Perspectives from Sub-Saharan Signed Language Communities
Audrey C. Cooper
Gallaudet University Press, 2015
Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the most linguistically, culturally, and geographically diverse regions of the world, home to more than 2,000 languages. As in the rest of the world, Deaf people live throughout the widely varying sub-Saharan communities, equally rich in their signed languages. An emergent body of scholarly research on sub-Saharan signed languages (SSSL) and related Deaf community organizing has created the opportunity to gather together the informed perspectives presented in this revolutionary collection. Drawing examples from all regions of sub-Saharan Africa—Western, Eastern, Central, and Southern—16 contributors join the volume editors in illuminating the circumstances pertaining to cross-border, cross-regional, and global engagements in sub-Saharan Deaf communities.

       This collection centers upon two interrelated purposes: to examine sub-Saharan African deaf people’s perspectives on citizenship, politics, and difference in relation to SSSL practices, and to analyze SSSL practices in relation to sociopolitical histories and social change interests (including addressing aspects of culture, gender, language usage, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and ability). The editors have organized these themes under three main sections, Sub-Saharan Signed Languages and Deaf Communities, The Politics of Mobilizing Difference, and Citizenship. Such wide-ranging subjects as the ethics of studying Kenyan signed language, sign language and Deaf communities in Eritrea, and overcoming cultural and linguistic barriers to HIV/AIDS education drive home the importance of the unique and varied research in this collection.
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Citrus, Strategy, And Class
Development In Southern Belize
Mark Moberg
University of Iowa Press, 1992

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The City
Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess
University of Chicago Press, 2019
First published in 1925, The City is a trailblazing text in urban history, urban sociology, and urban studies. Its innovative combination of ethnographic observation and social science theory epitomized the Chicago school of sociology. Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and their collaborators were among the first to document the interplay between urban individuals and larger social structures and institutions, seeking patterns within the city’s riot of people, events, and influences. As sociologist Robert J. Sampson notes in his new foreword, though much has changed since The City was first published, we can still benefit from its charge to explain where and why individuals and social groups live as they do.
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The City
Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess
University of Chicago Press, 2019
This is an auto-narrated audiobook version of this book. 

First published in 1925, The City is a trailblazing text in urban history, urban sociology, and urban studies. Its innovative combination of ethnographic observation and social science theory epitomized the Chicago school of sociology. Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and their collaborators were among the first to document the interplay between urban individuals and larger social structures and institutions, seeking patterns within the city’s riot of people, events, and influences. As sociologist Robert J. Sampson notes in his new foreword, though much has changed since The City was first published, we can still benefit from its charge to explain where and why individuals and social groups live as they do.
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The City
Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess
University of Chicago Press, 1984
The City, first published in 1925 and reprinted here in its entirety, is a cross-section of concerns of the Chicago urban school during the period of its most intense activity. Park and Burgess realized that ecological and economic factors were converted into a social organization by the traditions and aspirations of city dwellers. In their efforts to achieve objectivity, these sociologists never lost sight of the values that propel human beings.

"It is a classic which remains relevant largely because it poses questions still unresolved."—Choice
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The City after Property
Abandonment and Repair in Postindustrial Detroit
Sara Safransky
Duke University Press, 2023
In The City after Property, Sara Safransky examines how postindustrial decline generates new forms of urban land politics. In the 2010s, Detroit government officials classified a staggering 150,000 lots—more than a third of the city—as “vacant” or “abandoned.” Analyzing subsequent efforts to shrink the Motor City’s footprint and budget, Safransky presents a new way of conceptualizing urban abandonment. She challenges popular myths that cast Detroit as empty along with narratives that reduce its historical decline to capital and white flight. In connecting contemporary debates over neoliberal urbanism to Cold War histories and the lasting political legacies of global movements for decolonization and Black liberation, she foregrounds how the making of—and challenges to—modern property regimes have shaped urban policy and politics. Drawing on critical geographical theory and community-based ethnography, Safransky shows how private property functions as a racialized construct, an ideology, and a moral force that shapes selves and worlds. By thinking the city “after property,” Safransky illuminates alternative ways of imagining and organizing urban life.
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City and Regional Planning Papers
Alfred Bettman
Harvard University Press

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City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe
Barbara Hanawalt
University of Minnesota Press, 1994

Medieval Europe is known for its sense of ceremony and drama. Knightings, tournaments, coronations, religious processions, and even private celebrations such as baptisms, weddings, and funerals were occasions for ritual, feasting, and public display. This volume is the first to take a comprehensive look at the many types of city spectacles that entertained the masses and confirmed various messages of power in late medieval Europe. Bringing together leading scholars in history, art history, and literature, this interdisciplinary collection sets new standards for the study of medieval popular culture.

Drawing examples from Spain, England, France, Italy, and the Netherlands, most of them in the fifteenth century, the authors explore the uses of ceremony as statements of political power, as pleas for divine intercession, and as expressions of popular culture. Their essays show us spectacles meant to confirm events such as victories, the signing of a city charter, or the coronation of a king. In other circumstances, the spectacle acts as a battleground where a struggle for the control of the metaphors of power is played out between factions within cities or between cities and kings. Still other ceremonies called upon divine spiritual powers in the hope that their intervention might save the urban inhabitants. We see here a public cognizant of the power of symbols to express its goals and achievements, a society reaching the height of sophistication in its manipulation of popular and elite culture for grand shows.
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The City and the Hospital
The Paradox of Medically Overserved Communities
Daniel Skinner, Jonathan R. Wynn, and Berkeley Franz
University of Chicago Press, 2023
A surprising look at how hospitals affect and are affected by their surrounding communities.
 
An enduring paradox of urban public health is that many communities around hospitals are economically distressed and, counterintuitively, medically underserved. In The City and the Hospital two sociologists, Jonathan R. Wynn and Berkeley Franz, and a political scientist, Daniel Skinner, track the multiple causes of this problem and offer policy solutions.
 
Focusing on three urban hospitals—Connecticut’s Hartford Hospital, the flagship of the Hartford Healthcare system; the Cleveland Clinic, which coordinates with other providers for routine care while its main campus provides specialty care; and the University of Colorado Hospital, a rare example of an urban institution that relocated to a new community—the authors analyze the complicated relationship between a hospital and its neighborhoods. On the one hand, hospitals anchor the communities that surround them, often staying in a neighborhood for decades. Hospitals also craft strategies to engage with the surrounding community, many of those focused on buying locally and hiring staff from their surrounding area. On the other hand, hospitals will often only provide care to the neighboring community through emergency departments, reserving advanced medical care and long-term treatment for those who can pay a premium for it. In addition, the authors show, hospitals frequently buy neighborhood real estate and advocate for development programs that drive gentrification and displacement.
 
To understand how urban healthcare institutions work with their communities, the authors address power, history, race, and urbanity as much as the workings of the medical industry. These varied initiatives and effects mean that understanding urban hospitals requires seeing them in a new light—not only as medical centers but as complicated urban forces.
 
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The City Aroused
Queer Places and Urban Redevelopment in Postwar San Francisco
Damon Scott
University of Texas Press, 2023

A history of San Francisco that studies change in the postwar urban landscape in relation to the city's queer culture.

The City Aroused is a lively history of urban development and its influence on queer political identity in postwar San Francisco. By reconstructing the planning and queer history of waterfront drinking establishments, Damon Scott shows that urban renewal was a catalyst for community organizing among racially diverse operators and patrons with far-reaching implications for the national gay rights movement.

Following the exclusion of suspected homosexuals from the maritime trades in West Coast ports in the early 1950s, seamen’s hangouts in the city came to resemble gay bars. Local officials responded by containing the influx of gay men to a strip of bars on the central waterfront while also making plans to raze and rebuild the area. This practice ended when city redevelopment officials began acquiring land in the early 1960s. Aided by law enforcement, they put these queer social clubs out of business, replacing them with heteronormative, desexualized land uses that served larger postwar urban development goals. Scott argues that this shift from queer containment to displacement aroused a collective response among gay and transgender drinking publics who united in solidarity to secure a place in the rapidly changing urban landscape.

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The City as Campus
Urbanism and Higher Education in Chicago
Sharon Haar
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
We are witnessing an explosion of universities and campuses nationwide, and urban schools play an important role in shaping the cities outside their walls. In The City as Campus, Sharon Haar uses Chicago as a case study to examine how universities interact with their urban contexts, demonstrating how higher education became integrated with ideas of urban growth as schools evolved alongside the city.

The City as Campus shows the strain of this integration, detailing historical accounts of battles over space as campus designers faced the challenge of weaving the social, spatial, and architectural conditions of the urban milieu into new forms to meet the changing needs of academia. Through a close analysis of the history of higher education in Chicago, The City as Campus explores how the university's missions of service, teaching, and research have metamorphosed over time, particularly in response to the unique opportunities-and restraints-the city provides. Illustrating how Chicago serves as a site of pedagogical transformation and a location for the larger purpose of the academic community, The City as Campus presents a social and design history of the urban campus as an architectural idea and form.
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