Public art is a form of communication that enables spaces for encounters across difference. These encounters may be routine, repeated, or rare, but all take place in urban spaces infused with emotion, creativity, and experimentation. In Painting Publics, Caitlin Bruce explores how various legal graffiti scenes across the United States, Mexico, and Europe provide diverse ways for artists to navigate their changing relationships with publics, institutions, and commercial entities. 

Painting Publics draws on a combination of interviews with more than 100 graffiti writers as well as participant observation, and uses critical and rhetorical theory to argue that graffiti should be seen as more than counter-cultural resistance. Bruce claims it offers resources for imagining a more democratic city, one that builds and grows from personal relations, abandoned or under-used spaces, commercial sponsorship, and tacit community resources. In the case of Mexico, Germany, and France, there is even some state support for the production and maintenance of civic education through visual culture. 

In her examination of graffiti culture and its spaces of inscription, Bruce allows us to see moments where practitioners actively reckon with possibility.

Is there a link between the colonization of Palestinian lands and the enclosing of Palestinian minds? The Palestinian Idea argues that it is precisely through film and media that hope can occasionally emerge amidst hopelessness, emancipation amidst oppression, freedom amidst apartheid. Greg Burris employs the work of Edward W. Said, Jacques Rancière, and Cedric J. Robinson in order to locate Palestinian utopia in the heart of the Zionist present.

He analyzes the films of prominent directors Annemarie Jacir (Salt of This Sea, When I Saw You) and Hany Abu-Assad (Paradise Now) to investigate the emergence and formation of Palestinian identity. Looking at Mais Darwazah’s documentary My Love Awaits Me By the Sea, Burris considers the counterhistories that make up the Palestinian experience—stories and memories that have otherwise been obscured or denied. He also examines Palestinian (in)visibility in the global media landscape, and how issues of Black-Palestinian transnational solidarity are illustrated through social media, staged news spectacles, and hip hop music.

This is a book about the politics of competing cultures and myths in a colonized nation. Elizabeth Buck considers the transformation of Hawaiian culture focusing on the indigenous population rather than on the colonizers. She describes how Hawaii's established religious, social, political, and economic relationships have changed in the past 200 years as a result of Western imperialism. Her account is particularly timely in light of the current Hawaiian demands for sovereignty 100 years after the overthrow of the monarchy in 1893.

Buck examines the social transformation Hawaii from a complex hierarchical, oral society to an American state dominated by corporate tourism and its myths of paradise. She pays particular attention to the ways contemporary Hawaiians are challenging the use of their traditions as the basis for exoticized entertainment.

Buck demonstrates that sacred chants and hula were an integral part of Hawaiian social life; as the repository of the people's historical memory, chants and hula practices played a vital role in maintaining the links between religious, political, and economic relationships. Tracing the ways in which Hawaiian culture has been variously suppressed and constructed by Western explorers, New England missionaries, the tourist industry, ethnomusicologists, and contemporary Hawaiians, Buck offers a fascinating "rereading" of Hawaiian history.

In the post-Maoist era, China adopted a strategy for investing in the “quality” of its people—through education and training opportunities—that created talented labor. In her significant ethnographic study, Patriotic Professionalism in Urban China, Lisa Hoffman explains why the development of “human capital” is seen as fundamental for economic growth and national progress. She examines these new urban employees, who were deemed vital to the success of the global city in China, and who hoped for social mobility, a satisfying career, and perhaps a family.

Patriotic Professionalism in Urban China addresses the emergence of this urban professional subject in Dalian, a port city in China. Hoffman identifies who these new professionals are, what choices they have made, and how they have remained closely connected with the nation—although not necessarily the Communist party—leading to a new social form she calls “Patriotic Professionalism.”

Hoffman contributes to the understanding of changing urban life in China while providing an analysis of the country’s “late-socialist neoliberalism.” In the process, she asks pressing questions about how such shifts in urban life reshape cities, impact individual and family decisions, and reflect economic growth in China in tandem with “global” neoliberal practices.

On November 16, 1989, on the campus of El Salvador's University of Central America, six Jesuits and two women were murdered by members of the Salvadoran army, an army funded and trained by the United States. One of the murdered Jesuits was Ignacio Ellacuría, the university's Rector and a key, although controversial, figure in Salvadoran public life. From an opening account of this terrible crime, Paying the Price asks, Why were they killed and what have their deaths meant? Answers come through Teresa Whitfield's detailed examination of Ellacuría's life and work. His story is told in juxtaposition with the crucial role played by the unraveling investigation of the Jesuits' murders within El Salvador's peace process.

A complex and nuanced book, Paying the Price offers a history of the Church in El Salvador in recent decades, an analysis of Ellacuría's philosophy and theology, an introduction to liberation theology, and an account of the critical importance of the University of Central America. In the end, Whitfield's comprehensive picture of conditions in El Salvador suggest that the Jesuits' murders were almost inevitable. A crime that proved a turning point in El Salvador's civil war, the murders expressed the deep tragedy of the Salvadoran people beyond suffering the heartless cruelty, violence, and deceitfulness of a corrupt military and their patrons in the U.S. government.

Whitfield draws on her extensive research of Jesuit archives and private papers, Ellacuría's diaries, documents declassified by the U.S. government, and 200 interviews conducted with sources ranging from Jesuits to Salvadoran military officers, U.S. officials and congressmen to human rights campaigners.

Pedagogy of Democracy re-interprets the U.S. occupation of Japan from 1945 to 1952 as a problematic instance of Cold War feminist mobilization rather than a successful democratization of Japanese women as previously argued. By combining three fields of research—occupation, Cold War, and postcolonial feminist studies—and examining occupation records and other archival sources, Koikari argues that postwar gender reform was one of the Cold War containment strategies that undermined rather than promoted women’s political and economic rights.

The activities of state governments have always been important in the American federal system. However, recent partisan gridlock in Washington, DC has placed states at the forefront of policymaking as the national government maintains the status quo. Pennsylvania Politics and Policy, Volume 1 is designed to showcase current issues of interest to Pennsylvanians. This reader contains updated chapters from recent issues of Commonwealth: A Journal of Pennsylvania Politics and Policy on education, health care, public finance, tax policy, environmental policy, alcohol policy and more. Each chapter is supplemented by forums with arguments in support of or opposed to contested elements of state policy, discussion questions, and suggestions for further reading. 

In addition, Pennsylvania Politics and Policy, Volume 1 includes a comprehensive guide to researching state government and policy online. It is designed as a text or supplement for college or advanced high school classes in American government, state and local politics, public policy, and public administration. 

Contributors include: David G. Argall, Tom Baldino, Michele Deegan, Michael Dimino, George Hale, Rachel L. Hampton , Paula Duda Holoviak Jon Hopcraft, Vera Krekanova, Maureen W. McClure, Barry G. Rabe, Marguerite Roza, Lanethea Mathews Shultz, Jennie Sweet-Cushman, Amanda Warco, and the editors.

Designed to showcase current issues of interest, Pennsylvania Politics and Policy, Volume 2 isthe second reader consisting of updated chapters from recent issues of Commonwealth: A Journal of Pennsylvania Politics and Policy. The editors and contributors to this volume focus on government institutions, election laws, the judiciary, government finance and budgeting, the opioid crisis, childcare, property taxes, environmental policy, demographics, and more. Each chapter is supplemented by discussion questions, suggestions for further reading, and forums with arguments in support of or opposed to contested elements of state policy.

In addition, Pennsylvania Politics and Policy, Volume 2 includes a detailed guide to researching state government and policy online, as well as a comprehensive chapter on the structure of Pennsylvania government. It is designed as a text or supplement for college or advanced high school classes in American government, state and local politics, public policy, and public administration. 

Contributors include: John Arway, Jenna Becker Kane, Jeffrey Carroll, Bob Dick, Ashley Harden, Stefanie I. Kasparek, Vera Krekanova, Maureen W. McClure, John F. McDonald, Josh Shapiro, Marc Stier, Jennie Sweet-Cushman, James Vike, and the editors.

Like our divided nation, the Supreme Court is polarized. But does a split among Supreme Court justices—particularly when it occurs along ideological lines—hurt public perception and the Court’s ability to muster popular support for its rulings? Michael Salamone’s Perceptions of a Polarized Court offers the first comprehensive, empirical analysis of how divisiveness affects the legitimacy of the Court’s decisions.

Salamone looks specifically at the Roberts Court years—which are characterized by unprecedented ideological and partisan polarization among the justices—to evaluate the public consequences of divided Supreme Court rulings. He also analyzes both the media’s treatment of Supreme Court decisions and public opinion toward the Court’s rulings to show how public acceptance is (or is not) affected. 

Salmone contends that judicial polarization has had an impact on the manner in which journalists report on the Supreme Court. However, contrary to expectation, Court dissent may help secure public support by tapping into core democratic values.

The Persuasive Power of Campaign Advertising offers a comprehensive overview of political advertisements and their changing role in the Internet age. Travis Ridout and Michael Franz examine how these ads function in various kinds of campaigns and how voters are influenced by them.

The authors particularly study where ads are placed, asserting that television advertising will still be relevant despite the growth of advertising on the Internet. The authors also explore the recent phenomenon of outrageous ads that "go viral" on the web-which often leads to their replaying as television news stories, generating additional attention.

It also features the first analysis of the impact on voters of media coverage of political advertising and shows that televised political advertising continues to have widespread influence on the choices that voters make at the ballot box.

In 1875, after being acquitted for the murder of his wife’s lover, Eadweard Muybridge spent a year photographing along the Central American Pacific Coast, particularly in Guatemala and Panamá. Upon his return to California in 1876, he published a very limited number of albums of the photographs (11 are known), each of which was unique in size and scope. In 2007, photographer Byron Wolfe (born 1967) tracked down and cataloged every known Muybridge Central American photograph. Then, with cultural geographer Scott Brady, he traveled to many of Muybridge’s sites to rephotograph them. Through photographic collage, interpretive rephotography, illustrations and essays, this book examines an exceptionally rare series by Muybridge. Also included is a catalogue of every known Muybridge Central American picture.

Allen Iverson loved Philadelphia Daily News basketball beat reporter Phil Jasner, calling him “the best” in the world of sports journalism. From 1981 until his death in 2010, Jasner was always “on the case,” going to great lengths to track athletes down for a quote or a story. He was most known for covering the team’s famous players, including World B. Free and Bobby Jones, Julius Erving and Moses Malone, Charles Barkley, and, of course, Iverson. His tremendous output was beloved by players and fans alike, earning him many honors, including inductions into six Halls of Fame.

Phil Jasner “On the Case” collects the best of Jasner’s writing throughout his illustrious career. Jasner wrote about baseball, the Eagles, and the Philadelphia Atoms’ soccer with the same insight and aplomb he showed in his coverage of The Big 5, the 76ers’ championship season in 1983, and the Dream Team. Lovingly assembled—each chapter is introduced by some of the most prominent figures Jasner covered, from Vince Papale, Doug Collins, and Billy Cunningham to Iverson and Barkley—this collection recounts a distinguished sportswriter’s remarkable career.

Understanding Philadelphia’s history requires that we understand that nothing is inevitable; history is not made by abstract forces, but by the decisions of real individuals as they conduct their lives. With its insightful analysis and engaging prose, Philadelphia provides an accessible and readable overview of the history of the Quaker City from its founding by William Penn to the deindustrialization and gentrification of the early twenty-first century. Roger Simon asserts that the history of Philadelphia is a story of the efforts to sustain economic prosperity while fulfilling community needs, and the continued tension between those priorities.

Philadelphia devotes considerable attention to the evolving physical development of the city and to the social conditions and class structure of the people. Three dozen maps and illustrations enrich this edition, which has been fully updated and revised to reflect new scholarship on Philadelphia’s role in the post-industrial present and the diverse communities that incorporated women and minorities into the economic and social fabric of the city. 

Published in association with the Pennsylvania Historical Association

Philadelphia possesses an exceptionally large number of places that have almost disappeared—from workshops and factories to sporting clubs and societies, synagogues, churches, theaters, and railroad lines. In Philadelphia: Finding the Hidden City, urban observers Nathaniel Popkin and Peter Woodall uncover the contemporary essence of one of America’s oldest cities. Working with accomplished architectural photographer Joseph Elliott, they explore secret places in familiar locations, such as the Metropolitan Opera House on North Broad Street, the Divine Lorraine Hotel, Reading Railroad, Disston Saw Works in Tacony, and mysterious parts of City Hall.

Much of the real Philadelphia is concealed behind facades. Philadelphia artfully reveals its urban secrets. Rather than a nostalgic elegy to loss and urban decline, Philadelphia exposes the city’s vivid layers and living ruins. The authors connect Philadelphia’s idiosyncratic history, culture, and people to develop an alternative theory of American urbanism, and place the city in American urban history. The journey here is as much visual as it is literary; Joseph Elliott’s sumptuous photographs reveal the city's elemental beauty.

Every New Year's Day since 1901, the Philadelphia Mummers have presented a spectacular show of shows that raucously snakes and shimmies its way through city streets. The Mummers Parade features music, dance, comedy, and mime, along with dazzling costumes and floats. Although the lavish event is now televised to a wide audience, it is still rooted in the same neighborhoods where it began.

This book explores the community created and annually reaffirmed by the Philadelphia Mummers. The author spent more than five years with the Mummers, observing their lives and rituals as she took part in their preparations and parades. Writing with the fascination of a sociologist and the excitement of a participant, Masters examines the Mummers from their beginnings. Through the prism of their century-long history, we can see how communities retain their identities and how they are affected by larger cultural trends.

Face it: Philadelphia athletes are often as tough as their fans are passionate. How else to explain the rabid appeal of the bone-crunching Broad Street Bullies? Chuck Bednarik was one of the looniest tunes in Philadelphia sports history, but fuggedabout him. In The Philly Fan's Code, New York Times sportswriter Mike Tanier provides fun and opinionated essays that evaluate the 50 greatest, toughest, and most eccentric legends of Philly sports since Concrete Charlie hung up his cleats.

Using his own "rubric" to calculate the impact of each athlete, Tanier ranks well-adjusted players like Mark Howe alongside both unpredictable athletes like Brad Lidge—who followed an almost perfect season with a 162-game catastrophe—and quirky ones, such as Wilt Chamberlain, who may be better known for bragging about his sexual conquests than for scoring 100 points in a game. And let's not forget our visitor from Planet Lovetron… Then there are the real wild cards-players like Terrell Owens, who does sit-ups in his driveway and whose impact—for better or worse— outlasted the few actual games he played for the Eagles. As for Tanier's choice for the No. 1 toughest, craziest, most legendary player, well, you'll have to read the book to see if you agree. Whether you do or don't, The Philly Fan's Code will provide hours of debates and memories of who our toughest sports heroes were—or weren't.

Ten years ago Philosophy in the Classroom, by Lipman, Sharp, and Oscanyan, hailed the emergence of philosophy as a novel, although in some ways highly traditional, elementary school discipline. In this sequel, Matthew Lipman examines the impact that elementary school philosophy has had, and may yet have, upon the process of education. Going beyond his earlier work to describe the contribution that training in philosophy can make in the teaching of values, he shows the applications of ethics in civics education and the ways in which aesthetics can be incorporated into areas of the curriculum related to the development of creativity.

Making reference to the contemporary educational scene, Lipman compares the K-12 Philosophy for Children curriculum to the many unsatisfactory solutions being offered in our current drive for educational excellence. He addresses the relationship of elementary school philosophy to educational reform in the areas of science, language, social studies, and writing. And he shows how philosophy can be instrumental in the difficult task of teaching values to children while avoiding both ideological indoctrination and mindless relativism.

This is a textbook for teachers that demonstrates how philosophical thinking can be used in teaching children. It begins with the assumption that what is taught in schools is not (and should not be) subject matter but rather ways of thinking. The main point is that the classroom should be converted into a community of inquiry, and that one can begin doing that with children. Based on the curriculum that Matt Lipman has developed at the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children, which he heads, this book describes the curriculum and explains its use. The text is self-contained, however.

This revision is thorough-going and incorporates new chapters, as well as new material in old chapters. Part One focuses on the need of educational change and the importance of philosophical inquiry in developing new approaches. Part Two discusses curriculum and teaching methodology, including teacher behavior conducive to helping children. Part Three deals with developing logic skills and moral judgment. It concludes with a chapter on the sorts of philosophical themes pertinent to ethical inquiry for children: the right and the fair, perfect and right, free will and determinism, change and growth, truth, caring, standards and rules, thinking and thinking for oneself. Education, in this sense, is not a matter of dispensing information; it is the process of assisting in the growth of the whole individual.

This collection of essays by American philosopher Alain Locke (1885-1954) makes readily available for the first time his important writings on cultural pluralism, value relativism, and critical relativism. As a black philosopher early in this century, Locke was a pioneer: having earned both undergraduate and doctoral degrees at Harvard, he was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, studied at the University of Berlin, and chaired the Philosophy Department at Howard University for almost four decades. He was perhaps best known as a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance.

Locke’s works in philosophy—many previously unpublished—conceptually frame the Harlem Renaissance and New Negro movement and provide an Afro-American critique of pragmatism and value absolutism, and also offer a view of identity, communicative competency, and contextualism. In addition, his major works on the nature of race, race relations, and the role of race-conscious literature are presented to demonstrate the application of his philosophy. Locke’s commentaries on the major philosophers of his day, including James, Royce, Santayana, Perry, and Ehrenfels help tell the story of his relationship to his former teachers and his theoretical affinities.

In his substantial Introduction and interpretive concluding chapter, Leonard Harris describes Locke’s life, evaluates his role as an American philosopher and theoretician of the Harlem Renaissance, situates him in the pragmatist tradition, and outlines his affinities with modern deconstructionist ideas. A chronology of the philosopher’s life and bibliography of his works are also provided. Although much has been written about Alain Locke, this is the first book to focus on his philosophical contributions.

This book recasts nursing history and places it in the context of women’s history, labor history, medical history, and sociology. Removed from the limited framework of professionalization, nursing history can provide a fresh perspective on broader issues in social history. First, it offers an illuminating example of the ways in which gender informs work and, conversely. How work reproduces and transforms relationships of power and inequality.

Second, the experience of nurses adds a new dimension to our understanding of work. More than a study of professionalization, nursing history is the story of women workers’ experience in a rationalizing service industry. Like other workers, nurses faced a fundamental reorganization of work that changed the content and experience of nursing. But unlike many others, they did not suffer a dilution of skill. The book also explores the shifting configurations of social relations on the job and their implications for nurses’ work.

Third, nurses’ history provides a useful standpoint for analyzing the possibilities and limitations of women’s work.

Finally, nursing history alerts us to the complexities of working women’s consciousness, countering the common notion of women’s passivity in the workplace.

The Physician’s Hand traces nursing history from the twenties to the seventies. It begins just after World War I when the "trained nurse" had gained a secure place in medical care but not yet found a niche in the hospital. Most worked in private duty. Chapter 1 outlines the theoretical framework of professionalization. Chapter 2 examines the history and culture of hospital schools, and the following chapters focus on the changing structure and experience of nursing in its three major settings: private duty nursing, public health care, and hospital work. The conclusion weighs the competing traditions of professionalization and occupational culture in nurses’ history and their meaning for the current crisis in nursing.

For more than forty years Bruce Jackson has been documenting—in books, photographs, audio recording, and film—inmates’ lives in American prisons. In November, 1975, he acquired a collection of old ID photos while he was visiting the Cummins Unit, a state prison farm in Arkansas. They are published together for the first time in this remarkable book.

The 121 images that appear here were likely taken between 1915 and 1940. As Jackson describes in an absorbing introduction, the function of these photos was not portraiture—their function was to “fold a person into the controlled space of a dossier.” Here, freed from their prison “jackets,” and printed at sizes far larger than their originals, these one-time ID photos have now become portraits. Jackson’s restoration transforms what were small bureaucratic artifacts into moving images of real men and women.

Pictures from a Drawer also contains an extraordinary description of everyday life at Cummins prison in the 1950s, written originally by hand and presented to Jackson in 1973 by its author, a long-time inmate.

At the heart of the model minority myth—often associated with Asian Americans—is the concept of civility. In this groundbreaking book, Picturing Model Citizens, Thy Phu exposes the complex links between civility and citizenship, and argues that civility plays a crucial role in constructing Asian American citizenship.

Featuring works by Arnold Genthe, Carl Iwasaki, Toyo Miyatake, Nick Ut, and others, Picturing Model Citizens traces the trope of civility from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Through an examination of photographs of Chinese immigrants, Japanese internment camps, the Hiroshima Maidens project, napalm victims, and the SARS epidemic, Phu explores civility's unexpected appearance in images that draw on discourses of intimacy, cultivation, apology, and hygiene. She reveals how Asian American visual culture illustrates not only cultural ideas of civility, but also contests the contradictions of state-defined citizenship.

 

Home to 33,000 Filipino American residents, Daly City, California, located just outside of San Francisco, has been dubbed “the Pinoy Capital of the United States.” In this fascinating ethnographic study of the lives of Daly City residents, Benito Vergara shows how Daly City has become a magnet for the growing Filipino American community.

Vergara challenges rooted notions of colonialism here, addressing the immigrants’ identities, connections and loyalties. Using the lens of transnationalism, he looks at the “double lives” of both recent and established Filipino Americans. Vergara explores how first-generation Pinoys experience homesickness precisely because Daly City is filled with reminders of their homeland’s culture, like newspapers, shops and festivals. Vergara probes into the complicated, ambivalent feelings these immigrants have—toward the Philippines and the United States—and the conflicting obligations they have presented by belonging to a thriving community and yet possessing nostalgia for the homeland and people they left behind.

In this work, Dorothy Guyot asks: What makes a good police department? In analyzing the transformation of the police department in Troy, New York. she explains a set of standards by which the quality of police service can be judged and illustrates a way to improve services over the long run. Throughout her case study and analysis, Guyot asks penetrating questions about the performance of police departments. She maintains that when police officers are treated as professionals by their department, they will act professionally toward citizens. This examination of fifteen years of policymaking within a single department looks at policing as a complex social service in an urban environment.

Rather than accepting the traditional "chain of command" authoritarian model of police administration, Guyot draws an analogy to hospital organization and suggests that the practitioner, whether a physician or a cop on the beat, performs the service with a tremendous amount of discretion. It follows that better management tactics at the police chief level as well as better employment policies will result in more responsible and dedicated policing by officers. The author demonstrates how, under the leadership of George W. O’Connor, the Troy P.D. changed from a backward department to one that promotes competence, as well as concern for citizens, among its individual officers.

The book is organized by issues and provides a full picture of how upgrading can be achieved through clear and specific goals. Throughout this case study, Guyot provides many examples of the behavior of police officers on the street, to illustrate the differences made by restructuring the department.

When natural disasters and emergencies strike, the short- and long-term effects of these events on first responders—the very people society relies upon in the midst of a catastrophe—are often overlooked. Policing in Natural Disasters provides a comprehensive analysis of the major challenges faced by law enforcement officers during extreme crisis events. Terri Adams and Leigh Anderson examine the dilemmas police departments face as well as the impact of the disasters on the professional and personal lives of the officers. Case studies explore the response and recovery phases of emergencies including Hurricane Katrina, the 2010 earthquake and subsequent tsunami in Santiago, Chile, and the Superstorm Tornado Outbreak in 2011.   

Policing in Natural Disasters was inspired by the personal accounts of triumph and tragedy shared by first responders. It provides an understanding of first-responder behaviors during disasters, as well as the preparedness, mitigation, response and recovery policy implications for first responders and emergency managers. As first responders must frequently cope with stress, uncertainty, and threats to their health and safety during high-consequence events, Adams and Anderson provide lessons from first-hand experiences of police officers that can lead to better management in times of crisis.

At a time when Canadian political institutions are being fundamentally questioned, this book provides a comparative perspective on the distinctive features of the Canadian policy process hich have enabled conflict to be resolved in the past. In comparison with other Western industrial nations, Canada's policies in some arenas appear as models of workable compromise; in others, they stand out as marked by continuing irresolution. In this first book-length treatment of Canadian public policy in comparative perspective, Carolyn Tuohy focuses on constitutional change, health care delivery, industrial relations and labor market policy, economic development and adjustment, oil and gas policy, and minority language rights.

What distinguishes Canada's characteristic policy process is its quintessential ambivalence: ambivalence about the appropriate role of the state, about definitions of political community, and about individual and collective values and conceptions of rights. Embedded in the country's political institutions, it has deep roots in Canada's relationship to the United States, its history of English-French tensions, and its regional diversity.

Examining in particular the delicate federal-provincial division of power and the legislative-judicial relationship, Tuohy discusses how the constitutional debates of the 1980s and 1990s are testing Canada's institutions to resolve conflict.

Advertised in Asia as "The Chinese Beverly Hills," this small city minutes east of downtown Los Angeles, became by the late 1970s a regional springboard for a new type of Chinese immigration—suburban and middle class with a diversified and globally-oriented economy. Freed from the isolation of old Chinatowns, new immigrants now confronted resistance from more established Anglo, Asian American, and Latino neighbors, whose opposition took the form of interconnected "English Only" and slow-growth movements.

In The Politics of Diversity, a multiethnic team of researches employ ethnography, interviewing, and exit polls to capture the process of change as newcomers and established residents come to terms with the meaning of diversity and identity in their everyday lives. The result is an engaging grass-roots account of immigration and change: the decline of the loyal old-boy Anglo network; the rise of women, minorities, and immigrants in the political scene; and a transformation of ethnic and American identities.

This anthology of work by three Asian American women playwrights—Wakako Yamauchi, Genny Lim, and Velina Hasu Houston—features pioneering contemporary writers who have made their mark in regional and ethnic theatres throughout the United States. In her introduction, Houston observes that the Asian American woman playwright is compelled "to mine her soul" and express the angst, fear, and rage that oppression has wrought while maintaining her relationship with America as a good citizen.

The plays are rich with cultural and political substance and have a feminist concern about women's spirit, intellect, and lives. They portray Asian and Asian American women who challenge the cultural and sexual stereotypes of the Asian female. Yamauchi's two plays deal with how easily a country can dishonor its citizens. In "12-1-A," a Japanese American family is incarcerated during World War II in an Arizona camp where Yamauchi herself was interned. "The Chairman's Wife" dramatizes the life of Madame Mao Tse Tung through the lens of events at Tien An Men Square in 1989. Lim's "Bitter Cane" is about the exploitation of Chinese laborers who were recruited to work the Hawaiian sugar cane plantations. In "Asa Ga Kimashita" ("Morning Has Broken"), Houston explores a Japanese woman's interracial romance in postwar Japan and the influence of traditional patriarchy on the lives of Japanese women.

These plays will entertain and enlighten, enrage and profoundly move audiences. With honesty, imagination and courage, each grapples with the politics of life.


In the series Asian American History and Culture, edited by Sucheng Chan, David Palumbo-Liu, Michael Omi, K. Scott Wong, and Linda Trinh Võ.

 

Migration to new destinations in Europe and the United States has expanded dramatically over the past few decades. Within these destinations, there is a corresponding greater variety of ethnic, cultural, and/or religious diversity. This timely volume, The Politics of New Immigrant Destinations, considers the challenges posed by this proliferation of diversity for governments, majority populations, and immigrants. 

The contributors assess the effectiveness of the policy and political responses that have been spawned by increasing diversity in four types of new immigrant destinations: “intermediate” destination countries—Ireland and Italy; culturally distinct regions experiencing new migration such as Catalonia in Spain or the American South; new destinations within traditional destination countries like the state of Utah and rural towns in England; and “early migration cycle” countries including Latvia and Poland.  

The Politics of New Immigrant Destinations examines how these new destinations for immigrants compare to traditional destinations, with respect to their policy responses and success at integrating immigrants, offering perspectives from both immigrants and natives.

Contributors include: Dace Akule, Amado Alarcón, Rhys Andrews, Francesca Campomori, Tiziana Caponio, Scott Decker, Erica Dobbs, Melissa M. Goldsmith, Aleksandra Grzymała-Kazłowska, Claudio A. Holzner, Magdalena Lesińska, Paul Lewis, Helen B. Marrow, Laura Morales, Katia Pilati, Marie Provine, Monica Varsanyi, and the editors.

The Politics of State Feminism addresses essential questions of women's movement activism and political change in western democracies. The authors—top gender and politics scholars—provide a comparative analysis of the effectiveness of government agencies and women's movements regarding women’s policy issues—if, how, and why they form a kind of state feminism.

The central research questions are examined across five issue areas in thirteen postindustrial democracies in Europe and North America from the 1960s through the early 2000s. The authors explore a range of topics drawn from contemporary theory, interactions between descriptive and substantive representation, and the place of institutions in democratic change.

Using the innovative qualitative and quantitative methods employed by the Research Network on Gender Politics and the State, the authors have developed a new body of theories about the role of state feminism and how it can help further women’s rights.

When cities gentrify, it can be hard for working-class and low-income residents to stay put. Rising rents and property taxes make buildings unaffordable, or landlords may sell buildings to investors interested in redeveloping them into luxury condos. 

In her engaging study The Politics of Staying Put, Carolyn Gallaher focuses on a formal, city-sponsored initiative—The Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA)—that helps people keep their homes. This law, unique to the District of Columbia, allows tenants in apartment buildings contracted for sale the right to refuse the sale and purchase the building instead. In the hands of tenants, a process that would usually hurt them—conversion to a condominium or cooperative—can instead help them.  

Taking a broad, city-wide assessment of TOPA, Gallaher follows seven buildings through the program’s process. She measures the law’s level of success and its constraints. Her findingshave relevance for debates in urban affairs about condo conversion, urban local autonomy, and displacement. 

Americans find street crime terrifying and repellent. Yet we vicariously seek it out in virtually all of our media: books, newspapers, television, films, and the theatre. Stuart Scheingold confronts this cultural contradiction and asks why street crime is generally regarded in the trivializing and punitive images of cops and robbers that attribute crime to the willful acts of flawed individuals rather than to the structural shortcomings of a flawed society. In his case study of the police and criminal courts in the community he calls "Cedar City," a medium-sized city in the Western United States, Scheingold examines the effects of this cultural contradiction and these punitive predispositions on politics and policy making.

George Lipsitz’s classic book The Possessive Investment in Whiteness argues that public policy and private prejudice work together to create a possessive investment in whiteness that is responsible for the racialized hierarchies of our society. Whiteness has a cash value: it accounts for advantages that come to individuals through profits made from housing secured in discriminatory markets, through the unequal educational opportunities available to children of different races, through insider networks that channel employment opportunities to the friends and relatives of those who have profited most from past and present discrimination, and especially through intergenerational transfers of inherited wealth that pass on the spoils of discrimination to succeeding generations. White Americans are encouraged to invest in whiteness, to remain true to an identity that provides them with structured advantages.

In this twentieth anniversary edition, Lipsitz provides a new introduction and updated statistics; as well as analyses of the enduring importance of Hurricane Katrina; the nature of anti-immigrant mobilizations; police assaults on Black women, the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Freddie Gray; the legacy of Obama and the emergence of Trump; the Charleston Massacre and other hate crimes; and the ways in which white fear, white fragility, and white failure have become drivers of a new ethno-nationalism. 

As vital as it was upon its original publication, the twentieth anniversary edition of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness is an unflinching but necessary look at white supremacy.

In this systematic historical analysis, Nino Langiulli focuses on a key philosophical issue, possibility, as it is refracted through the thought of the Italian philosopher Nicola Abbagnano. Langiulli examines Abbagnano's attempt to raise possibility to a level of prime importance and investigates his understanding of existence. In so doing, the author offers a sustained exposition of and argument with the account of possibility in the major thinkers of the Western tradition—Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Kierkegaard. He also makes pertinent comments on such philosophers as Diodorus Cronus, William of Ockham, Spinoza, Hobbes, and Hegel, as well as such logicians as DeMorgan and Boole.

Nicola Abbagnano, who died in 1990, recently came to the attention of the general public as an influential teacher of author Umberto Eco. Creator of a dictionary of philosophy and author of a multiple-volume history of Western philosophy, Abbagnano was the only philosopher, according to Langiulli, to argue that "to be is to be possible."

Even though the concept of probability and the discipline of statistics are grounded in the concept of possibility, philosophers throughout history have grappled with the problem of defining it. Possibility has been viewed by some as an empty concept, devoid of reality, and by others as reducible to actuality or necessity—concepts which are opposite to it. Langiulli analyzes and debates Abbagnano's treatment of necessity as secondary to possibility, and he addresses the philosopher's conversation with his predecessors as well as his European and American contemporaries.

When the 2011 municipal takeover in Flint, Michigan placed the city under state control, some supported the intervention while others saw it as an affront to democracy. Still others were ambivalent about what was supposed to be a temporary disruption. However, the city’s fiscal emergency soon became a public health emergency—the Flint Water Crisis—that captured international attention.

But how did Flint’s municipal takeovers, which suspended local representational government, alter the local political system? In Power, Participation, and Protest in Flint, Michigan, Ashley Nickels addresses the ways residents, groups, and organizations were able to participate politically—or not—during the city’s municipal takeovers in 2002 and 2011. She explains how new politics were created as organizations developed, new coalitions emerged and evolved, and people’s understanding of municipal takeovers changed.

Inwalking readers through the policy history of, implementation of, and reaction to Flint’s two municipal takeovers, Nickels highlights how the ostensibly apolitical policy is, in fact, highly political.