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The Jamesonian Unconscious
The Aesthetics of Marxist Theory
Clint Burnham
Duke University Press, 1995
Imagine Fredric Jameson—the world’s foremost Marxist critic—kidnapped and taken on a joyride through the cultural ephemera, generational hype, and Cold War fallout of our post-post-contemporary landscape. In The Jamesonian Unconscious, a book as joyful as it is critical and insightful, Clint Burnham devises unexpected encounters between Jameson and alternative rock groups, new movies, and subcultures. At the same time, Burnham offers an extraordinary analysis of Jameson’s work and career that refines and extends his most important themes.
In an unusual biographical move, Burnham negotiates Jameson’s major works—including Marxism and Form, The Political Unconscious, and Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism—by way of his own working-class, queer-ish, Gen-X background and sensibility. Thus Burnham’s study draws upon an immense range of references familiar to the MTV generation, including Reservoir Dogs, theorists Slavoj Zizek and Pierre Bourdieu, The Satanic Verses, Language poetry, the collapse of state communism in Eastern Europe, and the indie band Killdozer. In the process, Burnham addresses such Jamesonian questions as how to imagine the future, the role of utopianism in capitalist culture, and the continuing relevance of Marxist theory.
Through its redefinition of Jameson’s work and compelling reading of the political present, The Jamesonian Unconscious defines the leading edge of Marxist theory. Written in a style by turns conversational, playful, and academic, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Marxism, critical theory, aesthetics, narratology, and cultural studies, as well as the wide circle of readers who have felt and understood Jameson’s influence.
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Japanese Cities
edited by Kuniko Fujita and Richard Child Hill
Temple University Press, 1993

Japan is the world's second most powerful economy and one of the most urbanized nations on earth. Yet English-language literature contains remarkable little about cities in Japan. This collection of original essays on Japanese urban and industrial development covers a broad spectrum of city experiences. Leading Japanese and Western urbanists analyze Japan's largest metropolitan areas (Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya); proto-typical industrial cities (Kamaishi, Kitakyushu, Toyota); high technology urban satellites (Kanagawa); and smaller, more traditionally organized industrial districts (Tsubame). This book demonstrates how Japan's flexible economic growth strategies and changing relationship to the world economy have produced a uniquely Japanese pattern of urban development in this century.

Throughout the essays that describe individual cities, contributors provide commentary on each city's twentieth-century history and functional relations with other cities and focus on the dynamic linkage between global relations and local activities. They examine the role of government—central, prefectural, and local—in the restructuring of Japanese industrial and urban life. One essay is devoted to the urbanization process in pre-World War II Japan; another considers urban planning on the western Pacific Rim. This is the first book that analyzes how the economic transformation of Japan has restructured Japanese cities and how urban and regional development policies have kept pace with (and in some ways effected) changes in the economy.

This comprehensive study of Japanese cities provides interdisciplinary coverage of urban development issues of interest to the fields of economics, business, sociology, political science, history, Asian and Japanese studies, and urban planning.

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Jean Baudrillard
In Radical Uncertainty
Mike Gane
Pluto Press, 2000

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Jews and Other Germans
Civil Society, Religious Diversity, and Urban Politics in Breslau, 1860–1925
Till van Rahden
University of Wisconsin Press, 2008
Jews and Other Germans is the first social and cultural history to probe the parameters of Jewish integration in the half century between the founding of the German Empire in 1871 and the early Weimar Republic. Questioning received wisdom about German-Jewish assimilation and the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany, van Rahden’s prize-winning book restores some of the complexity and openness of relations between Protestants, Catholics, and Jews before World War I.
            Closely analyzing the political, social, and cultural life in a major German city, van Rahden shows that Jews were a part of a broad urban community that encompassed diversity within unity, at once offering them a large measure of equality while permitting them to remain meaningfully Jewish. Jews and Other Germans also substantially revises the chronology of anti-Semitism in Germany, showing that Jews only began to experience exclusion from Breslau’s social world during World War I.
            Yet van Rahden not only illuminates Breslau’s multicultural fabric; he also tells the story of this remarkable city as one of cultural and religious conflict and coexistence. Recounting the experiences of Jews, Protestants, and Catholics within a single narrative, he offers a critical intervention into scholarship on liberalism and civil society in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe.
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Jim Crow Sociology
The Black and Southern Roots of American Sociology
Earl Wright
University of Cincinnati Press, 2020
Jim Crow Sociology: The Black and Southern Roots of American Sociology is an extraordinary new volume that examines the origin, development, and significance of Black Sociology through the accomplishments of early African American sociologists at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) such as Atlanta University, Tuskegee Institute, Fisk University, and Howard University. Black Sociology is a concept that weaponizes the discipline for that which is “right and good” and prioritizes scholar-activist inspired research directed at impacting real world conditions of African Americans.

Guided by this approach, this book debunks the idea that the sociology practiced by early African Americans does not exemplify scholarly excellence. Instead, Earl Wright demonstrates that Tuskegee Institute, under the leadership of Booker T. Washington, established the first applied program of rural sociology. Fisk University, first under the guidance of George Edmund Haynes then Charles S. Johnson, developed one of the earliest and most impactful programs of applied urban sociology. Wright extends our understanding of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Atlanta Sociological Laboratory with an articulation of the contributions of women to the first American school of sociology. Jim Crow Sociology forces contemporary scholars to grapple with who are and who are not included in the disciplinary canon. Specifically, this book forces us to ask why early African American sociologists and HBCUs are not canonized. What makes this book most consequential is that it provides evidence supporting the proposition that sociology began in earnest in the United States as a Black and southern enterprise. 
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Jobless Future
Sci-Tech and the Dogma of Work
Stanley Aronowitz
University of Minnesota Press, 1995
Essential reading for those seeking solutions to the new jobless economy. This widely reviewed and highly successful book examines the job market of tomorrow. Aronowitz and DiFazio take you behind the headlines to challenge the idea that a high-tech economy will provide high-paying jobs for all who want them. Instead, they demonstrate that we're more likely to see continued layoffs and job displacement. "Imagine a Brave New Work World in which unemployment is so rampant that more than a third of the adult population can't find a job and millions of others have stopped looking. Another third works only part-time, or at temporary or dead-end jobs. Meanwhile, the number of those still holding full-time positions steadily diminishes, their wages depressed because of the premium placed simply on having a job. . . . 'People need to start thinking about a jobless future,' insist [Aronowitz and DeFazio] . . . . Tha authors attribute rising unemployment to economic stagnation coupled with revolutionary technological change that has fostered workplace trends such as downsizing, re-engineering, with part-time jobs, temporary jobs and job-sharing replacing full-time work." --Washington Post "Looks beyond the shadow play of welfare politics to the real source of that anxiety-the modern workplace. . . . Aronowitz and DiFazio are quite right to look beyond the dismal realities of today's workplace and envision a society that uses the fruits of technology to abolish-or at least diminish-what the left used to call wage slavery." --The Nation "Replete with such futuristic concepts as cybernetics, technoculture, de-skilling, and informatics, this book is as timely as today's headlines announcing the latest round of layoffs and down-sizing. . . an important and thought-provoking work." --Library Journal Stanley Aronowitz is professor of sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. William DiFazio is professor of sociology at St. John's University
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Jobs and the Labor Force of Tomorrow
Migration, Training, Education
Michael Pagano
University of Illinois Press, 2017
The new volume in the Urban Agenda series addresses the challenges shaping the development of human capital in metropolitan regions. The articles, products of the 2016 Urban Forum at the University of Illinois at Chicago, engage with the overarching idea that a dynamic metropolitan economy needs a diverse, trained, and available workforce that can adapt to the needs of commerce, industry, government, and the service sector. Authors explore provocative issues like the jobless recovery, migration and immigration, K-12 education preparedness, the urban-oriented gig economy, postsecondary workforce training, and the recruitment and professional development of millennials.

Contributors: Xochitl Bada, John Bragelman, Laura Dresser, Rudy Faust, Beth Gutelius, Brad Harrington, Gregory V. Larnell, Twyla T. Blackmond Larnell, and Nik Theodore.
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Jobs Aren't Enough
Toward a New Economic Mobility for Low-Income Families
Roberta Rehner Iversen and Annie Laurie Armstrong
Temple University Press, 2006
This unflinching examination of the obstacles to economic mobility for low-income families exposes the ugly reality that lies beneath the shining surface of the American Dream. The fact is that nearly 25% of employed adults have difficulty supporting their families today. In eye-opening interviews, twenty-five workers and nearly a thousand people who are linked to them—children, teachers, job trainers, and employers—tell wrenching stories about "trying to get ahead." Spanning five cities over five years, this study convincingly demonstrates that prevailing ideas about opportunity, merit, and "bootstraps" are outdated. As the authors show, some workers who believe the myths end up destroying their health and families in the process of trying to "move up." Jobs Aren't Enough demonstrates that the social institutions of family, education, labor market, and policy all intersect to influence—and inhibit—employment mobility. It proposes a new mobility paradigm grounded in cooperation and collaboration across social institutions, along with revitalization of the "public will."
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Johannesburg
The Elusive Metropolis
Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe, eds.
Duke University Press, 2008
Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis is a pioneering effort to insert South Africa’s largest city into urban theory, on its own terms. Johannesburg is Africa’s premier metropolis. Yet theories of urbanization have cast it as an emblem of irresolvable crisis, the spatial embodiment of unequal economic relations and segregationist policies, and a city that responds to but does not contribute to modernity on the global scale. Complicating and contesting such characterizations, the contributors to this collection reassess classic theories of metropolitan modernity as they explore the experience of “city-ness” and urban life in post-apartheid South Africa. They portray Johannesburg as a polycentric and international city with a hybrid history that continually permeates the present. Turning its back on rigid rationalities of planning and racial separation, Johannesburg has become a place of intermingling and improvisation, a city that is fast developing its own brand of cosmopolitan culture.

The volume’s essays include an investigation of representation and self-stylization in the city, an ethnographic examination of friction zones and practices of social reproduction in inner-city Johannesburg, and a discussion of the economic and literary relationship between Johannesburg and Maputo, Mozambique’s capital. One contributor considers how Johannesburg’s cosmopolitan sociability enabled the anticolonial projects of Mohandas Ghandi and Nelson Mandela. Journalists, artists, architects, writers, and scholars bring contemporary Johannesburg to life in ten short pieces, including reflections on music and megamalls, nightlife, built spaces, and life for foreigners in the city.

Contributors: Arjun Appadurai, Carol A. Breckenridge, Lindsay Bremner, David Bunn, Fred de Vries, Nsizwa Dlamini, Mark Gevisser, Stefan Helgesson, Julia Hornberger, Jonathan Hyslop, Grace Khunou, Frédéric Le Marcis, Xavier Livermon, John Matshikiza, Achille Mbembe, Robert Muponde, Sarah Nuttall, Tom Odhiambo, Achal Prabhala, AbdouMaliq Simone

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Johannesburg
The Elusive Metropolis, Volume 16
Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe, eds.
Duke University Press
This issue of Public Culture attempts to overturn perceptions that frame Africa as an object apart from the rest of the world. By placing the city of Johannesburg—the preeminent metropolis of the African continent and a city facing a complicated legacy of racial strife and wealth accumulation—at the heart of new critical urban theory, Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis broadens discussions of modernity, cosmopolitanism, and urban renewal to include Africa. The issue brings Johannesburg into direct dialogue with other world cities, creating a space for the interrogation and investigation of the metropolis in a properly global sense.

Contributors to this issue—a mix of scholars, urban planners, and artists, many of whom hail from South Africa—reveal Johannesburg to be a polycentric and international city that has developed its own cosmopolitan culture. In a detailed study of three streets in the modern precinct of Melrose Arch, one essay shows how the thoroughly commodified and marketed Johannesburg cityscape has shaped the cultural sensitivities, aesthetics, and urban subjectivities of its inhabitants, at times even overriding the historical memory of apartheid. Another essay, focusing on the emergence of a new urban culture, examines how the city itself becomes a crucial site for the remixing and reassembling of racial identities. By tracking the movement of people with AIDS to various locations in the city to seek relief and treatment, another essay reveals an urban geography very different from what is seen from the highways. Finally, through interviews and commentaries, journalists, artists, and architects of Johannesburg offer reflections on the geography and shifting culture of the city and its townships, on the complicated relationship between Johannesburg and other African cities, and on the search for an architectural style that adequately expresses the complexity of this cosmopolitan city.

Contributors. Lindsay Bremner, Nsizwa Dlamini, Mark Gevisser, Grace Khunou, Frédéric Le Marcis, John Matshikiza, Achille Mbembe, Sarah Nuttall, Rodney Place, AbdouMaliq Simone, Michael Watts

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John Locke
Economist and Social Scientist
Karen Iversen Vaughn
University of Chicago Press, 1980
In John Locke: Economist and Social Scientist Karen Iversen Vaughn presents a comprehensive treatment of Locke's important position in the development of eighteenth century economic thought.
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Jonathan Fisher of Blue Hill, Maine
Commerce, Culture, and Community on the Eastern Frontier
Kevin D. Murphy
University of Massachusetts Press, 2010
This book examines the life of Jonathan Fisher (1768–1847), a native of Braintree, Massachusetts, and graduate of Harvard College who moved in his late twenties to Blue Hill, Maine, where he embarked on a multifaceted career as a pioneer minister, farmer, entrepreneur, and artist. Drawing on a vast record of letters, diaries, sermons, drawings, paintings, and buildings, Kevin D. Murphy reconstructs Fisher's story and uses it to explore larger issues of material culture, visual culture, and social history during the early decades of the American republic.

Murphy shows how Fisher, as pastor of the Congregational church in Blue Hill from 1796 to 1837, helped spearhead the transformation of a frontier settlement on the eastern shores of the Penobscot Bay into a thriving port community; how he used his skills as an architect, decorative painter, surveyor, and furniture maker not only to support himself and his family, but to promote the economic growth of his village; and how the fluid professional identity that enabled Fisher to prosper on the eastern frontier could only have existed in early America where economic relations were far less rigidly defined than in Europe.

Among the most important artifacts of Jonathan Fisher's life is the house he designed and built in Blue Hill. The Jonathan Fisher Memorial, as it is now known, serves as a point of departure for an examination of social, religious, and cultural life in a newly established village at the turn of the nineteenth century. Fisher's house provided a variety of spaces for agricultural and domestic work, teaching, socializing, artmaking, and more.

Through the eyes of Jonathan Fisher, we see his family grow and face the challenges of the new century, responding to religious, social, and economic change—sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing. We appreciate how an extraordinarily energetic man was able to capitalize on the wide array of opportunities offered by the frontier to give shape to his personal vision of community.
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Journal of Community Engagement and Scholarship, Vol 1 No 1
Fall 2008
Cassandra E. Simon
University of Alabama Press, 2008

The Journal of Community Engagement and Scholarship (JCES) is a peer-reviewed international journal through which faculty, staff, students, and community partners disseminate scholarly works. JCES integrates teaching, research, and community engagement in all disciplines, addressing critical problems identified through a community-participatory process.

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Journal of Community Engagement and Scholarship, Vol. 2 No. 1
Summer 2009
Cassandra E. Simon
University of Alabama Press, 2010
The Journal of Community Engagement and Scholarship (JCES) is a peer-reviewed international journal through which faculty, staff, students, and community partners disseminate scholarly works. JCES integrates teaching, research, and community engagement in all disciplines, addressing critical problems identified through a community-participatory process.
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front cover of Journal of Community Engagement and Scholarship, Vol 3, No 1
Journal of Community Engagement and Scholarship, Vol 3, No 1
Spring 2010
Cassandra E. Simon
University of Alabama Press, 2010
The Journal of Community Engagement and Scholarship (JCES) is a peer-reviewed international journal through which faculty, staff, students, and community partners disseminate scholarly works. JCES integrates teaching, research, and community engagement in all disciplines, addressing critical problems identified through a community-participatory process.
[more]

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Journeys in Sociology
From First Encounters to Fulfilling Retirements
Rosalyn Benjamin Darling and Peter J. Stein
Temple University Press, 2017

For most sociologists, their life’s work does not end with retirement. Many professors and practitioners continue to teach, publish, or explore related activities after leaving academia. They also connect with others in the field to lessen the isolation they sometimes feel outside the ivory tower or an applied work setting. 

The editors and twenty contributors to the essential anthology Journeys in Sociology use a life-course perspective to address the role of sociology in their lives. The power of their personal experiences—during the Great Depression, World War II, or the student protests and social movements in the 1960s and ‘70s—magnify how and why social change prompted these men and women to study sociology. Moreover, all of the contributors include a discussion of their activities in retirement.   

From Bob Perrucci, Tuck Green, and Wendell Bell, who write about issues of class, to Debra Kaufman and Elinore Lurie, who explain how gender played a role in their careers, the diverse entries in Journeys in Sociology provide a fascinating look at both the influence of their lives on the discipline and the discipline on these sociologists’ lives. 

Contributors include: David J. Armor, Wendell Bell, Glen H. Elder, Jr., Henry W. Fischer, Janet Zollinger Giele, Charles S. (Tuck) Green, Peter Mandel Hall, Elizabeth Higginbotham, Debra Renee Kaufman, Corinne Kirchner, Elinore E. Lurie, Gary T. Marx, Robert Perrucci, Fred Pincus, Thomas Scheff, Arthur Shostak, David Simon, Natalie J. Sokoloff, Edward Tiryakian, Joyce E. Williams, and the editors.

Published in collaboration with the American Sociological Association Opportunities in Retirement Network.

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Julia Kristeva
Speaking the Unspeakable
Anne-Marie Smith
Pluto Press, 1998

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Jurgen Habermas
Democracy and the Public Sphere
Luke Goode
Pluto Press, 2005
Habermas is a hugely influential thinker, yet his writing can be dense and inaccessible. This critical introduction offers undergraduates a clear way into Habermas’s concept of the ‘public sphere’ and its relevance to contemporary society. Luke Goode’s lively account also sheds new light on the ‘public sphere’ debate that will interest readers already familiar with Habermas’s work.

For Habermas, the 'public sphere' was a social forum that allowed people to debate -- whether it was the town hall or the coffee house, maintaining a space for public debate was an essential part of democracy. Habermas’s controversial work examines the erosion of these spaces within consumer society and calls for new thinking about democracy today.

Drawing on Habermas’s early and more recent writings, this book examines the ‘public sphere’ in its full complexity, outlining its relevance to today’s media and culture. It will be of interest to students and scholars in a range of disciplines across the social sciences and humanities.

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Jurors' Stories of Death
How America's Death Penalty Invests in Inequality
Benjamin Fleury-Steiner
University of Michigan Press, 2004
"What is most extraordinary about Ben Fleury-Steiner's book is that it seeks to shed light on the 'black box' of capital jury deliberations. Based on a remarkable social science survey of persons who served on capital juries, this volume illuminates the workings of the most closely guarded secret in the criminal justice system."
-David Cole, from the Foreword

"Perhaps the most powerful, routinely enacted civic ritual in American public life is that of capital punishment. This state-sanctioned extirpation of human life in the collective pursuit of justice is a searing act of civic pedagogy, made legitimate only by the deliberative endorsement of a small group of ordinary citizens-the jury. In Jurors' Stories of Death, Benjamin Fleury-Steiner has taken a cold, hard look at how these ordinary citizens come to terms with their extraordinary role, and how they rationalize their irreversible decisions. The result is a chilling portrait of how we---that is, all of us Americans---constitute ourselves as a political community."
-Glenn Loury, Director, Institute on Race and Social Division

"This illuminating and insightful examination of jury deliberations makes a terrific contribution to the study of capital punishment. Fleury-Steiner's synthesis of sociological, legal and theoretical concepts with vivid juror narratives and statistical data, thoughtfully animates and details how race and class consciousness continue to shape America's death penalty."
---Bryan Stevenson, Professor of Clinical Law, NYU School of Law, Executive Director, Equal Justice Initiative of Alabama


Jurors' Stories of Death is more than just another book on the death penalty; it is the first systematic survey of how death penalty decisions are made.

Benjamin Fleury-Steiner draws on real-life accounts of white and black jurors in capital punishment trials to discuss the effect of race on the sentencing process. He finds that race is invariably a factor in sentencing, with jurors relying on accounts that deny the often marginalized defendants their individuality and complexity, while reinforcing the jurors' own identities as superior, moral, and law-abiding citizens-a system that punishes in the name of dominance. This biased story of "us versus them" continues to infuse political rhetoric on crime and punishment in the United States even today.

Jurors' Stories of Death concludes with an original argument for abolition of the death penalty: If America values multiculturalism and cultural diversity, it must do away with institutions such as state-sanctioned capital punishment in order to begin to free itself from the racism and classicism that so insidiously plague social relations today.
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Just a Dog
Animal Cruelty, Self, and Society
Arnold Arluke
Temple University Press, 2006
Psychiatrists define cruelty to animals as a psychological problem or personality disorder. Legally, animal cruelty is described by a list of behaviors. In Just a Dog, Arnold Arluke argues that our current constructs of animal cruelty are decontextualized—imposed without regard to the experience of the groups committing the act. Yet those who engage in animal cruelty have their own understandings of their actions and of themselves as actors. In this fascinating book, Arluke probes those understandings and reveals the surprising complexities of our relationships with animals. Just a Dog draws from interviews with more than 250 people, including humane agents who enforce cruelty laws, college students who tell stories of childhood abuse of animals, hoarders who chronically neglect the welfare of many animals, shelter workers who cope with the ethics of euthanizing animals, and public relations experts who use incidents of animal cruelty for fundraising purposes. Through these case studies, Arluke shows how the meaning of "cruelty" reflects and helps to create identities and ideologies.
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Just A Temp
Kevin Henson
Temple University Press, 1996

"So this is where the brain starts to shut down and that which we treasure most, our personal identities, begins to slip away....I suppose I should be thankful; it's a paycheck." With this disturbing sentiment, Kevin Henson begins a voyage into the world of "the temp." For several years while a graduate student, Henson logged in thousands of hours as a temporary worker in offices throughout Chicago's Loop. Those experiences, and numerous interviews with other temps and temporary counselors, create a vivid and often disheartening picture of working 9 to 5 behind the receptionist's desk, telephone console, or data-entry terminal.

In their own voices, the temps in this book lament the frequently demeaning and mundane nature of many assignments:

"You're not paid to think."


"Temps don't have names; they are just 'the temp.'"


"They always harass me...because I just wear a sweater and slacks."


"The worst part is telling people what you do. They always ask 'When are you going to get a real job?'"


Where the temporary service industry is quick to extol the virtues of temp work—mainly its flexibility—Henson and his cast of temps reveal the tacit pressure to persevere through an unpleasant assignment, to accept every assignment offered, and to readjust personal lives to do so. Outsiders to the established office culture and hierarchy, most temps are asked to do low-skill work and leave more detailed or complicated tasks for the return of the permanent employee.

Whether temp life is a preferred choice or grudgingly accepted as the last option when "real" or permanent work is unavailable, all temps must confront issues of gender, identity, and self-esteem. Henson examines these issues, documenting the concerns and interpretations of temp workers about their own work lives.

 
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Just One of the Guys?
Transgender Men and the Persistence of Gender Inequality
Kristen Schilt
University of Chicago Press, 2010

The fact that men and women continue to receive unequal treatment at work is a point of contention among politicians, the media, and scholars. Common explanations for this disparity range from biological differences between the sexes to the conscious and unconscious biases that guide hiring and promotion decisions. Just One of the Guys? sheds new light on this phenomenon by analyzing the unique experiences of transgender men—people designated female at birth whose gender identity is male—on the job.

Kristen Schilt draws on in-depth interviews and observational data to show that while individual transmen have varied experiences, overall their stories are a testament to systemic gender inequality. The reactions of coworkers and employers to transmen, Schilt demonstrates, reveal the ways assumptions about innate differences between men and women serve as justification for discrimination. She finds that some transmen gain acceptance—and even privileges—by becoming “just one of the guys,” that some are coerced into working as women or marginalized for being openly transgender, and that other forms of appearance-based discrimination also influence their opportunities. Showcasing the voices of a frequently overlooked group, Just One of the Guys? lays bare the social processes that foster forms of inequality that affect us all.

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Just Queer Folks
Gender and Sexuality in Rural America
Colin R. Johnson
Temple University Press, 2013

 Most studies of lesbian and gay history focus on urban environments. Yet gender and sexual diversity were anything but rare in nonmetropolitan areas in the first half of the twentieth century. Just Queer Folks explores the seldom-discussed history of same-sex intimacy and gender nonconformity in rural and small-town America during a period when the now familiar concepts of heterosexuality and homosexuality were just beginning to take shape. 

Eschewing the notion that identity is always the best measure of what can be known about gender and sexuality, Colin R. Johnson argues instead for a queer historicist approach. In so doing, he uncovers a startlingly unruly rural past in which small-town eccentrics, "mannish" farm women, and cross-dressing Civilian Conservation Corps enrollees were often just queer folks so far as their neighbors were concerned. Written with wit and verve, Just Queer Folks upsets a whole host of contemporary commonplaces, including the notion that queer history is always urban history.

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Just Words
Law, Language, and Power, Third Edition
John M. Conley, William M. O'Barr, and Robin Conley Riner
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Is it “just words” when a lawyer cross-examines a rape victim in the hopes of getting her to admit an interest in her attacker? Is it “just words” when the Supreme Court hands down a decision or when business people draw up a contract? In tackling the question of how an abstract entity exerts concrete power, Just Words focuses on what has become the central issue in law and language research: what language reveals about the nature of legal power. 

John M. Conley, William M. O'Barr, and Robin Conley Riner show how the microdynamics of the legal process and the largest questions of justice can be fruitfully explored through the field of linguistics. Each chapter covers a language-based approach to a different area of the law, from the cross-examinations of victims and witnesses to the inequities of divorce mediation. Combining analysis of common legal events with a broad range of scholarship on language and law, Just Words seeks the reality of power in the everyday practice and application of the law. As the only study of its type, the book is the definitive treatment of the topic and will be welcomed by students and specialists alike. This third edition brings this essential text up to date with new chapters on nonverbal, or “multimodal,” communication in legal settings and law, language, and race.
 
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Justice and Injustice in Law and Legal Theory
Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1998
Running through the history of jurisprudence and legal theory is a recurring concern about the connections between law and justice and about the ways law is implicated in injustice. In earlier times law and justice were viewed as virtually synonymous. Experience, however, has taught us that, in fact, injustice may be supported by law. Nonetheless, the belief remains that justice is the special concern of law.
Commentators from Plato to Derrida have called law to account in the name of justice, asked that law provide a language of justice, and demanded that it promote the attainment of justice. The justice that is usually spoken about in these commentaries is elusive, if not illusory, and disconnected from the embodied practice of law.
Furthermore, the very meaning of justice, especially as it relates to law, is in dispute. Justice may refer to distributional issues or it may involve primarily procedural questions, impartiality in judgment or punishment and recompense.
The essays collected in Justice and Injustice in Law and Legal Theory seek to remedy this uncertainty about the meaning of justice and its disembodied quality, by embedding inquiry about justice in an examination of law's daily practices, its institutional arrangements, and its engagement with particular issues at particular moments in time. The essays examine the relationship between law and justice and injustice in specific issues and practices and, in doing so, make the question of justice come alive as a concrete political question. They draw on the disciplines of history, law, anthropology, and political science.
Contributors to this volume include Nancy Coot, Joshua Coven, Robert Gorton, Frank Michelin, and Michael Tossing.
Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst College. Thomas R. Kearns is William H. Hastie Professor of Philosophy, Amherst College.
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Justice and the American Metropolis
Clarissa Rile Hayward
University of Minnesota Press, 2011

Today’s American cities and suburbs are the sites of “thick injustice”—unjust power relations that are deeply and densely concentrated as well as opaque and seemingly intractable. Thick injustice is hard to see, to assign responsibility for, and to change.

Identifying these often invisible and intransigent problems, this volume addresses foundational questions about what justice requires in the contemporary metropolis. Essays focus on inequality within and among cities and suburbs; articulate principles for planning, redevelopment, and urban political leadership; and analyze the connection between metropolitan justice and institutional design. In a world that is progressively more urbanized, and yet no clearer on issues of fairness and equality, this book points the way to a metropolis in which social justice figures prominently in any definition of success.

Contributors: Susan S. Fainstein, Harvard U; Richard Thompson Ford, Stanford U; Gerald Frug, Harvard U; Loren King, Wilfrid Laurier U; Margaret Kohn, U of Toronto; Stephen Macedo, Princeton U; Douglas W. Rae, Yale U; Clarence N. Stone, George Washington U; Margaret Weir, U of California, Berkeley; Thad Williamson, U of Richmond.

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Justice and the Interstates
The Racist Truth about Urban Highways
Edited by Ryan Reft, Amanda K. Phillips de Lucas, and Rebecca C. Retzlaff
Island Press, 2022
When the U.S. interstate system was constructed, spurred by the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, many highways were purposefully routed through Black, Brown, and poor communities. These neighborhoods were destroyed, isolated from the rest of the city, or left to deteriorate over time.
 
Edited by Ryan Reft, Amanda Phillips de Lucas, and Rebecca Retzlaff, Justice and the Interstates examines the toll that the construction of the U.S. Interstate Highway System has taken on vulnerable communities over the past seven decades, details efforts to restore these often- segregated communities, and makes recommendations for moving forward. It opens up new areas for historical inquiry, while also calling on engineers, urban planners, transportation professionals, and policymakers to account for the legacies of their practices.
 
The chapters, written by diverse experts and thought leaders, look at different topics related to justice and the highway system, including:
  • A history of how White supremacists used interstate highway routing in Alabama to disrupt the civil rights movement
  • The impact of the highway in the Bronzeville area of Milwaukee
  • How the East Los Angeles Interchange disrupted Eastside communities and displaced countless Latino households
  • Efforts to restore the Rondo neighborhood of St. Paul 
Justice and the Interstates provides a concise but in-depth examination of the damages wrought by highway construction on the nation’s communities of color. Community advocates, transportation planners, engineers, historians, and policymakers will find a way forward to both address this history and reconcile it with current practices.
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front cover of Justice at Work
Justice at Work
The Rise of Economic and Racial Justice Coalitions in Cities
Marc Doussard
University of Minnesota Press, 2022

A pathbreaking look at how progressive policy change for economic justice has swept U.S. cities

 

In the 2010s cities and counties across the United States witnessed long-overdue change as they engaged more than ever before with questions of social, economic, and racial justice. After decades of urban economic restructuring that intensified class divides and institutional and systemic racism, dozens of local governments countered the conventional wisdom that cities couldn’t address inequality—enacting progressive labor market policies, from $15 minimum wages to paid sick leave.

Justice at Work examines the mutually reinforcing roles of economic and racial justice organizing and policy entrepreneurship in building power and support for policy changes. Bridging urban social movement and urban politics studies, it demonstrates how economic and racial justice coalitions are collectively the critical institution underpinning progressive change. It also shows that urban policy change is driven by “urban policy entrepreneurs” who use public space and the intangible resources of the city to open “agenda windows” for progressive policy proposals incubated through national networks. 

Through case studies of organizing and policy change efforts in cities including Chicago, Seattle, and New Orleans around minimum wages, targeted hiring, paid time off, fair scheduling, and anti-austerity, Marc Doussard and Greg Schrock show that the contemporary wave of successful progressive organizing efforts is likely to endure. Yet they caution that success is dependent on skillful organizing that builds and sustains power at the grassroots—and skillful policy work inside City Hall. By promoting justice at—and increasingly beyond—work, these movements hold the potential to unlock a new model for inclusive economic development in cities. 

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front cover of Justifiable Conduct
Justifiable Conduct
Self-Vindication in Memoir
Erich Goode
Temple University Press, 2013
How do memoirists make their work interesting, daring, exciting, and unorthodox enough so that they attract an audience, yet not so heinous and scandalous that their readers are unable to empathize or identify with them? In Justifiable Conduct, renowned sociologist Erich Goode explores the different strategies memoirists use to "neutralize" their alleged wrongdoing and fashion a more positive image of themselves for audiences. He examines how writers, including James Frey, Susan Cheever, Roman Polanski, Charles Van Doren and Elia Kazan, explain, justify, contextualize, excuse, or warrant their participation in activities such as criminal behavior, substance abuse, sexual transgressions, and political radicalism.

Using a theory of deviance neutralization, Goode assesses the types of behavior exhibited by these memoirists to draw out generic narratives that are most effective in attempting to absolve the actor-author. Despite the highly individualistic and variable lives of these writers, Goode demonstrates that memoirists use a conventional vocabulary for their unconventional behavior.  
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