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Winner, Best Book on Ethnic and Racial Politics in a Local or Urban Setting , Organized Section on Race, Ethnicity, and Politics of the American Political Science Association, 2002

This cross-cultural study of Los Angeles gangs identifies the social and economic factors that lead to gang membership and underscores their commonality across four ethnic groups--Chicano, African American, Vietnamese, and Salvadorian.

With nearly 1,000 gangs and 200,000 gang members, Los Angeles holds the dubious distinction of being the youth gang capital of the United States. The process of street socialization that leads to gang membership now cuts across all ethnic groups, as evidenced by the growing numbers of gangs among recent immigrants from Asia and Latin America.

This cross-cultural study of Los Angeles gangs identifies the social and economic factors that lead to gang membership and underscores their commonality across four ethnic groups—Chicano, African American, Vietnamese, and Salvadorian. James Diego Vigil begins at the community level, examining how destabilizing forces and marginalizing changes have disrupted the normal structures of parenting, schooling, and policing, thereby compelling many youths to grow up on the streets. He then turns to gang members' life stories to show how societal forces play out in individual lives. His findings provide a wealth of comparative data for scholars, policymakers, and law enforcement personnel seeking to respond to the complex problems associated with gangs.

Winner, Best Book on Ethnic and Racial Politics in a Local or Urban Setting , Organized Section on Race, Ethnicity, and Politics of the American Political Science Association, 2002

This cross-cultural study of Los Angeles gangs identifies the social and economic factors that lead to gang membership and underscores their commonality across four ethnic groups--Chicano, African American, Vietnamese, and Salvadorian.

With nearly 1,000 gangs and 200,000 gang members, Los Angeles holds the dubious distinction of being the youth gang capital of the United States. The process of street socialization that leads to gang membership now cuts across all ethnic groups, as evidenced by the growing numbers of gangs among recent immigrants from Asia and Latin America.

This cross-cultural study of Los Angeles gangs identifies the social and economic factors that lead to gang membership and underscores their commonality across four ethnic groups—Chicano, African American, Vietnamese, and Salvadorian. James Diego Vigil begins at the community level, examining how destabilizing forces and marginalizing changes have disrupted the normal structures of parenting, schooling, and policing, thereby compelling many youths to grow up on the streets. He then turns to gang members' life stories to show how societal forces play out in individual lives. His findings provide a wealth of comparative data for scholars, policymakers, and law enforcement personnel seeking to respond to the complex problems associated with gangs.

Abject Animals: Discomfort in Human–Animal Companionship explores the emotional contradictions and ethical tensions at the heart of human–animal relationships through a cross-cultural, multispecies ethnography of cats and dogs in the UK, France, and South Korea. Framing cats and dogs as “abject animals,” Julien Dugnoille examines how the treatment of animals can generate discomfort—emotional, moral, and bodily—through their commodification in cafés, markets, shelters, and homes. Drawing on Kristeva’s theory of abjection alongside the ideas of Bataille, Blanchot, and Weil, the book interrogates the commodified intimacy of contemporary human–animal companionship, revealing how labor, cuteness, and care mask underlying hierarchies and exploitation. Through richly detailed fieldwork and autoethnographic reflection, it critiques normative ideas of “healthy” companionship, arguing instead for forms of interspecies attunement that embrace discomfort and resist instrumentalization. Abject Animals is both a theoretical intervention and a call for more ethical, ego-disrupting relationships with the nonhuman.

The first book to explore the forgotten terrestrial and celestial globes of early America—and the global imagination they shaped. 

Ranging from early modern Europe to the modern United States, American Cosmos introduces the objects, people, practices, and ideas that constituted the long-forgotten world of globes. As Tamara Plakins Thornton shows, paired terrestrial and celestial globes were important components of early American social, cultural, and intellectual life. They served as markers of learnedness and social status, provided a material vision of a human-centered cosmos, and as 3-D problem-solving devices, offered distinctive imaginative perspectives on global connections and human difference. Only some had access to these globes—including genteel families, men of science, navigators, and students in colleges, academies, and missionary schools—but in the nineteenth century, many more encountered mass-produced, stripped-down globes in common school classrooms and parlors. Yet with new cultural concerns taking root, these modern globes assumed a much-diminished role in American life and thought, and an older world of globes, rich with meaning and possibility, disappeared.

As we increasingly encounter global-scale experience—climate change, pandemics, human migrations, the economy—and as American historians strive to look beyond national borders, we can learn about the origins of American global thinking by looking at globes themselves and the people who used them.

American studies has changed drastically over the past few decades, as a new wave of scholars—armed with groundbreaking ideas and more extensive methods of research—flocked to the relatively young field. This focus on scholarship, though necessary to the advancement of the discipline, has left pedagogy largely ignored. In American Studies in Dialogue, Matthias Oppermann consciously resists the traditional academic split between scholarship and classroom practice. His study calls for a radical reconstruction of American studies grounded in an understanding of cultural analysis and critique as genuinely dialogic processes of research and pedagogy. Drawing on case studies ranging from courses in early American civilization to recent multimedia projects, American Studies in Dialogue will be required reading for American studies scholars and teachers.

A forthright look at the future of the discipline in the wake of immense social changes.

What becomes of "national knowledge" in our age of globalization? If dramatic changes in technology, commerce, and social relations are undermining familiar connections between culture and place, what happens to legacies of learning that put the nation at the center of the study of history, culture, language, politics, and geography? In short, what remains of American Studies? At a critical moment, this book offers a richly textured historical perspective on where our notions of national knowledge-and our sense of American Studies-have come from and where they may lead in a future of new ideas about culture and community.