22279 books match the query 'Social Science' and 1700 start with c

cover of Calamity Theory: Three Critiques of Existential Risk

Calamity Theory

Three Critiques of Existential Risk

Joshua Schuster

University of Minnesota Press, 2021

What are the implications of how we talk about apocalypse?

A new philosophical field has emerged. “Existential risk” studies any real or hypothetical human extinction event in the near or distant future. This movement examines catastrophes ranging from runaway global warming to nuclear warfare to malevolent artificial intelligence, deploying a curious mix of utilitarian ethics, statistical risk analysis, and, controversially, a transhuman advocacy that would aim to supersede almost all extinction scenarios. The proponents of existential risk thinking, led by Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, have seen their work gain immense popularity, attracting endorsement from Bill Gates and Elon Musk, millions of dollars, and millions of views. 

Calamity Theory is the first book to examine the rise of this thinking and its failures to acknowledge the ways some communities and lifeways are more at risk than others and what it implies about human extinction.

Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

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cover of Calculating Amazonia: The Politics of Quantification in the Age of Climate Change

Calculating Amazonia

The Politics of Quantification in the Age of Climate Change

Eduardo Romero Dianderas

Duke University Press, 2027

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cover of Calculating Brilliance: An Intellectual History of Mayan Astronomy at Chich’en Itza

Calculating Brilliance

An Intellectual History of Mayan Astronomy at Chich’en Itza

Gerardo Aldana y Villalobos

University of Arizona Press, 2021

To the modern eye, the architects at Chich’en Itza produced some of the most mysterious structures in ancient Mesoamerica. The purpose and cultural influences behind this architecture seem left to conjecture. The people who created and lived around this stunning site may seem even more mercurial.

Near the structure known today as the Great Ball Court and within the interior of the Lower Temple of the Jaguar, a mural depicts a female Mayan astronomer called K'uk'ul Ek' Tuyilaj. Weaving together archaeology, mathematics, history, and astronomy, Calculating Brilliance brings to light the discovery by this Mayan astronomer, which is recorded in the Venus Table of the Dresden Codex. As the book demonstrates, this brilliant discovery reverberated throughout Mayan science. But it has remained obscured to modern eyes.

Jumping from the vital contributions of K'uk'ul Ek' Tuyilaj, Gerardo Aldana y Villalobos critically reframes science in the pre-Columbian world. He reexamines the historiography of the Dresden Codex and contextualizes the Venus Table relative to other Indigenous literature. From a perspective anchored to Indigenous cosmologies and religions, Aldana y Villalobos delves into how we may understand Indigenous science and discovery—both its parallels and divergences from modern globalized perspectives of science.

Calculating Brilliance brings different intellectual threads together across time and space, from the Classic to the Postclassic, the colonial period to the twenty-first century to offer a new vision for understanding Mayan astronomy.

 
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cover of Caliban's Curse: George Lamming and the Revisioning of History

Caliban's Curse

George Lamming and the Revisioning of History

Supriya Nair

University of Michigan Press, 1996

Ever present in the work of contemporary Barbadian novelist George Lamming, author of In the Castle of My Skin, Natives of My Person, The Emigrants, and The Pleasures of Exile, are the subjects of history and revolution. In Caliban's Curse, Supriya M. Nair traces these themes and situates Lamming's work within the ongoing discourses of nationalism and identity. Retracing the history of colonial intervention in the anglophone Caribbean and seeking connections among Africa, the Caribbean, and England, Caliban's Curse moves beyond the popular perception of the archipelago as an ahistorical tourist paradise and presents the islands as a space populated by the tragic and triumphant cultures of the black diaspora.
Caliban's Curse draws upon a range of theories--postcolonial, Marxist, and feminist--to contextualize the black diaspora of the modern Caribbean through one of its primary anglophone novelists. Putting George Lamming in conversation with such contemporaries as C.L.R. James, Derek Walcott, and Wilson Harris, Nair argues that Lamming's works expand the protest of Shakespeare's Caliban to articulate a reinvention of Caribbean cultures. Both cursed by and cursing the weight of colonial history, Lamming works against the paralysis induced by such an encounter; his work serves to rewrite canonical icons and to reimagine popular cultures.
"Supriya Nair writes about the problems of history and social revolution with passion and clarity and an amazing range of critical and cultural reference. . . . She brings to existing studies of Lamming a wide and sustained knowledge of the forces that have shaped the West Indian novel, and the wider postcolonial debates in which these novels are read and discussed." --Simon Gikandi, University of Michigan
Supriya Nair is Associate Professor of English, Tulane University.
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cover of Califia Women: Feminist Education against Sexism, Classism, and Racism

Califia Women

Feminist Education against Sexism, Classism, and Racism

By Clark A. Pomerleau

University of Texas Press, 2013

A dynamic exploration of the Califia Community, a long-running Los Angeles based grassroots alternative education group formed in the mid-1970s, whose richly diverse membership offered a compelling array of responses to feminism’s key issues.

Launched in 1975, the Califia Community organized activist educational camps and other programs in southern California until its dissolution in 1987. An alternative to mainstream academia’s attempts to tie feminism to university courses, Califia blended aspects of feminism that spanned the labels “second wave” and “radical,” attracting women from a range of gender expressions, sexual orientations, class backgrounds, and races or ethnicities. Califia Women captures the history of the organization through oral history interviews, archives, and other forms of primary research. The result is a lens for re-reading trends in feminist and social justice activism of the time period, contextualized against a growing conservative backlash.

Throughout each chapter, readers learn about the triumphs and frictions feminists encountered as they attempted to build on the achievements of the postwar Civil Rights movement. With its backdrop of southern California, the book emphasizes a region that has often been overlooked in studies of East Coast or San Francisco Bay–area activism. Califia Women also counters the notions that radical and lesbian feminists were unwilling to address intersectional identities generally and that they withdrew from political activism after 1975. Instead, the Califia Community shows evidence that these and other feminists intentionally created an educational forum that embraced oppositional consciousness and sought to serve a variety of women, including radical Christian reformers, Wiccans, scholars of color, and GLBT activists.

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cover of California Dreaming: Boosterism, Memory, and Rural Suburbs in the Golden State

California Dreaming

Boosterism, Memory, and Rural Suburbs in the Golden State

Paul J. P. Sandul

West Virginia University Press, 2014

At the turn of the 20th century, the California dream was a suburban ideal where life on the farm was exceptional. Agrarian virtue existed alongside good roads, social clubs, cultural institutions, and business commerce. The California suburban dream was the ultimate symbol of progress and modernity.
 
California Dreaming: Boosterism, Memory, and Rural Suburbs in the Golden State analyzes the growth, promotion, and agricultural colonization that fed this dream during the early 1900s. Through this analysis, Paul J. P. Sandul introduces a newly identified rural-suburban type: the agriburb, a rural suburb deliberately planned, developed, and promoted for profit. Sandul reconceptualizes California’s growth during this time period, establishing the agriburb as a suburban phenomenon that occurred long before the booms of the 1920s and 1950s.
 
Sandul’s analysis contributes to a new suburban history that includes diverse constituencies and geographies and focuses on the production and construction of place and memory. Boosters purposefully “harvested” suburbs with an eye toward direct profit and metropolitan growth. State boosters boasted of unsurpassable idyllic communities while local boosters bragged of communities that represented the best of the best, both using narratives of place, class, race, lifestyle, and profit to avow images of the rural and suburban ideal.

This suburban dream attracted people who desired a family home, nature, health, culture, refinement, and rural virtue. In the agriburb, a family could live on a small home grove while enjoying the perks of a progressive city. A home located within the landscape of natural California with access to urban amenities provided a good place to live and a way to gain revenue through farming.
 
To uncover and dissect the agriburb, Sandul focuses on local histories from California’s Central Valley and the Inland Empire of Southern California, including Ontario near Los Angeles and Orangevale and Fair Oaks outside Sacramento. His analysis closely operates between the intersections of history, anthropology, geography, sociology, and the rural and urban, while examining a metanarrative that exposes much about the nature and lasting influence of cultural memory and public history upon agriburban communities.
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cover of California Futures: Haunted Ecologies, Decolonial Relations

California Futures

Haunted Ecologies, Decolonial Relations

Daniel Lanza Rivers

Duke University Press, 2026

California Futures is a critical study of California as a site of liberatory dreaming—one that takes up the history, politics, and afterlives of the region’s colonial imaginings as well as archives of resistance and world-making which strive toward Indigenous, decolonial, Black, queer, feminist, and anti-white supremacist futures. Attending carefully to the colonial, commercial, and environmental entanglements of the region, Daniel Lanza Rivers offers an account of the processes of speculation that worlded California into being. Rivers examines case studies such as the colonial cultures of grizzly bear eradication and reintroduction; the convergence of drought, industrial agriculture, and environmental toxicity in California's Central Valley; utopianism in the Klamath Mountains, from the Black Bear Ranch commune to Octavia Butler’s Parable series; dam removal and Native climate adaptation on the Klamath watershed; and the policing of unhoused people around Oakland's Lake Merritt. Through these case studies, Rivers interrogates the long histories of settler conquest, extractive and racial capitalism, and heteropatriarchy that have shaped California. They chart strategies for thinking beyond the colonial Anthropocene and toward the post-extractive and liberatory futures that emerge from and with decolonial land relations.
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cover of California Jews

California Jews

Edited by Ava F. Kahn and Marc Dollinger

Brandeis University Press, 2011

The nation’s thirty-first state emerged early as one of its most diverse as people immigrated to the west. California’s indigenous tribes were forced off their lands first by Spanish settlers, then by the arrival of gold miners from every corner of the world. Because of its Catholic missionary history, Gold Rush California did not experience a more exclusive eastern-style Protestantism. This permitted more rapid and inclusive acculturation. California Jews, unlike their eastern counterparts whose arrival often followed that of European Protestants, were often among the first settlers to establish a west coast community. Jewish immigrants to California took advantage of its physical environment, ethnic diversity, and cultural distinctiveness to fashion a form of Judaism unique in the American experience. California Jews enjoyed unprecedented access to political power a generation earlier than their New York counterparts. They thrived in the multicultural mix, redefining the classic black-white racial binary by forging relations with a variety of religious and ethnic groups in both San Francisco and Los Angeles.
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cover of California Polyphony: Ethnic Voices, Musical Crossroads

California Polyphony

Ethnic Voices, Musical Crossroads

Mina Yang

University of Illinois Press, 2007

What does it mean to be Californian? To find out, Mina Yang delves into multicultural nature of musics in the state that has launched musical and cultural trends for decades.

In the early twentieth century, an orientalist fascination with Asian music and culture dominated the popular imagination of white Californians and influenced their interactions with the Asian Other. Several decades later, tensions between the Los Angeles Police Department and the African American community made the thriving jazz and blues nightclub scene of 1940s Central Avenue a target for the LAPD's anti-vice crusade. The musical scores for Hollywood's noir films confirmed reactionary notions of the threat to white female sexuality in the face of black culture and urban corruption while Mexican Americans faced a conflicted assimilation into the white American mainstream. Finally, Korean Americans in the twenty-first century turned to hip-hop to express their cultural and national identities.

A compelling journey into the origins of musical identity, California Polyphony explores the intersection of musicology, cultural history, and politics to define Californian.

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cover of California's Channel Islands: The Archaeology of Human-Environment Interactions

California's Channel Islands

The Archaeology of Human-Environment Interactions

Christopher S. Jazwa

University of Utah Press, 2013

California’s Channel Islands are a chain of eight islands that extend along the state’s southern coastline from Santa Barbara’s Point Conception to the Mexican border. Popular tourist destinations today, these islands once supported some of the earliest human populations in the Americas; archaeological evidence of maritime Paleo-Indian settlements on the northern islands dates back some 13,000 years. The indigenous peoples of the islands—the Chumash of the northern islands and the Tongva of the southern islands—thrived into historic times by relying upon the abundance and diversity of marine and terrestrial resources available to them. California’s Channel Islands presents a definitive archaeological investigation of these unique islands and their inhabitants, and is the first publication to discuss the islands and their peoples holistically rather than individually or by subgroup.

Tracing the human occupation of the islands from the earliest settlement at the end of the Pleistocene by marine-adapted foragers with sophisticated stone tool technologies to the tragic story of historic depopulation continuing into the nineteenth century, contributors discuss topics including human settlement patterns on small and large scales, prehistoric trails, the use of plant resources, and ceremonialism. They also address the decisions that people made when confronted with diverse and changing environments. By focusing on distinct aspects of human relationships with California’s Channel Islands through time, they tell a story of settlement, subsistence, and ritual on the coastal edge of western North America.

This compendium of scholarship condenses decades of excavation and analysis into a single, illuminating volume that will be indispensable for those interested in the Channel Islands or New World history or archaeology.

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cover of California’s Ancient Past: From Pacific to the Range of Light

California’s Ancient Past

From Pacific to the Range of Light

Jeanne E. Arnold

University Press of Colorado, 2010

“California’s Ancient Past is an excellent introduction and overview of the archaeology and ancient peoples of this diverse and dynamic part of North America. Written in a concise and approachable format, the book provides an excellent foundation for students, the general public, and scholars working in other regions around the world. This book will be an important source of information on California’s ancient past for years to come.”—Torben C. Rick, Smithsonian Institution
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cover of Call Me by Your Name: Perspectives on the Film

Call Me by Your Name

Perspectives on the Film

Edited by Edward Lamberti and Michael Williams

Intellect Books, 2026

This edited collection explores how Luca Guadagnino’s film Call Me by Your Name speaks powerfully to questions of contemporary sexual identity and romance.

Adapted by James Ivory from André Aciman’s novel and directed by Luca Guadagnino, the film Call Me by Your Name has been passionately received among audiences and critics ever since its 2017 release. A love story between seventeen-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and graduate student Oliver (Armie Hammer) set in 1983 “somewhere in northern Italy,” Call Me by Your Name presents a gay relationship in a romantic idyll seemingly untroubled by outside pressures, prejudices, or tragedy.

While this means it offers audiences welcome opportunities to swoon in front of an LGBTQ+ romance that equals classic heterosexual romances onscreen, its relevance or political significance today may not be immediately apparent. This edited collection points out the ways in which the film is abundantly infused with narrative, thematic, and stylistic elements that can be interpreted as speaking powerfully to contemporary audiences on questions of sexual identity. How does this love story explore wider tensions that exist between the specific and the general, between the open and the hidden, and between the past and the present? The contributors to this collection provide stimulating and contemplative responses to this question.

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cover of Call School: Rural Education in the Midwest to 1918

Call School

Rural Education in the Midwest to 1918

Paul Theobald

Southern Illinois University Press, 1995

Paul Theobald chronicles the history of the one-room country schools that were spread throughout the rural Midwest during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Focusing on the region’s educational history in light of the religious, economic, and political atmosphere, Theobald explores the tight connection between educational preferences and religious views, between the economics of the countryside and the educational experiences of children, and between the politics of local power and the educational prospects of the powerless.

Basing his study on extensive archival research, including findings from eight midwestern states, Theobald neither condemns nor lauds the one-room school experience. Providing an objective evaluation, he examines rural school records, correspondence of early school officers, contemporary texts, and diaries and letters of rural students and teachers.

As he weaves together a contextualized account of the circumstances surrounding and within the one-room country schools of the Midwest, Theobald stresses that religion was of primary importance in nineteenth-century American life. Yet he also looks carefully at the shifting economic environment at work in the countryside, particularly in regard to the development of widespread farm tenancy and the consolidation of agricultural and related industries. He challenges readers to analyze how a national move from an agrarian to an industrial view caused conflict and confusion, thereby introducing irrevocable change into rural American life.

Theobald’s study illuminates the history of education on the plains and sheds light on the social foundations of the period.

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cover of Callachaca: Style Status In Inca Community

Callachaca

Style Status In Inca Community

Susan A. Niles

University of Iowa Press, 1987

Inca constructions, designed to conform to a state aesthetic, reveal the worldview of these masters of social and architectural engineering. In her meticulous analysis of Callachaca—the fifteenth-century estate of the royal Amaro Topa Inca and his retainers near the ancient capital of Cuzco—Susan Niles shows us that the physical order seen in this planned community reflects the Inca vision of an appropriate social order.

Callachaca: Style and Status in an Inca Community will be valuable reading for archaeologists, art historians, geographers, architects with an interest in pre-Columbian cultures, landscape architects, anthropologists, folklorists, and historians with a special interest in the Andes. Since she focuses on all the varied architectural remains at one site in the Inca heartland, Niles provides a unique model for examining royal Inca architecture and society.

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cover of Callaloo Nation: Metaphors of Race and Religious Identity among South Asians in Trinidad

Callaloo Nation

Metaphors of Race and Religious Identity among South Asians in Trinidad

Aisha Khan

Duke University Press, 2004

Mixing—whether referred to as mestizaje, callaloo, hybridity, creolization, or multiculturalism—is a foundational cultural trope in Caribbean and Latin American societies. Historically entwined with colonial, anticolonial, and democratic ideologies, ideas about mixing are powerful forces in the ways identities are interpreted and evaluated. As Aisha Khan shows in this ethnography, they reveal the tension that exists between identity as a source of equality and identity as an instrument through which social and cultural hierarchies are reinforced. Focusing on the Indian diaspora in the Caribbean, Khan examines this paradox as it is expressed in key dimensions of Hindu and Muslim cultural history and social relationships in southern Trinidad. In vivid detail, she describes how disempowered communities create livable conditions for themselves while participating in a broader culture that both celebrates and denies difference.

Khan combines ethnographic research she conducted in Trinidad over the course of a decade with extensive archival research to explore how Hindu and Muslim Indo-Trinidadians interpret authority, generational tensions, and the transformations of Indian culture in the Caribbean through metaphors of mixing. She demonstrates how ambivalence about the desirability of a callaloo nation—a multicultural society—is manifest around practices and issues, including rituals, labor, intermarriage, and class mobility. Khan maintains that metaphors of mixing are pervasive and worth paying attention to: the assumptions and concerns they communicate are key to unraveling who Indo-Trinidadians imagine themselves to be and how identities such as race and religion shape and are shaped by the politics of multiculturalism.

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cover of Called to Care?: Health Care, Burnout, and the Search for Meaningful Work

Called to Care?

Health Care, Burnout, and the Search for Meaningful Work

Cindy L. Cain

Rutgers University Press, 2026

Health care workers are burned out. Health care leaders know that workers are burned out but do not yet have the right tools to fix the problem. Called to Care? argues that we can mitigate burnout by examining what is most meaningful about health care work. Using interviews and observation of a wide range of health care workers, Cain shows that workers who care for our most vulnerable adults find their work to be meaningful when they are able to connect to the work and make progress on something that matters. In most cases, these meaningful experiences are also consistent with better care for patients. And yet organizational practices, policy environments, and cultural meanings get in the way of meaningful work, creating burnout. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Called to Care? illustrates that workplaces can and should align meaningful work experiences with quality care for patients.

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cover of Called to Courage: Four Women in Missouri History

Called to Courage

Four Women in Missouri History

Margot Ford McMillen & Heather Roberson

University of Missouri Press, 2002

While there are many accessible biographies of important Missouri men, there are few such biographies of Missouri women, which might suggest that they did not count in history. This book, written by a mother-and-daughter team, helps to correct that misconception by tracing the lives of four women who played important roles in their eras. These women were exceptional because they had the courage to make the best of their abilities, forging trails and breaking the barriers that separated women’s spheres from those of men:
·        A Native American woman the French newspapers called “Ignon Ouaconisen,” and the people of Paris called the “Missouri princess,” lived from about 1700 to after 1751. She traveled with adventurer Etienne de Bourgmont and bore his child. Although much of her life remains a mystery, her story gives us insights into the lives of Missouri Indian women in the days of the fur trade.
·        Pioneer Olive Boone (1783–1858) came to the Louisiana Territory as the teenage bride of Nathan Boone, guiding a skiff and their horses across the Missouri River to join the Daniel Boone family near St. Charles. For much of her married life, she stayed alone with her fourteen children while her husband traveled on lengthy hunting expeditions, supervised the Boone saltworks in present-day Howard County, and spent years in the military.
·        Martha Jane Chisley, born a slave in 1833, was brought to northeast Missouri as a young woman. During the Civil War, Martha Jane escaped with her children to Illinois. She overcame many obstacles so that her son Augustine was able to enter school and get an education. Augustine studied in Rome and became the first nationally known African American priest.
·        Nell Donnelly of Kansas City was a pioneering businesswoman who founded a dress company that became the world’s largest, brightening the wardrobe of the “housewife” while also creating fair working conditions for her employees. Born into an ordinary middle-class family in 1889, she achieved a success and high profile that brought its own problems.
            Using Missouri and Illinois archives, Margot Ford McMillen and Heather Roberson have compiled well-known and obscure materials to describe the lives of both women and men, showing how roles changed as Missouri and America matured. Bringing together family insights and the rare writings of observers who almost never mention women in their journals, Called to Courage will be welcomed by anyone interested in women’s history or Missouri history.
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cover of Called to Reckon: Replacing History and Reclaiming Mission at a Midwestern College

Called to Reckon

Replacing History and Reclaiming Mission at a Midwestern College

Edited by Jane E. Simonsen

Southern Illinois University Press, 2025

Called to Reckon offers a non-traditional history of Augustana College by centering the narratives of racially and ethnically diverse students and educators often overlooked in the institution’s past. The book traces how the college, founded by Swedish Lutherans with a mission to educate for the common good and “serve the neighbor so that all may flourish,” has been challenged to live up to these values over its 160-year history.
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cover of Calling All Cars: Radio Dragnets and the Technology of Policing

Calling All Cars

Radio Dragnets and the Technology of Policing

Kathleen Battles

University of Minnesota Press, 2010

Calling All Cars shows how radio played a key role in an emerging form of policing during the turbulent years of the Depression. Until this time popular culture had characterized the gangster as hero, but radio crime dramas worked against this attitude and were ultimately successful in making heroes out of law enforcement officers.
 
Through close analysis of radio programming of the era and the production of true crime docudramas, Kathleen Battles argues that radio was a significant site for overhauling the dismal public image of policing. However, it was not simply the elevation of the perception of police that was at stake. Using radio, reformers sought to control the symbolic terrain through which citizens encountered the police, and it became a medium to promote a positive meaning and purpose for policing. For example, Battles connects the apprehension of criminals by a dragnet with the idea of using the radio network to both publicize this activity and make it popular with citizens.
 
The first book to systematically address the development of crime dramas during the golden age of radio, Calling All Cars explores an important irony: the intimacy of the newest technology of the time helped create an intimate authority—the police as the appropriate force for control—over the citizenry.
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cover of Calling Family: Digital Technologies and the Making of Transnational Care Collectives

Calling Family

Digital Technologies and the Making of Transnational Care Collectives

Tanja Ahlin

Rutgers University Press, 2023

How do digital technologies shape both how people care for each other and, through that, who they are? With technological innovation is on the rise and increasing migration introducing vast distances between family members--a situation additionally complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the requirements of physical distancing, especially for the most vulnerable – older adults--this is a pertinent question. Through ethnographic fieldwork among families of migrating nurses from Kerala, India, Tanja Ahlin explores how digital technologies shape elder care when adult children and their aging parents live far apart. Coming from a country in which appropriate elder care is closely associated with co-residence, these families tinker with smartphones and social media to establish how care at a distance can and should be done to be considered good. Through the notion of transnational care collectives, Calling Family uncovers the subtle workings of digital technologies on care across countries and continents when being physically together is not feasible. Calling Family provides a better understanding of technological relationality that can only be expected to further intensify in the future.

This book is also freely available online as an open access digital edition. The open access publication was financially supported by the Social Science Research Master and partly also by the Health, Care and the Body Programme Group of the Department of Anthropology, both at the Amsterdam Institute of Social Science Research, University of Amsterdam.
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cover of Calling Home: Working-Class Women's Writings

Calling Home

Working-Class Women's Writings

Zandy, Janet

Rutgers University Press, 1990

Working-class women are the majority of women in the United States, and yet their work and their culture are rarely visible. Calling Home is an anthology of writings by and about working-class women. Over fifty selections represent the ethnic, racial, and geographic diversity of working-class experience. This is writing grounded in social history, not in the academy. Traditional boundaries of genre and periodization collapse in this collection, which includes reportage, oral histories, speeches, songs, and letters, as well as poetry, stories, and essays. The divisions in this collection - telling stories, bearing witness, celebrating solidarity - address the distinction of "by" or "about" working-class women, and show the connections between individual identity and collective sensibility in a common history of struggle for economic justice.

The geography of home, identity, parents, sex, motherhood, the dominance of the job, the overlapping of private and public worlds, the promise of solidarity and community are a few of the themes of this book. Here is a chorus of working class women's voices: Sandra Cisneros, Barbara Garson, Meridel Le Sueur, Tillie Olsen, Barbara Smith, Endesha I. M. Holland, Mother Jones, Nellie Wong, Agnes Smedley, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Sharon Doubiago, Carol Tarlen, Hazel Hall, Margaret Randall, Judy Grahn, and many others!

The aesthetic impulse is shaped by class, but not limited to one ruling class. What connects these writers is a collective consciousness, a class, which rejects bondage and lays claim to liberation through all  the possibilities of language. Calling Home is illustrated with family photographs as well as images of working women by professional photographers.
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cover of Calling Memory into Place

Calling Memory into Place

Dora Apel

Rutgers University Press, 2021

How can memory be mobilized for social justice? How can images and monuments counter public forgetting? And how can inherited family and cultural traumas be channeled in productive ways?  
 
In this deeply personal work, acclaimed art historian Dora Apel examines how memorials, photographs, artworks, and autobiographical stories can be used to fuel a process of “unforgetting”—reinterpreting the past by recalling the events, people, perspectives, and feelings that get excluded from conventional histories. The ten essays in Calling Memory into Place feature explorations of the controversy over a painting of Emmett Till in the Whitney Biennial and the debates about a national lynching memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. They also include personal accounts of Apel’s return to the Polish town where her Holocaust survivor parents grew up, as well as the ways she found strength in her inherited trauma while enduring treatment for breast cancer.  
 
These essays shift between the scholarly, the personal, and the visual as different modes of knowing, and explore the intersections between racism, antisemitism, and sexism, while suggesting how awareness of historical trauma is deeply inscribed on the body. By investigating the relations among place, memory, and identity, this study shines a light on the dynamic nature of memory as it crosses geography and generations.
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cover of Calling State Power to Account: Reparations in Morality, Law, and Politics

Calling State Power to Account

Reparations in Morality, Law, and Politics

Jennifer M. Page

University of Chicago Press, 2027

An incisive philosophical examination of reparations claims within today’s political and legal landscapes.

For generations, Black Americans have demanded reparations, and, for generations, the US government has ignored or denied these claims. In Calling State Power to Account, Jennifer M. Page puts forward a novel case for reparations owed to Black Americans for slavery, Jim Crow, and subsequent injustices.

Navigating conflicting insights that reparations are owed for blameworthy wrongdoing and that present iniquities to Black Americans are structural rather than the result of intentional offenses by a clearly identifiable party, Page theorizes how unredressed state-sponsored injustices can be the basis of present reparative duties. Split into two parts, the book first makes a philosophical case for reparations before then examining reparations from both legal and political perspectives. This analysis includes considering practical challenges to reparations, such as the limits of legal accountability in a system with formal barriers designed to shield the government from liability. Despite formidable obstacles, Page argues that there is deep moral and democratic significance to the pursuits of reparations claimants. The aim of reparations is not only monetary compensation but also a moral reckoning and assertion of equality against the backdrop of social and political inequalities.

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cover of Calling the Soul Back: Embodied Spirituality in Chicanx Narrative

Calling the Soul Back

Embodied Spirituality in Chicanx Narrative

Christina Garcia Lopez

University of Arizona Press, 2019

Spirituality has consistently been present in the political and cultural counternarratives of Chicanx literature. Calling the Soul Back focuses on the embodied aspects of a spirituality integrating body, mind, and soul. Centering the relationship between embodiment and literary narrative, Christina Garcia Lopez shows narrative as healing work through which writers and readers ritually call back the soul—one’s unique immaterial essence—into union with the body, counteracting the wounding fragmentation that emerged out of colonization and imperialism. These readings feature both underanalyzed and more popular works by pivotal writers such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Sandra Cisneros, and Rudolfo Anaya, in addition to works by less commonly acknowledged authors.

Calling the Soul Back explores the spiritual and ancestral knowledge offered in narratives of bodies in trauma, bodies engaged in ritual, grieving bodies, bodies immersed in and becoming part of nature, and dreaming bodies. Reading across narrative nonfiction, performative monologue, short fiction, fables, illustrated children’s books, and a novel, Garcia Lopez asks how these narratives draw on the embodied intersections of ways of knowing and being to shift readers’ consciousness regarding relationships to space, time, and natural environments.

Using an interdisciplinary approach, Calling the Soul Back draws on literary and Chicanx studies scholars as well as those in religious studies, feminist studies, sociology, environmental studies, philosophy, and Indigenous studies, to reveal narrative’s healing potential to bring the soul into balance with the body and mind.
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cover of Callous Objects: Designs against the Homeless

Callous Objects

Designs against the Homeless

Robert Rosenberger

University of Minnesota Press, 2017

Uncovering injustices built into our everyday surroundings

Callous Objects unearths cases in which cities push homeless people out of public spaces through a combination of policy and strategic design. Robert Rosenberger examines such commonplace devices as garbage cans, fences, signage, and benches—all of which reveal political agendas beneath the surface. Such objects have evolved, through a confluence of design and law, to be open to some uses and closed to others, but always capable of participating in collective ends on a large scale. Rosenberger brings together ideas from the philosophy of technology, social theory, and feminist epistemology to spotlight the widespread anti-homeless ideology built into our communities and enacted in law.

Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

[more]
cover of Calricaram Naulluutem-llu Qanrutkumallra / Wellness and Illness in Yup'ik Oral Tradition

Calricaram Naulluutem-llu Qanrutkumallra / Wellness and Illness in Yup'ik Oral Tradition

Ann Fienup-Riordan

University of Alaska Press, 2027

Calricaram Naulluutem-llu Qanrutkumallra / Wellness and Illness in Yup’ik Oral Tradition brings together stories and information shared by more than a hundred Yup’ik tradition bearers over more than thirty years. Recorded during elder gatherings hosted by the Calista Elders Council beginning in 1997 and, since 2014, by Calista Education and Culture, the book passes on the words of wisdom that will remain enduring parts of these elders’ legacy.

Combining recent recordings with material from earlier gatherings, the narratives address various aspects of personal and community health: how people talk about sickness and health, traditional foods, qanruyutet (oral instructions) for living a healthy life, medicinal plants, medicinal uses of bodily fluids, ailments and treatments, traditional healing techniques, caring for those who are sick, mental health and mental illness, and epidemics.

Calricaram Naulluutem-llu Qanrutkumallra / Wellness and Illness in Yup’ik Oral Tradition invites readers to listen to these elders to better understand past practices and how they can contribute to a healthier future for all.

[more]
cover of Calvinists Incorporated: Welsh Immigrants on Ohio's Industrial Frontier

Calvinists Incorporated

Welsh Immigrants on Ohio's Industrial Frontier

Anne Kelly Knowles

University of Chicago Press, 1996

Bringing immigrants onstage as central players in the drama of rural
capitalist transformation, Anne Kelly Knowles traces a community of
Welsh immigrants to Jackson and Gallia counties in southern Ohio. After
reconstructing the gradual process of community-building, Knowles
focuses on the pivotal moment when the immigrants became involved with
the industrialization of their new region as workers and investors in
Welsh-owned charcoal iron companies. Setting the southern Ohio Welsh in
the context of Welsh immigration as a whole from 1795 to 1850, Knowles
explores how these strict Calvinists responded to the moral dilemmas
posed by leaving their native land and experiencing economic success in
the United States.

Knowles draws on a wide variety of sources, including obituaries and
community histories, to reconstruct the personal histories of over 1,700
immigrants. The resulting account will find appreciative readers not
only among historical geographers, but also among American economic
historians and historians of religion.


[more]
cover of Cambodia's Trials: Contrasting Visions of Truth, Transitional Justice and National Recovery

Cambodia's Trials

Contrasting Visions of Truth, Transitional Justice and National Recovery

Edited by Robin Biddulph and Alexandra Kent

National University of Singapore Press, 2023

New insights into understanding how Cambodia grapples with its traumatic historical past. 

More than four decades have passed since the end of Khmer Rouge rule in Cambodia in 1979. Even so, the country is still coming to terms with the destruction wrought by the Khmer Rouge during both the time they were in power and during the period of guerrilla resistance that lasted until 1998. The Khmer Rouge Tribunal, or the Extraordinary Chambers in the Court of Cambodia (ECCC), was established in 2006 to bring the Khmer Rouge leadership to justice. In many ways a product of the 1990s, when liberal democracy appeared to be on the rise both in Cambodia and internationally, the ECCC was imagined as a transitional justice initiative that would help ease the transition to liberal democracy. 

The ECCC has long been the focus of scholarly attention in Cambodia’s recovery, but this compelling study argues that such an approach is dated, noting that the political circumstances in which the ECCC was born have since changed profoundly, both globally and locally. Cambodia’s current situation can no longer be analyzed solely in terms of transitional justice narratives or the work of the ECCC, and other ways in which Cambodians have come to terms with their past and built new lives must be considered. By decentering the ECCC in the scholarly narrative of Cambodia’s recovery, the volume’s authors offer fascinating new insights into the Khmer Rouge period and more recent years of social, cultural, and political change in Cambodia.
[more]
cover of Camels Back Cave: Anthropological Paper 125

Camels Back Cave

Anthropological Paper 125

Dave N. Schmitt

University of Utah Press, 2005

University of Utah Anthropological Paper No. 125

Camels Back Cave is in an isolated limestone ridge on the southern edge of the Great Salt Lake Desert. Recent archaeological investigations there have exposed a series of stratified deposits spanning the entire Holocene era (10,000 BP–present), deposits that show intermittent human occupations dating back through the past 7,600 years. Most human visits to the cave were brief—many likely representing overnight stays—and visitors did not dig pits or move sediment. As a result, fieldworkers were able to recognize and remove thirty-three stratigraphic horizons; radiocarbon analysis provided a pristine, high-resolution chronological sequence of human use. The brevity of visits and the undisturbed nature of the deposits also allowed researchers to identify portions of eight “living surfaces” where they exposed and mapped artifacts and ecofacts across contiguous blocks of units.

Aside from presenting model field techniques, this volume provides new and unique information on regional Holocene climates and biotic communities, cave taphonomy and small mammal hunting, as well as updated human chronologies for Great Basin occupation.

[more]
cover of Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs

Camera Indica

The Social Life of Indian Photographs

Christopher Pinney

University of Chicago Press, 1997

A wedding couple gazes resolutely at viewers from the wings of a butterfly; a portrait surrounded by rose petals commemorates a recently deceased boy.

These quiet but moving images represent the changing role of photographic portraiture in India, a topic anthropologist Christopher Pinney explores in Camera Indica. Studying photographic practice in India, Pinney traces photography's various purposes and goals from colonial through postcolonial times. He identifies three key periods in Indian portraiture: the use of photography under British rule as a quantifiable instrument of measurement, the later role of portraiture in moral instruction, and the current visual popular culture and its effects on modes of picturing. Photographic culture thus becomes a mutable realm in which capturing likeness is only part of the project. Lavishly illustrated, Pinney's account of the change from depiction to invention uncovers fascinating links between these evocative images and the society and history from which they emerge.
[more]
cover of Caminos: Memoirs from the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin

Caminos

Memoirs from the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin

Edited by Zita Arocha

University of Texas Press, 2026

Fourteen writers reflect on the complexities of Mexican American identity in hyphenated America.

At a time when memoir has become an increasingly popular form of self-expression, fourteen writers from diverse backgrounds engaged with one another in a series of writing workshops sponsored by the Center for Mexican American Studies at UT Austin to reflect on their life journeys. They wrestle with issues that shaped them in provocative, evocative, and sometimes humorous short essays. The writers include a lawyer, a civil rights activist, actors, journalists, and professors who write of belonging, national and sexual identity, coping with illness and loss, career challenges, and life-altering events familiar to us all. The contributors write poignantly about losing a parent at an early age; growing up in segregated communities; bravely confronting serious health problems; living in a household with a mentally disturbed family member; the complexity of being “American” as well as “Mexican”; and the professional challenges facing all hyphenated Americans, many of whom are often the first person of color in their workplaces.

[more]
cover of Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality

Camp Grounds

Style and Homosexuality

Edited by David Bergman

University of Massachusetts Press, 1993

The concept of camp has never been easy to define. Derived from the French verb camper, “to pose,” it has been variously interpreted as a style that favors exaggeration, an ironic attitude toward the cultural mainstream, and a form of aestheticism that celebrates artifice over beauty. At the same time, camp has been long associated with homosexual culture, or at least with a self-conscious eroticism that questions traditional gender constructions.

The sixteen essays on camp included in this book explore further the relationship between style and homosexuality, showing how camp has made its way into every aspect of our cultural lives: theater, popular music, opera, film, and literature. Beginning with an overview of what camp is, where it came from, and how it operates, the chapter addresses topics ranging from the “high camp” of Whitman and Proust to the “low camp” of drag queen culture and gay fanzines. Together they carry forward a conversation that began more than twenty-five years ago, before Stonewall and AIDS, when Susan Sontag published her memorable “Notes on Camp.”

[more]
cover of Camp Harmony: Japanese American Internment and the Puyallup Assembly Center

Camp Harmony

Japanese American Internment and the Puyallup Assembly Center

Louis Fiset

University of Illinois Press, 2009

This book is the first full portrait of a single assembly center--located at the Western Washington fairgrounds at Puyallup, outside Seattle--that held Japanese Americans for four months prior to their transfer to a relocation center during World War II. Gathering archival evidence and eyewitness accounts, Louis Fiset reconstructs the events leading up to the incarceration as they unfolded on a local level: arrests of Issei leaders, Nikkei response to the war dynamics, debates within the white community, and the forced evacuation of the Nikkei community from Bainbridge Island. The book explores the daily lives of the more than seven thousand inmates at "Camp Harmony," detailing how they worked, played, ate, and occasionally fought with each other and with their captors. Fiset also examines the inmates' community life, health care, and religious activities. He includes details on how army surveyors selected the center's site, oversaw its construction, and managed the transfer of inmates to the more permanent Minidoka Relocation Center in Idaho.

[more]
cover of Camp Notes and Other Writings

Camp Notes and Other Writings

Yamada, Mitsuye

Rutgers University Press, 1998

Honorable Mention of the 1999 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Awards

Two collections by an important Asian American writer -- Camp Notes and Other Poeems and Desert Run: Poems and Stories -- return to print in one volume.

Mitsuye Yamada was born in Kyushu, Japan, and raised in Seattle, Washington, until the outbreak of World War II when her family was removed to a concentration camp in Idaho. Camp Notes and Other Writings recounts this experience.

Yamada's poetry yields a terse blend of emotions and imagery. Her twist of words creates a twist of vision that make her poetry come alive. The weight of her cultural experience-the pain of being perceived as an outsider all of her life-permeates her work.

Yamada's strength as a poet stems from the fact that she has managed to integrate both individual and collective aspects of her background, giving her poems a double impact. Her strong portrayal of individual and collective life experience stands out as a distinct thread in the fabric of contemporary literature by women.

"The core poems of Camp Notes and the title come from the notes I had taken when I was in camp, and it wasn’t published until thirty years after most of it was written. I was simply describing what was happening to me, and my thoughts. But, in retrospect, the collection takes on a kind of expanded meaning about that period in our history. As invariably happens, because Japanese American internment became such an issue in American history, I suppose I will be forever identified as the author of Camp Notes. Of course, I try to show that it’s not the only thing I ever did in my whole life; I did other things besides go to an internment camp during World War II. So, in some ways I keep producing to counteract that one image that gets set in the public mind. At the time that I was writing it, I wasn’t necessarily a political person. Now, when I reread it, even to myself, I think it probably has a greater warning about the dangers of being not aware, not aware of one’s own rights, not aware of helping other people who may be in trouble. I think that it does speak to our present age very acutely." -- Mitsuye Yamada, "You should not be invisible”: An Interview with Mitsuye Yamada, Contemporary Women's Writing, March 2014, Vol. 8 Issue 1

Read the whole interview at: https://academic.oup.com/cww/article/8/1/1/414906/You-should-not-be-invisible-An-Interview-with

[more]
cover of Camp TV: Trans Gender Queer Sitcom History

Camp TV

Trans Gender Queer Sitcom History

Quinlan Miller

Duke University Press, 2019

Sitcoms of the 1950s and 1960s are widely considered conformist in their depictions of gender roles and sexual attitudes. In Camp TV Quinlan Miller offers a new account of the history of American television that explains what campy meant in practical sitcom terms in shows as iconic as The Dick Van Dyke Show as well as in more obscure fare, such as The Ugliest Girl in Town. Situating his analysis within the era's shifts in the television industry and the coalescence of straightness and whiteness that came with the decline of vaudevillian camp, Miller shows how the sitcoms of this era overflowed with important queer representation and gender nonconformity. Whether through regular supporting performances (Ann B. Davis's Schultzy in The Bob Cummings Show), guest appearances by Paul Lynde and Charles Nelson Reilly, or scripted dialogue and situations, industry processes of casting and production routinely esteemed a camp aesthetic that renders all gender expression queer. By charting this unexpected history, Miller offers new ways of exploring how supposedly repressive popular media incubated queer, genderqueer, and transgender representations.
[more]
cover of Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject--A Reader

Camp

Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject--A Reader

Fabio Cleto, Editor

University of Michigan Press, 1999

This groundbreaking collection addresses the multi-layered issue of camp, whose inexhaustible breadth of reference and theoretical relevance have made it one of the most salient and challenging issues on the contemporary critical stage. Reassessing the role and significance of the finest essays on camp written by leading intellectuals in cultural studies, lesbian and gay studies and queer theory, this critical anthology both "queers" camp as an issue and offers an excellent key to rethinking the history, theory, and practice of camp.

The anthology is divided into five thematic/historical sections: Tasting It; Flaunting the Closet; Gender, and Other Spectacles; Pop Camp, Surplus Counter-Value, or the Camp of Cultural Economy; and The Queer Issue. These groupings help the reader situate the critical debates around the subject. Fabio Cleto's introduction brings new theoretical insights to the subject of camp while tracing its history as an object of intellectual and cultural critique and analysis.

A comprehensive bibliography that traces the earliest use of the word 'camp' to the present completes this unique and exciting volume.

“Is ‘camp’ a kind of irony, an effect of one’s historic vantage point, an art form or an elitist aesthetic? … From landmark early works by Christopher Isherwood and Susan Sontag to influential contemporary pieces by Esther Newton, Andrew Ross and Judith Butler, this anthology encapsulates the philosophical discussion of this slippery postmodern concept.”
--Publishers Weekly
​

“As an object of critical inquiry, camp has proven notoriously difficult to define. Fabio Cleto takes this difficulty as his point of departure in the most recent anthology of a growing body of scholarly literature on the topic…Cleto resists defining camp [but] does not abandon the task of framing, in a coherent but flexible way, camp as a problematic.”
--Semiotica
 
“Fabio Cleto’s collection variously associates ‘camp’ with the 1960s, aestheticism, androgyny, cross-dressing, the cultural figure of the dandy, decadence, drag, exaggeration, kitsch, parody, pastiche, postmodernism, the sentimental, and the transvestite… The essayists in Camp disagree freely and fiercely over definitions. This is to be expected in a queer reader, one whose contributors endeavor to ‘read across’ the meanings of camp.”
--The Gay & Lesbian Review

[more]
cover of Campaigns of Knowledge: U.S. Pedagogies of Colonialism and Occupation in the Philippines and Japan

Campaigns of Knowledge

U.S. Pedagogies of Colonialism and Occupation in the Philippines and Japan

Malini Johar Schueller

Temple University Press, 2019

The creation of a new school system in the Philippines in 1898 and educational reforms in occupied Japan, both with stated goals of democratization, speaks to a singular vision of America as savior, following its politics of violence with benevolent recuperation. The pedagogy of recovery—in which schooling was central and natives were forced to accept empire through education—might have shown how Americans could be good occupiers, but it also created projects of Orientalist racial management: Filipinos had to be educated and civilized, while the Japanese had to be reeducated and “de-civilized.” 

In Campaigns of Knowledge, Malini Schueller contrapuntally reads state-sanctioned proclamations, educational agendas, and school textbooks alongside political cartoons, novels, short stories, and films to demonstrate how the U.S. tutelary project was rerouted, appropriated, reinterpreted, and resisted. In doing so, she highlights how schooling was conceived as a process of subjectification, creating particular modes of thought, behaviors, aspirations, and desires that would render the natives docile subjects amenable to American-style colonialism in the Philippines and occupation in Japan.

[more]
cover of Campus Whisper Networks: Knowing with Sexual Assault Survivors

Campus Whisper Networks

Knowing with Sexual Assault Survivors

Janet Hinson Shope

Rutgers University Press, 2026

Campus Whisper Networks examines how personal knowledge about student sexual assault circulates within college campus communities. Based upon both qualitative and quantitative survey data, Janet Hinson Shope and Richard Pringle's research demonstrates that students who have been sexually assaulted tell someone—almost always a friend. Most college students know someone who has been assaulted. Simply knowing, by means of relationships, that one or more peers have been assaulted affects the knowers, and the effects reverberate unevenly across campuses.  

Shope and Pringle highlight the structural properties that prohibit relational knowledge from becoming official institutional knowledge, confining it to whispers and secrecy within informal spheres of knowledge. The rules governing the circulation of such knowledge create an uneven epistemic field of sexual assault. This uneven field is consequential for the communities, affecting survivors and their confidants and shaping student views of the college community. Campus Whisper Networks demonstrates how personal and institutional avoidance, both the “need to not know” and “no need to know,” creates knowledge gaps that hide the community’s wounds and prevent personal knowledge from becoming social knowledge. 

[more]
cover of Campuses of Consent: Sexual and Social Justice in Higher Education

Campuses of Consent

Sexual and Social Justice in Higher Education

Theresa A. Kulbaga and Leland G. Spencer

University of Massachusetts Press, 2019

Winner of the 2020 OSCLG Outstanding Book Award
This new book for scholars and university administrators offers a provocative critique of sexual justice language and policy in higher education around the concept of consent. Complicating the idea that consent is plain common sense, Campuses of Consent shows how normative and inaccurate concepts about gender, gender identity, and sexuality erase queer or trans students' experiences and perpetuate narrow, regressive gender norms and individualist frameworks for understanding violence.

Theresa A. Kulbaga and Leland G. Spencer prove that consent in higher education cannot be meaningfully separated from larger issues of institutional and structural power and oppression. While sexual assault advocacy campaigns, such as It's On Us, federal legislation from Title IX to the Clery Act, and more recent affirmative-consent measures tend to construct consent in individualist terms, as something “given” or “received” by individuals, the authors imagine consent as something that can be constructed systemically and institutionally: in classrooms, campus communication, and shared campus spaces.

[more]
cover of Can Onions Cure Ear-Ache?: Medical Advice from 1769

Can Onions Cure Ear-Ache?

Medical Advice from 1769

William Buchan

Bodleian Library Publishing, 2012

What common condition was once treated with cow dung? How might oyster shells relieve heartburn? Can eels really cure deafness? Is the secret to stopping a stubborn case of hiccups a simple ingredient found in most pantries? If you were struck by illness or injury in the late eighteenth century, you would most likely have been referred to Scottish physician William Buchan’s Domestic Medicine—and, as a result, you may have found yourself administering urine to your ears or drinking a broth made from sheep’s brains.

Originally published in 1769, Domestic Medicine was produced for the benefit of those without access to—or means to afford—medical assistance, and copies of the book were found in apothecaries and coffee houses, private households and clubs. In 1797, Bounty mutineer Fletcher Christian and his crew even had the foresight to pack a copy before fleeing to the Pitcairns. Derived from folklore and the emerging medical science of the day, some of Buchan’s recommendations for how to live a healthy life still ring true: for instance, exercising, enjoying a varied diet, and getting an abundance of fresh air. Others are delightfully dodgy or even downright dangerous, such as genital trusses, the prescription of mercury, or the suggestion that Spanish fly might soothe aching joints.

Bringing together an exceedingly entertaining selection of entries from one of the earliest self-help books, Can Onions Cure Ear-ache? offers fascinating insight into the popular treatments of the time.
[more]
cover of Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?: American Women and the Kitchen in the Twentieth Century

Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?

American Women and the Kitchen in the Twentieth Century

Mary Drake McFeely

University of Massachusetts Press, 2000

In the rural America of the past, a woman's reputation was sometimes made by her cherry pie—or her chocolate layer cake, or her biscuits. As America modernized and as women left the home, entered the paid labor force, and battled their way to success in the professions, mastery of cooking remained an accepted sign that a woman took her gendered responsibilities seriously. Ironically, over the course of the twentieth century, as ready-made foods and kitchen appliances made home cooking less essential and labor-intensive, skill in the kitchen continued to be perceived not only by society but often by women themselves as a measure of a woman's true value. 

This book shows how cooking developed and evolved during the twentieth century. From Fannie Farmer to Julia Child, new challenges arose to replace the old. Women found themselves still tied to the kitchen, but for different reasons and with the need to acquire new skills. Instead of simply providing sustenance for the family, they now had to master more complex cooking techniques, the knowledge of “ethnic” cuisines, the science of nutrition, the business of consumerism, and, perhaps most important of all, the art of keeping their husbands and children happy and healthy.

[more]
cover of Can We Survive Our Origins?: Readings in René Girard's Theory of Violence and the Sacred

Can We Survive Our Origins?

Readings in René Girard's Theory of Violence and the Sacred

Pierpaolo Antonello

Michigan State University Press, 2015

Are religions intrinsically violent (as is strenuously argued by the ‘new atheists’)? Or, as Girard argues, have they been functionally rational instruments developed to manage and cope with the intrinsically violent runaway dynamic that characterizes human social organization in all periods of human history? Is violence decreasing in this time of secular modernity post-Christendom (as argued by Steven Pinker and others)? Or are we, rather, at increased and even apocalyptic risk from our enhanced powers of action and our decreased socio-symbolic protections? Rene Girard’s mimetic theory has been slowly but progressively recognized as one of the most striking breakthrough contributions to twentieth-century critical thinking in fundamental anthropology: in particular for its power to model and explain violent sacralities, ancient and modern. The present volume sets this power of explanation in an evolutionary and Darwinian frame. It asks: How far do cultural mechanisms of controlling violence, which allowed humankind to cross the threshold of hominization—i.e., to survive and develop in its evolutionary emergence—still represent today a default setting that threatens to destroy us? Can we transcend them and escape their field of gravity? Should we look to—or should we look beyond—Darwinian survival? What—and where (if anywhere)—is salvation?
[more]
cover of Can We Wear Our Pearls and Still Be Feminists?: Memoirs of a Campus Struggle

Can We Wear Our Pearls and Still Be Feminists?

Memoirs of a Campus Struggle

Joan D. Mandle

University of Missouri Press, 2000

When Joan Mandle accepted the position of Director of Women's Studies at Colgate University, she had specific goals in mind—to make the program stronger, more academically rigorous, and publicly open. The program would resist becoming the captive of identity politics and would refuse to allow itself to become marginalized on the campus. It would reach beyond the negative stereotypes of feminism on campus by appealing to and challenging all students and faculty interested in gender issues and social change.

Just as Mandle anticipated, she faced obstacles during the transformation. Among her critics were feminist students and faculty whose views of a successful program directly contradicted Mandle's. While the new director called for outreach, they insisted on isolation. While she set forth a policy of inclusiveness, they sought to maintain an exclusive community. These individuals preferred the former model of the women's studies program, despite its tendency toward separatism.

Can We Wear Our Pearls and Still Be Feminists? explores women's studies from Mandle's perspective as a program director, feminist activist, and scholar. She offers a vivid account of being forced to grapple with fundamental issues of what women's studies is and should be. Her strong commitment to feminism and women's studies does not prevent her from voicing her concerns; instead, it compells her to share the story of her directorship in hopes of shedding light on the strengths and weaknesses, pitfalls and triumphs of women's studies as an academic discipline.

Through her examination of the battles involved in creating an academically significant and ideologically open program, Mandle provides insight into a possible avenue of change for feminism. By showing how the program at Colgate University was able to encourage campuswide discussions on feminism, Mandle demonstrates that women's studies can succeed as an inclusive and rigorous field. This enlightening memoir provides readers with a window on important debates concerning feminism and women in academia.

[more]
cover of Can a Liberal be a Chief? Can a Chief be a Liberal?: Some Thoughts on an Unfinished Business of Colonialism

Can a Liberal be a Chief? Can a Chief be a Liberal?

Some Thoughts on an Unfinished Business of Colonialism

Olúfémi Táíwò

Prickly Paradigm Press, 2021

An argument against the idea of the indigenous chief as a liberal political figure.

Across Africa, it is not unusual for proponents of liberal democracy and modernization to make room for some aspects of indigenous culture, such as the use of a chief as a political figure. Yet for Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, no such accommodation should be made. Chiefs, he argues, in this thought-provoking and wide-ranging pamphlet, cannot be liberals—and liberals cannot be chiefs. If we fail to recognize this, we fail to acknowledge the metaphysical underpinnings of modern understandings of freedom and equality, as well as the ways in which African intellectuals can offer a distinctive take on the unfinished business of colonialism.
[more]
cover of Can the Subaltern See?: Photographs as History, Volume 84

Can the Subaltern See?

Photographs as History, Volume 84

Fernando Coronil , ed.

Duke University Press, 0

In the words of guest editor Fernando Coronil, this special issue of the Hispanic American Historical Review on photography contributes “an expanding discussion across disciplinary boundaries of the role of visuality in social life.” Helping to overcome the split between image and word in Western theory, the essays pinpoint the need to recognize the “play of all senses in the construction of reality.” Turning photos and collections of photos into historical documents, the four authors read images as texts to be analyzed in the context of their production and circulation.

Each essay looks at the role of a particular photographic genre in the making of modern Latin American identities. Articles cover the adaptation in late-nineteenth-century Oaxaca of European type photography as a tool of imperialist enterprise and science, state consolidation, and consumer culture; the use of portrait photography by the K’iche Mayans of Quetzaltenango; and the family album—made up of snapshots, postcards, and other memorabilia—as a historical document.

Contributors. Greg Grandin, Daniel James, Mirta Zaida Lobato, Deborah Poole


[more]
cover of Can't Pay, Won't Pay: The Fight to Stop the Poll Tax

Can't Pay, Won't Pay

The Fight to Stop the Poll Tax

Simon Hannah

Pluto Press, 2020

Thirty years ago, a social movement helped bring down one of the most powerful British Prime Ministers of the 20th Century. For the 30th anniversary of the Poll Tax rebellion, Simon Hannah looks back on those tumultuous days of resistance, telling the story of the people that beat the bailiffs, rioted for their rights and defied a government.

Starting in Scotland where the 'Community Charge' was first trialled, Can't Pay, Won't Pay immerses the reader in the gritty history of the rebellion. Amidst the drama of large scale protests and blockaded estates a number of key figures and groups emerge: Neil Kinnock and Tommy Sheridan; Militant, Class War and the Metropolitan Police. 

Assessing this legacy today, Hannah demonstrates the centrality of the Poll Tax resistance as a key chapter in the history of British popular uprisings, Labour Party factionalism, the anti-socialist agenda and failed Tory ideology.
[more]
cover of Canadian Cultural Studies: A Reader

Canadian Cultural Studies

A Reader

Sourayan Mookerjea, Imre Szeman, and Gail Faurschou, eds.

Duke University Press, 2009

Canada is situated geographically, historically, and culturally between old empires (Great Britain and France) and a more recent one (the United States), as well as on the terrain of First Nations communities. Poised between historical and metaphorical empires and operating within the conditions of incomplete modernity and economic and cultural dependency, Canada has generated a body of cultural criticism and theory, which offers unique insights into the dynamics of both center and periphery. The reader brings together for the first time in one volume recent writing in Canadian cultural studies and work by significant Canadian cultural analysts of the postwar era.

Including essays by anglophone, francophone, and First Nations writers, the reader is divided into three parts, the first of which features essays by scholars who helped set the agenda for cultural and social analysis in Canada and remain important to contemporary intellectual formations: Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, and Anthony Wilden in communications theory; Northrop Frye in literary studies; George Grant and Harold Innis in a left-nationalist tradition of critical political economy; Fernand Dumont and Paul-Émile Borduas in Quebecois national and political culture; and Harold Cardinal in native studies.

The volume’s second section showcases work in which contemporary authors address Canada’s problematic and incomplete nationalism; race, difference, and multiculturalism; and modernity and contemporary culture. The final section includes excerpts from federal policy documents that are especially important to Canadians’ conceptions of their social, political, and cultural circumstances. The reader opens with a foreword by Fredric Jameson and concludes with an afterword in which the Quebecois scholar Yves Laberge explores the differences between English-Canadian cultural studies and the prevailing forms of cultural analysis in francophone Canada.

Contributors. Ian Angus, Himani Bannerji, Jody Berland, Paul-Émile Borduas, Harold Cardinal, Maurice Charland, Stephen Crocker, Ioan Davies, Fernand Dumont, Kristina Fagan, Gail Faurschou, Len Findlay, Northrop Frye, George Grant, Rick Gruneau, Harold Innis, Fredric Jameson, Yves Laberge, Jocelyn Létourneau, Eva Mackey, Lee Maracle, Marshall McLuhan, Katharyne Mitchell, Sourayan Mookerjea, Kevin Pask, Rob Shields, Will Straw, Imre Szeman, Serra Tinic, David Whitson, Tony Wilden

[more]
cover of Canals and Communities: Small-Scale Irrigation Systems

Canals and Communities

Small-Scale Irrigation Systems

Jonathan B. Mabry

University of Arizona Press, 1996

From the mountains of South America to the deserts of northern Africa to the islands of south Asia, people have devised myriad ways of moving water to sustain their communities and nourish their crops. Many of these irrigation methods have been used over long periods of time and continue to function in diverse ecological and sociopolitical contexts. This book presents case studies and comparative essays about local institutions for managing water resources. Drawn from around the globe, the cases clearly demonstrate that "indigenous" irrigation is often more sustainable, cost-effective, and flexible than has been generally believed. The contributors discuss a wide range of environments, cultural traditions, and historical contexts in which such systems operate, maintaining a common focus on incentives for cooperation, operational rules, collective-choice arrangements, principles of allocation, and conflict-resolution mechanisms. Canals and Communities can serve as a sourcebook for social scientists and development planners investigating the cultural ecology of irrigated agriculture, the ethnology of cooperative social formations, the politics of collective-resource institutions, and the sociology of rural development. The book also provides examples and generalizations about the cross-cultural characteristics of sustainable water resource management and intensive agriculture. Aside from its theoretical contributions to human ecology and anthropology, the book is of practical importance to development studies. The cases it presents make a convincing argument for perpetuating small-scale irrigation systems as part of the world's repertoire of irrigation knowledge and resources.

CONTENTS
Introduction
The Ethnology of Irrigation: Cross-Cultural Characteristics of Local Water Management, Jonathan B. Mabry
Patterns of Cooperation and Conflict in Local Irrigation
1. La Gente es Muy Perra: Conflict and Cooperation over Irrigation Water in Cucurpe, Sonora, Mexico, Thomas E. Sheridan
2. Dhasheeg Agriculture in the Jubba Valley of Somalia, Catherine Besteman
3. The Dry and the Drier: Cooperation and Conflict in Moroccan Irrigation, John R. Welch
4. The Political Ecology of Irrigation in an Andean Peasant Community, Paul H. Gelles
Methods and Models for Analyzing Local Irrigation
5. Rapid Rural Appraisal of Arid Land Irrigation: A Moroccan Example, John R. Welch, Jonathan B. Mabry, and Hsain Ilahiane
6. Simulation Modelling of Balinese Irrigation, J. Stephen Lansing
7. Institutional Innovation in Small-Scale Irrigation Networks: A Cape Verdean Case, Mark W. Langworthy and Timothy J. Finan
Development Lessons from Local Irrigation
8. Qanats and Rural Societies: Sustainable Agriculture and Irrigation Cultures in Contemporary Iran, Michael E. Bonine
9. The Utility of Tradition in Sri Lankan Bureaucratic Irrigation: The Case of the Kirindi Oya Project, Pamela Stanbury
10. The Relevance of Indigenous Irrigation: A Comparative Analysis of Sustainability, Jonathan B. Mabry and David A. Cleveland
Conclusion
The Hydraulics of History: Evolutionary Trajectories of Local and Centralized Irrigation, Jonathan B. Mabry
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cover of Canaries in the Code Mine: Precarity and the Future of Tech Work

Canaries in the Code Mine

Precarity and the Future of Tech Work

Max Papadantonakis

Temple University Press, 2025

The idea that the tech industry is a secure field with jobs and opportunities for growth is a myth. There is widespread precarity among software developers, who experience uncertainty, anxiety, and imposter syndrome as technological advancements threaten job security. Max Papadantonakis investigates this phenomenon in his revealing study, Canaries in the Code Mine. He indicates that precarity is not just about the risk of losing one’s job; it is about living in a career where basic needs and rights are not guaranteed.

Interviewing 120 software developers from leading tech firms, Papadantonakis shows how temporary contracts, project cancellations, and company downsizing undermine the security of even highly skilled professionals. He also highlights the systemic inequalities that shape the tech industry, showing how age, race, and gender often dictate the opportunities and responsibilities software developers have—or are denied.  

Canaries in the Code Mine highlights a disturbing reality of privilege and vulnerability within the tech industry. Papadantonakis engages in a critical discourse on the evolving nature of work in the digital era, emphasizing the need to shape an equitable future in the rapidly evolving landscape.
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cover of Cancer Activism: Gender, Media, and Public Policy

Cancer Activism

Gender, Media, and Public Policy

Karen M. Kedrowski and Marilyn Stine Sarow

University of Illinois Press, 2010

The first comparison of the breast cancer and the prostate cancer movements

Cancer Activism explores the interplay between advocacy, the media, and public perception through an analysis of breast cancer and prostate cancer activist groups over a nearly twenty-year period. Despite both diseases having nearly identical mortality and morbidity rates, Karen M. Kedrowski and Marilyn Stine Sarow present evidence from more than 4,200 news articles to show that the different groups have had markedly different impacts. They trace the rise of each movement from its beginning and explore how discussions about the diseases appeared on media, public, and government agendas. In an important exception to the feminist tenet that women as a group hold less power than men, Kedrowski and Sarow demonstrate that the breast cancer movement is not only larger and better organized than the prostate cancer movement, it is also far more successful at shaping media coverage, public opinion, and government policy.

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