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

cover of Criminal Justice in Native America

Criminal Justice in Native America

Edited by Marianne O. Nielsen and Robert A. Silverman

University of Arizona Press, 2009

Native Americans are disproportionately represented as offenders in the U.S. criminal justice system, particularly in the southwestern and north-central regions. However, until recently there was little investigation into the reasons for their over-representation. Furthermore, there has been little acknowledgment of the positive contributions of Native Americans to the criminal justice system—in rehabilitating offenders, aiding victims, and supporting service providers. This book offers a valuable and contemporary overview of how the American criminal justice system impacts Native Americans on both sides of the law.

Each of the fourteen chapters of Criminal Justice in Native America was commissioned specifically for this volume. Contributors—many of whom are Native Americans—rank among the top scholars in their fields. Some of the chapters treat broad subjects, including crime, police, courts, victimization, corrections, and jurisdiction. Others delve into more specific topics, including hate crimes against Native Americans, state-corporate crimes against Native Americans, tribal peacemaking, and cultural stresses of police officers. Separate chapters are devoted to women and juveniles.

The well-known scholar Marianne Nielsen provides a context-setting introduction, in which she addresses the history of the legal treatment of Native Americans in the United States as well as a provocative conclusion that details important issues for current and future research in Native American criminal justice studies. Intended to introduce students to the substantive concerns of a range of disciplines that contribute to Native American Studies—among them, criminal justice and criminology, law, sociology, and anthropology—Criminal Justice in Native America will interest all readers who are concerned about relationships between Native peoples and prevailing criminal justice systems.
[more]
cover of Criminal Man

Criminal Man

Cesare Lombroso

Duke University Press, 2006

Cesare Lombroso is widely considered the founder of criminology. His theory of the “born” criminal dominated European and American thinking about the causes of criminal behavior during the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth. This volume offers English-language readers the first critical, scholarly translation of Lombroso’s Criminal Man, one of the most famous criminological treatises ever written. The text laid the groundwork for subsequent biological theories of crime, including contemporary genetic explanations.

Originally published in 1876, Criminal Man went through five editions during Lombroso’s lifetime. In each edition Lombroso expanded on his ideas about innate criminality and refined his method for categorizing criminal behavior. In this new translation, Mary Gibson and Nicole Hahn Rafter bring together for the first time excerpts from all five editions in order to represent the development of Lombroso’s thought and his positivistic approach to understanding criminal behavior.

In Criminal Man, Lombroso used modern Darwinian evolutionary theories to “prove” the inferiority of criminals to “honest” people, of women to men, and of blacks to whites, thereby reinforcing the prevailing politics of sexual and racial hierarchy. He was particularly interested in the physical attributes of criminals—the size of their skulls, the shape of their noses—but he also studied the criminals’ various forms of self-expression, such as letters, graffiti, drawings, and tattoos. This volume includes more than forty of Lombroso’s illustrations of the criminal body along with several photographs of his personal collection. Designed to be useful for scholars and to introduce students to Lombroso’s thought, the volume also includes an extensive introduction, notes, appendices, a glossary, and an index.

[more]
cover of Criminal Proceedings: The Contemporary American Crime Novel

Criminal Proceedings

The Contemporary American Crime Novel

Peter Messent

Pluto Press, 1997

[more]
cover of Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman

Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman

Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero

Duke University Press, 2004

Cesare Lombroso is widely considered the founder of the field of criminology. His theory of the “born” criminal dominated discussions of criminology in Europe and the Americas from the 1880s into the early twentieth century. His book, La donna delinquente, originally published in Italian in 1893, was the first and most influential book ever written on women and crime. This comprehensive new translation gives readers a full view of his landmark work.

Lombroso’s research took him to police stations, prisons, and madhouses where he studied the tattoos, cranial capacities, and sexual behavior of criminals and prostitutes to establish a female criminal type. Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman anticipated today’s theories of genetic criminal behavior. Lombroso used Darwinian evolutionary science to argue that criminal women are far more cunning and dangerous than criminal men. Designed to make his original text accessible to students and scholars alike, this volume includes extensive notes, appendices, a glossary, and more than thirty of Lombroso’s own illustrations. Nicole Hahn Rafter and Mary Gibson’s introduction, locating his theory in social context, offers a significant new interpretation of Lombroso’s place in criminology.

[more]
cover of Criminalization of Women: Abortion, Inequity, and Resistance in Chile

Criminalization of Women

Abortion, Inequity, and Resistance in Chile

Michele Eggers-Barison

University of Illinois Press, 2025

Until 2017, Chile’s abortion laws remained among the most draconian and restrictive in the world. The dozens of interviews that Michele Eggers-Barison conducted between 2011 and 2014 reveal how the criminalization of abortion and the construction of women as criminals went hand in hand--and both shaped and sustained structural, cultural, and direct forms of violence against women.

Eggers-Barison uncovers the narratives of economically disadvantaged, Indigenous, and immigrant women who broke the Chilean law by terminating a pregnancy. Their stories reveal how laws and policies that regulate and control women’s reproductive lives also construct women as criminals. As Eggers-Barison shows, systems of inequality legitimize and sustain harmful attitudes and practices while creating concrete expressions of discrimination and other forms of violence against women. Their experience with abortion remains hidden within spaces of illegality and only becomes visible due to health or legal consequences. Yet despite the obstacles, women used individual and collective forms of group action to resist anti-abortion laws.

Timely and vivid, Criminalization of Women shows how abortion’s illegality inscribes itself on a woman’s body and reality.

[more]
cover of Criminalization/Assimilation: Chinese/Americans and Chinatowns in Classical Hollywood Film

Criminalization/Assimilation

Chinese/Americans and Chinatowns in Classical Hollywood Film

Philippa Gates

Rutgers University Press, 2019

Criminalization/Assimilation traces how Classical Hollywood films constructed America’s image of Chinese Americans from their criminalization as unwanted immigrants to their eventual acceptance when assimilated citizens, exploiting both America’s yellow peril fears about Chinese immigration and its fascination with Chinatowns. Philippa Gates examines Hollywood’s responses to social issues in Chinatown communities, primarily immigration, racism, drug trafficking, and prostitution, as well as the impact of industry factors including the Production Code and star system on the treatment of those subjects. Looking at over 200 films, Gates reveals the variety of racial representations within American film in the first half of the twentieth century and brings to light not only lost and forgotten films but also the contributions of Asian American actors whose presence onscreen offered important alternatives to Hollywood’s yellowface fabrications of Chinese identity and a resistance to Hollywood’s Orientalist narratives.
[more]
cover of Criminalized Lives: HIV and Legal Violence

Criminalized Lives

HIV and Legal Violence

Alexander McClelland

Rutgers University Press, 2024

POZ Best in Literature Award 

Canada has been known as a hot spot for HIV criminalization where the act of not disclosing one’s HIV-positive status to sex partners has historically been regarded as a serious criminal offence. Criminalized Lives describes how this approach has disproportionately harmed the poor, Black and Indigenous people, gay men, and women in Canada. In this book, people who have been criminally accused of not disclosing their HIV-positive status, detail the many complexities of disclosure, and the violence that results from being criminalized. 
 
Accompanied by portraits from artist Eric Kostiuk Williams, the profiles examine whether the criminal legal system is really prepared to handle the nuances and ethical dilemmas faced everyday by people living with HIV. By offering personal stories of people who have faced criminalization first-hand, Alexander McClelland questions common assumptions about HIV, the role of punishment, and the violence that results from the criminal legal system’s legacy of categorizing people as either victims or perpetrators. 

Note: A regrettable error appears on page 22. The number 240 should be 206 when referring to the number of people prosecuted in relation to allegations of HIV nondisclosure. This will be fixed in future reprints.
[more]
cover of Criminology and Public Policy: Putting Theory to Work

Criminology and Public Policy

Putting Theory to Work

Hugh Barlow

Temple University Press, 2009

Crime policy ought to be guided by science rather than ideology, argue Hugh Barlow and Scott Decker in this incisive and original collection of essays. Establishing the value and importance of linking theory and practice, the contributors to Criminology and Public Policy provide a comprehensive treatment of the major theories in criminology and their implications for criminal justice, crime control, and the larger realm of justice.

In applying theories to real world issues—such as reducing crime and violence, prisoner reentry policies, gang behavior, and treatment courts—the contributors take both a macro and micro level approach. They find, too, that it is often difficult to turn theory into practice. Still, the very attempt pushes the criminal justice system toward workable solutions rather than ideological approaches, an orientation the editors believe will lead to greater progress in combating one of our society’s greatest difficulties.

Contributors include: Robert Agnew, Ronald L. Akers, Gordon Bazemore, Ronald V. Clarke, J. Heith Copes, Frank Cullen, Marcus Felson, Marie Griffin, Scott Jacques, David Kauzlarich, Jean McGloin, Steven Messner, Alex Piquero, Nicole Leeper Piquero, Nancy Rodriguez, Richard B. Rosenfeld, Dawn Rothe, Andrea Schoepfer, Neal Shover, Cassia Spohn, Katherine Tellis, Charles Tittle, Richard Wright, and the editors.
[more]
cover of Criminology and Public Policy: Putting Theory to Work

Criminology and Public Policy

Putting Theory to Work

Scott H. Decker and Kevin A. Wright

Temple University Press, 2018

In the field of criminal justice, public policy is designed to address the problems brought on by criminal behavior and the response to that behavior. However, too often, the theories carefully developed in the academy fail to make their way into programs and policy. The editors and contributors to this second edition of Criminology and Public Policy highlight the recent development of “translational criminology” to address the growing movement in criminology to use the results of criminological research and theory to better inform policy and practice.  

The essays in Criminology and Public Policy propose an in-depth look at both theory and practice and how they are integrated across a number of key criminal justice problems—from racial and environmental concerns to gun control and recidivism rates as well as police use of force and mass incarceration. The end result is an essential volume that blends both theory and practice in an effort to address the critical problems in explaining, preventing, responding to, and correcting criminal behavior.    

Contributors include: Robert K. Ax, Michelle N. Block, Anthony A. Braga, Rod K. Brunson, Jennifer Carlson, Ronald V. Clarke, Shea Cronin, Megan Denver, Kevin M. Drakulich, Grant Duwe, Amy Farrell, Cheryl Jonson, Charis E. Kubrin, Justin Kurland, Megan Kurlychek, Shannon Magnuson, Daniel P. Mears, Robert D. Morgan, Kathleen Powell, Danielle Rudes, Cassia Spohn, Cody Telep, Natalie Todak, Glenn Trager, Jillian J. Turanovic, Sara Wakefield, Patricia Warren, David Weisburd, Michael D. White, Rob White, Lauren Wilson and the editors

[more]
cover of Crip Authority: Disability and the Art of Consolation  in the Renaissance

Crip Authority

Disability and the Art of Consolation in the Renaissance

Elizabeth B. Bearden

University of Michigan Press, 2025

Crip Authority explores how Renaissance writers and artists with disabilities drew on consolatory literature to enhance their authority and create a sense of disability community across the centuries. Elizabeth B. Bearden considers how Renaissance writers and artists understood their lived experiences of disability by drawing on the ancient genre of consolation, which aims to comfort people for a variety of hardships, including mental and physical disability. Renaissance writers used the art of consolation to resignify the mental and physical disabilities that their society frequently scorned into an expression of their military, spiritual, political, and most importantly for this study, writerly authority. Bearden names this kind of defiant authorial self-representation crip authority, thereby transgressively cripping our society’s ableist notions of who has the ability and authority to write.  

Disabled authors include Francesco Petrarca, Teresa de Cartagena, Giovani Paolo Lomazzo, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Robert Burton, and John Milton. They all explore their experiences of disability, but their work has rarely or never been considered from a disability studies perspective. Bearden thus brings today’s models of disability studies and crip theory together with early modern articulations of disability based on ancient and Renaissance models of military, political, biblical, and literary authority. In sum, Crip Authority makes a significant contribution to the growing field of early modern disability studies and invites us to rethink the extent of crip history and the endurance of disability gain.
[more]
cover of Crip Colony: Mestizaje, US Imperialism, and the Queer Politics of Disability in the Philippines

Crip Colony

Mestizaje, US Imperialism, and the Queer Politics of Disability in the Philippines

Sony Coráñez Bolton

Duke University Press, 2023

In Crip Colony, Sony Coráñez Bolton examines the racial politics of disability, mestizaje, and sexuality in the Philippines. Drawing on literature, poetry, colonial records, political essays, travel narratives, and visual culture, Coráñez Bolton traces how disability politics colluded with notions of Philippine mestizaje. He demonstrates that Filipino mestizo writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used mestizaje as a racial ideology of ability that marked Indigenous inhabitants of the Philippines as lacking in civilization and in need of uplift and rehabilitation. Heteronormative, able-bodied, and able-minded mixed-race Filipinos offered a model and path for assimilation into the US empire. In this way, mestizaje allowed for supposedly superior mixed-race subjects to govern the archipelago in collusion with American imperialism. By bringing disability studies together with studies of colonialism and queer-of-color critique, Coráñez Bolton extends theorizations of mestizaje beyond the United States and Latin America while considering how Filipinx and Filipinx American thought fundamentally enhances understandings of the colonial body and the racial histories of disability.
[more]
cover of Crip Genealogies

Crip Genealogies

Mel Y. Chen, Alison Kafer, Eunjung Kim, and Julie A. Minich, editors

Duke University Press, 2023

The contributors to Crip Genealogies reorient the field of disability studies by centering the work of transnational feminism, queer of color critique, and trans scholarship and activism. They challenge the white, Western, and Northern rights-based genealogy of disability studies, showing how a single coherent narrative of the field is a mode of exclusion that relies on logics of whiteness and imperialism. The contributors examine how disability justice activists work in concert with other social justice projects, explore crip environments, create alternate disciplinary genealogies, and reject notions of the model minority. Throughout, they demonstrate how the mandate for a single genealogy of the discipline whitewashes disability and continues forms of violence. By cripping disability studies, the contributors allow for divergent histories, the coexistence of anti-ableist and antiracist theorizing, and a radically just and capacious understanding of disability.

Contributors. Suzanne Bost, Mel Y. Chen, Sony Coráñez Bolton, Natalia Duong, Lezlie Frye, Magda García, Alison Kafer, Eunjung Kim, Yoo-suk Kim, Kateřina Kolářová, James Kyung-Jin Lee, Stacey Park Milbern, Julie Avril Minich, Tari Young-Jung Na, Therí A. Pickens, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Jasbir K. Puar, Sami Schalk, Faith Njahîra Wangarî
[more]
cover of Crip Love Onscreen: Representations of Love, Sex, and Disability

Crip Love Onscreen

Representations of Love, Sex, and Disability

Sarah Rainey-Smithback

The Ohio State University Press, 2026

Crip Love Onscreen: Representations of Love, Sex, and Disability examines how disabled people’s sexual lives—including pleasure/sex, love, pregnancy, and sexual violence—are represented in popular film and television. Analyzing a variety of films and TV shows from the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, Sarah Rainey-Smithback traces patterns in disability representation that ignore or distort many of the realities of crip sexuality. These patterns of sexual representation tend to uphold compulsory able-bodiedness, heteronormativity, and privacy norms—what Rainey-Smithback terms “neoliberal love values,” or standards that celebrate normative forms of sexual desire, bodies, and intimacy practices.

As disability representation increases, though, new possibilities are emerging. Crip Love Onscreen also draws attention to the exceptional through a close reading of screen narratives (such as 50 First Dates,Love and Other Drugs,American Horror Story: Freak Show, and more) that push against neoliberal, heteronormative, and ableist values. Drawing on the work of queer/crip scholars and activists, Rainey-Smithback uncovers glimpses of what Tobin Siebers calls a “sexual culture for disabled people”—a space and way of being that expands sexual access and sexual experience.
[more]
cover of Crip Negativity

Crip Negativity

J. Logan Smilges

University of Minnesota Press, 2023

Imagining anti-ableist liberation beyond the rubrics of access and inclusion

In the thirty years since the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law, the lives of disabled people have not improved nearly as much as activists and politicians had hoped. In Crip Negativity, J. Logan Smilges shows us what’s gone wrong and what we can do to fix it.

Leveling a strong critique of the category of disability and liberal disability politics, Smilges asks and imagines what horizons might exist for the liberation of those oppressed by ableism—beyond access and inclusion. Inspired by models of negativity in queer studies, Black studies, and crip theory, Smilges proposes that bad crip feelings might help all of us to care gently for one another, even as we demand more from the world than we currently believe to be possible.

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 Crip Screens: Countering Psychiatric Media Technologies

Crip Screens

Countering Psychiatric Media Technologies

Olivia Banner

Duke University Press, 2025

In Crip Screens, Olivia Banner provides a wide-ranging and ongoing history of Black, feminist-of-color, and crip resistance to psychiatry’s incorporation of hegemonic media technologies into treatment and research. Banner shows how institutions use documentary films, data visualization, network graphs, therapy chatbots, virtual patient training programs, and pharmaceutical advertising to pathologize certain people as “deviant” and “mentally ill.” Those people so categorized have used media technologies toward alternative visions of care. Examining insurgent media and technology efforts in the 1960s and 1970s, Banner shows how women and communities of color worked to wrest away from psychiatry its hold over representing mental distress and pathological categorization. These efforts and innovations, she argues, were distinct from what is now accepted as the antipsychiatry movement. In so doing, Banner recovers a lost history of disability politics—what she calls crip screens—that refused psychiatry’s use of cultural productions toward its carceral and subjugating designs.
[more]
cover of Crip Spacetime: Access, Failure, and Accountability in Academic Life

Crip Spacetime

Access, Failure, and Accountability in Academic Life

Margaret Price

Duke University Press, 2024

In Crip Spacetime, Margaret Price intervenes in the competitive, productivity-focused realm of academia by sharing the everyday experiences of disabled academics. Drawing on more than three hundred interviews and survey responses, Price demonstrates that individual accommodations—the primary way universities address accessibility—actually impede access rather than enhance it. She argues that the pains and injustices encountered by academia’s disabled workers result in their living and working in realities different from nondisabled colleagues: a unique experience of space, time, and being that Price theorizes as “crip spacetime.” She explores how disability factors into the exclusionary practices found in universities, with multiply marginalized academics facing the greatest harms. Highlighting the knowledge that disabled academics already possess about how to achieve sustainable forms of access, Price boldly calls for the university to move away from individualized models of accommodation and toward a new system of collective accountability and care.
[more]
cover of Cripping Girlhood

Cripping Girlhood

Anastasia Todd

University of Michigan Press, 2024

Cripping Girlhood offers a new theorization of disabled girlhood, tracing how and why representations of disabled girls emerge with frequency in twenty-first century U.S. media culture. It uncovers how the exceptional figure of the disabled girl most often appears as a resource to work through post-Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) anxieties about the family, healthcare, labor, citizenship, and the precarity of the bodymind. In paying critical attention to disabled girlhood, the book uses feminist disability studies to rupture the unwitting assumption in girls’ studies that girlhood is necessarily non-disabled. 

By closely examining the ways that disabled girls represent themselves, Anastasia Todd goes beyond a critique of the figure of the privileged, disabled girl subject in the national imagination to explore how disabled girls circulate their own capacious re-envisioning of what it means to be a disabled girl. In analyzing a range of cultural sites, including YouTube, TikTok, documentaries, and GoFundMe campaigns, Todd shows how disabled girls actively upend what we think we know about them and their experience, recasting the meanings ascribed to their bodyminds in their own terms.  By analyzing disabled girls’ self-representational practices and cultural productions, Todd shows how disabled girls deftly theorize their experiences of ableism, sexism, racism, and ageism, and cultivate communities online, creating archives of disability knowledge and politicizing other disabled people in the process. 
[more]
cover of Cripping the Archive: Disability, History, and Power

Cripping the Archive

Disability, History, and Power

Edited by Jenifer L. Barclay and Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy Foreword by Jaipreet Virdi

University of Illinois Press, 2025

How do we explain the conspicuous absence of disability from the histories we write? What forces and factors create this dynamic? How can disability be everywhere and nowhere, present and absent, and obvious and overlooked in both the historical record and historians’ interpretations of the past?

Jenifer L. Barclay and Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy edit a collection of interdisciplinary essays that consider how and why physical, sensory, intellectual, and psychological disabilities are underrepresented, erased, or distorted in the historical record. The contributors draw on the methodology and practice of cripping to uncover disability in contested archives and explore ways to build inclusive archives accountable to, and centered on, disabled people and disability justice. Throughout, they show ableness informing the politics of the archive as a physical space, a discriminatory record, and a collection of silences.

An essential contribution to research methods and disability justice, Cripping the Archive offers a blueprint for intersectional and interdisciplinary approaches that bridge disability studies, history, and archival studies.

[more]
cover of Crisis Vision: Race and the Cultural Production of Surveillance

Crisis Vision

Race and the Cultural Production of Surveillance

Tom Monahan

Duke University Press, 2022

In Crisis Vision, Torin Monahan explores how artists confront the racializing dimensions of contemporary surveillance. He focuses on artists ranging from Kai Wiedenhöfer, Paolo Cirio, and Hank Willis Thomas to Claudia Rankine and Dread Scott, who engage with what he calls crisis vision—the regimes of racializing surveillance that position black and brown bodies as targets for police and state violence. Many artists, Monahan contends, remain invested in frameworks that privilege transparency, universality, and individual responsibility in ways that often occlude racial difference. Other artists, however, disrupt crisis vision by confronting white supremacy and destabilizing hierarchies through the performance of opacity. Whether fostering a recognition of a shared responsibility and complicity for the violence of crisis vision or critiquing how vulnerable groups are constructed and treated globally, these artists emphasize ethical relations between strangers and ask viewers to question their own place within unjust social orders.
[more]
cover of Crisis and Control: Institutional Change in Financial Market Regulation

Crisis and Control

Institutional Change in Financial Market Regulation

Edited by Renate Mayntz

Campus Verlag, 2012

In reaction to the international financial crisis of 2007, a network of social scientists from seven countries analyzed the various changes in the regulation of financial markets, and this book presents their results. The articles published herein show patterns of institutional change that were triggered by the economic crisis on different political levels, of their implementation and effectiveness, as well as their results. An indispensible tool for political scientists, Crisis and Control contributes significantly to the theory of institutional change.
[more]
cover of Crisis and Control: The Militarization of Protest Policing

Crisis and Control

The Militarization of Protest Policing

Lesley J. Wood

Pluto Press, 2014

Crisis and Control explains how neoliberal transformations of political and economic systems are militarising the policing of protest, based on a compelling empirical study of police agencies and practices from 1995 until the present.

Lesley J. Wood shows that the increasing role of the security and defense industries, professional police associations, anti-terrorism initiatives and ‘best practices’ in policing networks have accelerated the use of less lethal weapons, pre-emptive arrests, infiltration and barricading strategies against protesters.

The book uses Bourdieu and Boltanski to analyse court transcripts, police reports, policy, training materials and the conference programs of professional police organisations to argue that police agencies are neither omnipotent strategists, nor simple tools of the elite, but institutions struggling to maintain legitimacy, resources and autonomy in a changing field.

[more]
cover of Crisis and Transformation in Seventeenth-Century China: Society, Culture, and Modernity in Li Yu's World

Crisis and Transformation in Seventeenth-Century China

Society, Culture, and Modernity in Li Yu's World

Chun-shu Chang and Shelley Hsueh-lun Chang

University of Michigan Press, 1998

The seventeenth century was a time of great social and political upheaval in China. In Crisis and Transformation in Seventeenth-Century China, Chun-shu Chang and Shelley Hsueh-lun Chang offer a detailed and engaging analysis of society, culture, and the state in China during this critical period.
The main thread of the book follows the life and works of a remarkable figure of the period, Li Yü (1611-80), whose vast array of accomplishments and experiences mirror seventeenth-century China in all its complexity and excitement. Li Yü's China was a world of unprecedented changes in almost all spheres of life. A thriving commercial and industrial economy, stupendous population growth, and the emergence of a new age of science and technology were accompanied by intense urbanization, radical views on money, wealth, and luxury, liberal attitudes toward sexuality, and developments that would change the nature of the literary and intellectual world. The Changs' exhaustive exploration of Chinese historical and literary sources of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is combined with a selective application of interpretive insights and analytic techniques from the major theoretical schools.
An important resource for scholars in history, literature, and Asian studies, Crisis and Transformation extends its appeal to those interested in the history of science, issues of gender and social transformation, and popular culture movements.
Chun-shu Chang is Professor of History, University of Michigan, and Honorary Professor of Chinese History, China. Shelley Hsueh-lun Chang is Visiting Associate Professor of History and Research Associate, Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan.
[more]
cover of Crisis for Whom?: Critical Global Perspectives on Childhood, Care, and Migration

Crisis for Whom?

Critical Global Perspectives on Childhood, Care, and Migration

Edited by Rachel Rosen, Elaine Chase, Sarah Crafter, Valentina Glockner, and Sayani Mitra

University College London, 2023

A complex and nuanced interdisciplinary exploration of children in migration crises.

Children are central figures in narratives of “migration crises.” They are often depicted as either essentially vulnerable and in need of special protections, or suspiciously adult-like and a threat to national borders. This bilingual book, written in English and Spanish, challenges these simplistic narratives. Drawing on collaborations between young migrants, researchers, artists, and activists, this collection asks new questions about how crises are produced, mobility is controlled, and childhood is conceptualized. Answers to these questions have profound implications for resources, infrastructures, and relationships of care. The chapters offer insights from diverse global contexts, painting a rich and insightful tapestry about child migration. They stress that children are more than recipients of care and that the crises they face are multiple and stratifying, with long historical roots. Readers are invited to understand migration as an act of concern and love and to attend to how the solidarities between citizens and “others,” adults and children, and between children, are understood and forged.
[more]
cover of Critical Analyses in English Renaissance Drama: A Bibliographic Guide

Critical Analyses in English Renaissance Drama

A Bibliographic Guide

Brownell Salomon

University of Wisconsin Press, 1979

This bibliographic guide directs the reader to a prize selection of the best modern, analytical studies of every play, anonymous play, masque, pageant, and "entertainment" written by more than two dozen contemporaries of Shakespeare in the years between 1580 and 1642. Together with Shakespeare's plays, these works comprise the most illustrious body of drama in the English language.

[more]
cover of Critical Approaches to the Films of Robert Rodriguez

Critical Approaches to the Films of Robert Rodriguez

By Frederick Luis Aldama

University of Texas Press, 2015

Frederick Aldama’s The Cinema of Robert Rodriguez (2014) was the first full-scale study of one of the most prolific and significant Latino directors making films today. In this companion volume, Aldama enlists a corps of experts to analyze a majority of Rodriguez’s feature films, from his first break-out success El Mariachi in 1992 to Machete in 2010. The essays explore the formal and thematic features present in his films from the perspectives of industry (context, convention, and distribution), the film blueprint (auditory and visual ingredients), and consumption (ideal and real audiences). The authors illuminate the manifold ways in which Rodriguez’s films operate internally (plot, character, and event) and externally (audience perception, thought, and feeling).

The volume is divided into three parts: “Matters of Mind and Media” includes essays that use psychoanalytic and cognitive psychology to shed light on how Rodriguez’s films complicate Latino identity, as well as how they succeed in remaking audiences’ preconceptions of the world. “Narrative Theory, Cognitive Science, and Sin City: A Case Study” offers tools and models of analysis for the study of Rodriguez’s film re-creation of a comic book (on which Frank Miller was credited as codirector). “Aesthetic and Ontological Border Crossings and Borderlands” considers how Rodriguez’s films innovatively critique fixed notions of Latino identity and experience, as well as open eyes to racial injustices. As a whole, the volume demonstrates how Rodriguez’s career offers critical insights into the filmmaking industry, the creative process, and the consuming and reception of contemporary film.

[more]
cover of Critical Communication: A Memoir

Critical Communication

A Memoir

Vincent Mosco

University of Westminster Press, 2025

This memoir, completed just before Vincent Mosco’s sudden death in February 2024, chronicles the last half century of research, activism and teaching in critical communication, technology and society from the perspective of one of its pioneering figures. It concentrates on the making of a radical activist scholar, the creation of a critical communication research field, the growth of a critical political economy of media and the concomitant expansion of critical approaches to media and computer technology, to communication labour and to public policy and media activism.

This beautifully written and deeply personal book is an informative and fascinating read that will be of interest to anyone interested in Critical Media and Communication Studies and the Political Economy of Communication.
[more]
cover of Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader

Critical Ethnic Studies

A Reader

Critical Ethnic Studies Editorial Collective

Duke University Press, 2016

Building on the intellectual and political momentum that established the Critical Ethnic Studies Association, this Reader inaugurates a radical response to the appropriations of liberal multiculturalism while building on the possibilities enlivened by the historical work of Ethnic Studies. It does not attempt to circumscribe the boundaries of Critical Ethnic Studies; rather, it offers a space to promote open dialogue, discussion, and debate regarding the field's expansive, politically complex, and intellectually rich concerns. Covering a wide range of topics, from multiculturalism, the neoliberal university, and the exploitation of bodies to empire, the militarized security state, and decolonialism, these twenty-five essays call attention to the urgency of articulating a Critical Ethnic Studies for the twenty-first century. 
 
 
[more]
cover of Critical Fandom: Representations of Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Fan Fiction

Critical Fandom

Representations of Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Fan Fiction

Cara Marta Messina

University of Iowa Press, 2026

Critical Fandom positions fan authors as rhetoricians and fan fiction as an action. Every fan author navigates—implicitly or explicitly—the politics of their fandom, the media they love, their lived experiences, digital technologies, reader expectations, and a larger culture. To better understand critical fans, Cara Marta Messina analyzes Archive of Our Own tagging practices, fan fictions, and interviews from four different fandoms.

Fans of The Legend of Korra celebrate queer relationships while understanding representation is just the first step in the face of systemic homophobia. Game of Thrones fan authors challenge racism and heteronormativity in both the community and the show. In online forums for Black Panther, fans make space for sapphic romances and explore the humanity of Erik Killmonger, ultimately contending with harmful stereotypes of radical Black men. And the Our Flag Means Death fandom demonstrates how a show can flourish when it centers queerness, especially for trans fans. Even in these moments of joy, there’s conflict. Critical Fandom seeks to answer what comes next.

[more]
cover of Critical Geographies of Youth: Law, Policy, and Power

Critical Geographies of Youth

Law, Policy, and Power

Gloria Howerton

West Virginia University Press, 2023

Young people will bear the brunt of the impacts of present and emerging crises occurring at all scales, from the national to the global. This volume brings together scholars and activists from various backgrounds to analyze youth interactions with law and politics, focusing specifically on the US legal landscape. It uses the lens of youth geographies to consider how legal and political systems shape our spaces, and provides leading-edge perspectives through case studies of child labor, compulsory education, asylum claims, criminalization of youth, youth activism, and more.

Of special interest in this volume is the tension between young people as both objects of law and policy and creative agents of change. Despite being directly affected by law and policy, young people are denied access to many legally sanctioned paths to shape them. Yet youth find ways to work within and mold the social, political, and legal spheres and set the stage for alternative futures.

[more]
cover of Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space

Critical Geopolitics

The Politics of Writing Global Space

Gearoid O'Tuathail

University of Minnesota Press, 1996

[more]
cover of Critical Heritage Studies and the Futures of Europe

Critical Heritage Studies and the Futures of Europe

Edited by Rodney Harrison, Nélia Dias, and Kristian Kristiansen

University College London, 2023

This book applies heritage studies to the present and the future of Europe.

Cultural and natural heritage are central to ideas of what Europe and “the European project’” are. Heritage studies were prevalent in the emergence of nation-states in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where they were used to justify differences over which border conflicts were fought. Later, the idea of a “common European heritage” provided a rationale for the development of the European Union. Now, the emergence of “new” populist nationalisms shows how the imagined past continues to play a role in cultural and social governance, while a series of interlinked social and ecological crises are changing the ways that heritage operates, with new discourses and ontologies emerging to reconfigure heritage for the circumstances of the present and the uncertainties of the future.
 
[more]
cover of Critical Heritage and Social Justice: Redistribution, Recognition and Representation in Context

Critical Heritage and Social Justice

Redistribution, Recognition and Representation in Context

Edited by Veysel Apaydin, Kalliopi Fouseki, David Francis, Jonathan Gardner, and Sara Perry

University College London, 2026

The first edited volume in the field of heritage to conceptualize and contextualize social justice in depth, both theoretically and through practical applications.

In this edited volume, scholars and practitioners working across heritage, museums, galleries, and cultural institutions explore how principles of social justice can be embedded within these spaces. Highlighting intersections between critical heritage studies and urgent global challenges, the book seeks to foster inclusive, community-engaged heritage practices. Applying Nancy Fraser’s theory of three-dimensional justice—redistribution, recognition, and representation—within the context of heritage studies, the authors reflect on global social, cultural, political, and environmental issues through an interdisciplinary heritage-focused approach. 

[more]
cover of Critical Indigenous Studies: Engagements in First World Locations

Critical Indigenous Studies

Engagements in First World Locations

Edited by Aileen Moreton-Robinson

University of Arizona Press, 2016

With increasing speed, the emerging discipline of critical Indigenous studies is expanding and demarcating its territory from Indigenous studies through the work of a new generation of Indigenous scholars. Critical Indigenous Studies makes an important contribution to this expansion, disrupting the certainty of disciplinary knowledge produced in the twentieth century, when studying Indigenous peoples was primarily the domain of non-Indigenous scholars.
 
Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s introductory essay provides a context for the emerging discipline. The volume is organized into three sections: the first includes essays that interrogate the embedded nature of Indigenous studies within academic institutions; the second explores the epistemology of the discipline; and the third section is devoted to understanding the locales of critical inquiry and practice.
 
Each essay places and contemplates critical Indigenous studies within the context of First World nations, which continue to occupy Indigenous lands in the twenty-first century. The contributors include Aboriginal, Metis, Maori, Kanaka Maoli, Filipino-Pohnpeian, and Native American scholars working and writing through a shared legacy born of British and later U.S. imperialism. In these countries, critical Indigenous studies is flourishing and transitioning into a discipline, a knowledge/power domain where distinct work is produced, taught, researched, and disseminated by Indigenous scholars.

View the Table of Contents
here.

Contributors:

Hokulani K. Aikau
Chris Andersen
Larissa Behrendt
Vicente M. Diaz
Noelani Goodyear Kaopua
Daniel Heath Justice
Brendan Hokowhitu
Aileen Moreton-Robinson
Jean M. O'Brien
Noenoe Silva
Kim Tallbear
Robert Warrior       
[more]
cover of Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities

Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities

Alan Liu

University of Minnesota Press, 2026

How digital humanities can shape and be shaped by the infrastructures that sustain our world

Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities reimagines the digital humanities (DH) through the expanding field of critical infrastructure studies. Featuring voices from around the globe, this volume explores how DH builds on and extends theories and technologies of infrastructure that affect society, culture, and knowledge in different national and regional contexts. Examining DH’s own infrastructural genealogy, the contributors offer readers critical reflections and bold visions for the future as they address issues of environmentalism, decolonization, Indigenous sovereignty, multilingualism, labor justice, feminism, national development, and beyond from a variety of disciplinary perspectives embedded in concrete digital systems. Including innovative “infrastructure manifests,” the essays in this book illuminate how DH can both study and shape the systems that sustain culture, scholarship, and connection.

Contributors: Anne Beaulieu, U of Groningen; Kyle Booten, U of Connecticut; Ann Borda, U of Melbourne; Susan Brown, U of Guelph; Toby Burrows, U of Western Australia; Ashley Caranto Morford, Weber State U; Javier Cha, U of Hong Kong; Jing Chen, Nanjing U; Arianna Ciula, King’s College London; Maya Dodd, FLAME U, Pune, India; Martin Paul Eve, Birkbeck, U of London; Allan Gomez, Philly Community Wireless; Matthew N. Hannah, Purdue U; Matthew Hockenberry, Fordham U; Arun Jacob, U of Toronto; Mike Jones, U of Tasmania; Lucie Kolb, Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW; Ian M. Miller, St. John’s U, New York; Sylvia K. Miller, Duke U; Sarah Montoya, Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow; Saumyaa Naidu, independent researcher; Sharika Parmar, FLAME U, Pune, India; Kush Patel, Srishti Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Bengaluru; Miriam Posner, UCLA; Puthiya Purayil Sneha, International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad; Paul Spence, King’s College London; Lik Hang Tsui, City U of Hong Kong; Deb Verhoeven, U of Alberta; Miguel Vieira, King’s College London; Devren Washington, Philly Community Wireless; Alex Wermer-Colan, Temple U and Philly Community Wireless; Darren Wershler, Concordia U; Grant Wythoff, Princeton U and Philly Community Wireless.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

[more]
cover of Critical Latin American And Latino Studies

Critical Latin American And Latino Studies

Juan Poblete

University of Minnesota Press, 2003

Situates these dynamic disciplines within debates around globalization

This book brings together some of the most prominent scholars working across the spectrum of Latin American and Latino studies to explore their changing intellectual undertaking in relation to global processes of change. Critical Latin American and Latino Studies identifies the challenges and possibilities of more politically engaged and theoretically critical modes of scholarly practice.

One objective is to provide a brief critical history of the study of various Latin American cultures—Latino, Chicano, Puerto Rican, among others. But these essays also serve to assess the roles of ethnic and area studies in light of changing scholarly trends, from emphases on gender and sexuality to a focus on postcoloniality and globalization. The result is an important contribution to current debates on the conditions of contemporary knowledge production. Contributors: Tomás Almaguer, San Francisco State U; Frances R. Aparicio, U of Illinois, Chicago; John Beverley, U of Pittsburgh; Angie Chabram-Dernersesian, U of California, Davis; Román de la Campa, SUNY, Stony Brook; Juan Flores, Hunter College and CUNY; Walter D. Mignolo, Duke U; Giorgio Perissinotto, U of California, Santa Barbara; Kirsten Silva Gruesz, U of California, Santa Cruz; Stefano Varese, U of California, Davis; George Yúdice, NYU; Juan Zevallos Aguilar, Villanova U.
[more]
cover of Critical Medical Anthropology: Perspectives in and from Latin America

Critical Medical Anthropology

Perspectives in and from Latin America

Edited by Jennie Gamlin, Sahra Gibbon, Paola Sesia, and Lina Berrío

University College London, 2020

Critical Medical Anthropology presents inspiring new work from scholars engaged with and carrying out ethnographic research in or from Latin America, addressing themes of central importance to contemporary perspectives on Critical Medical Anthropology (CMA). This includes issues of health inequalities, embodiment of history, indigenous health, non-communicable diseases, social justice, gendered violence, migration, substance abuse, reproductive politics and the judicialisation of health. It includes work spanning four countries in Latin America (Mexico, Brazil, Guatemala and Peru) as well as the trans-migratory contexts they connect and are defined by. By drawing on diverse social practices it addresses themes of central relevance to medical anthropology and global health, including reproduction and maternal health, sex work, rare and chronic disease and the use of pharmaceuticals and incorporating questions of agency, identity, reproductive politics, indigenous health, and human rights.
 
[more]
cover of Critical Norths: Space, Nature, Theory

Critical Norths

Space, Nature, Theory

Edited by Sarah J. Ray and Kevin Maier

University of Alaska Press, 2017

For millennia, “the North” has held a powerful sway in Western culture. Long seen through contradictions—empty of life yet full of promise, populated by indigenous communities yet ripe for conquest, pristine yet marked by a long human history—it has moved to the foreground of contemporary life as the most dramatic stage for the reality of climate change.
 
This book brings together scholars from a range of disciplines to ask key questions about the North and how we’ve conceived it—and how conceiving of it in those terms has caused us to fail the region’s human and nonhuman life. Engaging questions of space, place, indigeneity, identity, nature, the environment, justice, narrative, history, and more, it offers a crucial starting point for an essential rethinking of both the idea and the reality of the North.
[more]
cover of Critical Passions: Selected Essays

Critical Passions

Selected Essays

Jean Franco

Duke University Press, 1999

Jean Franco’s work as a pathbreaking theorist, cultural critic, and scholar has helped to define Latin American studies over the last three decades. In the process, Franco has played a crucial role in developing cultural studies in both the English- and Spanish-speaking worlds. Critical Passions is the first volume to gather a wide-ranging selection of Franco’s influential essays.
A key participant in the major debates in Latin American studies—beginning with the “boom” period of the 1960s and continuing through debates on ideology and discourse, Marxism, mass culture, and postmodernism—Franco is recognized for her feminist critique of Latin American writing. While her principal books are all readily available, Franco’s several dozen articles are dispersed in a variety of periodicals in Latin America, Europe, and the United States. Although many of these essays are considered pioneering and classic, they have never before been collected in a single work. In this volume, Mary Louise Pratt and Kathleen Newman have organized the essays into four interrelated sections: feminism and the critique of authoritarianism, mass and popular culture, Latin American literature from the “boom” onward, and the cultural history of Mexico. As a group, these writings demonstrate Franco’s ability to reflect on and judge with equal seriousness all spheres of expression, whether subway graffiti, a fashion manual, or an avant-garde haiku. A bona fide fan of popular and mass media, Franco never allows her critiques to dissolve into the puritanical or reductive; instead, she finds ways to present and debate complex theoretical questions in direct and accessible language.
This volume will draw an extensive readership in Latin American, cultural, and women’s studies.
[more]
cover of Critical Perspectives in International Studies

Critical Perspectives in International Studies

Frank P. Harvey and Michael Brecher, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2002

Critical Perspectives in International Studies offers an exciting survey of recent approaches to the study of international politics, including critical theory, radical theory, constructivism, postmodernism, system change, and feminist and gender perspectives. The authors—among the founders and leaders of these innovative ways to comprehend and re-present world politics—reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of each school of thought and suggest future research agendas.
[more]
cover of Critical Perspectives on Cultural Memory and Heritage: Construction, Transformation and Destruction

Critical Perspectives on Cultural Memory and Heritage

Construction, Transformation and Destruction

Edited by Veysel Apaydin

University College London, 2020

Critical Perspectives on Cultural Memory and Heritage focuses on the importance of memory and heritage for individual and group identity, and for their sense of belonging. It aims to expose the motives and discourses related to the destruction of memory and heritage during times of war, terror, sectarian conflict and through capitalist policies. It is within these affected spheres of cultural heritage where groups and communities ascribe values, develop memories, and shape their collective identity. It is an essential read for researchers in Museum and Heritage Studies, Archaeology and History who seek a global, comprehensive study of cultural memory and heritage.
 
[more]
cover of Critical Perspectives on Latino Education in Massachusetts

Critical Perspectives on Latino Education in Massachusetts

Lorna Rivera and Melissa Colón, editors

University of Massachusetts Press, 2025

In Massachusetts, the Latino population increased by 475 percent between 1980 and 2017, marking a dramatic growth. This diverse ethnic community of Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Salvadoreans, Colombians, Brazilians, and more also contains a wide range of cultures, immigration and migration experiences, languages, and socio-political backgrounds. However, there are numerous commonalities involving education. Recent research at the Mauricio Gastón Institute for Latino Community Development and Policy reveals that Latino students in Massachusetts are more likely to attend public schools, in communities with significant academic achievement and opportunity gaps as well as other challenges, from food scarcity to higher rates of unemployment. At the same time, the state-wide shift to standards-based education has had a disproportionately negative impact on Latino students, who already feel the effects of politically motivated anti-immigrant policies and laws that limit bilingual education.

This collection of essays, from those working inside the classroom as well as researchers taking a broader look at policy, addresses the array of issues facing Latino students in Massachusetts. These perspectives paint a complex picture of the educational experience for Latinos, and offer expert suggestions for improving classrooms, school environments, and ultimate educational outcomes for an important growing demographic in the Commonwealth.

In addition to editors Lorna Rivera and Melissa Colón, this volume’s contributors include Almudena G. Abeyta, Nasteho Ali, Cristina Araujo Brinkerhoff, Michael Berardino, Alex Briesacher, Thomas Conroy, Judenie Dabel, Liya Escalera, Luis Enrique Esquivel, Deyja Enriquez, Isahiah Erilus, Nyal Fuentes, Jazmin Rubi Flete Gomez, Manuel Frau-Ramos, Kimberly A. S. Howard, Patricia Krueger-Henney, Steven Lue, Mary Jo Marion, Timothy E. Murphy, Cecilia Nardi, Laurie Occhipinti, Alexandra Oliver-Davila, Chong Myung Park, Angelica Rodriquez, Marta T. Rosa, Diana Santiago, Melissa Sargent, Ester Shapiro, V. Scott H. Solberg, Fabián Torres-Ardila, Ashley Torres Carrasquillo, Paul Trunfio, Carmen N. Veloria, and Heilam Xie.

[more]
cover of Critical Race Theory 2Nd Ed

Critical Race Theory 2Nd Ed

Richard Delgado

Temple University Press, 1999

In this wide-ranging second edition, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic bring together the  finest, most illustrative, and highly accessible articles in the fast-growing legal  genre of Critical Race Theory. In challenging orthodoxy, questioning the premises of liberalism, and debating sacred wisdoms, Critical Race Theory scholars writing over the past few years have indelibly changed the way America looks at race.

This edition contains treatment of all the topics covered in the first edition, along with provocative and probing questions for discussion and detailed suggestions for additional reading, all of which set this fine volume apart from the field. In addition, this edition contains five new substantive units -- crime, critical race practice, intergroup tensions and alliances, gay/lesbian issues, and transcending the black-white binary paradigm of race. In each of these areas, groundbreaking scholarship by the movement's founding figures as well as the brightest new stars provides immediate entre to current trends and developments in critical civil rights thought.
[more]
cover of Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge

Critical Race Theory

The Cutting Edge

Richard Delgado

Temple University Press, 2013

Critical Race Theory has become a dynamic, eclectic, and growing movement in the study of law. With this third edition of Critical Race Theory, editors Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic have created a reader for the twenty-first century-one that shakes up the legal academy, questions comfortable liberal premises, and leads the search for new ways of thinking about our nation's most intractable, and insoluble, problem-race.

The contributions, from a stellar roster of established and emerging scholars, address new topics, such as intersectionality and black men on the "down low." Essays also confront much-discussed issues of discrimination, workplace dynamics, affirmative action, and sexual politics. Also new to this volume are updated section introductions, author notes, questions for discussion, and reading lists for each unit. The volume also covers the spread of the movement to other disciplines such as education.

Offering a comprehensive and stimulating snapshot of current race jurisprudence and thought, this new edition of Critical Race Theory is essential for those interested in law, the multiculturalism movement, political science, education, and critical thought.

[more]
cover of Critical Studies in Indian Grammarians I: The Theory of Homogeneity (Savar?ya)

Critical Studies in Indian Grammarians I

The Theory of Homogeneity (Savar?ya)

Madhav M. Deshpande

University of Michigan Press, 1975

In the historical study of the Indian grammarian tradition, a line of demarcation can often be drawn between the conformity of a system with the well-known grammar of Pāṇini and the explanatory effectiveness of that system. One element of Pāṇini’s grammar that scholars have sometimes struggled to bring across this line of demarcation is the theory of homogeneity, or sāvarṇya, which concerns the final consonants in Pāṇini’s reference catalog, as well as phonetic similarities between sounds. While modern Sanskrit scholars understand how to interpret and apply Pāṇini’s homogeneity, they still find it necessary to unravel the history of varying interpretations of the theory in subsequent grammars.
Madhav Deshpande’s The Theory of Homogeneity provides a thorough account of the historical development of the theory. Proceeding first to study this conception in the Pāṇinian tradition, Deshpande then passes on to other grammatical systems. Deshpande gives attention not only to the definitions of homogeneity in these systems but also the implementation of the theory in those respective systems. Even where definitions are identical, the concept may be applied quite differently, in which cases Deshpande examines by considering the historical relationships among the various systems.
[more]
cover of Critical Terms for the Study of Africa

Critical Terms for the Study of Africa

Edited by Gaurav Desai and Adeline Masquelier

University of Chicago Press, 2018

For far too long, the Western world viewed Africa as unmappable terrain—a repository for outsiders’ wildest imaginings. This problematic notion has had lingering effects not only on popular impressions of the region but also on the development of the academic study of Africa. Critical Terms for the Study of Africa considers the legacies that have shaped our understanding of the continent and its place within the conceptual grammar of contemporary world affairs.
 
Written by a distinguished group of scholars, the essays compiled in this volume take stock of African studies today and look toward a future beyond its fraught intellectual and political past. Each essay discusses one of our most critical terms for talking about Africa, exploring the trajectory of its development while pushing its boundaries. Editors Gaurav Desai and Adeline Masquelier balance the choice of twenty-five terms between the expected and the unexpected, calling for nothing short of a new mapping of the scholarly field. The result is an essential reference that will challenge assumptions, stimulate lively debate, and make the past, present, and future of African Studies accessible to students and teachers alike.
[more]
cover of Critical Terms for the Study of Gender

Critical Terms for the Study of Gender

Edited by Catharine R. Stimpson and Gilbert Herdt

University of Chicago Press, 2014

“Gender systems pervade and regulate human lives—in law courts and operating rooms, ballparks and poker clubs, hair-dressing salons and kitchens, classrooms and playgroups. . . . Exactly how gender works varies from culture to culture, and from historical period to historical period, but gender is very rarely not at work. Nor does gender operate in isolation. It is linked to other social structures and sources of identity.”
 
So write women’s studies pioneer Catharine R. Stimpson and anthropologist Gilbert Herdt in their introduction to Critical Terms for the Study of Gender, laying out the wide-ranging nature of this interdisciplinary and rapidly changing field. The sixth in the series of “Critical Terms” books, this volume provides an indispensable introduction to the study of gender through an exploration of key terms that are a part of everyday discourse in this vital subject.
 
Following Stimpson and Herdt’s careful account of the evolution of gender studies and its relation to women’s and sexuality studies, the twenty-one essays here cast an appropriately broad net, spanning the study of gender and sexuality across the humanities and social sciences. Written by a distinguished group of scholars, each essay presents students with a history of a given term—from bodies to utopia—and explains the conceptual baggage it carries and the kinds of critical work it can be made to do. The contributors offer incisive discussions of topics ranging from desire, identity, justice, and kinship to love, race, and religion that suggest new directions for the understanding of gender studies. The result is an essential reference addressed to students studying gender in very different disciplinary contexts.
[more]
cover of Critical Theory and Authoritarian Populism

Critical Theory and Authoritarian Populism

Jeremiah Morelock

University of Westminster Press, 2018

After President Trump’s election, BREXIT and the widespread rise of far-Right political parties, much public discussion has intensely focused on populism and authoritarianism. In the middle of the twentieth century, members of the early Frankfurt School prolifically studied and theorized fascism and anti-Semitism in Germany and the United States. In this volume, leading European and American scholars apply insights from the early Frankfurt School to present-day authoritarian populism, including the Trump phenomenon and related developments across the globe. Chapters are arranged into three sections exploring different aspects of the topic: theories, historical foundations, and manifestations via social media. Contributions examine the vital political, psychological and anthropological theories of early Frankfurt School thinkers, and how their insights could be applied now amidst the insecurities and confusions of twenty-first century life. The many theorists considered include Adorno, Fromm, Löwenthal and Marcuse, alongside analysis of Austrian Facebook pages and Trump’s tweets and operatic media drama. This book is a major contribution towards deeper understanding of populism’s resurgence in the age of digital capitalism.
[more]
cover of Critical Theory of Communication: New Readings of Lukács, Adorno, Marcuse, Honneth and Habermas in the Age of the Internet

Critical Theory of Communication

New Readings of Lukács, Adorno, Marcuse, Honneth and Habermas in the Age of the Internet

Christian Fuchs

University of Westminster Press, 2016

This book contributes to the foundations of a critical theory of communication as shaped by the forces of digital capitalism. One of the world's leading theorists of digital media Professor Christian Fuchs explores how the thought of some of the Frankfurt School’s key thinkers can be deployed for critically understanding media in the age of the Internet. Five essays that form the heart of this book review aspects of the works of Georg Lukács, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Axel Honneth and Jürgen Habermas and apply them as elements of a critical theory of communication's foundations. The approach taken starts from Georg Lukács Ontology of Social Being, draws on the work of the Frankfurt School thinkers, and sets them into dialogue with the Cultural Materialism of Raymond Williams.
Critical Theory of Communication offers a vital set of new insights on how communication operates in the age of information, digital media and social media, arguing that we need to transcend the communication theory of Habermas by establishing a dialectical and cultural-materialist critical theory of communication.
It is the first title in a major new book series 'Critical Digital and Social Media Studies' published by the University of Westminster Press.
[more]
cover of Critical White Studies

Critical White Studies

Richard Delgado

Temple University Press, 1997

No longer content with accepting whiteness as the norm, critical scholars have turned their attention to whiteness itself. In Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror, numerous thinkers, including Toni Morrison, Eric Foner, Peggy McIntosh, Andrew Hacker, Ruth Frankenberg, John Howard Griffin, David Roediger, Kathleen Heal Cleaver, Noel Ignatiev, Cherrie Moraga, and Reginald Horsman, attack such questions as:

*How was whiteness invented, and why?
*How has the category whiteness changed over time?
*Why did some immigrant groups, such as the Irish and Jews, start out as nonwhite and later became white?
*Can some individual people be both white and nonwhite at different times, and what does it mean to "pass for white"?
*At what point does pride in being white cross the line into white power or white supremacy?
*What can whites concerned over racial inequity or white privilege do about it?

Science and pseudoscience are presented side by side to demonstrate how our views on whiteness often reflect preconception, not fact. For example, most scientists hold that race is not a valid scientific category -- genetic differences between races are insignificant compared to those within them. Yet, the "one drop" rule, whereby those with any nonwhite heritage are classified as nonwhite, persists even today. As the bell curve controversy shows, race concepts die hard, especially when power and prestige lie behind them.

A sweeping portrait of the emerging field of whiteness studies, Critical White Studies presents, for the first time, the best work from sociology, law, history, cultural studies, and literature. Delgado and Stefancic expressly offer critical white studies as the next step in critical race theory. In focusing on whiteness, not only do they ask nonwhites to investigate more closely for what it means for others to be white, but also they invite whites to examine themselves more searchingly and to "look behind the mirror."
[more]
cover of Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies

Critically Sovereign

Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies

Joanne Barker, editor

Duke University Press, 2017

Critically Sovereign traces the ways in which gender is inextricably a part of Indigenous politics and U.S. and Canadian imperialism and colonialism. The contributors show how gender, sexuality, and feminism work as co-productive forces of Native American and Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, and epistemology. Several essays use a range of literary and legal texts to analyze the production of colonial space, the biopolitics of “Indianness,” and the collisions and collusions between queer theory and colonialism within Indigenous studies. Others address the U.S. government’s criminalization of traditional forms of Diné marriage and sexuality, the Iñupiat people's changing conceptions of masculinity as they embrace the processes of globalization, Hawai‘i’s same-sex marriage bill, and stories of Indigenous women falling in love with non-human beings such as animals, plants, and stars. Following the politics of gender, sexuality, and feminism across these diverse historical and cultural contexts, the contributors question and reframe the thinking about Indigenous knowledge, nationhood, citizenship, history, identity, belonging, and the possibilities for a decolonial future.

Contributors. Jodi A. Byrd, Joanne Barker, Jennifer Nez Denetdale, Mishuana Goeman,  J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Melissa K. Nelson, Jessica Bissett Perea, Mark Rifkin
[more]