Results by title

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

cover of Cancer Entangled: Anticipation, Acceleration, and the Danish State

Cancer Entangled

Anticipation, Acceleration, and the Danish State

Rikke Sand Andersen

Rutgers University Press, 2023

Cancer Entangled explores the shifts that took place in Denmark around the millennium, when health promoters set out to minimize delays in cancer diagnoses in hope of improving cancer survival. The authors suggest a temporal reframing of cancer control that emphasizes the importance of focusing on how people – potential patients as well as health care professionals – experience and anticipate cancer before a diagnosis or a prediction has been made. This argument compellingly challenges and augments anthropological work on cancer control that has privileged attention to the productive role of science and technology and to life with cancer or cancer risk. By offering rich ethnographic insights into the introduction of the first cancer vaccine, cancer signs and symptoms, public discourses on delays, social class and care seeking, cancer suspicion in the clinic, as well as the work on fast-track referral – the book convincingly situates cancer control in an ethical registrar involving attention to acceleration and time, showing how cancer waiting times become an index of the "state of the nation".
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cover of Cancer and the Politics of Care: Inequalities and Interventions in Global Perspective

Cancer and the Politics of Care

Inequalities and Interventions in Global Perspective

Edited by Linda Rae Bennett, Lenore Manderson, and Belinda Spagnoletti

University College London, 2023

An ethnographic examination of the effects of structural inequalities on cancer treatment around the world.
 
Taking an ethnographic approach, the contributors to this book offer new examinations of cancer and its treatment to show how social, economic, race, gender, and other structural inequalities intersect, compound, and complicate health inequalities. Cancer experiences and impacts are explored across eleven countries: Argentina, Brazil, Denmark, France, Greece, India, Indonesia, Italy, Senegal, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The volume engages with specific cancers from the point of primary prevention to screening, diagnosis, treatment (or its absence), and end-of-life care. Cancer and the Politics of Care traverses new theoretical terrain by explicitly critiquing cancer interventions, their limitations and success, the politics that drive them, and their embeddedness in local cultures and value systems. Its diversity and innovation ensure its wide utility among those working in and studying medical anthropology, social anthropology, and other fields at the intersections of social science, medicine, and health equity.
 
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cover of Cane Fires: The Anti-Japanese Movement in Hawaii, 1865-1945

Cane Fires

The Anti-Japanese Movement in Hawaii, 1865-1945

Gary Y. Okihiro

Temple University Press, 1992

Outstanding Book in History and Social Science Award, Association for Asian American Studies, 1992 "Okihiro's account is an important corrective to our understanding of the Japanese American Experience in World War II." --The Hawaiian Journal of History Challenging the prevailing view of Hawaii as a mythical "racial paradise," Gary Okihiro presents this history of a systematic anti-Japanese movement in the islands from the time migrant workers were brought to the sugar cane fields until the end of World War II. He demonstrates that the racial discrimination against Japanese Americans that occurred on the West Coast during the second World War closely paralleled the less familiar oppression of Hawaii's Japanese, which evolved from the production needs of the sugar planters to the military's concern over the "menace of alien domination." Okihiro convincingly argues that those concerns motivated the consolidation of the plantation owners, the Territorial government, and the U.S. military-Hawaii's elite-into a single force that propelled the anti-Japanese movement, while the military devised secret plans for martial law and the removal and detention of Japanese Americans in Hawaii two decades before World War II. Excerpt Read an excerpt from Chapter 1 (pdf). Reviews "Scholars of American race relations will want to read this book. So will anyone interested in Hawaii's history or in the experiences of Japanese or Asian Americans. It will go far in putting to rest any residual notion that the WWII experiences of the Japanese Americans represented 'aberration' or 'hysterical' reaction to wartime exigencies." --Franklin S. Odo, University of Hawaii at Manoa "A well-researched and well-written treatment of the subject." --Library Journal Contents Illustrations Preface Part I: Years of Migrant Labor, 1986-1909 1. So Much Charity, So Little Democracy 2. Hole Hole Bushi 3. With the Force of Wildfire Part II: Years of Dependency, 1910-1940 4. Cane Fires 5. In the National Defense 6. Race War 7. Extinguishing the Dawn 8. Dark Designs Part III: World War II, 1941-1945 9. Into the Cold Night Rain 10. Bivouac Song 11. In Morning Sunlight Notes Index About the Author(s) Gary Y. Okihiro is Associate Professor of History at Cornell University.
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cover of Canfield Drive: A History of Race and the American City on a Street in St. Louis

Canfield Drive

A History of Race and the American City on a Street in St. Louis

Matthew Knox Averett

University of Missouri Press, 2027

Winner of the 2026 Missouri Conference on History Book Award; the 2026 Missouri History Book Award; and shortlisted for the 2026 ASU Humanities Book Award

On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown and a friend were walking down Canfield Drive, a residential street in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson. There, they encountered Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson. Moments later, Brown was dead on the street—shot by Wilson at least six times. That evening, a memorial appeared on the pavement where he had fallen. In the days that followed, vigils turned into protests, and protests into an Uprising, as police in riot gear faced off with a grieving, outraged community. For nearly two weeks, Ferguson commanded the nation’s attention. The killing of Michael Brown was an outrage and it should not have happened. But Canfield Drive was primed for tragedy long before that fatal encounter because the street was already a place of racial conflict. This was no accident. 
 
Canfield Drive: A History of Race and the American City on a Street in St. Louis uncovers the deeper history behind the street where Brown died, tracing how race and the built environment have long intersected in St. Louis—from the city’s founding to the Ferguson Uprising. The book follows the story of Black space across two centuries: from early Black communities, to the birth of the St. Louis Blues, to the Halcyon days of The Ville, to the destruction of Mill Creek Valley, to the tragedy of Pruitt-Igoe, and to the construction of Canfield Drive. Though Canfield Drive is the first comprehensive history of St. Louis’s Black urban landscape, it is more than just St. Louis's story. Canfield Drive details the racial engineering of the American city. Here is the machinery of American segregation laid bare: occupancy covenants, court decisions, racial steering, white flight, public housing, voucher systems, and predatory policing that combine to transform neighborhoods into traps. Here too are the people who fought back, building community against staggering odds and securing civil rights reforms that transformed America's understanding of government's obligations to its citizens.
 
Canfield Drive provides a powerful lens on the national story of race and the American city and reveals how Michael Brown's death was not just one officer's deadly decision, but the inevitable outcome of America's built environment—a tragedy centuries in the making, on a street designed for violence. This is how a place becomes a powder keg. This is how history erupts into headlines. This is the story behind the story that America couldn't look away from. This is the story of how a street came to matter, and how it came to stand for something far greater than itself.

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cover of Cannibal Fictions: American Explorations of Colonialism, Race, Gender, and Sexuality

Cannibal Fictions

American Explorations of Colonialism, Race, Gender, and Sexuality

Jeff Berglund

University of Wisconsin Press, 2006

    Objects of fear and fascination, cannibals have long signified an elemental "otherness," an existence outside the bounds of normalcy. In the American imagination, the figure of the cannibal has evolved tellingly over time, as Jeff Berglund shows in this study encompassing a strikingly eclectic collection of cultural, literary, and cinematic texts.
    Cannibal Fictions brings together two discrete periods in U.S. history: the years between the Civil War and World War I, the high-water mark in America's imperial presence, and the post-Vietnam era, when the nation was beginning to seriously question its own global agenda. Berglund shows how P. T. Barnum, in a traveling exhibit featuring so-called "Fiji cannibals," served up an alien "other" for popular consumption, while Edgar Rice Burroughs in his Tarzan of the Apes series tapped into similar anxieties about the eruption of foreign elements into a homogeneous culture. Turning to the last decades of the twentieth century, Berglund considers how treatments of cannibalism variously perpetuated or subverted racist, sexist, and homophobic ideologies rooted in earlier times. Fannie Flagg's novel Fried Green Tomatoes invokes cannibalism to new effect, offering an explicit critique of racial, gender, and sexual politics (an element to a large extent suppressed in the movie adaptation). Recurring motifs in contemporary Native American writing suggest how Western expansion has, cannibalistically, laid the seeds of its own destruction. And James Dobson's recent efforts to link the pro-life agenda to allegations of cannibalism in China testify still further to the currency and pervasiveness of this powerful trope.
    By highlighting practices that preclude the many from becoming one, these representations of cannibalism, Berglund argues, call into question the comforting national narrative of e pluribus unum.
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cover of Cannibal Metaphysics

Cannibal Metaphysics

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

University of Minnesota Press, 2017

The iconoclastic Brazilian anthropologist and theoretician Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, well known in his discipline for helping initiate its “ontological turn,” offers a vision of anthropology as “the practice of the permanent decolonization of thought.” After showing that Amazonian and other Amerindian groups inhabit a radically different conceptual universe than ours—in which nature and culture, human and nonhuman, subject and object are conceived in terms that reverse our own—he presents the case for anthropology as the study of such “other” metaphysical schemes, and as the corresponding critique of the concepts imposed on them by the human sciences. Along the way, he spells out the consequences of this anthropology for thinking in general via a major reassessment of the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, arguments for the continued relevance of Deleuze and Guattari, dialogues with the work of Philippe Descola, Bruno Latour, and Marilyn Strathern, and inventive treatments of problems of ontology, translation, and transformation. Bold, unexpected, and profound, Cannibal Metaphysics is one of the chief works marking anthropology’s current return to the theoretical center stage.

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cover of Cannibal Writes: Eating Others in Caribbean and Indian Ocean Women's Writing

Cannibal Writes

Eating Others in Caribbean and Indian Ocean Women's Writing

Njeri Githire

University of Illinois Press, 2014

Postcolonial and diaspora studies scholars and critics have paid increasing attention to the use of metaphors of food, eating, digestion, and various affiliated actions such as loss of appetite, indigestion, and regurgitation. As such stylistic devices proliferated in the works of non-Western women writers, scholars connected metaphors of eating and consumption to colonial and imperial domination.
 
In Cannibal Writes, Njeri Githire concentrates on the gendered and sexualized dimensions of these visceral metaphors of consumption in works by women writers from Haiti, Jamaica, Mauritius, and elsewhere. Employing theoretical analysis and insightful readings of English- and French-language texts, she explores the prominence of alimentary-related tropes and their relationship to sexual consumption, writing, global geopolitics and economic dynamics, and migration. As she shows, the use of cannibalism in particular as a central motif opens up privileged modes for mediating historical and sociopolitical issues.
 
Ambitiously comparative, Cannibal Writes ranges across the works of well-known and lesser known writers to tie together two geographic and cultural spaces that have much in common but are seldom studied in parallel.
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cover of Canons by Consensus: Critical Trends and American Literature Anthologies

Canons by Consensus

Critical Trends and American Literature Anthologies

Joseph Csicsila, with a foreword by Tom Quirk

University of Alabama Press, 2004

The first systematic analysis of American literature textbooks used by college instructors in the last century

Scholars have long noted the role that college literary anthologies play in the rising and falling reputations of American authors. Canons by Consensus examines this classroom fixture in detail to challenge and correct a number of assumptions about the development of the literary canon throughout the 20th century.

Joseph Csicsila analyzes more than 80 anthologies published since 1919 and traces not only the critical fortunes of individual authors, but also the treatment of entire genres and groupings of authors by race, region, gender, and formal approach. In doing so, he calls into question accusations of deliberate or inadvertent sexism and racism. Selections by anthology editors, Csicsila demonstrates, have always been governed far more by prevailing trends in academic criticism than by personal bias.

Academic anthologies are found to constitute a rich and often overlooked resource for studying American literature, as well as an irrefutable record of the academy’s changing literary tastes throughout the last century.

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cover of Canyon de Chelly: Its People and Rock Art

Canyon de Chelly

Its People and Rock Art

Campbell Grant

University of Arizona Press, 1978

With the exception of the Grand Canyon itself, none of the great gorges of the American Southwest is more uniquely beautiful than Canyon de Chelly, with its sheer red cliffs and innumerable prehistoric Indian dwellings. Of all the important centers of prehistoric Anasazi culture, only this magnificent canyon shows an unbroken record of settlement for more than 1,000 years. In this liberally illustrated book, rock art authority Campbell Grant examines four aspects of the spectacular canyon: its physical characteristics, its history of human habitation, its explorers and archaeologists, and its countless rock paintings and petroglyphs. Grant surveys 96 sites in the two main canyons and offers an interpretation of the rock art found there.
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cover of Cape Town after Apartheid: Crime and Governance in the Divided City

Cape Town after Apartheid

Crime and Governance in the Divided City

Tony Roshan Samara

University of Minnesota Press, 2010

Nearly two decades after the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa, how different does the nation look? In Cape Town, is hardening inequality under conditions of neoliberal globalization actually reproducing the repressive governance of the apartheid era? By exploring issues of urban security and development, Tony Roshan Samara brings to light the features of urban apartheid that increasingly mark not only Cape Town but also the global cities of our day—cities as diverse as Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, Paris, and Beijing.

Cape Town after Apartheid focuses on urban renewal and urban security policies and practices in the city center and townships as this aspiring world-class city actively pursues a neoliberal approach to development. The city’s attempt to escape its past is, however, constrained by crippling inequalities, racial and ethnic tensions, political turmoil, and persistent insecurity. Samara shows how governance in Cape Town remains rooted in the perceived need to control dangerous populations and protect a somewhat fragile and unpopular economic system. In urban areas around the world, where the affluent minority and poor majority live in relative proximity to each other, aggressive security practices and strict governance reflect and reproduce the divided city.

A critical case for understanding a transnational view of urban governance, especially in highly unequal, majority-poor cities, this closely observed study of postapartheid Cape Town affords valuable insight into how security and governance technologies from the global North combine with local forms to create new approaches to social control in cities across the global South.
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cover of Cape Verde, Let's Go: Creole Rappers and Citizenship in Portugal

Cape Verde, Let's Go

Creole Rappers and Citizenship in Portugal

Derek Pardue

University of Illinois Press, 2015

Musicians rapping in kriolu--a hybrid of Portuguese and West African languages spoken in Cape Verde--have recently emerged from Lisbon's periphery. They popularize the struggles with identity and belonging among young people in a Cape Verdean immigrant community that shares not only the kriolu language but its culture and history.

Drawing on fieldwork and archival research in Portugal and Cape Verde, Derek Pardue introduces Lisbon's kriolu rap scene and its role in challenging metropolitan Portuguese identities. Pardue demonstrates that Cape Verde, while relatively small within the Portuguese diaspora, offers valuable lessons about the politics of experience and social agency within a postcolonial context that remains poorly understood. As he argues, knowing more about both Cape Verdeans and the Portuguese invites clearer assessments of the relationship between the experience and policies of migration. That in turn allows us to better gauge citizenship as a balance of individual achievement and cultural ascription.

Deftly shifting from domestic to public spaces and from social media to ethnographic theory, Pardue describes an overlooked phenomenon transforming Portugal, one sure to have parallels in former colonial powers across twenty-first-century Europe.

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cover of Capital Consequences: Families of the Condemned Tell Their Stories

Capital Consequences

Families of the Condemned Tell Their Stories

King, Rachel

Rutgers University Press, 2004

Those who support capital punishment often claim that they do so because it provides justice and closure for the victims’ families. In Capital Consequences, attorney Rachel King reminds us that there are other families and other victims who must be considered in the debate over the death penalty.

Combining a narrative voice with vivid, passionate, and painful accounts of the families of death row inmates, the book demonstrates that crimes that lead to death sentences also devastate the families of those convicted. These families, King argues, are the unseen victims of capital punishment.

King challenges readers to question the morality of a punishment that victimizes families of the condemned and ripples out through future generations. Chapters tell the stories of families that have lost life savings supporting an accused loved one, endured intense public scrutiny, been subjected to harassment by the media, and are struggling to live with the inhumane treatment that their loved ones receive on death row.  The author also explores the unique nature of the grief that these families suffer. Because their pain tends to elicit less attention and empathy than that of the crime victims’ families, King shows how it becomes much more desperate and isolating.

On a human level, this book is a powerful reminder that tragic events have tragic consequences that far outreach their immediate victims. At the same time, the accounts illustrate many of the flaws inherent in the judicial system—racial and economic bias, incompetent counsel, prosecutorial misconduct, the execution of juveniles, and wrongful convictions, some of which are only now being overturned because of recent advances in DNA technology.

Regardless of which side of the death penalty issue you are on, this book will lead you to pause and consider that all acts—criminal and retributive—have broader human implications than we are sometimes willing to realize.

 

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cover of Capital of Mind: The Idea of a Modern American University

Capital of Mind

The Idea of a Modern American University

Adam R. Nelson

University of Chicago Press, 2024

The second volume of an ambitious new economic history of American higher education.

Capital of Mind is the second volume in a breathtakingly ambitious new economic history of American higher education. Picking up from the first volume, Exchange of Ideas, Adam R. Nelson looks at the early decades of the nineteenth century, explaining how the idea of the modern university arose from a set of institutional and ideological reforms designed to foster the mass production and mass consumption of knowledge. This “industrialization of ideas” mirrored the industrialization of the American economy and catered to the demands of a new industrial middle class for practical and professional education. From Harvard in the north to the University of Virginia in the south, new experiments with the idea of a university elicited intense debate about the role of scholarship in national development and international competition, and whether higher education should be supported by public funds, especially in periods of fiscal austerity. The history of capitalism and the history of the university, Nelson reveals, are intimately intertwined—which raises a host of important questions that remain salient today. How do we understand knowledge and education as commercial goods? Should they be public or private? Who should pay for them? And, fundamentally, what is the optimal system of higher education for a capitalist democracy?
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cover of Capital of the American Century: The National and International Influence of New York City

Capital of the American Century

The National and International Influence of New York City

Martin Shefter

Russell Sage Foundation, 1993

Capital of the American Century investigates the remarkable influence that New York City has exercised over the economy, politics, and culture of the nation throughout much of the twentieth century. New York's power base of corporations, banks, law firms, labor unions, artists and intellectuals has played a critical role in shaping areas as varied as American popular culture, the nation's political doctrines, and the international capitalist economy. If the city has lost its unique prominence in recent decades, the decline has been largely—and ironically—a result of the successful dispersion of its cosmopolitan values. The original essays in Capital of the American Century offer objective and intriguing analyses of New York City as a source of innovation in many domains of American life. Postwar liberalism and modernism were advanced by a Jewish and WASP coalition centered in New York's charitable foundations, communications media, and political organizations, while Wall Street lawyers and bankers played a central role in fashioning national security policies. New York's preeminence as a cultural capital was embodied in literary and social criticism by the "New York intellectuals," in the fine arts by the school of Abstract Expressionism, and in popular culture by Broadway musicals. American business was dominated by New York, where the nation's major banks and financial markets and its largest corporations were headquartered. In exploring New York's influence, the contributors also assess the larger social and economic conditions that made it possible for a single city to exert such power. New York's decline in recent decades stems not only from its own fiscal crisis, but also from the increased diffusion of industrial, cultural, and political hubs throughout the nation. Yet the city has taken on vital new roles that, on the eve of the twenty-first century, reflect an increasingly global era: it is the center of U.S. foreign trade and the international art market: The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have emerged as international newspapers; and the city retains a crucial influence in information-intensive sectors such as corporate law, accounting, management consulting, and advertising. Capital of the American Century provides a fresh link between the study of cities and the analysis of national and international affairs. It is a book that enriches our historical sense of contemporary urban issues and our understanding of modern culture, economy, and politics.
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cover of Capital, Class & Technology in Contemporary American Culture: Projecting Post-Fordism

Capital, Class & Technology in Contemporary American Culture

Projecting Post-Fordism

Nick Heffernan

Pluto Press, 2000

In the tradition of Mike Davis and Fredric Jameson, Nick Heffernan engages in a series of meditations on capital, class and technology in contemporary America. 

He turns to the stories we generate and tell ourselves - via fiction, film journalism, theory - to see how change is registered. By investigating a variety of texts, he observes how structural change affects the way people organise their lives economically, socially and culturally. Case studies include Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, William Gibson's cyberspace trilogy, Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, and Wim Wenders's Until the End of the World.

Using the links between narrative cultural forms and the process of historical understanding, he brings together debates that have so far been conducted largely within the separate domains of political economy, social theory and cultural criticism to provide a compelling analysis of contemporary cultural change. By relocating postmodernism in the context of changing modes of capitalism, Heffernan puts the question of class and class agency back at the centre of the critical agenda.
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cover of Capital, Interrupted: Agrarian Development and the Politics of Work in India

Capital, Interrupted

Agrarian Development and the Politics of Work in India

Vinay Gidwani

University of Minnesota Press, 2008

The central Gujarat region of western India is home to the entrepreneurial landowning Patel caste who have leveraged their rural dominance to become a powerful global diaspora of merchants, industrialists, and professionals. Investigating the Patels’ intriguing ascent, Vinay Gidwani analyzes its broad implications for the nature of labor and capital worldwide.

With the Patels as his central case, Gidwani interrogates established concepts of value, development, and the relationship between capital and history. Capitalism, he argues, is not a frame of economic organization based on the smooth, consistent operation of a series of laws, but rather an assemblage of contingent and interrupted logics stitched together into the appearance of a deus ex machina. Following this line of thinking, Gidwani points to ways in which political economy might be freed of its lingering Eurocentrism, raises questions about the adequacy of postcolonial studies’ critique of Marx and capitalism, and opens the possibility of situating capitalism as a geographically uneven social formation in which different normative or value-creating practices are imperfectly sutured together in ways that can equally impair and enable profit and accumulation.

Both theoretically astute and empirically informed, Capital, Interrupted unsettles encrusted understandings of staple concepts within the human sciences such as hegemony, governmentality, caste, and agency and, ultimately, does nothing less than rethink the very constitution of capitalism.

Vinay Gidwani is associate professor of geography and global studies at the University of Minnesota.

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cover of Capital, State, Empire: The New American Way of Digital Warfare

Capital, State, Empire

The New American Way of Digital Warfare

Scott Timcke

University of Westminster Press, 2017

The United States presents the greatest source of global geo-political violence and instability. Guided by the radical political economy tradition, this book offers an analysis of the USA’s historical impulse to weaponize communication technologies.

Scott Timcke explores the foundations of this impulse and how the militarization of digital society creates structural injustices and social inequalities. He analyses how new digital communication technologies support American paramountcy and conditions for worldwide capital accumulation. Identifying selected features of contemporary American society, Capital, State, Empire undertakes a materialist critique of this digital society and of the New American Way of War. At the same time it demonstrates how the American security state represses activists—such as Black Lives Matter—who resist this emerging security leviathan. The book also critiques the digital positivism behind the algorithmic regulation used to control labour and further diminish prospects for human flourishing for the ‘99%’.

Capital, State, Empire contributes to a broader understanding of the dynamics of global capitalism and political power in the early 21st century.

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cover of Capitalism

Capitalism

Peter Saunders

University of Minnesota Press, 1995

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cover of Capitalism Hates You: Marxism and the New Horror Film

Capitalism Hates You

Marxism and the New Horror Film

Joshua Gooch

University of Minnesota Press, 2025

What contemporary horror films teach us about the cruelties of capitalist society

Capitalism Hates You uses the horror film genre as a tool to diagnose and expose the hostile conditions of life under capitalism. Through incisive critical analyses of popular films such as Get Out, Drag Me to Hell, Hereditary, The Babadook, and many others, Joshua Gooch draws connections between Marxist theory and contemporary narratives of psychological unease.

Gooch highlights the work of women, trans, and nonwhite filmmakers to show how the remarkable diversity of twenty-first-century horror cinema can provide an expansive catalog of capitalism’s varying forms of oppression. Studying films that interrogate such urgent topics as gentrification, climate change, and reproductive labor, he demonstrates how contemporary horror films give affective shape to the negative undercurrents of our present socioeconomic system.

Capitalism Hates You argues that these films and their material conditions can deepen our understanding of essential concepts in contemporary Marxism, from the theory of value and changing forms of commodification to the labor of social reproduction, the abolition of the family, and the necessity of ecosocialism. Synthesizing various strands of Marxist thought, Gooch sheds light on the growing field of socially conscious horror films, examining how they pinpoint and exaggerate latent feelings of dread and discomfort to reflect the ills of society.

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

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cover of Capitalism and Labor: Towards Critical Perspectives

Capitalism and Labor

Towards Critical Perspectives

Edited by Klaus Dörre, Nicole Mayer-Ahuja, Dieter Sauer, and Volker Wittke

Campus Verlag, 2012

Capitalism’s presence in nearly all areas of contemporary life is widely-known and unshakeable. There is perhaps nowhere more true than in the workplace. Why then, ask the authors of this collection, have the broad concepts of work and capitalism become a progressively smaller focus in sociology in recent decades, shunted to the sidelines in favor of more granular subjects in labor studies? Capitalism and Labor calls for sociologists to refocus their research on the unavoidable realities of the capitalist system, particularly in the wake of the global financial and economic unrest of the past decade. Although they provide no easy solutions, the essays in this book will serve as a starting point for sociologists to renew their focus on labor and its inextricable relationship to capitalism in the twenty-first century.
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cover of Capitalism from Outside?: Economic Cultures in Eastern Europe after 1989

Capitalism from Outside?

Economic Cultures in Eastern Europe after 1989

János Mátyás Kovács

Central European University Press, 2012

Does capitalism emerging in Eastern Europe need as solid ethnic or spiritual foundations as some other "Great Transformations" in the past? Apparently, one can become an actor of the new capitalist game without belonging to the German, Jewish, or, to take a timely example, Chinese minority. Nor does one have to go to a Protestant church every Sunday, repeat Confucian truisms when falling asleep, or study Adam Smith's teachings on the virtues of the market in a business course. He/she may just follow certain quasi-capitalist routines acquired during communism and import capitalist culture (more exactly, various capitalist cultures) in the form of down-to-earth cultural practices embedded in freshly borrowed economic and political institutions. Does capitalism come from outside? Why do then so many analysts talk about hybridization? This volume offers empirical insights into the current cultural history of the Eastern European economies in three fields: entrepreneurship, state governance and economic science. The chapters are based on large case studies prepared in the framework of an eight-country research project (funded by the European Commission, and directed jointly by the Center for Public Policy at the Central European University and the Institute for Human Sciences) on East-West cultural encounters in the ex-communist economies.
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cover of Capitalism's Conscience: 200 Years of the Guardian

Capitalism's Conscience

200 Years of the Guardian

Des Freedman

Pluto Press, 2021

'A lively and well-researched history and critique' - Jonathan Steele, former Chief Foreign Correspondent for the Guardian

Since its inception in Manchester in 1821 as a response to the 1819 Peterloo Massacre, the Guardian has been a key institution in the definition and development of liberalism. The stereotype of the 'Guardianista', an environmentally-conscious, Labour-voting, progressively-minded public sector worker endures in the popular mythology of British press history.

Yet the title has a complex lineage and occupies an equivocal position between capital and its opponents. It has both fiercely defended the need for fearless, independent journalism and handed over documents to the authorities; it has carved out a niche for itself in the UK media as a progressive voice but has also consistently diminished more radical projects on the left.

Published to coincide with its 200th anniversary, Capitalism's Conscience brings together historians, journalists and activists in an appraisal of the Guardian's contribution to British politics, society and culture - and its distinctive brand of centrism. Contextualising some of the main controversies in which the title has been implicated, the book offers timely insights into the publication's history, loyalties and political values.
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cover of Capitalism's New Clothes: Enterprise, Ethics and Enjoyment in Times of Crisis

Capitalism's New Clothes

Enterprise, Ethics and Enjoyment in Times of Crisis

Colin Cremin

Pluto Press, 2011

From broadsheet newspapers to television shows and Hollywood films, capitalism is increasingly recognised as a system detrimental to human existence. Colin Cremin investigates why, despite this de-robing, capitalism remains a powerful and seductive force.

Using materialist, psychoanalytic and linguistic approaches, Cremin shows how capitalism, anxiety and desire enter into a mutually supporting relationship. He identifies three ways in which we are tied in to capitalism – through a social imperative for enterprise and competition; through enjoyment and consumption; and through the depoliticisation of ethical debate by government and business.

Capitalism's New Clothes is ideal for students of sociology and for anyone worried about the ethics of capitalism or embarrassed by the enjoyments the system has afforded them.
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cover of Capitalism, Democracy, and Ecology: Departing from Marx

Capitalism, Democracy, and Ecology

Departing from Marx

Timothy W. Luke

University of Illinois Press, 1999

The world that was revolutionized by industrialization is being remade by the information revolution. But this is mostly a revolution from above, increasingly shaped by a new class of technocrats, experts, and professionals in the service of corporate capitalism.

Using Marx as a touchstone, Timothy W. Luke warns that if communities are not to be overwhelmed by new class economic and political agendas, then the practice of democracy must be reconstituted on a more populist basis. However, the galvanizing force for this new, more community-centered populism will not be the proletariat, as Marx predicted, nor contemporary militant patriotic groups. Rather, Luke argues that many groups unified by a concern for ecological justice present the strongest potential opposition to capitalism.

Wide-ranging and lucid, Capitalism, Democracy, and Ecology is essential reading in the age of information.

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cover of Captain America and the Nationalist Superhero: Metaphors, Narratives, and Geopolitics

Captain America and the Nationalist Superhero

Metaphors, Narratives, and Geopolitics

Jason Dittmer

Temple University Press, 2012

Nationalist superheroes—such as Captain America, Captain Canuck, and Union Jack—often signify the “nation-state” for readers, but how do these characters and comic books address issues of multiculturalism and geopolitical order? In his engaging book Captain America and the Nationalist Superhero, geographer Jason Dittmer traces the evolution of the comic book genre as it adapted to new national audiences. He argues that these iconic superheroes contribute to our contemporary understandings of national identity, the righteous use of power, and the role of the United States, Canada, and Britain in the world.

Tracing the nationalist superhero genre from its World War II origins to contemporary manifestations throughout the world, Captain America and the Nationalist Superhero analyzes nearly one thousand comic books and audience responses to those books. Dittmer also interviews key comic book writers from Stan Lee and J. M. DeMatteis to Steve Englehart and Paul Cornell.

At a time when popular culture is saturated with superheroes and their exploits, Captain America and the Nationalist Superhero highlights the unique relationship between popular culture and international relations.

[more]
cover of Captioning and Subtitling for d/Deaf and Hard of Hearing Audiences

Captioning and Subtitling for d/Deaf and Hard of Hearing Audiences

Soledad Zárate

University College London, 2021

A comprehensive guide to the theory and practice of captioning and subtitling.

Captioning and Subtitling for d/Deaf and Hard of Hearing Audiences is a comprehensive guide to the theory and practice of captioning and subtitling, with examples and exercises at the end of each chapter. Analyzing the requirements of d/Deaf and hard of hearing audiences in detail, as well as treating the linguistic and technical considerations necessary for effective captioning, this volume will familiarize the reader with the characteristics, needs, and diversity of d/Deaf and hard of hearing audiences. Based on first-hand experience in the field, the book provides a step-by-step guide to making live performances accessible to d/Deaf and hard of hearing audiences. The guide will be valuable reading to students of audiovisual translation, professional subtitlers, and captioners, as well as any organization or venue that engages with d/Deaf and hard of hearing people.
 
[more]
cover of Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life

Captivating Technology

Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life

Ruha Benjamin, editor

Duke University Press, 2019

The contributors to Captivating Technology examine how carceral technologies such as electronic ankle monitors and predictive-policing algorithms are being deployed to classify and coerce specific populations and whether these innovations can be appropriated and reimagined for more liberatory ends.
[more]
cover of Captive Ecologies: The Environmental Afterlives of Slavery

Captive Ecologies

The Environmental Afterlives of Slavery

Jennifer C. James

Duke University Press, 2026

Captive Ecologies makes a case for the ecological significance of slavery’s afterlife, tracing the complex entanglements between racial capitalism and Black ecological freedom. Attending to the ways that racial capitalism implicates both captive bodies and captive land, Jennifer C. James brings into relief the harm that racial capitalism does to Black people as well as the human and non-human worlds they inhabit. James looks to a range of case studies and media from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, including Black music, ecopoetics, literature, social history, biography, and Black feminist and queer art, tracing the various ways that the environmental stakes of racial capitalism have shaped the Black ecological imagination. In these works, the concept of captivity signals not only slavery but also Black life in the “wake”: carceral spaces and enclosures, exploitative economic systems, sacrifice zones, and more. James offers novel concepts and frameworks to generate new modes of ecocriticism that are equipped to grapple with the unique demands and stakes of captive ecologies.
[more]
cover of Captive Revolution: Palestinian Women's Anti-Colonial Struggle within the Israeli Prison System

Captive Revolution

Palestinian Women's Anti-Colonial Struggle within the Israeli Prison System

Nahla Abdo

Pluto Press, 2014

Women throughout the world have always played their part in struggles against colonialism, imperialism and other forms of oppression. However, there are few books on Arab political prisoners, fewer still on the Palestinians who have been detained in their thousands for their political activism and resistance.

Nahla Abdo's Captive Revolution seeks to break the silence on Palestinian women political detainees, providing a vital contribution to research on women, revolutions, national liberation and anti-colonial resistance. Based on stories of the women themselves, as well as her own experiences as a former political prisoner, Abdo draws on a wealth of oral history and primary research in order to analyse their anti-colonial struggle, their agency and their appalling treatment as political detainees.

Making crucial comparisons with the experiences of female political detainees in other conflicts, and emphasising the vital role Palestinian political culture and memorialisation of the 'Nakba' have had on their resilience and resistance, Captive Revolution is a rich and revealing addition to our knowledge of this little-studied phenomenon.

[more]
cover of Captivity Beyond Prisons: Criminalization Experiences of Latina (Im)migrants

Captivity Beyond Prisons

Criminalization Experiences of Latina (Im)migrants

By Martha D. Escobar

University of Texas Press, 2016

Today the United States leads the world in incarceration rates. The country increasingly relies on the prison system as a “fix” for the regulation of societal issues. Captivity Beyond Prisons is the first full-length book to explicitly link prisons and incarceration to the criminalization of Latina (im)migrants.

Starting in the 1990s, the United States saw tremendous expansion in the number of imprisoned (im)migrants, specifically Latinas/os. Consequently, there was also an increase in the number of deportations. In addition to regulating society, prisons also serve as a reproductive control strategy, both in preventing female inmates from having children and by separating them from their families. With an eye to racialized and gendered technologies of power, Escobar argues that incarcerated Latinas are especially depicted as socially irrecuperable because they are not considered useful within the neoliberal labor market. This perception impacts how they are criminalized, which is not limited to incarceration but also extends to and affects Latina (im)migrants’ everyday lives. Escobar also explores the relationship between the immigrant rights movement and the prison abolition movement, scrutinizing a variety of social institutions working on solutions to social problems that lead to imprisonment.

Accessible to both academics and those in the justice and social service sectors, Escobar’s book pushes readers to consider how, even in radical spaces, unequal power relations can be reproduced by the very entities that attempt to undo them.

[more]
cover of Captivity and Sentiment: Cultural Exchange in American Literature, 1682–1861

Captivity and Sentiment

Cultural Exchange in American Literature, 1682–1861

Michelle Burnham

Dartmouth College Press, 2000

In a radically new interpretation and synthesis of highly popular 18th- and 19th-century genres, Michelle Burnham examines the literature of captivity, and, using Homi Bhabha's concept of interstitiality as a base, provides a valuable redescription of the ambivalent origins of the US national narrative. Stories of colonial captives, sentimental heroines, or fugitive slaves embody a "binary division between captive and captor that is based on cultural, national, or racial difference," but they also transcend these pre-existing antagonistic dichotomies by creating a new social space, and herein lies their emotional power. Beginning from a simple question on why captivity, particularly that of women, so often inspires a sentimental response, Burnham examines how these narratives elicit both sympathy and pleasure. The texts carry such great emotional impact precisely because they "traverse those very cultural, national, and racial boundaries that they seem so indelibly to inscribe. Captivity literature, like its heroines, constantly negotiates zones of contact," and crossing those borders reveals new cultural paradigms to the captive and, ultimately, the reader.
[more]
cover of Capture These Indians for the Lord: Indians, Methodists, and Oklahomans, 1844-1939

Capture These Indians for the Lord

Indians, Methodists, and Oklahomans, 1844-1939

Tash Smith

University of Arizona Press, 2014

In 1844, on the heels of the final wave of the forced removal of thousands of Indians from the southern United States to what is now Oklahoma, the Southern Methodist Church created a separate organization known as the Indian Mission Conference to oversee its missionary efforts among the Native communities of Indian Territory. Initially, the Church conducted missions as part of the era’s push toward assimilation. But what the primarily white missionaries quickly encountered was a population who exerted more autonomy than they expected and who used Christianity to protect their culture, both of which frustrated those eager to bring Indian Territory into what they felt was mainstream American society.

In Capture These Indians for the Lord, Tash Smith traces the trajectory of the Southern Methodist Church in Oklahoma when it was at the frontlines of the relentless push toward western expansion. Although many Native people accepted the missionaries’ religious practices, Smith shows how individuals found ways to reconcile the Methodist force with their traditional cultural practices. When the white population of Indian Territory increased and Native sovereignty came under siege during the allotment era of the 1890s, white communities marginalized Indians within the Church and exploited elements of mission work for their own benefit.

Later, with white indifference toward Indian missions peaking in the early twentieth century, Smith explains that as the remnants of the Methodist power weakened, Indian membership regained control and used the Church to regenerate their culture. Throughout, Smith explores the complex relationships between white and Indian community members and how these phenomena shaped Methodist churches in the twentieth century.
[more]
cover of Captured Peace: Elites and Peacebuilding in El Salvador

Captured Peace

Elites and Peacebuilding in El Salvador

Christine J. Wade

Ohio University Press, 2015

El Salvador is widely considered one of the most successful United Nations peacebuilding efforts, but record homicide rates, political polarization, socioeconomic exclusion, and corruption have diminished the quality of peace for many of its citizens. In Captured Peace: Elites and Peacebuilding in El Salvador, Christine J. Wade adapts the concept of elite capture to expand on the idea of “captured peace,” explaining how local elites commandeered political, social, and economic affairs before war’s end and then used the peace accords to deepen their control in these spheres.

While much scholarship has focused on the role of gangs in Salvadoran unrest, Wade draws on an exhaustive range of sources to demonstrate how day-to-day violence is inextricable from the economic and political dimensions. In this in-depth analysis of postwar politics in El Salvador, she highlights the local actors’ primary role in peacebuilding and demonstrates the political advantage an incumbent party—in this case, the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA—has throughout the peace process and the consequences of this to the quality of peace that results.

[more]
cover of Captured Societies in Southeast Europe: Networks of Trust and Control

Captured Societies in Southeast Europe

Networks of Trust and Control

Eric Gordy

Central European University Press, 2025

In Southeast Europe, there is a growing disjunction between “the way the world is” and the world that is described by law. The informal practices that address problems when formal institutions fail can be celebrated as spaces of creative problem-solving, or criticized as spaces for favouritism and corruption. When ruling political parties control informal networks, they consolidate the hold of unaccountable actors on power, moving from state capture to societal capture.
This book presents findings from a collaborative, multidisciplinary research project. Over three years, a group of forty researchers examined informal practices in nine Southeast European states, adopting a mix of qualitative and quantitative methodologies.
This close look at the Balkans illuminates persistent deficits in state legitimacy and capacity. The evidence allows a critical assessment of “Europeanisation” processes that produce only superficial formal changes, and of ways that networks of mutual assistance turn into instruments of social control and closure.
[more]
cover of Capturing COVID: Media and the Pandemic in the Digital Era

Capturing COVID

Media and the Pandemic in the Digital Era

Katherine A. Foss

University of Massachusetts Press, 2025

When health authorities quarantined guests aboard the Diamond Princess on February 5, 2020, the cruise ship abruptly shifted from a dream vacation vessel to a public health nightmare. Over the next three weeks, 712 passengers tested positive for coronavirus, with fourteen deaths, and the ship outbreak quickly became the largest cluster of cases outside of China. Guests began to routinely share quarantine updates on social media, ranging from the quality of the ship’s food to their sense of imprisonment. These Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok accounts became a key source of information for news outlets like the Associated Press, and they helped to set the tone for how the media would cover and frame the pandemic for the next several years.

Unlike past outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics, COVID-19 emerged in a 21st-century digital landscape of instant communication and abundant online platforms, with older models of news and entertainment media mingling with new types of citizen-produced content. In Capturing COVID, Katherine A. Foss makes sense of how this contemporary media landscape shaped the public’s knowledge and perceptions of the new pandemic. The book focuses on crucial media moments, including the initial reporting from Wuhan; news and social media content on the Diamond Princess quarantine; stories of inequality, stigma, and injustice; narratives of the vaccine rollout; and representations of pandemic life in popular culture. Drawing on press releases, interviews, websites, blogs, social media posts, and other publicly available materials, and guided by critical media analysis, Foss illuminates how this new digital era profoundly shaped the progression of the pandemic. This media landscape kept people informed and connected, but also led to the politicization of the virus, rampant mis/disinformation, and stigmatizing messaging that contributed to public distrust and division. Capturing COVID deftly helps make sense of the entire affair.

[more]
cover of Capturing Finance: Arbitrage and Social Domination

Capturing Finance

Arbitrage and Social Domination

Carolyn Hardin

Duke University Press, 2021

Arbitrage—the trading practice that involves buying assets in one market at a cheap price and immediately selling them in another market for a profit—is fundamental to the practice of financial trading and economic understandings of how financial markets function. Because traders complete transactions quickly and use other people's money, arbitrage is considered to be riskless. Yet, despite the rhetoric of riskless trading, the arbitrage in mortgage-backed securities led to the 2008 financial crisis. In Capturing Finance Carolyn Hardin offers a new way of understanding arbitrage as a means for capturing value in financial capitalism. She shows how arbitrage relies on a system of abstract domination built around risk. The commonsense beliefs that taking on debt is necessary for affording everyday life and that investing is necessary to secure retirement income compel individuals to assume risk while financial institutions amass profits. Hardin insists that mitigating financial capitalism's worst consequences, such as perpetuating class and racial inequities, requires challenging the narratives that naturalize risk as a necessary element of financial capitalism as well as social life writ large.
[more]
cover of Capturing Imagination: A Proposal for an Anthropology of Thought

Capturing Imagination

A Proposal for an Anthropology of Thought

Carlo Severi

HAU, 2018

We have all found ourselves involuntarily addressing inanimate objects as though they were human. For a fleeting instant, we act as though our cars and computers can hear us. In situations like ritual or play, objects acquire a range of human characteristics, such as perception, thought, action, or speech. Puppets, dolls, and ritual statuettes cease to be merely addressees and begin to address us—we see life in them.
 
How might we describe the kind of thought that gives life to the artifact, making it memorable as well as effective, in daily life, play, or ritual action? Following The Chimera Principle, in this collection of essays Carlo Severi explores the kind of shared imagination where inanimate artifacts, from non-Western masks and ritual statuettes to paintings and sculptures in our own tradition, can be perceived as living beings. This nuanced inquiry into the works of memory and shared imagination is a proposal for a new anthropology of thought.
[more]
cover of Capturing Troy: The Narrative Functions of Landscape in Archaic and Early Classical Greek Art

Capturing Troy

The Narrative Functions of Landscape in Archaic and Early Classical Greek Art

Guy Hedreen

University of Michigan Press, 2002

Those in the field of classical art will appreciate this investigation of the most common remnant of ancient Greek society available to the modern scholar, the painted vase. Guy Hedreen discusses how the imagery on Greek vases is only sometimes used as a narrative device, and delves further into the extent to which visual imagery depends upon literary sources. With the backdrop of one of the world's earliest, and some would argue greatest stories ever told, the sacking of Troy, Hedreen brings the reader into one of the most current and persistent topics in the art world: Narrative vs. Art. Employing a wide range of stunning visual imagery to illustrate his points, this insightful original text, Capturing Troy is a valuable new contribution to the subject, accessible to the learned scholar and beginning student alike.
Guy Michael Hedreen is Professor of Art, Williams College.
[more]
cover of Capturing Water: Puebloan Resilience and Agricultural Sustainability in Chaco Canyon

Capturing Water

Puebloan Resilience and Agricultural Sustainability in Chaco Canyon

R. Gwinn Vivian and Samantha G. Fladd

University of Utah Press, 2025

An esteemed archaeologist's lifetime of work on water use in Chaco Canyon

The ability of the inhabitants of Chaco Canyon to sustain themselves through farming in an arid environment has long been a topic of debate among scholars. Building upon the work of his father, Gordon, R. Gwinn Vivian dedicated his lifetime of archaeological work to investigating water management and practices at Chaco. These efforts provide compelling evidence of the extensive use of canal irrigation systems and other water management techniques employed by the Ancestral Puebloan people by the ninth century and continuing through recent periods by Navajo farmers.

Rich with archaeological data, ethnographic evidence, maps, and photographs, this volume challenges long-standing assumptions about Chaco Canyon's agricultural potential. By highlighting the adaptability and ingenuity of the canyon's early inhabitants, the book offers a fresh perspective on the role of water management in the development of Chaco Canyon as a sociopolitical center in the northern Southwest.
[more]
cover of Capturing the News: Three Decades of Reporting Crisis and Conflict

Capturing the News

Three Decades of Reporting Crisis and Conflict

Anthony Collings

University of Missouri Press, 2010

Anthony Collings found himself in his share of difficult situations in his thirty-four years as a newsman. Like being captured by AK-47–toting Syrians in Lebanon in 1981 while looking for missiles that threatened a new outbreak of hostilities with Israel, or being “detained” by the KGB in Moscow in 1967 during his first foreign posting for the Associated Press filing stories about Soviet dissidents.

Name a hot spot, and Collings has likely been there. From AP correspondent to Newsweek bureau chief to CNN reporter, he covered the Middle East, Rome, Moscow, London, Paris, and Washington. Now he has gathered stories about his work in a book that is both a journalist’s memoir and a commentary on the current ethical crises in the news media and how to address them.

Brimming with entertaining stories about journalism, especially the chaotic early years at CNN when he and his colleagues established the first major cable news network, Collings’s book reveals the dangers and pressures of covering the news and the difficulties of overcoming obstacles to the truth. He recalls smuggling tapes out of Poland after the Communists had imposed martial law; flying dangerously near Libya’s “Line of Death”; interviewing world figures from Brezhnev to Kaddafi and Arafat; and winning awards for covering Iran-Contra and the Oklahoma City bombing. Collings brings fresh insights to the Oliver North affair and examines how the press was suckered in its coverage of the Jessica Lynch prisoner-of-war story in 2003. He voices his concerns regarding oversimplified reporting of complex issues and poses provocative questions about covering terrorism.

In this book, Collings presents an insider’s appraisal of the American news media’s failings and accomplishments. Easy to read, informative, and thoughtful, Capturing the News will enlighten general readers interested in how journalists cover current affairs, while offering newsmen food for thought about the craft and ethics of journalism.
[more]
cover of Caracoleando Among Worlds: Reconstructing Maya Worldviews in Chiapas

Caracoleando Among Worlds

Reconstructing Maya Worldviews in Chiapas

Silvia Soto

University of Arizona Press, 2024

The contemporary literary movement of Maya writers of Chiapas and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (or EZLN) insurgency are intricately intertwined. Even as each has forged its own path, they are bound by a shared commitment to rescuing, reclaiming, and recentering Maya worldviews.

This shared vision emerges in Caracoleando Among Worlds, which provides an in-depth analysis of poetry, short stories, and one of the first novels written by a Maya Tsotsil writer of Chiapas alongside close readings of the EZLN’s six declarations of the Lacandon Jungle. Themes echoing ancestral connections, informing epistemologies, and sustaining cultural and spiritual practices emerge and weave the texts to each other. The work brings into the conversation literature that has been translated into English for the first time and places Maya writers of Chiapas in discussion with other Native American and Indigenous scholars.

This work shows how literature, culture, and activism intertwine, and offers a compelling narrative that transcends boundaries and fosters a deeper understanding of Maya identities and resilience.
[more]
cover of Caravan Trails of Tamentica: An Archaeoethnography of Geoglyphs in Northern Chile

Caravan Trails of Tamentica

An Archaeoethnography of Geoglyphs in Northern Chile

Persis B. Clarkson

University of Utah Press, 2025

An anthropological and narrative exploration of ancient llama caravans and their associated geoglyphs in the Chilean Atacama Desert

Caravan Trails of Tamentica is a vivid exploration of ancient Andean llama caravans and their associated geoglyphs—ground drawings—in the Chilean Atacama Desert. In retracing the paths of caravans and documenting the evidence that remains of their journeys, Persis B. Clarkson sheds new light on the possible social, astronomical, and ritual roles of these magnificent drawings.

Focusing on one segment of caravan trails from the Tamentica Oasis in the Guatacondo Quebrada to the Cerros Maní to the south, Clarkson intertwines insights on the environmental, cultural, and archaeological landscapes with narratives of her methods and personal experiences of archaeological fieldwork in the Atacama Desert. Modern and historic accounts of and by Andean caravanners lend depth and significance, while dozens of aerial photographs capture the breadth and scope of the thousands of geoglyphs in this fascinating region.
[more]
cover of Carbon Criminals, Climate Crimes

Carbon Criminals, Climate Crimes

Ronald C. Kramer

Rutgers University Press, 2020

2020 Choice​ Outstanding Academic Title

Carbon Criminals, Climate Crimes analyzes the looming threats posed by climate change from a criminological perspective. It advances the field of green criminology through a examination of the criminal nature of catastrophic environmental harms resulting from the release of greenhouse gases. The book describes and explains what corporations in the fossil fuel industry, the U.S. government, and the international political community did, or failed to do, in relation to global warming. Carbon Criminals, Climate Crimes integrates research and theory from a wide variety of disciplines, to analyze four specific state-corporate climate crimes: continued extraction of fossil fuels and rising carbon emissions; political omission (failure) related to the mitigation of these emissions; socially organized climate change denial; and climate crimes of empire, which include militaristic forms of adaptation to climate disruption. The final chapter reviews policies that could mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, adapt to a warming world, and achieve climate justice.
[more]
cover of Carbon Sovereignty: Coal, Development, and Energy Transition in the Navajo Nation

Carbon Sovereignty

Coal, Development, and Energy Transition in the Navajo Nation

Andrew Curley

University of Arizona Press, 2023

For almost fifty years, coal dominated the Navajo economy. But in 2019 one of the Navajo Nation’s largest coal plants closed.

This comprehensive new work offers a deep dive into the complex inner workings of energy shift in the Navajo Nation. Geographer Andrew Curley, a member of the Navajo Nation, examines the history of coal development within the Navajo Nation, including why some Diné supported coal and the consequences of doing so. He explains the Navajo Nation’s strategic choices to use the coal industry to support its sovereignty as a path forward in the face of ongoing colonialism. Carbon Sovereignty demonstrates the mechanism of capitalism through colonialism and the construction of resource sovereignty, in both the Navajo Nation’s embrace and its rejection of a coal economy.

For the people of the Navajo Nation, energy sovereignty is dire and personal. Thanks to on-the-ground interviews with Diné coal workers, environmental activists, and politicians, Curley documents the real consequences of change as they happened. While some Navajo actors have doubled down for coal, others have moved toward transition. Curley argues that political struggles ultimately shape how we should understand coal, capitalism, and climate change. The rise and fall of coal magnify the nuance and complexity of change. Historical and contemporary issues intermingle in everyday life with lasting consequences.
 
[more]
cover of Carceral Afterlives: Prisons, Detention, and Punishment in Postcolonial Uganda

Carceral Afterlives

Prisons, Detention, and Punishment in Postcolonial Uganda

Katherine Bruce-Lockhart

Ohio University Press, 2022

Drawing upon social history, political history, and critical prison studies, this book analyzes how prisons and other instruments of colonial punishment endured after independence and challenges their continued existence. In Carceral Afterlives, Katherine Bruce-Lockhart traces the politics, practices, and lived experiences of incarceration in postcolonial Uganda, focusing on the period between independence in 1962 and the beginning of Yoweri Museveni’s presidency in 1986. During these decades, Ugandans experienced multiple changes of government, widespread state violence, and war, all of which affected the government’s approach to punishment. Bruce-Lockhart analyzes the relationship between the prison system and other sites of confinement—including informal detention spaces known as “safe houses” and wartime camps—and considers other forms of punishment, such as public executions and “disappearance” by state paramilitary organizations. Through archival and personal collections, interviews with Ugandans who lived through these decades, and a range of media sources and memoirs, Bruce-Lockhart examines how carceral systems were imagined and experienced by Ugandans held within, working for, or impacted by them. She shows how Uganda’s postcolonial leaders, especially Milton Obote and Idi Amin, attempted to harness the symbolic, material, and coercive power of prisons in the pursuit of a range of political agendas. She also examines the day-to-day realities of penal spaces and public perceptions of punishment by tracing the experiences of Ugandans who were incarcerated, their family members and friends, prison officers, and other government employees. Furthermore, she shows how the carceral arena was an important site of dissent, examining how those inside and outside of prisons and other spaces of captivity challenged the state’s violent punitive tactics. Using Uganda as a case study, Carceral Afterlives emphasizes how prisons and the wider use of confinement—both as a punishment and as a vehicle for other modes of punishment—remain central to state power in the Global South and North. While scholars have closely analyzed the prison’s expansion through colonial rule and the rise of mass incarceration in the United States, they have largely taken for granted its postcolonial persistence. In contrast, Bruce-Lockhart demonstrates how the prison’s transition from a colonial to a postcolonial institution explains its ubiquity and reveals ways to critique and challenge its ongoing existence. The book thus explores broader questions about the unfinished work of decolonization, the relationship between incarceration and struggles for freedom, and the prison’s enduring yet increasingly contested place in our global institutional landscape.
[more]
cover of Carceral Citizens: Labor and Confinement in Puerto Rico

Carceral Citizens

Labor and Confinement in Puerto Rico

Caroline M. Parker

University of Chicago Press, 2024

A nuanced take on how carceral expansions are changing labor and social life.
 
In Carceral Citizens, anthropologist Caroline M. Parker offers an ethnographic portrait of therapeutic communities in Puerto Rico, the oldest colony in the Americas. As nonprofits nested within the carceral state, therapeutic communities serve as reeducation and recovery centers for the mostly male drug offenders who serve out their sentences engaged in manual labor and prayer. The most surprising aspect of these centers, however, is that their “graduates” often remain long after the completion of their term, working as self-appointed peer counselors in a mixture of volunteer and low-wage positions.
 
Parker seeks to explain this dynamic by showing how, in these therapeutic communities, criminalized men find new and meaningful ways of living in the shadow of the prison. Through their participation in the day-to-day functioning of the centers, they discover and cultivate alternative forms of belonging, livelihood, and citizenship, despite living within the restrictions of the carceral state. Situating her study against the backdrop of Puerto Rico’s colonial history, and with findings that extend across Latin America, Parker challenges common assumptions about confinement, labor, and rehabilitation. By delving into lives shaped by the convergence of imperialism, the carceral state, and self-help, she offers a fresh understanding of the transformations of labor and social life brought about by mass incarceration.
[more]
cover of Carceral Citizens: Labor and Confinement in Puerto Rico

Carceral Citizens

Labor and Confinement in Puerto Rico

Caroline M. Parker

University of Chicago Press, 2024

A nuanced take on how carceral expansions are changing labor and social life.
 
In Carceral Citizens, anthropologist Caroline M. Parker offers an ethnographic portrait of therapeutic communities in Puerto Rico, the oldest colony in the Americas. As nonprofits nested within the carceral state, therapeutic communities serve as reeducation and recovery centers for the mostly male drug offenders who serve out their sentences engaged in manual labor and prayer. The most surprising aspect of these centers, however, is that their “graduates” often remain long after the completion of their term, working as self-appointed peer counselors in a mixture of volunteer and low-wage positions.
 
Parker seeks to explain this dynamic by showing how, in these therapeutic communities, criminalized men find new and meaningful ways of living in the shadow of the prison. Through their participation in the day-to-day functioning of the centers, they discover and cultivate alternative forms of belonging, livelihood, and citizenship, despite living within the restrictions of the carceral state. Situating her study against the backdrop of Puerto Rico’s colonial history, and with findings that extend across Latin America, Parker challenges common assumptions about confinement, labor, and rehabilitation. By delving into lives shaped by the convergence of imperialism, the carceral state, and self-help, she offers a fresh understanding of the transformations of labor and social life brought about by mass incarceration.
[more]
cover of Carceral Entanglements: Gendered Public Memories of Japanese American World War II Incarceration

Carceral Entanglements

Gendered Public Memories of Japanese American World War II Incarceration

Wendi Yamashita

Temple University Press, 2024

Japanese Americans have long contended with settler colonization and mass criminalization by the state, most notably during the WWII era when they were forced into incarceration camps. In Carceral Entanglements, Wendi Yamashita asks, how do narratives of worth and success that make Japanese Americans legible to the state come to be? What are the consequences of such narratives?

Carceral Entanglements features interviews, archival research, and texts to explore racial violence and patriotic masculinity and explain how Japanese American history and identity are publicly memorialized. Yamashita examines museums, digital archives, pilgrimages, and student-run and performed plays to understand how Japanese Americans occupy a “contradictory location” produced by the state. She also addresses historical erasure, race relations and the struggle for redress and reparations.

Carceral Entanglements is about the interlocking relationship Japanese American incarceration memories have to the prison industrial complex and the settler colonial logics that at times unknowingly sustain it.
[more]
cover of Carceral Liberalism: Feminist Voices against State Violence

Carceral Liberalism

Feminist Voices against State Violence

Edited by Shreerekha Pillai. Foreword by Demita Frazier

University of Illinois Press, 2023

One of Ms. Magazine's Most Anticipated Books of 2023

Carceral liberalism emerges from the confluence of neoliberalism, carcerality, and patriarchy to construct a powerful ruse disguised as freedom. It waves the feminist flag while keeping most women still at the margins. It speaks of a post-race society while one in three Black men remain incarcerated. It sings the praises of capital while the dispossessed remain mired in debt.

Shreerekha Pillai edits essays on carceral liberalism that continue the trajectory of the Combahee River Collective and the many people inspired by its vision of feminist solidarity and radical liberation. Academics, activists, writers, and a formerly incarcerated social worker look at feminist resurgence and resistance within, at the threshold of, and outside state violence; observe and record direct and indirect forms of carcerality sponsored by the state and shaped by state structures, traditions, and actors; and critique carcerality. Acclaimed poets like Honorée Fanonne Jeffers and Solmaz Sharif amplify the volume’s themes in works that bookend each section.

Cutting-edge yet historically grounded, Carceral Liberalism examines an American ideological creation that advances imperialism, anti-blackness, capitalism, and patriarchy.

Contributors: Maria F. Curtis, Joanna Eleftheriou, Autumn Elizabeth and Zarinah Agnew and D Coulombe, Jeremy Eugene, Demita Frazier, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Alka Kurian, Cassandra D. Little, Beth Matusoff Merfish, Francisco Argüelles Paz y Puente, Shreerekha Pillai, Marta Romero-Delgado, Ravi Shankar, Solmaz Sharif, Shailza Sharma, Tria Blu Wakpa and Jennifer Musial, Javier Zamora

[more]
cover of Care Activism: Migrant Domestic Workers, Movement-Building, and Communities of Care

Care Activism

Migrant Domestic Workers, Movement-Building, and Communities of Care

Ethel Tungohan

University of Illinois Press, 2023

Care activism challenges the stereotype of downtrodden migrant caregivers by showing that care workers have distinct ways of caring for themselves, for each other, and for the larger transnational community of care workers and their families. Ethel Tungohan illuminates how the goals and desires of migrant care worker activists goes beyond political considerations like policy changes and overturning power structures. Through practices of subversive friendships and being there for each other, care activism acts as an extension of the daily work that caregivers do, oftentimes also instilling practices of resistance and critical hope among care workers. At the same time, the communities created by care activism help migrant caregivers survive and even thrive in the face of arduous working and living conditions and the pains surrounding family separation. As Tungohan shows, care activism also unifies caregivers to resist society’s legal and economic devaluations of care and domestic work by reaffirming a belief that they, and what they do, are important and necessary.
[more]