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Analyses of crime and justice in an unprecedented time

While COVID-19 lockdowns affected nearly everyone worldwide, feelings of anxiety and fear were exacerbated for those already entangled in the criminal justice system. Scholars recognized the unique opportunity to study crime and the justice system’s response during this period, though they soon realized that determining the pandemic’s effects would be a complicated, nuanced process.

Crime, Corrections, and the COVID-19 Pandemic features analyses and findings from more than thirty contributors in eleven essays. The collection examines the multifaceted social, economic, cultural, legislative, and policy responses to COVID-19 and their impacts on crime and justice. It also explores how professionals across the criminal justice system—police officers, campus police officers, attorneys, judges, correctional staff, and community supervision agents—adapted to unprecedented challenges.

The book provides real-world evidence of how unconventional solutions and groundbreaking practices were implemented in response to a global crisis. Contributors analyze how incarcerated individuals, their families, and their supervisors dealt with the fear of transmission, medical care, and death. Their findings, which are necessarily dependent on timing, place, measurement, and operationalization, include both change and stasis, both negative and positive outcomes. For instance, while minor and property-related offenses initially declined, violent crimes like homicide and intimate partner violence increased. Drug usage patterns changed, leading to a rise in opioid overdoses, and despite the rise in digital interactions, there was no significant difference in self-reported cybervictimization. Furthermore, rates of gang-related crimes did not decrease. Policy and public health responses reshaped criminal activities, influencing the methods and motivations behind theft, child and elder abuse, and other offenses. This volume includes in-depth examinations of certain often-overlooked crimes, such as labor trafficking, and provides direct insights into the job challenges faced by criminal justice professionals, from probation personnel to labor rights advocates.

Emerging innovations in health risk management within correctional facilities led to increased awareness and focus on specific types of crime. Responses to the pandemic revealed significant challenges, such as burnout among justice system personnel, difficulties in adapting and innovating, and challenges in providing services to vulnerable populations.

Through diverse perspectives and empirical approaches ranging from advanced statistical analysis to qualitative interviews, Crime, Corrections, and the COVID-19 Pandemic offers a comprehensive exploration of the complexities that affect research results.  It showcases the resilience and innovation within the criminal justice field and details the challenges professionals in this area tackled during a universally trying time, presenting valuable lessons for future crises. 

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.

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.

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2026 Mejor libro Humanidades, Mexico Section of the Latin American Studies Association

2026 Honorable Mention, First Book Prize, Cultural Studies Association

2025 Excellence in Scholarly Research and Publication Award, SECAC (formerly the Southeastern College Art Conference)

How the visual culture of food, cookery, and consumption played a central role in the making of postrevolutionary Mexico.

Postrevolutionary Mexico City was a site of anxious nation-building, as rampant modernization converged and clashed with the nation’s growing nostalgia for its pre-Columbian heritage. During this volatile period, food became a meaningful symbol for a Mexican citizenry seeking new modes of national participation.

Culinary Palettes explores how the artistic invocation of food cultures became an arena in which to negotiate the political entanglements of postrevolutionary Mexico. Lesley Wolff casts a nuanced eye on the work of visual artists such as Tina Modotti, Carlos González, and Rufino Tamayo, who nurtured the symbolic and performative power of iconic foods such as pulque, mole poblano, and watermelon. Through analysis of a wide array of visual evidence, including paintings, architecture, vintage postcards, menus, and cookbooks, Culinary Palettes demonstrates how these artists positioned their work within a broad visual landscape that relied upon the power of Mexican foodways in the urban and national imagination. In the studios of modernists, Wolff argues, artistic production, foodways, and Indigeneity proved to be mutually constitutive—and at times weaponized—agents in articulating competing claims to a new nationhood.

Since World War II, the Green Revolution has boosted agricultural production in Latin America and other parts of the Third World, with money, technical assistance, and other forms of aid from United States development agencies. But the Green Revolution came at a high price—massive pesticide dependence that has caused serious socioeconomic and public health problems and widespread environmental damage.

In this study, Douglas Murray draws on ten years of field research to tell the stories of international development strategies, pesticide problems, and agrarian change in Latin America. Interwoven with his considerations of economic and geopolitical dimensions are the human consequences for individual farmers and rural communities.

This highly interdisciplinary study, integrating the perspectives of sociology, ecology, economics, political science, and public health, adds an important voice to the debate on opportunities for and obstacles to more lasting and sustainable development in the Third World. It will be of interest to a wide audience in the social and environmental sciences.

Development agencies and researchers are preoccupied with policy; with exerting influence over policy, linking research to policy and with implementing policy around the world.

But what if development practice is not driven by policy? Suppose that the things that make for 'good policy' - policy that legitimises and mobilises political support - in reality make it impossible to implement?

By focusing in detail on the unfolding activities of a development project in western India over more than ten years, as it falls under different policy regimes, this book takes a close look at the relationship between policy and practice in development.

David Mosse shows how the actions of development workers are shaped by the exigencies of organisations and the need to maintain relationships rather than by policy; but also that development actors work hardest of all to maintain coherent representations of their actions as instances of authorised policy. Raising unfamiliar questions, Mosse provides a rare self-critical reflection on practice, while refusing to endorse current post-modern dismissal of development.

What urban food networks reveal about middle class livability in times of transformation

In recent years, the concept of “livability” has captured the global imagination, influencing discussions about the implications of climate change on human life and inspiring rankings of “most livable cities” in popular publications. But what really makes for a livable life, and for whom?

Cultivating Livability takes Bengaluru, India, as a case study—a city that is alternately described as India’s most and least livable megacity, where rapid transformation is undergirded by inequalities evident in the food networks connecting peri-urban farmers and the middle-class public. Anthropologist Camille Frazier probes the meaning of “livability” in Bengaluru through ethnographic work among producers and consumers, corporate intermediaries and urban information technology professionals.

Examining the varying efforts to reconfigure processes of food production, distribution, retail, and consumption, she reveals how these intersections are often rooted in and exacerbate ongoing forms of disenfranchisement that privilege some lives at the expense of others.

The late Dwight Conquergood’s research has inspired an entire generation of scholars invested in performance as a meaningful paradigm to understand human interaction, especially between structures of power and the disenfranchised. Conquergood’s research laid the groundwork for others to engage issues of ethics in ethnographic research, performance as a meaningful paradigm for ethnography, and case studies that demonstrated the dissolution of theory/practice binaries.Cultural Struggles is the first gathering of Conquergood’s work in a single volume, tracing the evolution of one scholar’s thinking across a career of scholarship, teaching, and activism, and also the first collection of its kind to bring together theory, method, and complete case studies.

The collection begins with an illuminating introduction by E. Patrick Johnson and ends with commentary by other scholars (Micaela di Leonardo, Judith Hamera, Shannon Jackson, D. Soyini Madison, Lisa Merrill, Della Pollock, and Joseph Roach), engaging aspects of Conquergood’s work and providing insight into how that work has withstood the test of time, as scholars still draw on his research to inform their current interests and methods.

In Cultures of Fear, a truly world-class line up of scholars explore the formation and normalisation of fear in the context of war and terrorism.

"Freedom from fear" is a universal right and fundamental for human well-being. People often look to governments, humanitarian agencies, and other institutions to further this aim. However, this book shows that these organisations often use the same "logic of fear" to monitor, control, and contain human beings in zones of violence.

This is an excellent interdisciplinary reader for students of anthropology, sociology and politics. Contributors include Noam Chomsky, Slavoj Zizek, Jean Baudrillard, Catharine MacKinnon, Neil Smith, Cynthia Enloe, David L. Altheide, Cynthia Cockburn and Carolyn Nordstrum.

Around the globe, people leave their homes to better themselves, to satisfy needs, and to care for their families. They also migrate to escape undesirable conditions, ranging from a lack of economic opportunities to violent conflicts at home or in the community. Most studies of migration have analyzed the topic at either the macro level of national and global economic and political forces, or the micro level of the psychology of individual migrants. Few studies have examined the "culture of migration"—that is, the cultural beliefs and social patterns that influence people to move.

Cultures of Migration combines anthropological and geographical sensibilities, as well as sociological and economic models, to explore the household-level decision-making process that prompts migration. The authors draw their examples not only from their previous studies of Mexican Oaxacans and Turkish Kurds but also from migrants from Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, the Pacific, and many parts of Asia. They examine social, economic, and political factors that can induce a household to decide to send members abroad, along with the cultural beliefs and traditions that can limit migration. The authors look at both transnational and internal migrations, and at shorter- and longer-term stays in the receiving location. They also consider the effect that migration has on those who remain behind. The authors' "culture of migration" model adds an important new dimension to our understanding of the cultural beliefs and social patterns associated with migration and will help specialists better respond to increasing human mobility.

South Africa’s private fertility clinics promise hope: expert care, measurable success rates, and the possibility of long-desired children. While seemingly insulated from the legacies of apartheid and the stark inequalities of the present, these clinics operate within a society still shaped by racial stratification and uneven access to care. But what happens once patients step through the clinic doors? Based on fieldwork conducted over a decade, Curating Conception offers the first book-length study of IVF in sub-Saharan Africa. Tessa Moll turns to the polished, private clinics of Cape Town and Johannesburg to show how racial hierarchies are quietly sustained through everyday decisions—about donor selection, embryo grading, success statistics, and patient eligibility—that shape ideas of legitimate parenthood and belonging in the post-apartheid era. Introducing the concept of curating, Moll shows how medical authority, patient desire, and enduring social orders work together to shape which reproductive futures are seen as natural and desirable. In doing so, Curating Conception demonstrates how racial imaginaries—and the normalization of whiteness as the default family form—are woven into the intimate and technological processes of IVF. Blending vivid storytelling with careful analysis, it invites readers to rethink fertility care not simply as a technology of hope, but as a powerful site where history, inequality, and aspiration converge.

A trailblazing exploration of the political stakes of curiosity

Curiosity is political. Who is curious, when, and how reflects the social values and power structures of a given society. In Curiosity and Power, Perry Zurn explores the political philosophy of curiosity, staking the groundbreaking claim that it is a social force—the heartbeat of political resistance and a critical factor in social justice. He argues that the very scaffolding of curiosity is the product of political architectures, and exploring these values and architectures is crucial if we are to better understand, and more ethically navigate, the struggle over inquiry in an unequal world. 

Curiosity and Power explores curiosity through the lens of political philosophy—weaving in Nietzsche, Foucault, and Derrida in doing so—and the experience of political marginalization, demonstrating that curiosity is implicated equally in the maintenance of societies and in their transformation. Curiosity plays as central a role in establishing social institutions and fields of inquiry as it does in their deconstruction and in building new forms of political community. Understanding curiosity is critical to understanding politics, and understanding politics is critical to understanding curiosity. 

Drawing not only on philosophy and political theory but also on feminist theory, race theory, disability studies, and trans studies, Curiosity and Power tracks curiosity in the structures of political marginalization and resistance—from the Civil Rights Movement to building better social relationships. Curiosity and Power insists that the power of curiosity be recognized and engaged responsibly.