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Considers the cultural and philosophical assumptions underlying virtual reality, and how the technology affects the real world.

Virtual reality is in the news and in the movies, on TV and in the air. Why is the technology-or the idea—so prevalent precisely now? What does it mean—what does it do—to us? Digital Sensations looks closely at how the “lived” world is affected by representational forms generated by communication technologies, especially digital and optical virtual technologies.

"Today there is massive interest in how digital tools and popular culture are transforming learning out of school and lots of dismay at how digitally lost our schools are. Jabari Mahiri works his usual magic and here shows us how to cross this divide in a solidly grounded and beautifully written book."
---James Paul Gee, Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies, Arizona State University

"Digital Tools in Urban Schools is a profoundly sobering yet inspiring depiction of the potential for committed educators to change the lives of urban youth, with the assistance of a new set of technical capabilities."
---Mimi Ito, Professor in Residence and MacArthur Foundation Chair in Digital Media and Learning, Departments of Informatics and Anthropology, University of California, Irvine

"An uplifting book that addresses a critical gap in existing literature by providing rich and important insights into ways teachers, administrators, and members of the wider community can work together with students previously alienated---even excluded---from formal education to enhance classroom learning with appropriate digital tools and achieve inspiring results under challenging circumstances."
---Colin Lankshear, James Cook University, and Michele Knobel, Montclair State University

Digital Tools in Urban Schools demonstrates significant ways in which high school teachers in the complex educational setting of an urban public high school in northern California extended their own professional learning to revitalize learning in their classrooms. Through a novel research collaboration between a university and this public school, these teachers were supported and guided in developing the skills necessary to take greater advantage of new media and new information sources to increase student learning while making connections to their relevant experiences and interests. Jabari Mahiri draws on extensive qualitative data---including blogs, podcasts, and other digital media---to document, describe, and analyze how the learning of both students and teachers was dramatically transformed as they utilized digital media in their classrooms. Digital Tools in Urban Schools will interest instructional leaders and participants in teacher preparation and professional development programs, education and social science researchers and scholars, graduate and undergraduate programs and classes emphasizing literacy and learning, and those focused on urban education issues and conditions.

Tracing the rise of digital computing in policing and punishment and its harmful impact on criminalized communities of color

 

The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that law enforcement agencies have access to more than 100 million names stored in criminal history databases. In some cities, 80 percent of the black male population is registered in these databases. Digitize and Punish explores the long history of digital computing and criminal justice, revealing how big tech, computer scientists, university researchers, and state actors have digitized carceral governance over the past forty years—with devastating impact on poor communities of color.

Providing a comprehensive study of the use of digital technology in American criminal justice, Brian Jefferson shows how the technology has expanded the wars on crime and drugs, enabling our current state of mass incarceration and further entrenching the nation’s racialized policing and punishment. After examining how the criminal justice system conceptualized the benefits of computers to surveil criminalized populations, Jefferson focuses on New York City and Chicago to provide a grounded account of the deployment of digital computing in urban police departments.

By highlighting the intersection of policing and punishment with big data and web technology—resulting in the development of the criminal justice system’s latest tool, crime data centers—Digitize and Punish makes clear the extent to which digital technologies have transformed and intensified the nature of carceral power.

As part of its effort to forge a new secular Jewish nation, the nascent Israeli state tried to limit Jewish religiosity. However, with the steady growth of the ultraorthodox community and the expansion of the settler community, Israeli society is becoming increasingly religious. Although the arrival of religious discourse in Israeli politics has long been noticed, its cultural development has rarely been addressed. Directed by God explores how the country’s popular media, principally film and television, reflect this transformation. In doing so, it examines the changing nature of Zionism and the place of Judaism within it.

Once the purview of secular culture, Israel’s media initially promoted alternatives to traditional religious expression; however, using films such as Kadosh, Waltz with Bashir, and Eyes Wide Open, Yaron Peleg shows how Israel’s contemporary film and television programs have been shaped by new religious trends and how secular Israeli culture has processed and reflected on its religious heritage. He investigates how shifting cinematic visions of Jewish masculinity and gender track transformations in the nation’s religious discourse. Moving beyond the secular/religious divide, Directed by God explores changing film and television representations of different Jewish religious groups, assessing what these representations may mean for the future of Israeli society.

Disability in Africa has received significant attention as a dimension of global development and humanitarian initiatives. Little international attention is given, however, to the ways in which disability is discussed and addressed in specific countries in Africa. Little is known also about the ways in which persons with disabilities have advocated for themselves over the past one hundred years and how their needs were or were not met in locations across the continent. Kenya has been on the forefront of disability activism and disability rights since the middle of the twentieth century. The country was among the first African states to create a legal framework addressing the rights of persons with disabilities, namely the Persons with Disabilities Act of 2003. Kenya, however, has a much longer history of institutions and organizations that are dedicated to addressing the specific needs of persons with disabilities, and substantial developments have occurred since the introduction of the legal framework in 2003.

In Disaster Citizenship, Jacob A. C. Remes draws on histories of the Salem and Halifax events to explore the institutions--both formal and informal--that ordinary people relied upon in times of crisis. He explores patterns and traditions of self-help, informal order, and solidarity and details how people adapted these traditions when necessary. Yet, as he shows, these methods--though often quick and effective--remained illegible to reformers. Indeed, soldiers, social workers, and reformers wielding extraordinary emergency powers challenged these grassroots practices to impose progressive "solutions" on what they wrongly imagined to be a fractured social landscape.

Diseases Have No Eyes investigates how communities in Central Valley, California deal with Valley Fever, a painful illness caused by a soil fungus. The airborne disease’s symptoms can last from two months to a patient’s lifetime and may be fatal. Nearly a third of the national cases are reported in California, where those infected are disproportionately farmworkers and people incarcerated in the region. Poverty, pollution, and prison expose these groups to cumulative environmental and health risks that deny Valley Fever patients adequate medical treatment.

Sarah M. Rios examines how these populations face racial health disparities and develop strategies of care. She connects environmental justice activists as well as prison advocates and abolitionists who mobilize protests and issue calls to action to the past and ongoing efforts for medical autonomy and healthy communities. Diseases Have No Eyes emphasizes that vulnerable groups have developed an expertise and understanding of Valley Fever out of necessity. In the process, these community members offer an alternative public health response that extends beyond the individual body.

In the series Insubordinate Spaces

A compelling inquiry into the rhetorical and aesthetic techniques that subvert contemporary regimes of digital surveillance, embodiment, and control.

The contemporary world bristles with tools of observation and manipulation. Security cameras, social media, data mining, biometric scans, and other instruments ensnare the individual in a web of surveillance. In Disobedient Aesthetics, Anthony Stagliano exposes the use of human lives as sites of data exploitation and outlines paths of resistance. From the thermal-vision systems used on military drones, which use human body heat itself as a media object, to facial recognition platforms that use human faces as data mines, and from law enforcement tools of DNA analysis to data-driven urban governance, the realm of algorithmic surveillance and control is wide and subtle.

Disobedient Aesthetics outlines interventions into the technical systems subtending data-driven surveillance and control. Stagliano maps not only the surveillant regimes afforded by recent networked technologies, but also the inventive, artistic research into ways of undermining, upending, or redirecting such technologies. The concluding chapter examines creative, critical, and collective efforts to democratize access to the technology that undergirds such scrutiny and enables ways to detect and contest its power.

In a fascinating epilogue, Stagliano revisits current theories of control and offers an alternative reading of Gilles Deleuze’s oft-cited thesis on control societies: namely that it is not a matter of “finding new weapons” to undermine control but developing new techniques, new designs, new prototypes, and new modes of creative escape.
 

Hurricane Katrina forced the largest and most abrupt displacement in U.S. history. About 1.5 million people evacuated from the Gulf Coast preceding Katrina’s landfall. New Orleans, a city of 500,000, was nearly emptied of life after the hurricane and flooding. Katrina survivors eventually scattered across all fifty states, and tens of thousands still remain displaced. Some are desperate to return to the Gulf Coast but cannot find the means. Others have chosen to make their homes elsewhere. Still others found a way to return home but were unable to stay due to the limited availability of social services, educational opportunities, health care options, and affordable housing.

The contributors to Displaced have been following the lives of Katrina evacuees since 2005. In this illuminating book, they offer the first comprehensive analysis of the experiences of the displaced. Drawing on research in thirteen communities in seven states across the country, the contributors describe the struggles that evacuees have faced in securing life-sustaining resources and rebuilding their lives. They also recount the impact that the displaced have had on communities that initially welcomed them and then later experienced “Katrina fatigue” as the ongoing needs of evacuees strained local resources. Displaced reveals that Katrina took a particularly heavy toll on households headed by low-income African American women who lost the support provided by local networks of family and friends. It also shows the resilience and resourcefulness of Katrina evacuees who have built new networks and partnered with community organizations and religious institutions to create new lives in the diaspora.

How the memory of military dictatorship shapes Brazil's political divides and the far-right's rise.

Brazil’s military dictatorship ended in 1985, but its history still looms large over the country. Since the restoration of democracy, national politics have been shaped by heated contestation over the dictatorship’s legacy. Cristina Buarque de Hollanda and José Szwako examine how the state, the military, and civil society have variously mourned, celebrated, and suppressed memories of Brazil’s violent past—and to what ends.

As the dictatorship faltered under pressure from the opposition in the streets and in Congress, popular opinion favored democracy, which often meant forgetting. Today, the Brazilian left contends that the past has been silenced, paving the way for Jair Bolsonaro and the far right. Yet the past has been intensely contested: media outlets, social movements, and official commissions have long documented the dictatorship and spurred reparations. Disputed Pasts argues that the conservative ascendency is a reaction to these efforts of remembrance. The right seeks to rehabilitate the violent past by discrediting victims and elevating the dictatorship’s anti-communist ideology. Far from forgetting the past, Bolsonaro and Bolsonarismo actively remember and celebrate it.

The school-to-prison pipeline impacts communities across the country; often, this system and families impacted by it remain invisible. But librarians, educators, and others who work with youth know first-hand that libraries and reading can be life-altering for youth impacted by incarceration. Written by public librarians who have supported youth before, during, and after incarceration, this book draws from their own experiences while showcasing insights from other library workers, researchers, educators, people who work in the juvenile justice fields, and mental health professionals. Designed to empower libraries and their staff to provide children and teens with information, visibility, knowledge and skills, recreation, and role models, it shares practical strategies for helping youth avoid the school-to-prison pipeline or contend with it. Readers will discover

• a concise explanation of the school-to-prison pipeline, including statistics on how and why it disproportionately impacts LGBTQ+, BIPOC, and disabled youth;
• concrete, proven strategies for disrupting youth incarceration pathways by giving young people the tools and support they need to avoid incarceration;
• steps for bolstering youth engagement during out of school time;
• guidance on how to align disciplinary approaches with trauma-informed practices when dealing with rowdy youth and other disruptive behavior;
• an overview of what libraries are doing to provide programs and services inside a youth facility, including literacy support, high school equivalency/GED programs, and televisiting;
• strategies for combatting the isolation of children of incarcerated parents by creating inclusive and welcoming library environments;
• information about the complex and difficult process of reentry for incarcerated youth, with adaptable ideas and lessons from the work being done in libraries for reentering adults; and
• an inspiring vision, extrapolating from work in adjacent fields, of what libraries can do to overcome barriers to bringing more youth into the library.

Applying insights from philosophy and cognitive science to address the urgent issue of smartphone-induced distracted driving
 

Although the dangers of texting while driving are widely known, many people resist the idea that phone usage will impair their driving. And connectivity features in new cars have only made using technology behind the wheel more tempting. What will it take to change people’s minds and behavior? Robert Rosenberger contends that a better understanding of why this combination of technologies is so dangerous could effectively adjust both habits and laws.

Rosenberger brings together ideas from philosophy and cognitive science to leverage a postphenomenological perspective that reveals how our smartphones make us such bad drivers. Reviewing decades of empirical studies in cognitive science, he shows that we have developed habits of perception regarding our compulsive technology use—habits that may wrest our attention away from the road. 

Distracted develops innovative concepts for understanding technology-related habits and the ways that our relationships to our devices influence how we perceive the world. In turn, these ideas can help drivers be more cognizant of the effect that smartphone usage has on their perceptions, better inform efforts to enact stricter regulations, and help us all to be more reflective about the technologies that shape our lives.

Hyper-criminalization and the normalization of violence was an integral aspect of Robert Weide’s formative years growing up in Los Angeles in the 1980s and 1990s, where Sureño, Crip, and Blood gangs maintained a precarious coexistence, often punctuated by racialized gang violence. His insider status informs Divide & Conquer, which considers how the capitalist economy, the race concept, and nationalist ideology have made gang members the instruments of their own oppression, resulting in racialized sectarian conflicts spanning generations between African American and Latino gangs in Los Angeles and California’s prisons. 

While gang members may fail to appreciate the deeper historical and conceptual foundations of these conflicts, they rarely credit naked bigotry as the root cause. As Weide asserts, they divide themselves according to inherited groupist identities, thereby turning them against one another in protracted blood feuds across gang lines and racial lines. 

Weide explores both the historical foundations and the conceptual and cultural boundaries and biases that divide gang members across racial lines, detailing case studies of specific racialized gang conflicts between Sureño, Crip, and Blood gangs. Weide employs mixed-methods research, having spent nearly a decade on ethnographic fieldwork and conducted over one hundred formal interviews with gang members and gang enforcement officers concerning taboo subjects like prison and gang politics, and transracial gang membership. 

Divide & Conquer concludes with encouraging developments in recent years, as gang members themselves, on their own volition, have intervened to build solidarity and bring racialized gang conflicts between them to an end.

An ethnographic study of how Iranian documentary filmmakers navigate censorship and creativity to shape civic discourse.

Iranian filmmakers have overcome significant obstacles to create a distinctive, globally renowned cinema. Filmmaker and educator Persheng Vaziri explores how documentarians, in particular, have developed a dynamic and creative environment by negotiating limited resources and official constraints. Through their films, they share hard truths—and artful narratives—with fellow Iranians and viewers the world over.

Documenting Iran introduces key historical foundations of documentary filmmaking amid generations of political change—first under the shah and later the Islamic government—with a focus on contemporary filmmakers between 2000 and 2022. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic encounters, Vaziri describes the creative practices and pragmatic choices that provide documentarians relative independence from state censorship and other restrictions on artistic production. Relying on poetic aesthetics, observational filmmaking, international connections, and the accumulated knowledge of a tight-knit local community, filmmakers engage with controversial topics like women’s rights, marriage and divorce laws, environmental degradation, and encounters with Western culture. Documentarians have thus created an activist cinema both subtle and persuasive enough to challenge dogmatic rule and uphold progressive elements of Iranian society.

The issue of immigration is one of the most hotly debated topics in the national arena, with everyone from right-wing pundits like Sarah Palin to alternative rockers like Zack de la Rocha offering their opinion. The traditional immigrant narrative that gained popularity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries continues to be used today in describing the process of the “Americanization” of immigrants. Yet rather than acting as an accurate representation of immigrant experiences, this common narrative of the “American Dream” attempts to ideologically contain those experiences within a story line that promotes the idea of achieving success through hard work and perseverance.

In Domestic Disturbances, Irene Mata dispels the myth of the “shining city on the hill” and reveals the central truth of hidden exploitation that underlies the great majority of Chicana/Latina immigrant stories. Influenced by the works of Latina cultural producers and the growing interdisciplinary field of scholarship on gender, immigration, and labor, Domestic Disturbances suggests a new framework for looking at these immigrant and migrant stories, not as a continuation of a literary tradition, but instead as a specific Latina genealogy of immigrant narratives that more closely engage with the contemporary conditions of immigration. Through examination of multiple genres including film, theatre, and art, as well as current civil rights movements such as the mobilization around the DREAM Act, Mata illustrates the prevalence of the immigrant narrative in popular culture and the oppositional possibilities of alternative stories.