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Encounters with Korean Folk Religion is an account of forty-five years of engagement with the cult of goddesses on Eight Peaks Mountain in Korea’s western Kangwŏn Province, the shaman who tended to the goddesses there from 1977 to 2015, and the folk religion of the surrounding village of Eight Peaks. Since the 1980s, South Korea has urbanized and the village of Eight Peaks has been transformed from a remote agricultural village into a rafting and ski resort. While communal worship ceremonies have been dying out in most of Korea, they have only grown on Eight Peaks Mountain, which has been a site of worship since at least the 15th century. What was a small-scale local ceremony in 1977 has grown into a large-scale regional celebration attracting shamans and tourists from far and wide. The manuscript delves in a historically and anthropologically innovative way into the social, religious, and historical reasons for this efflorescence.

Why hasn’t polygamous marriage died out in African cities, as experts once expected it would? Enduring Polygamy considers this question in one of Africa’s fastest-growing cities: Bamako, the capital of Mali, where one in four wives is in a polygamous marriage. Using polygamy as a lens through which to survey sweeping changes in urban life, it offers ethnographic and demographic insights into the customs, gender norms and hierarchies, kinship structures, and laws affecting marriage, and situates polygamy within structures of inequality that shape marital options, especially for young Malian women. Through an approach of cultural relativism, the book offers an open-minded but unflinching perspective on a contested form of marriage. Without shying away from questions of patriarchy and women’s oppression, it presents polygamy from the everyday vantage points of Bamako residents themselves, allowing readers to make informed judgments about it and to appreciate the full spectrum of human cultural diversity.

Passionate and enlightening, Energy Never Dies uses the power of storytelling to show how optimism and courage fuel the dreams of Black Chicago.

We celebrate cruise ships as gateways to new cultures. However, over the past half a century, the mass-market cruise industry has increasingly relied on global supply chains, exploited maritime labor, and corporate control over the consumer experience to turn cultural contact into profit.

Shayan S. Lallani uncovers the historical scaffolding behind the cruise industry’s strategic co-opting of global cultures. Tracing the evolution of the modern mega-ship from its roots in postwar ocean liners to the floating cities of the twenty-first century, Lallani demonstrates how cruise lines paired commodified cultural referents with immersive spatial design and international labor to maximize guest spending. This corporate grip extended to Caribbean destinations, where companies steadily gained control of port enclaves and vetted shore excursions to manage contact with local communities while retaining the profits.

A sobering look at a vacation mainstay, <i>Engineered Paradise</i> explores where leisure becomes entangled with culture, capitalism, and power.

2026 Association for Theatre in Higher Education Edited Works Award Winner

Enveloping Worlds is a collection of essays that analyzes the phenomenon of immersive, participatory performance as it has developed in the US. As this collection demonstrates, immersive performance offers three-dimensional multisensory experiences, inviting audience members to be participants in the unfolding of the story, and challenging pre-existing ideas about the function of performance and entertainment. Enveloping Worlds questions audience agency and choice, the space and boundaries of performance, modes of immersion, empathy and engagement, and ethical considerations through fifteen essays. 

Case studies in the volume include the Choctaw Cultural Center in Oklahoma and Choctaw sovereignty; a Black artist’s autoethnographic performance challenging White audiences’ entitlement to full inclusion; Immersive Van Gogh experiences and their scenographers; telephone performance during the COVID-19 lockdowns; Diane Paulus’s The Donkey Show; the Battle of Atlanta panorama; an antebellum-themed department store display from the 1920s; escape rooms; Disney Parks; remotely staged plays about aging and dementia; tiki bars; anachronistic costuming at Renaissance Festivals; the technologies that shape the boundaries of immersive worlds; and tabletop role-playing games. Taken together, these essays contribute a rich discussion of immersive performance across radically different contexts, offering analytical models and terminology with which to clarify and advance this emergent discourse.

The Mid-Atlantic region is often overlooked in environmental justice scholarship, but as Kimberly Fields argues, it provides insights into broadly applicable patterns of state policymaking. Focusing on Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia, Fields examines how state governments respond to claims of environmental racism—deliberate decisions about whose neighborhoods should host environmental burdens—and to sustained pressure from community activists.

Environmental Inequality examines how these states develop their environmental justice policies and approaches as a way to understand why they vary in form and focus despite similar issues and demands. Fields reviews the institutional and structural factors that shape environmental justice policymaking. She pays particular attention to how the relevant policy-formulating bodies are organized and how they engage—or fail to engage—with affected communities. She considers race-conscious and race-dismissive models, as well as open versus closed approaches to deliberations with engaged local activists. By analyzing these processes, Fields uncovers profound implications of policymaking and institutional design choices, showing how differing arrangements produce variation in states’ policy focus and enactment.

Drawing on extensive original research, Environmental Inequality offers a nuanced and detailed explanation for the variation in state-level environmental justice efforts

Less celebrated than the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, the 1933–1934 Century of Progress Exposition brought visitors face-to-face with gleaming American consumerism in the midst of the Great Depression. Lindsay Fullerton draws on a wealth of personal photographs, scrapbooks, oral histories, and writings to illuminate the wildly different experiences of fairgoers against the backdrop of a city steeped in poverty and segregation.

The Exposition took place amidst massive changes sparked by expansion of mass media, Franklin Roosevelt’s election, the repeal of Prohibition, and the Great Migration. A diverse cross-section of Chicagoans informs Fullerton’s history of the event in the context of the fast-changing America of the interwar era. These personal accounts tell stories of how attendees interpreted their own experiences while being surrounded by whiz-bang products and full-throated evangelism on the benefits of progress.

A colorful people’s history, Ephemeral City takes readers inside the other Chicago World’s Fair and how visitors interacted with a pivotal moment in American history.

Ethical Encounters is an exploration of the intersection of feminism, human rights, and memory to illuminate how visual practices of recollecting violent legacies in Bangladeshi cinema can conjure a global cinematic imagination for the advancement of humanity. 

By examining contemporary, women-centered Muktijuddho cinema—features and documentaries that focus on the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971—Elora Chowdhury shows how these films imagine, disrupt, and reinscribe a gendered nationalist landscape of trauma, freedom, and agency. Chowdhury analyzes Bangladeshi feminist films including Meherjaan, and Itihaash Konna (Daughters of History), as well as socially-engaged films by activist-filmmakers including Jonmo Shathi (Born Together), and Shadhinota (A Certain Liberation), to show how war films of Bangladesh can generate possibilities for gender justice. 

Chowdhury argues that justice-driven films are critical to understanding and negotiating the layered meanings and consequences of catastrophic human suffering yet at the same time they hint at subjectivities and identities that are not reducible to the politics of suffering. Rather, they are key to creating an alternative and disruptive archive of feminist knowledge—a sensitive witnessing, responsible spectatorship, and just responsibility across time, and space. 

Drawing on Black and transnational feminist critiques, Chowdhury explores questions around women’s place, social roles, and modes of participation in war as well as the visual language through which they become legible as victims/subjects of violence and agents of the nation. Ethical Encounters illuminates the possibilities of film as a site to articulate an ethics that acknowledges a founding violence of the birth of a nation, recuperates it even if in fragments, and imagines differently the irreconcilable relationship between humanity, liberty, and justice.

A groundbreaking historical narrative of corruption and economic success in Mexico.

Ethnic Entrepreneurs, Crony Capitalism, and the Making of the Franco-Mexican Elite provides a new way to understand the scope and impact of crony capitalism on institutional development in Mexico. Beginning with the Porfiriato, the period between 1876 and 1911 named for the rule of President Porfirio Díaz, José Galindo identifies how certain behavioral patterns of the Mexican political and economic elite have repeated over the years, and analyzes aspects of the political economy that have persisted, shaping and at times curtailing Mexico’s economic development.

Strong links between entrepreneurs and politicians have allowed elite businessmen to receive privileged support, such as cheap credit, tax breaks, and tariff protection, from different governments and to run their companies as monopolies. In turn, successive governments have obtained support from businesses to implement public policies, and, on occasion, public officials have received monetary restitution. Galindo notes that Mexico’s early twentieth-century institutional framework was weak and unequal to the task of reining in these systematic abuses. The cost to society was high and resulted in a lack of fair market competition, unequal income distribution, and stunted social mobility.

The most important investors in the banking, commerce, and manufacturing sectors at the beginning of the twentieth century in Mexico were of French origin, and Galindo explains the formation of the Franco-Mexican elite. This Franco-Mexican narrative unfolds largely through the story of one of the richest families in Mexico, the Jeans, and their cotton textile empire. This family has maintained power and wealth through the current day as Emilio Azcárraga Jean, a great-grandson of one of the members of the first generation of the Jean family to arrive in Mexico, owns Televisa, a major mass media company with one of the largest audiences for Spanish-language content in the world.
 

Hispanic or Latino? Mexican American or Chicano? Social labels often take on a life of their own beyond the control of those who coin them or to whom they are applied. In Ethnic Labels, Latino Lives, Suzanne Oboler explores the history and current use of the label “Hispanic” as she illustrates the complex meanings that ethnicity has acquired in shaping our lives and identities.