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A revelatory examination of 150 years of sexuality-based discrimination against immigrants to the United States.

Lesbians, prostitutes, women likely to have sex across racial lines, "brought to the United States for immoral purposes," or "arriving in a state of pregnancy"—national threats, one and all. Since the late nineteenth century, immigrant women’s sexuality has been viewed as a threat to national security, to be contained through strict border-monitoring practices. By scrutinizing this policy, its origins, and its application, Eithne Luibhéid shows how the U.S. border became a site not just for controlling female sexuality but also for contesting, constructing, and renegotiating sexual identity.

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

Envisioning Socialism examines television and the power it exercised to define the East Germans’ view of socialism during the first decades of the German Democratic Republic. In the first book in English to examine this topic, Heather L. Gumbert traces how television became a medium prized for its communicative and entertainment value. She explores the difficulties GDR authorities had defining and executing a clear vision of the society they hoped to establish, and she explains how television helped to stabilize GDR society in a way that ultimately worked against the utopian vision the authorities thought they were cultivating.

Gumbert challenges those who would dismiss East German television as a tool of repression that couldn’t compete with the West or capture the imagination of East Germans. Instead, she shows how, by the early 1960s, television was a model of the kind of socialist realist art that could appeal to authorities and audiences. Ultimately, this socialist vision was overcome by the challenges that the international market in media products and technologies posed to nation-building in the postwar period.

A history of ideas and perceptions examining both real and mediated historical conditions, Envisioning Socialism considers television as a technology, an institution, and a medium of social relations and cultural knowledge. The book will be welcomed in undergraduate and graduate courses in German and media history, the history of postwar Socialism, and the history of science and technologies.

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.

Explores questions of identity and belonging through the lens of Canadian cultural production

What does it mean to be at home? In a critical engagement with notions of territory, identity, racial difference, separatism, multiculturalism, and homelessness, this book delves into the question of what it means to belong—in particular, what it means to be at home in Canada. Ephemeral Territories weaves together many narratives and representations of Canadian identity—from political philosophy and cultural theory to art and films such as Srinivas Krishna’s Lulu, Clement Virgo’s Rude, and Charles Biname’s Eldorado—to develop and complicate familiar views of identity and selfhood.

Shares novel insights into American colleges and universities that deliberately support the success of their first-generation, low-income students.

In American higher education, universities that prioritize inclusivity and equity over exclusivity and prestige are penalized rather than rewarded, both in terms of status and resources. Consequently, very few colleges and universities both enroll large shares of low-income students and graduate them at high rates. This is terrible news, both for the first-generation, low-income students with big aspirations and for a democratic society that relies on an educated citizenry and a representative government to function.

In Equity Engines, Becca Spindel Bassett shines a light on a small group of colleges that are quietly achieving the improbable. These “equity engines” open their doors widely to low-income students and graduate them at remarkably high rates. Immersing herself in two distinct institutions, a small private liberal arts university and a large regional public university, Bassett offers a window into the unseen mindsets and policies that drive universities toward equitable outcomes. By culturally and structurally centering first-generation, low-income students and challenging the superiority of exclusive, research-oriented cultures, the faculty, staff, and administrators of both institutions achieve extraordinary results. 

Combining ethnography with sociological analysis, Equity Engines presents a detailed and nuanced depiction of the people and practices that power equity engines, the pressures that challenge their operation, and how we can transform American higher education to promote a more democratic and equitable society.

The failure of attempts to tackle global poverty have bred cynicism and 'compassion fatigue'. Eradicating Extreme Poverty provides an urgently needed fresh approach which will re-energise action on this issue.

Rejecting traditional 'top-down' approaches, Xavier Godinot and his colleagues start from the experiences, capabilities and strategies of the poor themselves. They argue that the first step is a close connection with poor communities followed by a commitment to take action alongside them. Life-stories from Burkina Faso, France, Peru and the Philippines are used to show that the poor must be involved in their own liberation.

After decades of failed development policies, this book outlines a radical new approach which will enliven debate amongst policy-makers, researchers, students and academics.

Linking the writings of the great humanist psychologist Erich Fromm to criminology, this collection shows how viewing crime patterns and the criminal justice system from Fromm's humanist perspective opens a path to more effective and more humane ways of understanding and dealing with crime and criminals.

Contributors to Erich Fromm and Critical Criminology draw on Fromm's writings on alienation, sadomasochism, and patriarchal/matriarchal values to assess the kinds of crimes being committed and the kinds of people committing them. They explore the spiritual and intellectual sources of Fromm's thought--including Jewish theology, Freudian psychoanalysis, Marxism, and Buddhism--and demonstrate how his socialist humanism points toward a society free of crime and violence. This volume also includes translations of two of Fromm's early articles on criminal justice, never before available in English, in which he develops a psychoanalytic Marxist critique of the role of criminal justice in a class society.

At a time when American society seems bent, to an unprecedented degree, on imprisonment, executions, and other violent responses to the problem of crime, Fromm's humanist critique offers a unique vantage point from which to renew and develop a critical criminology.

Heightened awareness of the problem of sexual abuse has led to deep anxiety over adults touching children—in nearly any context. Though our society has moved toward increasingly strict enforcement of this taboo, studies have shown that young children need regular human contact, and the benefits of breastfeeding have been widely extolled. Exploring the complicated history of love, desire, gender, sexuality, parenthood, and inequality, Erotic Attunement probes the disquieting issue of how we can draw a clear line between natural affection toward children and perverse exploitation of them.

Cristina L. H. Traina demonstrates that we cannot determine what is wrong about sexual abuse without first understanding what is good about appropriate sensual affection. Pondering topics such as the importance of touch in nurturing children, the psychology of abuse and victimhood, and recent ideologies of motherhood, she argues that we must expand our philosophical and theological language of physical love and make a distinction between sexual love and erotic love. Taking on theological and ethical arguments over the question of sexuality between unequals, she arrives at the provocative conclusion that it can be destructive to completely bar eroticism from these relationships.