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Malay Muslim women in Singapore cultivate piety by attending popular Islamic self-help classes. Nurhaizatul Jamil’s ethnographic study offers an interdisciplinary analysis of this phenomenon.

The Islamic self-help classes in this book exist at the nexus of sacred texts, aphorisms, and social media engagements, scaffolded by the neoliberal economy that shapes idealized Muslim subjectivities. Within a context whereby the Singapore state discursively frames Malayness in terms of cultural deficiency, Malay Muslim women’s inward focus on transformative ethics rather than societal change underscores the appeal of gendered pious self-help discourses. At the same time, Jamil’s referencing of Black, Indigenous, and Ethnic studies offers a compelling analytical frame that places affective transformation within the context of racial capitalism, historical trauma, and embodied healing.

A provocative and rich ethnography, Faithful Transformations tells the stories of Malay Muslim women desiring piety and self-improvement as minoritized subjects in contemporary Singapore while exploring the limitations of self-care.

Set in the remote, mountainous Guangxi Autonomous Region and based on ethnographic fieldwork, Families We Need traces the movement of three Chinese foster children, Dengrong, Pei Pei, and Meili, from the state orphanage into the humble, foster homes of Auntie Li, Auntie Ma, and Auntie Huang. Traversing the geography of Guangxi, from the modern capital Nanning where Pei Pei and Meili reside, to the small farming village several hours away where Dengrong is placed, this ethnography details the hardships of social abandonment for disabled children and disenfranchised, older women in China, while also analyzing the state’s efforts to cope with such marginal populations and incorporate them into China’s modern future. The book argues that Chinese foster families perform necessary, invisible service to the Chinese state and intercountry adoption, yet the bonds they form also resist such forces, exposing the inequalities, privilege, and ableism at the heart of global family making.

Families for Mobility documents elite Korean transnational families, focusing on how they use elite education abroad as a tool for class reproduction. Drawing on over 100 interviews with both parents and children at elite U.S. colleges, the book explores the desires, aspirations, and expectations that shape these education-driven transnational family arrangements. By triangulating the perspectives of children, mothers, and fathers, Families for Mobility argues that gendered transnational parenting—by both mothers and fathers—plays a crucial role in the intergenerational transmission of mobility and cosmopolitan lifestyles. The analysis shows how class and gender shape both parents’ and children’s approaches to their transnational ‘family projects,’ with fathers and sons appearing more resourceful and ambitious than mothers and daughters, reflecting the gender achievement gap even among the elite. The book challenges stereotypes of Asian high achievers and ‘tiger’ parenting, providing a more nuanced understanding of who thrives in the hierarchical realms of global education and business, as well as the familial support systems behind their success.

Fantasies of Hong Kong Disneyland: Attempted Indigenizations of Space, Labor, and Consumption examines the attempt to transplant Disney's "happiest place on Earth" ethos to Hong Kong—with unhappy results. Focusing on the attempted localization/indigenization of this idea in a globalized transnational park, the book delves into the three-way dynamics of an American culture-corporation's intentions, Hong Kong, China's government investment and Hong Konger audience, and the Hong Kong Chinese locale. The triple actors introduce an especially complex case as two of the world's most powerful entities, the nominally Communist state of China and corporate behemoth Disney, come together for a project in the third space of Hong Kong. The situation poses special challenges for Disney's efforts to manage space, labor, and consumption to achieve local adaptation and business success. 

Finding Mr. Perfect explores the romantic relationships between Korean men and women who were inspired by romantic Korean televisual depictions of Korean masculinity to travel to Korea as tourists. Author Min Joo Lee argues that disparate racialized erotic desires of Korean pop culture fans, foreign tourists to Korea, Korean men, and the Korean nation converge to configure the interracial and transnational relationships between these tourists and Korean men. Lee observes how racial prejudices are developed and manifested through interracial and transnational intimate desires and encounters. This book is the first to examine the interracial relationships between Hallyu tourists and Korean men. Furthermore, it is the first to analyze Korea as a popular romance tourist destination for heterosexual women. Finding Mr. Perfect illuminates South Korean popular culture’s transnational fandom and tourism as a global phenomenon where fantasies and realities converge to have a tangible impact on individual lives.

Women from Chuuk, Federated States of Micronesia, who migrate to Guam, a U.S. territory, suffer disproportionately poor reproductive health outcomes. Though their access to the United States is unusually easy, through a unique migration agreement, it keeps them in a perpetual liminal state as nonimmigrants, who never fully belong as part of the United States Chuukese women move to Guam, sometimes with their families but sometimes alone, in search of a better life: for jobs, for the education system, or to access safe health care. Yet, the imperial system they encounter creates underlying conditions that greatly and disproportionately impact their ability to succeed and thrive, negatively impacting their reproductive health. Through clinical and community ethnography, Sarah A. Smith illuminates the way this system stratifies women’s reproduction at structural, social, and individual levels. Readers can visualize how U.S. imperialist policies of benign neglect control the body politic, change the social body, and render individual bodies vulnerable in the twenty-first century but also how people resist.