Results by title

Reassessing interpretations of development with a new approach to fair trade

Is fair trade really fair? Who is it for, and who gets to decide? Fair Trade Rebels addresses such questions in a new way by shifting the focus from the abstract concept of fair trade—and whether it is “working”—to the perspectives of small farmers. It examines the everyday experiences of resistance and agricultural practice among the campesinos/as of Chiapas, Mexico, who struggle for dignified livelihoods in self-declared autonomous communities in the highlands, confronting inequalities locally in what is really a global corporate agricultural chain.

Based on extensive fieldwork, Fair Trade Rebels draws on stories from Chiapas that have emerged from the farmers’ interaction with both the fair-trade–certified marketplace and state violence. Here Lindsay Naylor discusses the racialized and historical backdrop of coffee production and rebel autonomy in the highlands, underscores the divergence of movements for fairer trade and the so-called alternative certified market, traces the network of such movements from the highlands and into the United States, and evaluates existing food sovereignty and diverse economic exchanges. 

Putting decolonial thinking in conversation with diverse economies theory, Fair Trade Rebels evaluates fair trade not by the measure of its success or failure but through a unique, place-based approach that expands our understanding of the relationship between fair trade, autonomy, and economic development.

CHOSEN AS ONE OF THE WALL STREET JOURNAL’S 10 BEST BOOKS OF 2025

A definitive history of the United States’ recovery from the Great Depression—and the New Deal's true part in it.

FDR’s New Deal has long enjoyed a special place in American history and policy—both because it redefined the government’s fundamental responsibilities and because Roosevelt’s “bold experimentation” represented a type of policymaking many would like to see repeated.

But “the thing about bold experiments,” economist George Selgin reminds us, “is that they often fail.” In False Dawn Selgin draws on both contemporary sources and numerous studies by economic historians to show that, although steps taken during the Roosevelt administration’s first days raised hopes of a speedy recovery from the Great Depression, instead of fulfilling those hopes, subsequent New Deal policies proved so counterproductive that over seventeen percent of American workers—more than the peak unemployment rate during the COVID-19 crisis—were still either unemployed or on work relief six years later.

By distinguishing the New Deal’s successes from its failures, and explaining how the U.S. finally managed to lay the specter of mass unemployment to rest, Selgin draws salient lessons for dealing with future recessions.

How people eat today is a record of food use through the ages—and not just the decadent, delicious foods but the less glamorous and often life-saving foods from periods of famine as well. In Famine Foods, Paul E. Minnis focuses on the myriad plants that have sustained human populations throughout the course of history, unveiling the those that people have consumed, and often still consume, to avoid starvation. For the first time, this book offers a fascinating overview of famine foods—how they are used, who uses them, and, perhaps most importantly, why they may be critical to sustain human life in the future.

In addition to a broader discussion of famine foods, Minnis includes fourteen short case studies that examine the use of alternative foods in human societies throughout the world, from hunter-gatherers to major nations. When environmental catastrophes, war, corrupt governments, annual hunger seasons, and radical agricultural policies have threatened to starve populations, cultural knowledge and memories of food shortages have been crucial to the survival of millions of people.Famine Foods dives deeply into the cultural contexts of famine food use, showing the curious, strange, and often unpleasant foods people have turned to in order to get by. There is not a single society or area of the world that is immune to severe food shortages, and gaining a deeper knowledge of famine foods will be relevant for the foreseeable future of humanity.

A visual feast of the Midwest's homegrown bounty

In this splendidly illustrated book, food writer and self-described farm groupie Janine MacLachlan embarks on a tour of seasonal markets and farmstands throughout the Midwest, sampling local flavors from Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. She conducts delicious research as she meets farmers, tastes their food, and explores how their businesses thrive in the face of an industrial food supply. She tells the stories of a pair of farmers growing specialty crops on a few acres of northern Michigan for just a few months out of the year, an Ohio cattle farm that has raised heritage beef since 1820, and a Minnesota farmer who tirelessly champions the Jimmy Nardello sweet Italian frying pepper. Along the way, she savors vibrant red carrots, slurpy peaches, vast quantities of specialty cheeses, and some of the tastiest pie to cross anyone's lips.

Informed by debates about eating local, seasonal crops, organic farming, sanitation, and biodiversity, Farmers' Markets of the Heartland tantalizes with special recipes from farm-friendly chefs and dozens of luscious color photographs that will inspire you to harvest the homegrown flavors in your own neighborhood.

A fascinating deep dive into one city’s urban policy—and the anxiety over immigrants that informs it

 

The city of Toronto is often held up as a leader in diversity and inclusion. In Fearing the Immigrant, however, Parastou Saberi argues that Toronto’s urban policies are influenced by a territorialized and racialized security agenda—one that parallels the “War on Terror.” Focusing on the figure of the immigrant and so-called immigrant neighborhoods as the targets of urban policy, Saberi offers an innovative, multidisciplinary approach to the politics of racialization and the governing of alterity through space in contemporary cities.

A comprehensive study of urban policymaking in Canada’s largest city from the 1990s to the late 2010s, Fearing the Immigrant uses Toronto as a jumping-off point to understand how the nexus of development, racialization, and security works at the urban and international levels. Saberi situates urban policymaking in Toronto in relation to the dominant policies of international development and public health, counterinsurgency, and humanitarian intervention. Engaging with the genealogies and contemporary developments of major policy techniques involving mapping and policy concepts such as poverty, security, policing, development, empowerment, as well as social determinants of health, equity, and prevention, she scrutinizes the parallel ways these techniques and concepts operate in urban policy and international relations. 

Fearing the Immigrant ultimately asserts that the geopolitical fear of the immigrant is central to the formation of urban policy in Toronto. Rather than addressing the root causes of poverty, urban policy as it has been practiced aims to pacify the specter of urban unrest and to secure the production of a neocolonial urban order. As such, this book is an urgent call to reimagine urban policy in the name of equality and social justice.

WINNER OF THE 2020 SOCIETY FOR ECONOMIC BOTANY'S MARY W. KLINGER BOOK AWARD

An authoritative and thoroughly accessible overview of farming and food practices at Cahokia

Agriculture is rightly emphasized as the center of the economy in most studies of Cahokian society, but the focus is often predominantly on corn. This farming economy is typically framed in terms of ruling elites living in mound centers who demanded tribute and a mass surplus to be hoarded or distributed as they saw fit. Farmers are cast as commoners who grew enough surplus corn to provide for the elites.

Feeding Cahokia: Early Agriculture in the North American Heartland presents evidence to demonstrate that the emphasis on corn has created a distorted picture of Cahokia’s agricultural practices. Farming at Cahokia was biologically diverse and, as such, less prone to risk than was maize-dominated agriculture. Gayle J. Fritz shows that the division between the so-called elites and commoners simplifies and misrepresents the statuses of farmers—a workforce consisting of adult women and their daughters who belonged to kin groups crosscutting all levels of the Cahokian social order. Many farmers had considerable influence and decision-making authority, and they were valued for their economic contributions, their skills, and their expertise in all matters relating to soils and crops. Fritz examines the possible roles played by farmers in the processes of producing and preparing food and in maintaining cosmological balance.

This highly accessible narrative by an internationally known paleoethnobotanist highlights the biologically diverse agricultural system by focusing on plants, such as erect knotweed, chenopod, and maygrass, which were domesticated in the midcontinent and grown by generations of farmers before Cahokia Mounds grew to be the largest Native American population center north of Mexico. Fritz also looks at traditional farming systems to apply strategies that would be helpful to modern agriculture, including reviving wild and weedy descendants of these lost crops for redomestication. With a wealth of detail on specific sites, traditional foods, artifacts such as famous figurines, and color photos of significant plants, Feeding Cahokia will satisfy both scholars and interested readers.

Winner, Bolton-Johnson Prize, Conference on Latin American History, 2011
Murdo J. McLeod Book Prize, 2011

On the eastern coast of Brazil, facing westward across a wide magnificent bay, lies Salvador, a major city in the Americas at the end of the eighteenth century. Those who distributed and sold food, from the poorest street vendors to the most prosperous traders—black and white, male and female, slave and free, Brazilian, Portuguese, and African—were connected in tangled ways to each other and to practically everyone else in the city, and are the subjects of this book. Food traders formed the city's most dynamic social component during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, constantly negotiating their social place. The boatmen who brought food to the city from across the bay decisively influenced the outcome of the war for Brazilian independence from Portugal by supplying the insurgents and not the colonial army. Richard Graham here shows for the first time that, far from being a city sharply and principally divided into two groups—the rich and powerful or the hapless poor or enslaved—Salvador had a population that included a great many who lived in between and moved up and down.

The day-to-day behavior of those engaged in food marketing leads to questions about the government's role in regulating the economy and thus to notions of justice and equity, questions that directly affected both food traders and the wider consuming public. Their voices significantly shaped the debate still going on between those who support economic liberalization and those who resist it.

While the stereotype of the persistently pregnant Mexican-origin woman is longstanding, in the past fifteen years her reproduction has been targeted as a major social problem for the United States. Due to fear-fueled news reports and public perceptions about the changing composition of the nation's racial and ethnic makeup—the so-called Latinization of America—the reproduction of Mexican immigrant women has become a central theme in contemporary U. S. politics since the early 1990s.

In this exploration, Elena R. Gutiérrez considers these public stereotypes of Mexican American and Mexican immigrant women as "hyper-fertile baby machines" who "breed like rabbits." She draws on social constructionist perspectives to examine the historical and sociopolitical evolution of these racial ideologies, and the related beliefs that Mexican-origin families are unduly large and that Mexican American and Mexican immigrant women do not use birth control.

Using the coercive sterilization of Mexican-origin women in Los Angeles as a case study, Gutiérrez opens a dialogue on the racial politics of reproduction, and how they have developed for women of Mexican origin in the United States. She illustrates how the ways we talk and think about reproduction are part of a system of racial domination that shapes social policy and affects individual women's lives.

This is the first study to cover cinemas from Iran to Morocco. Nine essays present the region's major national cinemas, devoting special attention to the work of directors who have given image and voice to dissent from political regimes, from patriarchal customs, from fundamentalist movements, and from the West. These country essays are complemented by in-depth discussions of eighteen films that have been selected for both their excellence and their critical engagement with pressing current issues. The introduction provides a comprehensive overview of filmmaking throughout the region, including important films produced outside the national cinemas. The long history of Iranian cinema, its international renown, and the politics of directors confronting the state, earns it a special place in this volume. The other major emphasis is on the Israel/Palestine conflict, featuring films by Palestinian directors, Israelis, and an Egyptian working in Syria.

Nineteen authors collaborated on this book, among them Walter Armbrust, Roy Armes, Kevin Dwyer, Eric Egan, Nurith Gertz, Lina Khatib, Florence Martin, and Nadia Yaqub. About half of the contributors are film scholars; the others range across literary studies and the social sciences to two film directors and a novelist. Beyond differences in disciplinary orientation, there is considerable variation among contributors in the perspectives that inform their writing. They offer an illuminating range of approaches to the cinemas of the region.

The book is richly illustrated with posters of the featured films, photos of their directors at work, and stills illustrating critical arguments in the film essays.

Conventional wisdom holds that programs for the poor are vulnerable to instability and retrenchment. Medicaid, however, has grown into the nation’s largest intergovernmental grant program, accounting for nearly half of all federal funding to state and local governments. Medicaid’s generous open-ended federal matching grants have given governors a powerful incentive to mobilize on behalf of its maintenance and expansion, using methods ranging from lobbying and negotiation to creative financing mechanisms and waivers to maximize federal financial assistance. Perceiving federal retrenchment efforts as a threat to states’ finances, governors, through the powerful National Governors’ Association, have repeatedly worked together in bipartisan fashion to defend the program against cutbacks.

Financing Medicaidengagingly intertwines theory, historical narrative, and case studies, drawing on sources including archival materials from the National Governors’ Association and gubernatorial and presidential libraries, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services data, the Congressional Record, and interviews.

The story of starting and running an organic farm—told by the woman who owned one of the first Community-Supported Agriculture operations in the Upper Midwest
 

On a twenty-acre farm in Iowa in 1995, Angela Tedesco planted the seeds (quite literally) of a quiet revolution. While American agriculture had strayed so far afield, her farm would raise food that served the earth and the community as well as the palate. In Finding Turtle Farm, Tedesco recounts this adventure in all its down-and-dirty work and wonder, from plan and plot to harvest, with nods along the way to the vagaries of weather, pests, and human nature.

Introducing Community-Supported Agriculture to Iowa, Tedesco’s Turtle Farm educated its customers along with providing seasonal boxes of produce—an undertaking that continues here, as Tedesco describes what it takes to establish and run an organic operation, bringing to bear all her experience growing up on a family farm, studying chemistry and horticulture, and shepherding a religious education program. From ordering seeds and tending greenhouses to surviving floods and a personal health crisis, Tedesco tells a story of transforming a piece of land and the life within it. She includes practical information about harvesting and preserving food, the discoveries of research conducted on the farm and bonds established between farmers, and even recipes to make delicious use of the produce in your CSA box.

Looking forward to a healthier, happier future when crops are more than mere commodities and food feeds the soul of a community, Finding Turtle Farm is an enlightening, hard-won, and ultimately hopeful account of what it means to meet the most basic of human needs.

Flows of Violence offers a profound ethnographic exploration of the intricate relationship between violence and water infrastructure in one of Colombia’s most marginalized cities. This groundbreaking work engages with the concept of “infrastructural violence,” revealing how the Colombian state’s neglect and inadequate provision of water services perpetuate inequality and suffering among Buenaventura’s residents. Through extensive fieldwork, Fernández provides rich empirical data and firsthand accounts that bring to light the daily struggles and resilience of the city’s inhabitants.

The book critically examines how everyday crime and state neglect intersect, altering the improvised practices of water storage and access among the population. It also highlights the innovative mechanisms employed by social movements and ordinary citizens to cope with and resist these challenges.

Flows of Violence is an essential read for scholars in anthropology, geography, and Latin American studies, offering valuable insights into the sociopolitical impacts of infrastructure. This timely contribution underscores the urgent need for equitable infrastructure development and social justice, making it a pivotal text for understanding urban poverty and state dynamics in Latin America and beyond.

In recent years, the federal government’s increasing inability to address major societal challenges has arguably hampered America’s commitment to renewable energy initiatives. Individual U.S. states have stepped into this void and adopted their own policies, leading some to believe that the states can propel America’s renewable energy industry forward. However, we know little about how legislative and regulatory dynamics within America’s states might accelerate or hinder renewable energy policy creation. 

In Following in Footsteps or Marching Alone?, Srinivas Parinandi explores how states have devised their own novel policies, and how the political workings of legislatures and public utilities commissions have impacted state renewable energy policy design. Through the meticulous study of nearly three decades of state-level renewable energy policy-making, he finds that their creation is primarily driven by legislatures, and that ideologically liberal legislatures largely push the envelope. The book suggests that having a predominantly state-driven renewable energy effort can lead to uneven and patchwork-based policy development outcomes, and a possible solution is to try to more successfully federalize these issues. Parinandi urges readers, scholars, and policy practitioners to consider whether a state-led effort is adequate enough to handle the task of building momentum for renewable energy in one of the world’s largest electricity markets.

A detailed exploration of parents’ fight for a safe environment for their kids, interrogating how race, class, and gender shape health advocacy 

The success of food allergy activism in highlighting the dangers of foodborne allergens shows how illness communities can effectively advocate for the needs of their members. In Food Allergy Advocacy, Danya Glabau follows parents and activists as they fight for allergen-free environments, accurate labeling, the fair application of disability law, and access to life-saving medications for food-allergic children in the United States. At the same time, she shows how this activism also reproduces the culturally dominant politics of personhood and responsibility, based on an idealized version of the American family, centered around white, middle-class, and heteronormative motherhood.

By holding up the threat of food allergens to the white nuclear family to galvanize political and scientific action, Glabau shows, the movement excludes many, including Black women and disabled adults, whose families and health have too often been marginalized from public health and social safety net programs. Further, its strategies are founded on the assumption that market-based solutions will address issues of social exclusion and equal access to healthcare. 

Sharing the personal experiences of a wide spectrum of people, including parents, support group leaders, physicians, entrepreneurs, and scientists, Food Allergy Advocacy raises important questions about who controls illness activism. Using critical, intersectional feminism to interrogate how race, class, and gender shape activist priorities and platforms, it shows the way to new, justice-focused models of advocacy.

Interdisciplinary in approach and transnational in scope, Food Instagram offers general readers and experts alike new perspectives on an important social media space and its impact on a fundamental area of our lives.

Contributors: Laurence Allard, Joceline Andersen, Emily Buddle, Robin Caldwell, Emily J. H. Contois, Sarah E. Cramer, Gaby David, Deborah A. Harris, KC Hysmith, Alex Ketchum, Katherine Kirkwood, Zenia Kish, Stinne Gunder Strøm Krogager, Jonathan Leer, Yue-Chiu Bonni Leung, Yi-Chieh Jessica Lin, Michael Z. Newman, Tsugumi Okabe, Rachel Phillips, Sarah Garcia Santamaria, Tara J. Schuwerk, Sarah E. Tracy, Emily Truman, Dawn Woolley, and Zara Worth

Winner of the 2025 New England Society Book Award for Specialty Titles
Winner of the 2024 Readable Feast Award for Social Consciousness 
Named one of Food Tank's 20 Food Systems Reads that Will Inspire You this Summer

In a food industry shaped by the abundance, cheapness, and convenience that giant corporations can offer, small-­scale ventures struggle to survive, as anthropologist Cathy Stanton discovered when she joined the effort to save a small food co-­op in a former mill town in western Massachusetts. On the margins of the dominant system, Stanton found herself reckoning with its deep racial and class inequities, and learning that making real change requires a fierce commitment to community and a willingness to change herself as well.

Part memoir and part history lesson, Food Margins traces the tangled economic and political histories of the plantation, the factory, and the supermarket through the life of one New England town. Stanton tells a complex and compelling story of a rural community imagining and creating a viable alternative to the mainstream in a time of increasingly urgent need to build a more socially and ecologically just food system.