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At the center of what was once the tallgrass prairie, Iowa has stood out for clearing the land and becoming one of the most productive agricultural states in the nation. But its success is challenged by multiple issues including but not limited to a decline in union representation of meatpacking workers; lack of demographic diversity; the advent of job-replacing mechanization; growing income inequality; negative contributions to and effects of climate change and environmental hazards.

To become green, fair, and prosperous, Connerly argues that Iowa must reckon with its past and the fact that its farm economy continues to pollute waterways, while remaining utterly unprepared for climate change. Iowa must recognize ways in which it can bolster its residents’ standard of living and move away from its demographic tradition of whiteness. For development to be sustainable, society must balance it with environmental protection and social justice. Connerly provides a crucial roadmap for how Iowans can move forward and achieve this balance.

The first monograph to trace artist and activist Gregg Bordowitz’s visual practice.

For over four decades, Gregg Bordowitz has been a force in contemporary art, recognized for his work as an AIDS activist and an artist working in video, conceptual art, and institutional critique. During the 1980s, Bordowitz made vital contributions in the early years of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) in New York, where he cofounded video collectives including Testing the Limits and DIVA (Damn Interfering Video Activists). His collaborative activist work formed the foundation of his art practice—a sprawling, diverse, and deeply human endeavor that has explored his gay and Jewish identities within the context of the ongoing AIDS crisis. 

Despite his expansive artistic production, activism, and influence, there has yet to be a full monographic exploration of Bordowitz’s work. This landmark volume serves as the first publication dedicated exclusively to his visual work, offering a comprehensive portrait of an artist in constant motion. I Wanna Be Well—named after the 1977 Ramones song—traces the emergence of his visual art practice. Developed in close collaboration with Bordowitz and a team of art historians, curators, scholars, poets, and artists who have worked with him over the years, this book reveals Bordowitz’s practice as an evolving investigation of how to live, teach, and make art through sustained acts of care, critique, and remembrance. Lavishly illustrated with color throughout, the essays, interviews, poetry, and other writings gathered here present a rich look at Bordowitz’s life and career.

A key period in the history of food cooperatives that continues to influence how we purchase organic food today

Our notions of food co-ops generally don’t include images of baseball bat–wielding activists in the aisles. But in May 1975, this was the scene as a Marxist group known as the Co-op Organization took over the People’s Warehouse, a distribution center for more than a dozen small cooperative grocery stores in the Minneapolis area. The activist group’s goal: to curtail the sale of organic food. The People’s Warehouse quickly became one of the principal fronts in the political and social battle that Craig Upright explores in Grocery Activism. The story of the fraught relationship of new-wave cooperative grocery stores to the organic food industry, this book is an instructive case study in the history of activists intervening in capitalist markets to promote social change.

Focusing on Minnesota, a state with both a long history of cooperative enterprise and the largest number of surviving independent cooperative stores, Grocery Activism looks back to the 1970s, when the mission of these organizations shifted from political activism to the promotion of natural and organic foods. Why, Upright asks, did two movements—promoting cooperative enterprise and sustainable agriculture—come together at this juncture? He analyzes the nexus of social movements and economic sociology, examining how new-wave cooperatives have pursued social change by imbuing products they sell with social values. Rather than trying to explain the success or failure of any individual cooperative, his work shows how members of this fraternity of organizations supported one another in their mutual quest to maintain fiscal solvency, promote better food-purchasing habits, support sustainable agricultural practices, and extol the virtues of cooperative organizing. A foundational chapter in the history of organic food, Grocery Activism clarifies the critical importance of this period in transforming the politics and economics of the grocery store in America.

As commercial flight is changing dramatically and its future remains unclear, a look at how we got here

Grounded: Perpetual Flight . . . and Then the Pandemic considers the time leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing global plummet in commercial flight. Mobility studies scholar Christopher Schaberg tours the newly opened airport terminal outside of New Orleans (MSY) in late 2019, and goes on to survey the broad cultural landscape of empty airports and grounded planes in the early months of the novel coronavirus’s spread in 2020. The book culminates in a reflection on the future of air travel: what may unfold, and what parts of commercial flight are almost certainly relics of the past. Grounded blends journalistic reportage with cultural theory and philosophical inquiry in order to offer graspable insights as well as a stinging critique of contemporary air travel.

Grounding Practice: Dancing Haiti on Tè Glise tracks the responsive physical techniques Haitian dancers devised for navigating precarity, making place, and igniting repair in the decade following the 2010 earthquake. Via the concept “grounding practice,” which connotes the powerful community building and placemaking made possible by the teaching and practice of Haitian folkloric dance, this interdisciplinary study illustrates how the embodied labor of revitalizing traditions took on increasing relevance as vital reparative worldmaking amidst instability, or tè glise–—Haitian Creole for sliding land or slippery ground.

The dancers in Grounding Practice regenerate understandings of Haitian dance’s potential for fomenting decolonial consciousness, meaningfully sustaining African-derived culture, birthing new social relations, activating the queer potentials of tradition, and ultimately making place. Through ethnography and vivid descriptions, Dasha A. Chapman’s attention to embodied knowledge illuminates how movement practice operates as a site of theorization—wherein not just subjectivity, but also concepts of sovereignty, relation, and futurity, are articulated through the body. Paying homage to important forebears yet moving us beyond static narratives, this study brings our understanding of Haitian dance—and Haiti—through expansive landscapes into the contemporary.

A detailed foray into the material and spatial realities of cloud computing

Since the 1990s, technologists have promoted a vision of the “cloud” as a shapeless and intangible entity. Grounding the Cloud peers through this hazy façade to reveal the earthly material foundations of global computing and data extraction. Tracing the historical and technological development of the cloud computing paradigm, Ali Fard exposes an ever-evolving project in which ideologies, economic models, and marketing images collude to shape our shared urban environments.

Demonstrating how technology’s spatial footprint now stretches to nearly every corner of the globe, Grounding the Cloud analyzes the often-hidden infrastructures that facilitate platform capitalism—from the mines extracting rare earth minerals in remote regions to the vast global network of fiber-optic cables at the bottom of the oceans to the nondescript data centers that sit on the peripheries of major urban areas. Meanwhile, with compelling examples of smart-city initiatives and corporate campuses, Fard shows how the future of urbanism is deeply intertwined with the growing economies of data extraction.

Breaking down the myth of a clean and efficient tech urbanism, this book makes visible the complex material geographies and geopolitics that undergird today’s most powerful and omnipresent corporations. A timely critique of the growing agency of tech platforms in determining the future of urban space, Grounding the Cloud offers an essential framework for understanding the shifting relationship between technology and urbanization.

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Maturation is a way we evaluate others and ourselves. It serves as a guidepost for our own behavior, often starting in adolescence. In Grow Up, Will You? Michael Rocque considers maturation across the life-course, providing a cultural and scholarly history of maturation before demonstrating how components of maturation develop, how they can be influenced, and their consequences for behavior and other life outcomes. He shows how biology and psychology propel us towards adulthood, but also how milestones, like graduating or getting married, produce a point of maturation.

Looking at examples from pop cultural movies, such as Juno, where a pregnant teenager faces numerous challenges and is forced to grow up quickly, Rocque explains how maturity has been defined and how it evolves. Such examples address key issues related to maturation, including timing and social expectations. He also introduces scientific conceptualizations and breaks down ways of measuring.

Ultimately, Grow Up, Will You? offers practical knowledge, programs, and approaches that can positively influence human development while also protecting a sense of childhood. Now grow up, will you?

Growing Old on the Margins is a moving portrait of aging at the edge of social life. Set in a state-run shelter for older adults in urban Lima, Peru, the book traces the everyday lives of men and women who have been left behind by family, institutions, and the promises of care. Based on more than two years of close ethnographic engagement, it follows residents as they navigate loneliness, illness, intimacy, and the quiet anticipation of death. Through small gestures—shared silences, requests for affection, moments of tenderness and conflict—the book reveals how people strive to remain present in a world that offers them little reason to hope. Care appears here not as a simple act of kindness, but as a fragile and uneven practice, shaped by scarcity, power, and moral ambiguity. Attentive to suffering without romanticizing it, Growing Old on the Margins reflects on what it means to age, endure, and remain human when one’s life is no longer considered worthy of attention.

New York, London, Paris, and Tokyo are the four largest cities among the wealthiest, most developed nations of the world. The essays commissioned for this volume compare what it is like to grow older in these cities with respect to health care, quality of life, housing, and long-term care. The contributors look beyond aggregate national data to highlight the importance of how local authorities implement policies.

Much has been written about the life of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879), but relatively little attention has been paid to his wife, Helen Benson Garrison, and their seven children. In Growing Up Abolitionist, Garrison's public image recedes into the background and the family's private world takes center stage. 

The lives of the Garrison children were shaped within the context of the great nineteenth-century campaigns against slavery, racism, violence, war, imperialism, and the repression of women. As children, they became apprentices of these movements and grew up adoring their dissident parents. Collectively and individually, they carried on their parents' values in distinctive ways. 

Their path was not always easy. When the Civil War erupted, the entire family had to come to grips with a basic contradiction in their lives. While each member passionately yearned for the end of slavery, all but the eldest son, George, who served as an officer with the 55th Massachusetts Colored Regiment, opposed military participation. 

The Civil War years also brought four marriage partners into the Garrisons' lives-Ellen Wright, Lucy McKim, and Annie Anthony (all abolitionist daughters) and Henry Villard, a German-born journalist who later became a railroad magnate and publisher of the New York Evening Post and the Nation. 

Raised by loving parents to be political activists, the Garrison children, as adults, assumed positions as leaders or participants in those radical causes of their day that most closely reflected their upbringing: racial justice, women's rights, anti-imperialism, and peace.

The place occupied by Japanese Americans within the annals of United States history often begins and ends with their cameo appearance as victims of incarceration after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. In this provocative work, David K. Yoo broadens the scope of Japanese American history to examine how the second generation—the Nisei—shaped its identity and negotiated its place within American society. 

Tracing the emergence of a dynamic Nisei subculture, Yoo shows how the foundations laid during the 1920s and 1930s helped many Nisei adjust to the upheaval of the concentration camps. Schools, racial-ethnic churches, and the immigrant press served not merely as waystations to assimilation but as tools by which Nisei affirmed their identity in connection with both Japanese and American culture. The Nisei who came of age during World War II formed identities while negotiating complexities of race, gender, class, generation, economics, politics, and international relations. 

A thoughtful consideration of the gray area between accommodation and resistance, Growing Up Nisei reveals the struggles and humanity of a forgotten generation of Japanese Americans.

The prosperous, comfortable, and homogeneous American suburb is a relatively recent institution in American history. Edward Wynne was one of the first to take a serious look at the quality of suburban childhood, where, he contends, we have ignored the developments affecting the largest pool of children and parents in America. This provocative volume argues that the total environment of the suburban youth—the school, the community, the family, and the workplace—is in need of drastic reform.

Wynne advances a forthright argument for the preservation of traditional moral values and criticizes excessive individualism in fragmented modern society. Focusing on the schools and extending his discussion to the larger community, he pleads for more attention to such goals as honesty, persistence, patriotism, and loyalty.

Post-industrial suburban environments, Wynne argues, do not provide the diversity of experience children must have to become successful adults. Strong community ties to the schools are basic to Wynne's thesis. Within the schools, he recommends changes in grading systems, student responsibilities and assignments, selection and training of teachers and administrators, structuring and evaluation of programs, and the socioeconomic and age mix of pupils. A feeling of cooperation and unity within the school itself is a major goal. Wynne also suggests steps for moving toward more heterogeneous, close-knit communities, where citizens have greater local control. For example, community members could restrict movement into the community and should aim for a mix of blue- and white-collar residents.

Wynne's arguments clearly run counter to fashion and are sure to provoke a high level of debate among educators of differing philosophic persuasions. Civil libertarians, feminists, civil rights advocates, and others are bound to make spirited replies to many of Wynne's contentions. Growing Up Suburban will be of interest to educators, public school administrators, parents, and suburban dwellers.

A deep ethnography on children who work in Lima, Peru, and a critique of the global anti-child labor effort.

Children juggling at traffic lights and selling candy from car to car are ubiquitous in Lima, Peru’s capital, making the country a hotspot for child labor reformers. Even when the intentions behind the anti-child labor movement are benevolent, in practice this effort affects children and their families in unexpected and often harmful ways.

Anthropologist Leigh Campoamor argues that the concept of child labor is stuck in an industrial-era framing that fails to capture the reality of working youth in the global south today. Following children who work on Lima’s streets through their daily routines, Campoamor shows how these youth—and often their mothers—become subjects of moral intervention by state institutions, NGOs, and the general public. Arguing that reformers reinforce hierarchies of race, class, gender and age in the name of children's rights, Growing Up Working shows how working youth assert agency while also performing invisible caring and affective labor that doesn't count as work under neoliberal capitalism. Campoamor follows the children at the center of her ethnography into adulthood, providing an intimate and dynamic portrait of their lives while critiquing the ways anti–child labor discourses imagine working children’s futures.

Far from the mainstream of society, the pastoral community of Chillihuani in the high Peruvian Andes rears children who are well-adjusted, creative, and curious. They exhibit superior social and cognitive skills and maintain an attitude of respect for all life as they progress smoothly from childhood to adulthood without a troubled adolescence. What makes such child-rearing success even more remarkable is that "childhood" is not recognized as a distinct phase of life. Instead, children assume adult rights and responsibilities at an early age in order to help the community survive in a rugged natural environment and utter material poverty.

This beautifully written ethnography provides the first full account of child-rearing practices in the high Peruvian Andes. Inge Bolin traces children's lives from birth to adulthood and finds truly amazing strategies of child rearing, as well as impressive ways of living that allow teenagers to enjoy the adolescent stage of their lives while contributing significantly to the welfare of their families and the community. Throughout her discussion, Bolin demonstrates that traditional practices of respect, whose roots reach back to pre-Columbian times, are what enable the children of the high Andes to mature into dignified, resilient, and caring adults.