22279 books match the query 'Social Science' and 583 start with g

cover of Gendered Vulnerability: How Women Work Harder to Stay in Office

Gendered Vulnerability

How Women Work Harder to Stay in Office

Jeffrey Lazarus and Amy Steigerwalt

University of Michigan Press, 2018

Gendered Vulnerability examines the factors that make women politicians more electorally vulnerable than their male counterparts. These factors combine to convince women that they must work harder to win elections—a phenomenon that Jeffrey Lazarus and Amy Steigerwalt term “gendered vulnerability.” Since women feel constant pressure to make sure they can win reelection, they devote more of their time and energy to winning their constituents’ favor. Lazarus and Steigerwalt examine different facets of legislative behavior, finding that female members do a better job of representing their constituents than male members.
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cover of Gendering Bodies/Performing Art: Dance and Literature in Early Twentieth-Century British Culture

Gendering Bodies/Performing Art

Dance and Literature in Early Twentieth-Century British Culture

Amy Koritz

University of Michigan Press, 1995

Gendering Bodies / Performing Art is the first book that attempts a conceptual integration of dance and literary history in British culture. It attempts to make visible the role of dance in creating, reinforcing, and challenging developments in aesthetic practice and ideology in which both dance and literature participated. Koritz integrates chapters on dance and dancers- from music hall ballet girls of the 1890s to the prestigious season of Diaghilev's Russian Ballet- with discussions on how major literary figures such as Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, and T.S. Eliot used dance to further their own aesthetic agendas. In doing so, she provides an illuminating analysis of the connections between literature and dance, and explores the ways in which these two arts actively engaged in cultural processes encompassing both. ". . . provocative and stimulating . . . an invaluable addition to the work that is already available on turn-of-century theater/culture. . . ."--Vivien Gardner, Manchester University "Reaching between the poles of popular music hall and the Ballet Russe, Koritz addresses a series of interrelated, mutually informing discourses in which we overhear the language of the literary community in its accolades and in its outcries. Koritz's book will prove useful to a wide variety of readers; many scholars of English literature will undoubtedly use this book to the fullest, turning to it again and again as a contextual primer for performance issues in their field."--Cheryl Herr, University of Iowa Amy Koritz is Co-Director of the Cultural Studies Program and Assistant Professor of English, Tulane University.
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cover of Gendering Disability

Gendering Disability

Smith, Bonnie G

Rutgers University Press, 2004

Disability and gender, terms that have previously seemed so clear-cut, are becoming increasingly complex in light of new politics and scholarship. These words now suggest complicated sets of practices and ways of being.

Contributors to this innovative collection explore the intersection of gender and disability in the arts, consumer culture, healing, the personal and private realms, and the appearance of disability in the public sphere—both in public fantasies and in public activism. Beginning as separate enterprises that followed activist and scholarly paths, gender and disability studies have reached a point where they can move beyond their boundaries for a common landscape to inspire new areas of inquiry. Whether from a perspective in the humanities, social sciences, sciences, or arts, the shared subject matter of gender and disability studies—the body, social and cultural hierarchy, identity, discrimination and inequality, representation, and political activism—insistently calls for deeper conversation. This volume provides fresh findings not only about the discrimination practiced against women and people with disabilities, but also about the productive parallelism between these two categories.

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cover of Gendering Ethnicity in African Women’s Lives

Gendering Ethnicity in African Women’s Lives

Edited by Jan Bender Shetler

University of Wisconsin Press, 2015

Do African men and women think about and act out their ethnicity in different ways? Most studies of ethnicity in Africa consider men’s experiences, but rarely have scholars examined whether women have the same idea of what it means to be, for example, Igbo or Tswana or Kikuyu. Or, studies have invoked the adage “women have no tribe” to indicate a woman’s loss of ethnicity as she marries into her husband’s community. This volume engages directly the issue of women’s ethnicity and makes stimulating contributions to debates about how and why women’s movements have a unifying role in African political organization and peace movements.
            Drawing on extensive field research in many different regions of Africa, the contributors demonstrate in their essays that women do make choices about the forms of ethnicity they embrace, creating alternatives to male-centered definitions—in some cases rejecting a specific ethnic identity in favor of an interethnic alliance, in others reinterpreting the meaning of ethnicity within gendered domains, and in others performing ethnic power in gendered ways. Their analysis helps explain why African women may be more likely to champion interethnic political movements while men often promote an ethnicity based on martial masculinity. Bringing together anthropologists, historians, linguists, and political scientists, Gendering Ethnicity in African Women’s Lives offers a diverse and timely look at a neglected but important topic.
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cover of Gendering Historiography: Beyond National Canons

Gendering Historiography

Beyond National Canons

Edited by Angelika Epple and Angelika Schaser

Campus Verlag, 2009

Comparing various European and American historiographies from the past two hundred years, Gendering Historiography provides insights into the establishment and cultivation of gendered power relations in different societies and outlines the devastating effects that exclusionary practices can have on each national canon. This detailed and revealing book will change the face of history writing, bringing overlooked and previously excluded histories back into modern historiography.

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cover of Gendering Labor History

Gendering Labor History

Alice Kessler-Harris

University of Illinois Press, 2006

This collection represents the thirty-year intellectual trajectory of one of today’s leading historians of gender and labor in the United States. The seventeen essays are divided into four sections, narrating the evolution and refinement of Alice Kessler-Harris's central project: showing gender’s fundamental importance in the shaping of United States history and working class culture. 

The first section considers women and organized labor while the second pushes this analysis toward a gendered labor history as the essays consider the gendering of male as well as female workers and how gender operates with and within the social category of class. Subsequent sections broaden this framework to examine U.S. social policy as a whole, the question of economic citizenship, and wage labor from a global perspective. While each essay represents an important intervention in American historiography in itself, the collection taken as a whole shows Kessler-Harris continuing to push the field of American history to greater levels of inclusion and analysis.

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cover of Gendering Politics: Women in Israel

Gendering Politics

Women in Israel

Hanna Herzog

University of Michigan Press, 1999

What are the cultural and structural mechanisms that exclude women from politics in general and from local politics in particular? What meaning is ascribed to women's political activity?
Gendering Politics explores the place of women in democratic politics by means of a detailed study of women in Israeli politics who were elected to municipal councils from 1950 to 1989. Drawing from a variety of sources, including questionnaires, interviews, newspaper coverage, and existing statistical data, as well as examinations of studies of the role of women in politics in other democracies, Herzog analyzes the extent of success and failure of women in Israeli elections. She then explores reasons why female participation in Israeli politics has been relatively slight, despite historical precedents and social circumstances that would indicate otherwise.
The author examines the gendered bias of the power structure as it is shaped by basic cultural organizing principles. She exposes hidden assumptions--and notes the overt assumptions--which by definition exclude women from politics. The author also looks at the structure of opportunities within the prevailing political system, uncovering the relevant blocking and facilitating elements.
Gendering Politics will be of interest to students and scholars of women's studies, Israeli studies, political sociology, and political science.
Hanna Herzog is Associate Professor of Sociology, Tel Aviv University.
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cover of Gendering the Fair: Histories of Women and Gender at World's Fairs

Gendering the Fair

Histories of Women and Gender at World's Fairs

Edited by TJ Boisseau and Abigail M. Markwyn

University of Illinois Press, 2010

This field-defining work opens the study of world's fairs to women's and gender history, exploring the intersections of masculinity, femininity, exoticism, display, and performance at these influential events. As the first global gatherings of mass numbers of attendees, world's fairs and expositions introduced cross-class, multi-racial, and mixed-sex audiences to each other, as well as to cultural concepts and breakthroughs in science and technology. Gendering the Fair focuses on the manipulation of gender ideology as a crucial factor in the world's fairs' incredible power to shape public opinions of nations, government, and culture.
 
Established and rising scholars working in a variety of disciplines and locales discuss how gender played a role in various countries' exhibits and how these nations capitalized on opportunities to revise national and international understandings of womanhood. Spanning several centuries and extending across the globe from Portugal to London and from Chicago to Paris, the essays cover topics including women's work at the fairs; the suffrage movement; the intersection of faith, gender, and patriotism; and the ability of fair organizers to manipulate fairgoers' experience of the fairgrounds as gendered space. The volume includes a foreword by preeminent world's fair historian Robert W. Rydell.
 
Contributors are TJ Boisseau, Anne Clendinning, Lisa K. Langlois, Abigail M. Markwyn, Sarah J. Moore, Isabel Morais, Mary Pepchinski, Elisabeth Israels Perry, Andrea G. Radke-Moss, Alison Rowley, and Anne Wohlcke.
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cover of Gendering the Recession: Media and Culture in an Age of Austerity

Gendering the Recession

Media and Culture in an Age of Austerity

Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker, eds.

Duke University Press, 2014

This timely, necessary collection of essays provides feminist analyses of a recession-era media culture characterized by the reemergence and refashioning of familiar gender tropes, including crisis masculinity, coping women, and postfeminist self-renewal. Interpreting media forms as diverse as reality television, financial journalism, novels, lifestyle blogs, popular cinema, and advertising, the contributors reveal gendered narratives that recur across media forms too often considered in isolation from one another. They also show how, with a few notable exceptions, recession-era popular culture promotes affective normalcy and transformative individual enterprise under duress while avoiding meaningful critique of the privileged white male or the destructive aspects of Western capitalism. By acknowledging the contradictions between political rhetoric and popular culture, and between diverse screen fantasies and lived realities, Gendering the Recession helps to make sense of our postboom cultural moment.

Contributors. Sarah Banet-Weiser, Hamilton Carroll, Hannah Hamad, Anikó Imre, Suzanne Leonard, Isabel Molina-Guzmán, Sinéad Molony, Elizabeth Nathanson, Diane Negra, Tim Snelson, Yvonne Tasker, Pamela Thoma
 
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cover of Genealogies of Joy: The Pleasure of Latinx Literature

Genealogies of Joy

The Pleasure of Latinx Literature

Edited by Leigh Johnson and Erin Murrah-Mandril; Foreword by Melina Vizcaíno-Alemán

University of Arizona Press, 2027

What does it mean to center joy in a world that insists on Latinx suffering? Genealogies of Joy: The Pleasure of Latinx Literature argues that joy is not a luxury or distraction but a radical, sustaining force woven through Latinx literature and culture. From humor and food to protest, friendship, sexuality, and aging, the essays gathered here reveal joy as an embodied, communal practice—one that refuses racialized shame and imagines liberatory futures.
 
Organized into three sections—Memory, Method, and Maps—the volume traces a genealogy of joy across time and space. Contributors explore how writers such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Julia de Burgos, Erika Sánchez, Javier Zamora, Myriam Gurba, Aidan Thomas, and Sandra Cisneros transform grief into resilience, invert dominant narratives, and reclaim pleasure as political praxis. Whether through irreverent laughter, queer desire, culinary memory, or vulnerable resistance, Latinx authors insist that pleasure and politics are bound together.
 
Engaging affect theory, Black joy scholarship, borderlands studies, and archival studies, this collection asserts that Latinx joy resists the quantification and commodification of late-stage capitalism. At once rigorous and celebratory, Genealogies of Joy invites readers to recognize joy as a human right and a vital source of connection, creativity, and collective flourishing.

Contributors
Soffía Blystra
Norma Cantú
Margaret Cantú-Sánchez
Karina Diaz
Stephanie Fetta
Elena Foulis
Eva Maria Geicht
Leigh Johnson
Mark J. Mascia
Regina Marie Mills
Erin Murrah-Mandril
Jeannine Ortega
Nancy Ríos
Rey M. Rodríguez
Rosarito Rodríguez-González
Alexandra Rodríguez Sabogal
Karen Roybal
Bianca S. Rubalcava
Suzanne Uzzilia
Natalia Villanueva-Nieves
Melina Vizcaíno-Alemán

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cover of Genealogy Of Queer Theory

Genealogy Of Queer Theory

William Turner

Temple University Press, 2000

Who are queers and what do they want? Could it be that we are all queers? Beginning with such questions, William B. Turner's lucid and engaging book traces the roots of queer theory to the growing awareness that few of us precisely fit standard categories for sexual and gender identity.

Turner shows how Michal Foucault's work contributed to feminists' investigations into the ways that power relates to identity. In the last decades of the twentieth century, feminists were the first to challenge the assumption that a claim to universal identity -- the white male citizen -- should serve as the foundation of political thought and action. Difference matters. Race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality interact, producing a wide array of identities that resist rigid definition and are mutable. By understanding the notion of transhistorical categories -- woman, man, homosexual, and so forth -- feminist and gay male scholars launched queer theoretical work as a new way to think about the politics of gender and sexuality.

A Geneology of Queer Theory probes the fierce debates among scholars and activists, weighing the charges that queer readings  of texts and identity politics do not constitute and might inhibit radical social change. Written by a historian, it considers the implications of queer theory for historical  inquiry and the distinction between philosophy and history. As such, the book will interest readers of gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender studies, intellectual history, political theory, and the history of gender/sexuality.
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cover of General Education in the Social Sciences: Centennial Reflections on the College of the University of Chicago

General Education in the Social Sciences

Centennial Reflections on the College of the University of Chicago

Edited by John J. MacAloon

University of Chicago Press, 1992

Higher education's most vibrant and contentious issues—common and specialized learning in the curriculum, conceptions of general and liberal education, the design of common core sequences, the merits of classic texts and contemporary research, Western and non-Western course materials, the place of undergraduate teaching in scholarly careers—have for decades been debated by the faculty of the College of the University of Chicago. At the College, they have become embodied in educational programs of sufficient historical depth to reveal patterns of intellectual and pedagogical continuity amidst changing social and institutional circumstances.

Social Science 2 holds the place of honor among these educational projects. For more than half a century, Soc 2 has been one of the most influential courses in American undergraduate education. This unique, year-long course, the oldest and most distinguished of its kind at any American university, has served as an ongoing experiment in how the social sciences can be taught and learned in the general education context.

In this collection John MacAloon has gathered essays by fourteen eminent social scientists—such as David Riesman, Michael Schudson, and F. Champion Ward—who as either teachers or students were profoundly shaped by Soc 2. Their multifarious and selective memories—full of dissonances and harmonies of recollection, judgment, and voice—create a compelling biography of a course and a college that have survived tumultous change through sustained and committed argument.

This book will be of great interest to anyone interested not only in the theory but the practice of higher education.
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cover of General History of Peru: Book 1

General History of Peru

Book 1

Martín de Murúa

University Press of Colorado, 2024

Mercedarian friar Martín de Murúa’s General History of Peru (Historia General del Piru, 1616) is one of the most significant Spanish chronicles of Inca history and Peru’s early colonial period yet to be published in English. Written over several decades and approved by King Philip III for publication, Murúa’s magnificent manuscript disappeared from public view for nearly 350 years until its publication in 1964. Here, translators Brian S. Bauer, Eliana Gamarra C., and Andrea Gonzales Lombardi present the first English translation of Book 1 of Murúa’s comprehensive three-part work.
 
Book 1 covers both the history of the Inca Empire and the first forty years of the Spanish occupation, up to and including the fall of Vilcabamba in 1572. While the J. Paul Getty Museum produced a digital facsimile of Murúa’s full Historia in 2008, it remained underused and, until now, untranslated. This translation revitalizes the momentous early volume with an introduction offering a window into Murúa’s life and the writing of his Historia, and extensive footnotes that provide the scholarly context of Murúa’s work.
 
This edition of The General History of Peru: Book 1 provides long-awaited access to Murúa’s contribution to Indigenous Andean history and early colonial Peru. The book is valuable for English-speaking students and scholars of pre-Hispanic Andean history, especially those interested in the ancient Andean world and colonial Peru’s literary production.
 
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cover of Generating Jobs: How to Increase Demand for Less-Skilled Workers

Generating Jobs

How to Increase Demand for Less-Skilled Workers

Richard B. Freeman

Russell Sage Foundation, 1998

The American economy is in danger of leaving its low-skilled workers behind. In the last two decades, the wages and employment levels of the least educated and experienced workers have fallen disastrously. Where willing workers once found ready employment at reasonable wages, our computerized, service-oriented economy demands workers who can read and write, master technology, deal with customers, and much else. Improved education and training will alleviate this problem in the long run, but educating the new workforce will take a substantial national investment over many years. In the meantime, we face increasingly acute questions about how to include low-skill workers in today's economy. Generating Jobs takes a hard look at these questions, and asks whether anything can be done to improve the lot of low-skilled workers by intervening in the labor market on their behalf. These micro demand-side policies seek to improve wages and employment levels—either by lowering the costs of hiring low-skilled workers through employer subsidies, or by raising wage levels, benefit levels, or hours of employment, or by providing employment via government jobs. Although these policies are not currently popular in the U.S., they have long been used in many countries. Generating Jobs provides a clear-eyed assessment of this history, and asks if any of these policies might be applicable to the current problems of low-skilled workers in the United States. The results are surprising. Several recently touted panaceas turn out to be costly and ineffective in the American labor market. Enterprise zones, for instance, are an expensive way of moving jobs into areas of high unemployment, costing as much as $60,000 per job. Similarly, job-sharing, which has had uneven success in Europe, turns out to be ill-suited to conditions in the U.S., where wages are relatively low and workers need to work long hours to maintain income. On the other hand, a number of older, less flashy policies turn out to have real, if modest, benefits. Wage subsidies have increased employment among qualifying workers, and public employment policies can increase the number of workers from targeted groups working during the program. While acknowledging that many solutions are counterproductive, this definitive review of active labor market policies shows that many programs can offer real help. More than any rhetoric, Generating Jobs is the best guide to future action and a serious response to those who claim that nothing can be done.
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cover of Generations

Generations

Vilém Flusser

University of Minnesota Press, 2027

A vision of modern humanity trapped inside the system it has created

Written in the 1960s and unpublished until 2017, Generations is Vilém Flusser’s largest work and the foundation for many of his later theories on media and post-history. In this ambitious study of the Modern Age, Flusser traces a devastating shift in Western civilization that ultimately leads to the modern “apparatus”: the impersonal, cybernetic system of self-programmed objectification that has become our reality.

Flusser presents history as a recurring struggle between generations, with each new generation overturning the values of the former and eventually drifting into a state of existential avoidance. This cycle becomes the basis for a powerful diagnosis of the modern condition. Flusser identifies a critical shift toward self-worship and collective will in humanity’s understanding of progress and divinity during the Renaissance. This shift foregrounded our path toward an automated world driven by apathetic functionaries serving the apparatus and widespread fascist irrationalism, catastrophically realized during the Holocaust.

With surprising relevance to the digital present that gradually empties the world of its grounded reality, Generations offers a striking account of humanity’s relationship to technology, algorithms, and systems of control. Flusser’s concept of the “apparatus” anticipates the modern experience of being shaped by social media, bureaucratic systems, and oppressive technologies. Arguing that contemporary humanity exists in a state of slow existential stagnation rather than dramatic apocalypse, the book asks and answers a pressing question: how did we get here?

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

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cover of Generations Past: Youth in East African History

Generations Past

Youth in East African History

Andrew Burton

Ohio University Press, 2010

Contemporary Africa is demographically characterized above all else by its youthfulness. In East Africa the median age of the population is now a striking 17.5 years, and more than 65 percent of the population is age 24 or under. This situation has attracted growing scholarly attention, resulting in an important and rapidly expanding literature on the position of youth in African societies.

While the scholarship examining the contemporary role of youth in African societies is rich and growing, the historical dimension has been largely neglected in the literature thus far. Generations Past seeks to address this gap through a wide-ranging selection of essays that covers an array of youth-related themes in historical perspective. Thirteen chapters explore the historical dimensions of youth in nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first–century Ugandan, Tanzanian, and Kenyan societies. Key themes running through the book include the analytical utility of youth as a social category; intergenerational relations and the passage of time; youth as a social and political problem; sex and gender roles among East African youth; and youth as historical agents of change. The strong list of contributors includes prominent scholars of the region, and the collection encompasses a good geographical spread of all three East African countries.

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cover of Generations and Collective Memory

Generations and Collective Memory

Amy Corning and Howard Schuman

University of Chicago Press, 2015

When discussing large social trends or experiences, we tend to group people into generations. But what does it mean to be part of a generation, and what gives that group meaning and coherence? It's collective memory, say Amy Corning and Howard Schuman, and in Generations and Collective Memory, they draw on an impressive range of research to show how generations share memories of formative experiences, and how understanding the way those memories form and change can help us understand society and history.

Their key finding—built on historical research and interviews in the United States and seven other countries (including China, Japan, Germany, Lithuania, Russia, Israel, and Ukraine)—is that our most powerful generational memories are of shared experiences in adolescence and early adulthood, like the 1963 Kennedy assassination for those born in the 1950s or the fall of the Berlin Wall for young people in 1989. But there are exceptions to that rule, and they're significant: Corning and Schuman find that epochal events in a country, like revolutions, override the expected effects of age, affecting citizens of all ages with a similar power and lasting intensity.

The picture Corning and Schuman paint of collective memory and its formation is fascinating on its face, but it also offers intriguing new ways to think about the rise and fall of historical reputations and attitudes toward political issues.
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cover of Generations of Exclusion: Mexican-Americans, Assimilation, and Race

Generations of Exclusion

Mexican-Americans, Assimilation, and Race

Edward E. Telles

Russell Sage Foundation, 2008

Foreword by Joan W. Moore When boxes of original files from a 1965 survey of Mexican Americans were discovered behind a dusty bookshelf at UCLA, sociologists Edward Telles and Vilma Ortiz recognized a unique opportunity to examine how the Mexican American experience has evolved over the past four decades.  Telles and Ortiz located and re-interviewed most of the original respondents and many of their children.  Then, they combined the findings of both studies to construct a thirty-five year analysis of Mexican American integration into American society.  Generations of Exclusion is the result of this extraordinary project. Generations of Exclusion measures Mexican American integration across a wide number of dimensions: education, English and Spanish language use, socioeconomic status, intermarriage, residential segregation, ethnic identity, and political participation. The study contains some encouraging findings, but many more that are troubling. Linguistically, Mexican Americans assimilate into mainstream America quite well—by the second generation, nearly all Mexican Americans achieve English proficiency. In many domains, however, the Mexican American story doesn't fit with traditional models of assimilation. The majority of fourth generation Mexican Americans continue to live in Hispanic neighborhoods, marry other Hispanics, and think of themselves as Mexican. And while Mexican Americans make financial strides from the first to the second generation, economic progress halts at the second generation, and poverty rates remain high for later generations. Similarly, educational attainment peaks among second generation children of immigrants, but declines for the third and fourth generations. Telles and Ortiz identify institutional barriers as a major source of Mexican American disadvantage. Chronic under-funding in school systems predominately serving Mexican Americans severely restrains progress. Persistent discrimination, punitive immigration policies, and reliance on cheap Mexican labor in the southwestern states all make integration more difficult. The authors call for providing Mexican American children with the educational opportunities that European immigrants in previous generations enjoyed. The Mexican American trajectory is distinct—but so is the extent to which this group has been excluded from the American mainstream. Most immigration literature today focuses either on the immediate impact of immigration or what is happening to the children of newcomers to this country. Generations of Exclusion shows what has happened to Mexican Americans over four decades. In opening this window onto the past and linking it to recent outcomes, Telles and Ortiz provide a troubling glimpse of what other new immigrant groups may experience in the future.
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cover of Generations: Academic Feminists In Dialogue

Generations

Academic Feminists In Dialogue

Devoney Looser

University of Minnesota Press, 1997

Explores the conflicts and challenges facing older and younger feminist scholars.

In universities and colleges across the country, feminists are debating their histories and future legacies, often expressing these controversies in generational terms. Some older, second wave feminists accuse younger ones of being careerist, overly theoretical, insufficiently political, and not grateful enough to previous generations. Some third wave feminists consider their foremothers naive, universalizing, or elitist, resentful of deviations from their established plans and improperly wielding their power. Generations addresses these divisions and impasses through sophisticated analyses of the challenges of “passing the torch.”

Generations is composed of essays from academic women at various professional stages-from established scholars to junior professors to graduate students. Some are concerned with telling intergenerational feminist histories based on both research and experience. Others describe difficulties faced by feminists of all ages in the academy today. A final cluster considers issues in the highly charged convergence of feminist theory and postmodernism. The promise of feminisms yet to come can be found in these pages, alongside some of the most resonant and important feminist voices of the last two decades. Generations both complicates and enlivens the transmission and rebirth of feminist knowledges from one generation to another. Contributors: Diane Elam, U of Wales; Elizabeth Francis, Brown U; Linda Frost, U of Alabama; Jane Gallop, U of Wisconsin; Dana Heller, Old Dominion U; Jane Kalbfleisch; Jeanne Marecek, Swarthmore College; Nancy K. Miller, CUNY; Mona Narain, Otterbein College; Angela M. S. Nelson, Bowling Green State U; Judith Newton, U of California, Davis; Rebecca Dakin Quinn; Gita Rajan, Fairfield U; Judith Roof, Indiana U; Theresa Ann Sears, U of Missouri at St. Louis; Ruthe Thompson; Michele Wallace, CUNY; Barbara A. White, U of New Hampshire; Lynda Zwinger, U of Arizona.
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cover of Generous Betrayal: Politics of Culture in the New Europe

Generous Betrayal

Politics of Culture in the New Europe

Unni Wikan

University of Chicago Press, 2002

All over Western Europe, the lot of many non-Western immigrants is one of marginalization, discrimination, and increasing segregation. In this bold and controversial book, Unni Wikan shows how an excessive respect for "their culture" has been part of the problem. Culture has become a new concept of race, sustaining ethnic identity politics that subvert human rights—especially for women and children. Fearful of being considered racist, state agencies have sacrificed freedom and equality in the name of culture.

Comparing her native Norway to Western Europe and the United States, Wikan focuses on people caught in turmoil, how institutions function, and the ways in which public opinion is shaped and state policies determined. Contradictions arise between policies of respect for minority cultures, welfare, and freedom, but the goal is the same: to create a society committed to both social justice and respect for human rights.

Writing with power and grace, Wikan makes a plea for a renewed moral vitality and human empathy that can pave the way for more effective social policies and create change.
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cover of Genetic Afterlives: Black Jewish Indigeneity in South Africa

Genetic Afterlives

Black Jewish Indigeneity in South Africa

Noah Tamarkin

Duke University Press, 2020

In 1997, M. E. R. Mathivha, an elder of the black Jewish Lemba people of South Africa, announced to the Lemba Cultural Association that a recent DNA study substantiated their ancestral connections to Jews. Lemba people subsequently leveraged their genetic test results to seek recognition from the post-apartheid government as indigenous Africans with rights to traditional leadership and land, retheorizing genetic ancestry in the process. In Genetic Afterlives, Noah Tamarkin illustrates how Lemba people give their own meanings to the results of DNA tests and employ them to manage competing claims of Jewish ethnic and religious identity, African indigeneity, and South African citizenship. Tamarkin turns away from genetics researchers' results that defined a single story of Lemba peoples' “true” origins and toward Lemba understandings of their own genealogy as multivalent. Guided by Lemba people’s negotiations of their belonging as diasporic Jews, South African citizens, and indigenous Africans, Tamarkin considers new ways to think about belonging that can acknowledge the importance of historical and sacred ties to land without valorizing autochthony, borders, or other technologies of exclusion.
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cover of Genetic Witness: Science, Law, and Controversy in the Making of DNA Profiling

Genetic Witness

Science, Law, and Controversy in the Making of DNA Profiling

Jay D. Aronson

Rutgers University Press, 2007

When DNA profiling was first introduced into the American legal system in 1987, it was heralded as a technology that would revolutionize law enforcement. As an investigative tool, it has lived up to much of this hype—it is regularly used to track down unknown criminals, put murderers and rapists behind bars, and exonerate the innocent. 
   
Yet, this promise took ten turbulent years to be fulfilled.  In Genetic Witness, Jay D. Aronson uncovers the dramatic early history of DNA profiling that has been obscured by the technique’s recent success.  He demonstrates that robust quality control and quality assurance measures were initially nonexistent, interpretation of test results was based more on assumption than empirical evidence, and the technique was susceptible to error at every stage. Most of these issues came to light only through defense challenges to what prosecutors claimed to be an infallible technology.  Although this process was fraught with controversy, inefficiency, and personal antagonism, the quality of DNA evidence improved dramatically as a result. Aronson argues, however, that the dream of a perfect identification technology remains unrealized.
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cover of Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History

Genetics and the Unsettled Past

The Collision of DNA, Race, and History

Wailoo, Keith

Rutgers University Press, 2012

Our genetic markers have come to be regarded as portals to the past. Analysis of these markers is increasingly used to tell the story of human migration; to investigate and judge issues of social membership and kinship; to rewrite history and collective memory; to right past wrongs and to arbitrate legal claims and human rights controversies; and to open new thinking about health and well-being. At the same time, in many societies genetic evidence is being called upon to perform a kind of racially charged cultural work: to repair the racial past and to transform scholarly and popular opinion about the “nature” of identity in the present.

Genetics and the Unsettled Past considers the alignment of genetic science with commercial genealogy, with legal and forensic developments, and with pharmaceutical innovation to examine how these trends lend renewed authority to biological understandings of race and history.

This unique collection brings together scholars from a wide range of disciplines—biology, history, cultural studies, law, medicine, anthropology, ethnic studies, sociology—to explore the emerging and often contested connections among race, DNA, and history. Written for a general audience, the book’s essays touch upon a variety of topics, including the rise and implications of DNA in genealogy, law, and other fields; the cultural and political uses and misuses of genetic information; the way in which DNA testing is reshaping understandings of group identity for French Canadians, Native Americans, South Africans, and many others within and across cultural and national boundaries; and the sweeping implications of genetics for society today.

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cover of Genetics, Disability, and Deafness

Genetics, Disability, and Deafness

John Vickrey Van Cleve

Gallaudet University Press, 2004

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louis Menand begins this wide-ranging volume with an essay that extols diversity and warns of the dangers of modifying the human genome. Nora Groce reviews the ways that societies have defined disability and creates an interpretive framework for discussing the relationship between culture and disability.

     In essays devoted to historical perspective, Brian H. Greenwald comments upon the real “toll” taken by A. G. Bell’s insistence upon oralism, while Joseph J. Murray weighs the nineteenth-century debate over whether deaf-deaf marriages should be encouraged. John S. Schuchman’s chilling account of deafness and eugenics in the Nazi era adds wrenching reinforcement to the impetus to include disabled people in genetics debates.

     Mark Willis offers an intensely personal reflection on the complexities of genetic alteration, addressing both his heart condition and his blindness in surprisingly different ways. Anna Middleton extends Willis’s concepts in her discussion of couples currently considering the use of genetic knowledge and technology to select for or against a gene that causes deafness.

     In the part on the science of genetics, Orit Dagan, Karen B. Avraham, Kathleen S. Arnos, and Arti Pandya clarify the choices presented by genetic engineering, and geneticist Walter E. Nance emphasizes the importance of science in offering individuals knowledge from which they can fashion their own decisions. In the concluding section, Christopher Krentz raises moral questions about the ever-continuing search for human perfection, and Michael Bérubé argues that disability should be considered democratically to ensure full participation of disabled people in all decisions that might affect them.

[more]
cover of Genii of the River Niger

Genii of the River Niger

Jean-Marie Gibbal

University of Chicago Press, 1993

The river Niger, a source of life and danger for the people in impoverished eastern Mali, is also the origin of elaborate mythology. From his travels through Mali and down the Niger in a dugout canoe, Jean-Marie Gibbal has created a personal documentary of the cultures of the region. The result is at once an ethnography of cultures in crisis and a poetic evocation of the environment and people he encountered.

Gibbal portrays the river as the dominant, cohesive force among people in the face of social and environmental strife. He focuses on the Ghimbala healing cult, which centers on the river, and how the cult structures social relations in the region. Gibbal vividly recreations the Ghimbala rites, nocturnal ceremonies of spirit possession and seance which animate the water spirits, or genii, that inhabit the river. The genii, he finds, provide the strength of social identity in a world where famine and competing versions of Islam threaten to overpower traditional culture.

In its original French publication, The Genii of the River Niger was honored with an Alexandra David-Neel literary prize in 1989. Its powerful lyricism, combined with fascinating ethnographic depth, will delight general readers and specialists alike and will stir debates among specialists in African studies, the anthropology of religion, and literature.
[more]
cover of Genital Cutting and Transnational Sisterhood: DISPUTING U.S. POLEMICS

Genital Cutting and Transnational Sisterhood

DISPUTING U.S. POLEMICS

Edited by Stanlie M. James and Claire C. Robertson

University of Illinois Press, 2002

Genital Cutting and Transnational Sisterhood is a much-needed response to the ethnocentric and arrogant Western perceptions surrounding female genital cutting (FGC), often referred to as either female genital mutilation or female circumcision, but including a variety of practices of varying history, severity, geographical distribution, and consequences.
 
In five provocative essays, the contributors to this timely volume challenge representations of FGC through a range of perspectives: history, human rights, law, missionary feminism, cultural relativism, anthropology, and the intersex movement. Balancing feminist ideals with culturally conscious approaches, they dispel sensationalized and widely accepted concepts that influence Western media, law, and feminist thought on FGC, including the ignorance and oversimplification of African history, cultures, and religions, and an exaggeration of the extent and geographical distribution of the various procedures performed. The assumption that FGC does not occur presently in the United States is also considered. From Alice Walker and Pratibha Parmar's documentary film Warrior Marks to mainstream media and prime time television, Genital Cutting and Transnational Sisterhood critiques the sources that perpetuate the harmful myths that all African women have been mutilated and promote doing so to their children, that those who perform it are barbaric, and that families who allow it are abusive.
 
With sensitivity and clarity, the contributors to Genital Cutting and Transnational Sisterhood provide necessary and alternative suggestions for the eradication of the most harmful procedures--which they feel can only occur when the leadership of African women in the ongoing campaigns is acknowledged and supported, and when income generation for African women and education of the U.S. public, rather than criminalization, become primary strategies.
 
[more]
cover of Genocide Lives in Us: Women, Memory, and Silence in Rwanda

Genocide Lives in Us

Women, Memory, and Silence in Rwanda

Jennie E. Burnet

University of Wisconsin Press, 2012

In the aftermath of the 1994 genocide, Rwandan women faced the impossible—resurrecting their lives amidst unthinkable devastation. Haunted by memories of lost loved ones and of their own experiences of violence, women rebuilt their lives from “less than nothing.” Neither passive victims nor innate peacemakers, they traversed dangerous emotional and political terrain to emerge as leaders in Rwanda today. This clear and engaging ethnography of survival tackles three interrelated phenomena—memory, silence, and justice—and probes the contradictory roles women played in postgenocide reconciliation.
    Based on more than a decade of intensive fieldwork, Genocide Lives in Us provides a unique grassroots perspective on a postconflict society. Anthropologist Jennie E. Burnet relates with sensitivity the heart-wrenching survival stories of ordinary Rwandan women and uncovers political and historical themes in their personal narratives. She shows that women’s leading role in Rwanda’s renaissance resulted from several factors: the dire postgenocide situation that forced women into new roles; advocacy by the Rwandan women’s movement; and the inclusion of women in the postgenocide government.

Honorable Mention, Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize, Women’s Caucus of the African Studies Association

[more]
cover of Genocide as Social Practice: Reorganizing Society under the Nazis and Argentina's Military Juntas

Genocide as Social Practice

Reorganizing Society under the Nazis and Argentina's Military Juntas

by Daniel Feierstein, Translated by Douglas Andrew Town

Rutgers University Press, 2014

Genocide not only annihilates people but also destroys and reorganizes social relations, using terror as a method. In Genocide as Social Practice, social scientist Daniel Feierstein looks at the policies of state-sponsored repression pursued by the Argentine military dictatorship against political opponents between 1976 and 1983 and those pursued by the Third Reich between 1933 and 1945. He finds similarities, not in the extent of the horror but in terms of the goals of the perpetrators.

The Nazis resorted to ruthless methods in part to stifle dissent but even more importantly to reorganize German society into a Volksgemeinschaft, or people’s community, in which racial solidarity would supposedly replace class struggle. The situation in Argentina echoes this. After seizing power in 1976, the Argentine military described its own program of forced disappearances, torture, and murder as a “process of national reorganization” aimed at remodeling society on “Western and Christian” lines.

For Feierstein, genocide can be considered a technology of power—a form of social engineering—that creates, destroys, or reorganizes relationships within a given society. It influences the ways in which different social groups construct their identity and the identity of others, thus shaping the way that groups interrelate. Feierstein establishes continuity between the “reorganizing genocide” first practiced by the Nazis in concentration camps and the more complex version—complex in terms of the symbolic and material closure of social relationships —later applied in Argentina. In conclusion, he speculates on how to construct a political culture capable of confronting and resisting these trends.

First published in Argentina, in Spanish, Genocide as Social Practice has since been translated into many languages, now including this English edition. The book provides a distinctive and valuable look at genocide through the lens of Latin America as well as Europe.

Download open access ebook here.
[more]
cover of Genocide: Truth, Memory, and Representation

Genocide

Truth, Memory, and Representation

Alexander Laban Hinton and Kevin Lewis O Neill, eds.

Duke University Press, 2009

What happens to people and the societies in which they live after genocide? How are the devastating events remembered on the individual and collective levels, and how do these memories intersect and diverge as the rulers of postgenocidal states attempt to produce a monolithic “truth” about the past? In this important volume, leading anthropologists consider such questions about the relationship of genocide, truth, memory, and representation in the Balkans, East Timor, Germany, Guatemala, Indonesia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sudan, and other locales.

Specialists on the societies about which they write, these anthropologists draw on ethnographic research to provide on-the-ground analyses of communities in the wake of mass brutality. They investigate how mass violence is described or remembered, and how those representations are altered by the attempts of others, from NGOs to governments, to assert “the truth” about outbreaks of violence. One contributor questions the neutrality of an international group monitoring violence in Sudan and the assumption that such groups are, at worst, benign. Another examines the consequences of how events, victims, and perpetrators are portrayed by the Rwandan government during the annual commemoration of that country’s genocide in 1994. Still another explores the silence around the deaths of between eighty and one hundred thousand people on Bali during Indonesia’s state-sponsored anticommunist violence of 1965–1966, a genocidal period that until recently was rarely referenced in tourist guidebooks, anthropological studies on Bali, or even among the Balinese themselves. Other contributors consider issues of political identity and legitimacy, coping, the media, and “ethnic cleansing.” Genocide: Truth, Memory, and Representation reveals the major contribution that cultural anthropologists can make to the study of genocide.

Contributors. Pamela Ballinger, Jennie E. Burnet, Conerly Casey, Elizabeth Drexler, Leslie Dwyer, Alexander Laban Hinton, Sharon E. Hutchinson, Uli Linke, Kevin Lewis O’Neill, Antonius C. G. M. Robben, Debra Rodman, Victoria Sanford

[more]
cover of Genoese Immigration and Iberian Anxiety in the Early Modern Atlantic

Genoese Immigration and Iberian Anxiety in the Early Modern Atlantic

Richard Ibarra

University of Delaware Press, 2027

This book explores the experiences of Genoese immigrants in the sixteenth-century Iberian Atlantic, focusing on how they navigated issues of identity and community membership across generations and transnational movement. Moving to cities like Seville, as well as Santo Domingo and Mexico City, Genoese families encountered both tremendous opportunities and significant challenges in establishing their lives, reaching a communal apogee—the “Genoese Century”—while they faced increasing Iberian anxieties. While some found ways to integrate into Iberian society through religious and charitable activities, retaining references to their Genoese past, others dissimulated or renounced their Genoese identity. Through a combination of notarial and inquisition records, litigation to prove nobility (hidalguía) and purity of blood (limpieza de sangre), literary narratives, and funerary monuments, Richard Ibarra provides insights into the changing identity claims of Genoese families and the broader attitudes toward foreigners in Iberian society that reached beyond perceived religious and ethnic difference. 
 

[more]
cover of Genomics with Care: Minding the Double Binds of Science

Genomics with Care

Minding the Double Binds of Science

Mike Fortun

Duke University Press, 2023

In Genomics with Care Mike Fortun presents an experimental ethnography of contemporary genomics, analyzing science as a complex amalgam of cognition and affect, formal logics and tacit knowledge, statistics, and ethics. Fortun examines genomics in terms of care—a dense composite of affective and cognitive forces that drive scientists and the relations they form with their objects of research, data, knowledge, and community. Reading genomics with care shows how each resists definition yet is so entangled as to become indistinguishable. Fortun analyzes four patterns of genomic care—curation, scrupulousness, solicitude, and friendship—seen in the conceptual, technological, social, and methodological changes that transpired as the genetics of the 1980s became the genomics of the 1990s, and then the “post-genomics” of the 2000s. By tracing the dense patterns made where care binds to science, Fortun shows how these patterns mark where scientists are driven to encounter structural double binds that are impossible to resolve, and yet are where scientific change and creativity occur.
[more]
cover of Genre Fission: A New Discourse Practice for Culture Studies

Genre Fission

A New Discourse Practice for Culture Studies

Marleen S. Barr

University of Iowa Press, 2000

What do Amsterdam prostitutes, NASA astronauts, cross-dressing texts, and Star Trek characters have in common? Only Marleen Barr knows for sure. In Genre Fission, the award-winning author revitalizes literary and cultural theory by proposing an entirely new discourse practice of examining the points where genres and attendant meanings first converge, then reemerge as something new. Part literary analysis, part cultural studies, part feminist critique flavored with a smattering of science fiction and utopian studies, it is witty and eccentric, entertaining and enlightening.

Barr expands postmodern assumptions about cultural studies by suggesting that "genre fission" is occurring among discrete literary and cultural "types" of events--mainstream novels, science fiction, historical narratives, film, paintings, and museum displays. For her literary insights, Barr turns her attention to such mainstream authors as Saul Bellow, John Updike, Marge Piercy, and John Barth as well as science fiction writers Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler and Hispanic American writers Julia Alvarez, Ana Castillo, and Cristina García, among others.

Barr moves from literary to culture studies by addressing such phenomena from contemporary mass culture as the urban landscapes of New York and Los Angeles, Jackie Kennedy, the Star Trek industry, Lynn Redgrave, Amsterdam's red light district, Lorena Bobbitt, and the Apollo astronauts--to provide only a few of the relevant examples. Thus Genre Fission attains what Barr herself designates (in describing the art of Judy Chicago and Lee Bontecou) as "utopian interweavings of difference," crossing numerous boundaries in order to frame a larger territory for exploration.
[more]
cover of Genre Worlds: Popular Fiction and Twenty-First-Century Book Culture

Genre Worlds

Popular Fiction and Twenty-First-Century Book Culture

Kim Wilkins, Beth Driscoll, and Lisa Fletcher

University of Massachusetts Press, 2022

Works of genre fiction are a source of enjoyment, read during cherished leisure time and in incidental moments of relaxation. This original book takes readers inside popular genres of fiction, including crime, fantasy, and romance, to reveal how personal tastes, social connections, and industry knowledge shape genre worlds. Attuned to both the pleasure and the profession of producing genre fiction, the authors investigate contemporary developments in the field—the rise of Amazon, self-publishing platforms, transmedia storytelling, and growing global publishing conglomerates—and show how these interact with older practices, from fan conventions to writers’ groups.

Sitting at the intersection of literary studies, genre studies, fan studies, and studies of the book and publishing cultures, Genre Worlds considers how contemporary genre fiction is produced and circulated on a global scale. Its authors propose an innovative theoretical framework that unfolds genre fiction’s most compelling characteristics: its connected social, industrial, and textual practices. As they demonstrate, genre fiction books are not merely texts; they are also nodes of social and industrial activity involving the production, dissemination, and reception of the texts.

[more]
cover of Genres of Listening: An Ethnography of Psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires

Genres of Listening

An Ethnography of Psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires

Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas

Duke University Press, 2022

In Genres of Listening Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas explores a unique culture of listening and communicating in Buenos Aires. She traces how psychoanalytic listening circulates beyond the clinical setting to become a central element of social interaction and cultural production in the city that has the highest number of practicing psychologists and psychoanalysts in the world. Marsilli-Vargas develops the concept of genres of listening to demonstrate that hearers listen differently, depending on where, how, and to whom they are listening. In particular, she focuses on psychoanalytic listening as a specific genre. Porteños (citizens of Buenos Aires) have developed a “psychoanalytic ear” that emerges during conversational encounters in everyday interactions in which participants offer different interpretations of the hidden meaning the words carry. Marsilli-Vargas does not analyze these interpretations as impositions or interruptions but as productive exchanges. By outlining how psychoanalytic listening operates as a genre, Marsilli-Vargas opens up ways to imagine other modes of listening and forms of social interaction.
[more]
cover of Gentile New York: The Images of Non-Jews among Jewish Immigrants

Gentile New York

The Images of Non-Jews among Jewish Immigrants

Ribak, Gil

Rutgers University Press, 2012

The very question of “what do Jews think about the goyim” has fascinated Jews and Gentiles, anti-Semites and philo-Semites alike. Much has been written about immigrant Jews in nineteenth- and twentieth-century New York City, but Gil Ribak’s critical look at the origins of Jewish liberalism in America provides a more complicated and nuanced picture of the Americanization process.

Gentile New York examines these newcomers’ evolving feelings toward non-Jews through four critical decades in the American Jewish experience. Ribak considers how they perceived Gentiles in general as well as such different groups as “Yankees” (a common term for WASPs in many Yiddish sources), Germans, Irish, Italians, Poles, and African Americans. As they discovered the complexity of America’s racial relations, the immigrants found themselves at odds with “white” American values or behavior and were drawn instead into cooperative relationships with other minorities. Sparked with many previously unknown anecdotes, quotations, and events, Ribak’s research relies on an impressive number of memoirs, autobiographies, novels, newspapers, and journals culled from both sides of the Atlantic.
 

[more]
cover of Gentlemen of the Woods: Manhood, Myth, and the American Lumberjack

Gentlemen of the Woods

Manhood, Myth, and the American Lumberjack

Willa Hammitt Brown

University of Minnesota Press, 2025

Lumberjacks: the men, the myth, and the making of an American legend

The folk hero Paul Bunyan, burly, bearded, wielding his big ax, stands astride the story of the upper Midwest—a manly symbol of the labor that cleared the vast north woods for the march of industrialization while somehow also maintaining an aura of pristine nature. This idea, celebrated in popular culture with songs and folktales, receives a long overdue and thoroughly revealing correction in Gentlemen of the Woods, a cultural history of the life and lore of the real lumberjack and his true place in American history.

Now recalled as heroes of wilderness and masculinity, lumberjacks in their own time were despised as amoral transients. Willa Hammitt Brown shows that nineteenth-century jacks defined their communities of itinerant workers by metrics of manhood that were abhorrent to the residents of the nearby Northwoods boomtowns, valuing risk-taking and skill rather than restraint and control. Reviewing songs, stories, and firsthand accounts from loggers, Brown brings to life the activities and experiences of the lumberjacks as they moved from camp to camp. She contrasts this view with the popular image cultivated by retreating lumber companies that had to sell off utterly barren land. This mythologized image glorified the lumberjack and evoked a kindly, flannel-wearing, naturalist hero.

Along with its portrait of lumberjack life and its analysis of the creation of lumberjack myth, Gentlemen of the Woods offers new insight into the intersections of race and social class in the logging enterprise, considering the actual and perceived roles of outsider lumberjacks and Native inhabitants of the northern forests. Anchored in the dual forces of capitalism and colonization, this lively and compulsively readable account offers a new way to understand a myth and history that has long captured our collective imagination.

[more]
cover of Gentlemen's Disagreement: Alfred Kinsey, Lewis Terman, and the Sexual Politics of Smart Men

Gentlemen's Disagreement

Alfred Kinsey, Lewis Terman, and the Sexual Politics of Smart Men

Peter Hegarty

University of Chicago Press, 2013

What is the relationship between intelligence and sex? In recent decades, studies of the controversial histories of both intelligence testing and of human sexuality in the United States have been increasingly common—and hotly debated. But rarely have the intersections of these histories been examined. In Gentlemen’s Disagreement, Peter Hegarty enters this historical debate by recalling the debate between Lewis Terman—the intellect who championed the testing of intelligence— and pioneering sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, and shows how intelligence and sexuality have interacted in American psychology.

Through a fluent discussion of intellectually gifted onanists, unhappily married men, queer geniuses, lonely frontiersmen, religious ascetics, and the two scholars themselves, Hegarty traces the origins of Terman’s complaints about Kinsey’s work to show how the intelligence testing movement was much more concerned with sexuality than we might remember. And, drawing on Foucault, Hegarty reconciles these legendary figures by showing how intelligence and sexuality in early American psychology and sexology were intertwined then and remain so to this day.

[more]
cover of Gentrification Down the Shore

Gentrification Down the Shore

Molly Vollman Makris

Rutgers University Press, 2021

Makris and Gatta engage in a rich ethnographic investigation of Asbury Park to better understand the connection between jobs and seasonal gentrification and the experiences of longtime residents in this beach-community city. They demonstrate how the racial inequality in the founding of Asbury Park is reverberating a century later. This book tells an important and nuanced tale of gentrification using an intersectional lens to examine the history of race relations, the too often overlooked history of the postindustrial city, the role of the LGBTQ population, barriers to employment and access to amenities, and the role of developers as the city rapidly changes. Makris and Gatta draw on in-depth interviews, focus groups, ethnographic observation, as well as data analysis to tell the reader a story of life on the West Side of Asbury Park as the East Side prospers and to point to a potential path forward.
[more]
cover of Geographic Citizen Science Design: No One Left Behind

Geographic Citizen Science Design

No One Left Behind

Edited by Artemis Skarlatidou and Muki Haklay

University College London, 2020

A selection of case studies in the field of geographic citizen science casting insight on future research.

Unbeknownst to them as they made their scientific discoveries, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and other “gentlemen scientists” would later inspire a field of scientific practice and innovation known as citizen science. Today, the growth and availability of citizen science projects have been substantial, as anyone can now contribute to a scientific discipline without professional qualifications. As a subset of this movement, geographic citizen science presents a unique approach towards supporting the participation of everyday citizens in the collection, analysis, and dissemination of scientific data. This book presents a selection of wide-ranging case studies that provide insights into the design, interaction barriers, and lessons learned from a diverse set of participants. The volume captures the current status of research and development of geographic citizen science, providing critical insight to inform technological innovation and future research in this area.
 
[more]
cover of Geographical Identities Of Ethnic America: Race, Space, And Place

Geographical Identities Of Ethnic America

Race, Space, And Place

Kate A. Berry

University of Nevada Press, 2001

Twenty distinguished geographers examine the ways in which place fashions, recreates, and contextualizes human identity in North America. This volume discusses themes of population and habitat, displacement and circulation, resources and economic survival, through the experiences of several ethnic minorities. It covers such topics as Samoan communities in urban Southern California, South Asian migration to Canada, Native American health-care systems, and public housing for African Americans. Supported by statistical tables and graphs, maps, and photos that reflect a wide range of theoretical and historical approaches, the essays examine such topics as immigration, housing, and landscapes, complemented with discussions of religious ceremonies, women and marriage-mate selection, resource conflicts, health care, and social networking.
[more]
cover of Geographical Sources of Ming-Qing History

Geographical Sources of Ming-Qing History

Timothy Brook

University of Michigan Press, 2002

First published in 1988 in response to the growing need for documentation concerning local history in the late imperial period, Geographical Sources provides bibliographical data regarding two distinct genres: route books, and topographical and institutional gazetteers. In its second edition, this essential research tool has been completely revised and expanded with close to one hundred new entries, which provide complete coverage of these important sources for research in Chinese social, cultural, and religious history. The separate introductions to the two genres introduce the student to the history and uses of these materials. In addition to providing bibliographic data and noting variant editions, each entry provides locations where a work or its later editions can be found, whether in North America, Europe, China, or Japan.
[more]
cover of Geographies of Digital Exclusion: Data and Inequality

Geographies of Digital Exclusion

Data and Inequality

Mark Graham

Pluto Press, 2021

Today's urban environments are layered with data and algorithms that fundamentally shape how we perceive and move through space. But are our digitally dense environments continuing to amplify inequalities rather than alleviate them? This book looks at the key contours of information inequality, and who, what and where gets left out.

Platforms like Google Maps and Wikipedia have become important gateways to understanding the world, and yet they are characterized by significant gaps and biases, often driven by processes of exclusion. As a result, their digital augmentations tend to be refractions rather than reflections: they highlight only some facets of the world at the expense of others.

This doesn't mean that more equitable futures aren't possible. By outlining the mechanisms through which our digital and material worlds intersect, the authors conclude with a roadmap for what alternative digital geographies might look like.

[more]
cover of Geographies of Relation: Diasporas and Borderlands in the Americas

Geographies of Relation

Diasporas and Borderlands in the Americas

Theresa Delgadillo

University of Michigan Press, 2024

Geographies of Relation offers a new lens for examining diaspora and borderlands texts and performances that considers the inseparability of race, ethnicity, and gender in imagining and enacting social change. Theresa Delgadillo crosses interdisciplinary and canonical borders to investigate the interrelationships of African-descended Latinx and mestizx peoples through an analysis of Latin American, Latinx, and African American literature, film, and performance.
 
Not only does Delgadillo offer a rare extended analysis of Black Latinidades in Chicanx literature and theory, but she also considers over a century’s worth of literary, cinematic, and performative texts to support her argument about the significance of these cultural sites and overlaps. Chapters illuminate the significance of Toña La Negra in the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, reconsider feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa’s work in revising exclusionary Latin American ideologies of mestizaje, delve into the racial and gender frameworks Sandra Cisneros attempts to rewrite, unpack encounters between African Americans and Black Puerto Ricans in texts by James Baldwin and Marta Moreno Vega, explore the African diaspora in colonial and contemporary Peru through Daniel Alarcón’s literature and the documentary Soy Andina, and revisit the centrality of Black power in ending colonialism in Cuban narratives. Geographies of Relation demonstrates the long histories of networks and exchanges across the Americas as well as the interrelationships among Indigenous, Black, African American, mestizx, Chicanx, and Latinx peoples. It offers a compelling argument that geographies of relation are as significant as national frameworks in structuring cultural formation and change in this hemisphere. 
[more]
cover of Geographies of the Ear: The Cultural Politics of Sound in Contemporary Barcelona

Geographies of the Ear

The Cultural Politics of Sound in Contemporary Barcelona

Tania Gentic

Duke University Press, 2025

In Geographies of the Ear, Tania Gentic examines the language and soundscape of post-Franco Barcelona to listen for the remnants of a globalized colonial ear. She theorizes “echoic memory” to understand how sound circulates from the past to the present—and from neighborhood to nation to globe—to trace how sonic practices produce and contest modernity, community identity, and democracy. Focusing on migrant and tourist accents, free radio stations, punk music, drag performances, and antigentrification protests, Gentic shows how the underground sounds in Barcelona complicate a modernizing aural imaginary of place. By thinking through the auralities present in literature, fanzines, comic books, documentary films, television and print media, popular music, public protests, and even everyday conversation, Gentic outlines the difficulties of considering the contemporary city as either the product of a monolingual national identity or a lived space easily circumscribed by geographical categories such as North, South, East, or West.
[more]
cover of Geography And Social Movement: Comparing Antinuclear Activism in the Boston Area

Geography And Social Movement

Comparing Antinuclear Activism in the Boston Area

Byron A. Miller

University of Minnesota Press, 2000

A comparative analysis of the implications of space, place, and scale in political mobilization.

A comparative analysis of the implications of space, place, and scale in political mobilization.

Context matters, as students of social movements increasingly agree, and yet very little attention has been paid to the role geography plays in activism. Geography and Social Movements corrects this oversight, bringing a geographical perspective to the study of social movements. Byron A. Miller directly addresses the implications of space, place, and scale in social movement mobilization, and then demonstrates their significance in a detailed comparative analysis of peace movements in three municipalities around Boston. In focusing on the Boston area-an old northeastern region, heavily industrialized with many companies working on military contracts, and also a center of education-Miller is able to explore how campaigns aimed at curbing nuclear arms operate within the cultural, political, social, and economic confines of particular places and spaces. He shows how the decisions and actions of local peace movement organizations played a central role in the movement’s successes and failures, and how local organizations had to respond to the differing class, race, and gender characteristics of different locales. Miller’s empirical analysis clearly demonstrates that geographic strategies for social movement organizations have direct consequences for the successes and failures of specific campaigns.
[more]
cover of Geography's Quantitative Revolutions: Edward A. Ackerman and the Cold War Origins of Big Data

Geography's Quantitative Revolutions

Edward A. Ackerman and the Cold War Origins of Big Data

Elvin Wyly

West Virginia University Press, 2019

Do you have a smartphone? Billions of people on the planet now navigate their daily lives with the kind of advanced Global Positioning System capabilities once reserved for the most secretive elements of America’s military-industrial complex. But when so many people have access to the most powerful technologies humanity has ever devised for the precise determination of geographical coordinates, do we still need a specialized field of knowledge called geography?

Just as big data and artificial intelligence promise to automate occupations ranging from customer service and truck driving to stock trading and financial analysis, our age of algorithmic efficiency seems to eliminate the need for humans who call themselves geographers—at the precise moment when engaging with information about the peoples, places, and environments of a diverse world is more popular than ever before. How did we get here? This book traces the recent history of geography, information, and technology through the biography of Edward A. Ackerman, an important but forgotten figure in geography’s “quantitative revolution.” It argues that Ackerman’s work helped encode the hidden logics of a distorted philosophical heritage—a dangerous, cybernetic form of thought known as militant neo-Kantianism—into the network architectures of today’s pervasive worlds of surveillance capitalism.

[more]
cover of Geologic Life: Inhuman Intimacies and the Geophysics of Race

Geologic Life

Inhuman Intimacies and the Geophysics of Race

Kathryn Yusoff

Duke University Press, 2024

In Geologic Life, Kathryn Yusoff theorizes the processes by which race and racialization emerged geologically. Examining both the history of geology as a discipline and ongoing mineral and resource extraction, Yusoff locates forms of imperial geology embedded in Western and Enlightenment thought and highlights how it creates anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, and anti-Brown environmental and racial injustices. Throughout, she outlines how the disciplines of geology and geography—and their conventions: surveying, identifying, classifying, valuing, and extracting—established and perpetuated colonial practices that ordered the world and people along a racial axis. Examining the conceptualization of the inhuman as political, geophysical, and paleontological, Yusoff unearths an apartheid of materiality as distinct geospatial forms. This colonial practice of geology organized and underpinned racialized accounts of space and time in ways that materially made Anthropocene Earth. At the same time, Yusoff turns to Caribbean, Indigenous, and Black thought to chart a parallel geologic epistemology of the "earth-bound" that challenges what and who the humanities have chosen to overlook in its stories of the earth. By reconsidering the material epistemologies of the earth as an on-going geotrauma in colonial afterlives, Yusoff demonstrates that race is as much a geological formation as a biological one.
[more]
cover of Geology of the Netherlands East Indies: Lectures Delivered as Exchange-Professor at the University of Michigan in 1921-1922

Geology of the Netherlands East Indies

Lectures Delivered as Exchange-Professor at the University of Michigan in 1921-1922

H. Albert Brouwer

University of Michigan Press, 1925

The Geology of the Netherlands East Indies is a collection of lectures delivered at the University of Michigan in 1921 and 1922. The information was shaped with great industry and skill by Laurence M. Gould, from the Department of Geology at the University of Michigan, the source materials consisting of notes made by him during the lectures. The manuscript was added to by H. Albert Brouwer.The Geology of the Netherlands East Indies provides an outline of a field for geological research that is full of promise. As may be noted from the bibliography given in the Appendix, a great deal has been written about various phases of the geology of the Netherlands East Indies, but a large part of the subject matter appeared in this book for the first time in English.
[more]
cover of Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism

Geontologies

A Requiem to Late Liberalism

Elizabeth A. Povinelli

Duke University Press, 2016

In Geontologies Elizabeth A. Povinelli continues her project of mapping the current conditions of late liberalism by offering a bold retheorization of power. Finding Foucauldian biopolitics unable to adequately reveal contemporary mechanisms of power and governance, Povinelli describes a mode of power she calls geontopower, which operates through the regulation of the distinction between Life and Nonlife and the figures of the Desert, the Animist, and the Virus. Geontologies examines this formation of power from the perspective of Indigenous Australian maneuvers against the settler state. And it probes how our contemporary critical languages—anthropogenic climate change, plasticity, new materialism, antinormativity—often unwittingly transform their struggles against geontopower into a deeper entwinement within it. A woman who became a river, a snakelike entity who spawns the fog, plesiosaurus fossils and vast networks of rock weirs: in asking how these different forms of existence refuse incorporation into the vocabularies of Western theory Povinelli provides a revelatory new way to understand a form of power long self-evident in certain regimes of settler late liberalism but now becoming visible much further beyond.
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cover of Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms

Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms

Georg Simmel

University of Chicago Press, 1972

"Of those who created the intellectual capital used to launch the enterprise of professional sociology, Georg Simmel was perhaps the most original and fecund. In search of a subject matter for sociology that would distinguish it from all other social sciences and humanistic disciplines, he charted a new field for discovery and proceeded to explore a world of novel topics in works that have guided and anticipated the thinking of generations of sociologists. Such distinctive concepts of contemporary sociology as social distance, marginality, urbanism as a way of life, role-playing, social behavior as exchange, conflict as an integrating process, dyadic encounter, circular interaction, reference groups as perspectives, and sociological ambivalence embody ideas which Simmel adumbrated more than six decades ago."—Donald N. Levine

Half of the material included in this edition of Simmel's writings represents new translations. This includes Simmel's important, lengthy, and previously untranslated "Group Expansion and Development of Individuality," as well as three selections from his most neglected work, Philosophy of Money; in addition, the introduction to Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie, chapter one of the Lebensanschauung, and three essays are translated for the first time.
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