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A pointed look at the state of tech-based mental healthcare and what we must do to change it
 

Proponents of technology trumpet it as the solution to the massive increase in the mental distress that confronts our nation. They herald the arrival of algorithms, intelligent chatbots, smartphone applications, telemental healthcare services, and more—but are these technological fixes really as good as they seem? In Therapy Tech, Emma Bedor Hiland presents the first comprehensive study of how technology has transformed mental healthcare, showing that this revolution can’t deliver what it promises.

Far from providing a solution, technological mental healthcare perpetuates preexisting disparities while relying on the same failed focus on personal responsibility that has let us down before. Through vivid, in-depth case studies, Therapy Tech reveals these problems, covering issues including psychosurveillance on websites like Facebook and 7 Cups of Tea, shortcomings of popular AI “doctors on demand” like Woebot, Wysa, and Joy, and even how therapists are being conscripted into the gig economy.

Featuring a vital coda that brings Therapy Tech up to date for the COVID era, this book is the first to give readers a large-scale analysis of mental health technologies and the cultural changes they have enabled. Both a sobering dissection of the current state of mental health and a necessary warning of where things are headed, Therapy Tech makes an important assertion about how to help those in need of mental health services today.

There She Goes Again interrogates the representation of ostensibly powerful women in transmedia franchises, examining how presumed feminine traits—love, empathy, altruism, diplomacy—are alternately lauded and repudiated as possibilities for effecting long-lasting social change. By questioning how these franchises reimagine their protagonists over time, the book reflects on the role that gendered exceptionalism plays in social and political action, as well as what forms of knowledge and power are presumed distinctly feminine. The franchises explored in this book illustrate the ambivalent (post)feminist representation of women protagonists as uniquely gifted in ways both gendered and seemingly ungendered, and yet inherently bound to expressions of their femininity. At heart,There She Goes Again asks under what terms and in what contexts women protagonists are imagined, envisioned, embodied, and replicated in media. Especially now, in a period of gradually increasing representation, women protagonists demonstrate the importance of considering how we should define—and whether we need—feminine forms of knowledge and power.

In There Used to Be Order, Patience Mususa considers social change in the Copperbelt region of Zambia following the re-privatization of the large state mining conglomerate, the Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines (ZCCM), in the mid-1990s. As the copper mines were Zambia’s most important economic asset, the sale of ZCCM was considered a major loss to the country. More crucially, privatization marked the end of a way of life for mine employees and mining communities. Based on three years of ethnographic field research, this book examines life for those living in difficult economic circumstances, and considers the tension between the life they live and the nature of an “extractive area.” This account, unusual in its examination of middle-income decline in Africa, directs us to think of the Copperbelt not only as an extractive locale for copper whose activities are affected by the market, but also as a place where the residents’ engagement with the harsh reality of losing jobs and struggling to earn a living after the withdrawal of welfare is simultaneously changing both the material and social character of the place. Drawing on phenomenological approaches, the book develops a theoretical model of “trying,” which accounts for both Copperbelt residents’ aspirations and efforts.

"How is it that there are so many lloronas?" A haunting figure of Mexican oral and literary traditions, La Llorona permeates the consciousness of her folk community. From a ghost who haunts the riverbank to a murderous mother condemned to wander the earth after killing her own children in an act of revenge or grief, the Weeping Woman has evolved within Chican@ imaginations across centuries, yet no truly comprehensive examination of her impact existed until now. Tracing La Llorona from ancient oral tradition to her appearance in contemporary material culture, There Was a Woman delves into the intriguing transformations of this provocative icon.

From La Llorona's roots in legend to the revisions of her story and her exaltation as a symbol of resistance, Domino Renee Perez illuminates her many permutations as seductress, hag, demon, or pitiful woman. Perez draws on more than two hundred artifacts to provide vivid representations of the ways in which these perceived identities are woven from abstract notions—such as morality or nationalism—and from concrete, often misunderstood concepts from advertising to television and literature. The result is a rich and intricate survey of a powerful figure who continues to be reconfigured.

Andrea Carlisle isn’t struggling with her new identity as The Old Woman in the ways society seems to think she should. In fact, she is finding her later years to be an extraordinary and interesting time. In trying to understand the discrepancy, she interrogates the sources of negativity in literature, art, and received wisdom that often lead women to dread this transformative time of life. Given the cultural pervasiveness of ill will toward older women, it is small wonder that growing older is not seen as a natural, even desirable, process. Although some elements of aging are hard to reckon with, there is much to make use of and delight in, along with mysteries, surprises, and revelations.

In these personal essays, Carlisle looks for new ways to bring herself more fully to this time of life, such as daily walks with other women and connecting to the natural world that surrounds her houseboat on an Oregon river at the foot of a forest. She writes about experiences shared with many, if not most, older women: wondering at her body’s transformation, discovering new talents, caregiving, facing loss, tuning in to life patterns and drawing strength through understanding them, letting go (or not) of pieces of the past, and facing other changes large and small. Those curious about, approaching, or living in old age will find wisdom and insight in her unique perspective.

In a voice that rings with clarity, humor, humility, Carlisle shows us that Old Age is not another country where we can expect to find The Old Woman grimly waiting, but is instead an expansion of the borders in the country we’re most familiar with: ourselves.

In There’s a Disco Ball Between Us, Jafari S. Allen offers a sweeping and lively ethnographic and intellectual history of what he calls “Black gay habits of mind.” In conversational and lyrical language, Allen locates this sensibility as it emerged from radical Black lesbian activism and writing during the long 1980s. He traverses multiple temporalities and locations, drawing on research and fieldwork conducted across the globe, from Nairobi, London, and Paris to Toronto, Miami, and Trinidad and Tobago. In these locations and archives, Allen traces the genealogies of Black gay politics and cultures in the visual art, poetry, film, Black feminist theory, historiography, and activism of thinkers and artists such as Audre Lorde, Marsha P. Johnson, Essex Hemphill, Colin Robinson, Marlon Riggs, Pat Parker, and Joseph Beam. Throughout, Allen renarrates Black queer history while cultivating a Black gay method of thinking and writing. In so doing, he speaks to the urgent contemporary struggles for social justice while calling on Black studies to pursue scholarship, art, and policy derived from the lived experience and fantasies of Black people throughout the world.

Defines, examines, and elevates home video to its rightful place

From its recording of family events to its influence on filmmaking, home video defies easy categorization and demands serious consideration. In There’s No Place Like Home Video, James Moran takes on this neglected aspect of popular culture. He offers a cultural history of amateur home video, exploring its technological and ideological predecessors, the development of event videography, and its symbiotic relationship with television and film. He also investigates the broader field of video, taking on the question of medium specificity: the attempt to define its unique identity, to capture what constitutes its pure practice.

In Moran’s discussion of video, he argues that previous scholars have not sufficiently dealt with its nature as hybrid, varied, and mutable. He argues that such a medium shouldn’t be conceived as pure in and of itself; it is neither autonomous from other media nor entirely dependent on any other, but instead has a chameleonlike interface with films, television, computers, telephones, and even architecture. Rather than look for a grand narrative to define its specificity, Moran places video and home video at the intersections of multiple forms of communication.

The United States at the turn of the twentieth century cultivated a passion for big. It witnessed the emergence of large-scale corporate capitalism; the beginnings of American imperialism on a global stage; record-level immigration; a rapid expansion of cities; and colossal events and structures like world's fairs, amusement parks, department stores, and skyscrapers. Size began to play a key role in American identity. During this period, bigness signaled American progress.

These Days of Large Things explores the centrality of size to American culture and national identity and the preoccupation with physical stature that pervaded American thought. Clarke examines the role that body size played in racial theory and the ways in which economic changes in the nation generated conflicting attitudes toward growth and bigness. Finally, Clarke investigates the relationship between stature and gender.

These Days of Large Things brings together a remarkable range of cultural material including scientific studies, photographs, novels, cartoons, architecture, and film. As a general cultural and intellectual history of the period, this work will be of interest to students and scholars in American studies, U.S. history, American literature, and gender studies.

Michael Tavel Clarke is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Calgary.

Cover photograph: "New York from Its Pinnacles," Alvin Langdon Coburn (1912). Courtesy of the George Eastman House.

"A fascinating study of the American preoccupation with physical size, this book charts new paths in the history of science, culture, and the body. A must-read for anyone puzzling over why Americans today love hulking SUVs, Mcmansions, and outsized masculine bodies."
---Lois Banner, University of Southern California

"From the Gilded Age through the Twenties, Clarke shows a nation-state obsessed with sheer size, ranging from the mammoth labor union to the 'Giant Incorporated Body' of the monopoly trust. These Days of Large Things links the towering Gibson Girl with the skyscraper, the pediatric regimen with stereotypes of the Jew. Spanning anthropology, medicine, architecture, business, and labor history, Clarke provides the full anatomy of imperial America and offers a model of cultural studies at its very best."
---Cecelia Tichi, Vanderbilt University

A collage-style work in fragments, Lynne Huffer’s These Survivals brings together philosophy, memoir, poetry, and original multimedia artworks to articulate an ethics of living on a devastated planet. Focusing on climate change and mass species extinction, Huffer approaches ruination through assemblages rendered in sharp-edged prose, vibrant color images, and experimental features that include black-out poems, weather reports, and abecedarian essays. She considers her struggles with everyday life and confronts the immensity of extinction across the expanse of geological time, recognizing the self’s insignificance in the context of the planet’s 4.5-billion-year existence. As she moves across autobiographical, political, and literary registers, her abiding theme is the repeated phrase: the fragment remains while the whole crumbles. At every turn, Huffer insists on the fragmentary, provisional nature of anything taken to be whole as well as the impartial conditions under which we write, at times experienced as constraint and at others, freedom. Reveling in interruption, obliquity, and layering, Huffer opens space for thought to emerge in unexpected and innovative ways—ways that are grounded in the material practices of writing and living.

2025 Memoir Prize for Books Finalist

A haunting, an obsession, a calling: Tim Z. Hernandez has been searching for people his whole life. Now, in this highly anticipated memoir, he takes us along on an investigative odyssey through personal and collective history to uncover the surprising conjunctions that bind our stories together.

Hernandez’s mission to find the families of the twenty-eight Mexicans who were killed in the 1948 plane wreck at Los Gatos Canyon formed the basis for his acclaimed documentary novel All They Will Call You, which the San Francisco Chronicle dubbed “a stunning piece of investigative journalism,” and the New York Times hailed as “painstaking detective work by a writer who is the descendant of farmworkers.”

In this riveting new work, Hernandez continues his search for the plane crash victims while also turning the lens on himself and his ancestral past, revealing the tumultuous and deeply intimate experiences that have fueled his investigations—a lifelong journey haunted by memory, addiction, generational trauma, and the spirit world.

They Call You Back is the true chronicle of one man’s obsession to restore dignity to an undignified chapter in America’s past, while at the same time making a case for why we must heal our personal wounds if we are ever to heal our political ones.
 

Tension between Anglos and Tejanos has existed in the Lone Star State since the earliest settlements. Such antagonism has produced friction between the two peoples, and whites have expressed their hostility toward Mexican Americans unabashedly and at times violently.

This seminal work in the historical literature of race relations in Texas examines the attitudes of whites toward Mexicans in nineteenth-century Texas. For some, it will be disturbing reading. But its unpleasant revelations are based on extensive and thoughtful research into Texas' past. The result is important reading not merely for historians but for all who are concerned with the history of ethnic relations in our state.

They Called Them Greasers argues forcefully that many who have written about Texas's past—including such luminaries as Walter Prescott Webb, Eugene C. Barker, and Rupert N. Richardson—have exhibited, in fact and interpretation, both deficiencies of research and detectable bias when their work has dealt with Anglo-Mexican relations. De León asserts that these historians overlooled an austere Anglo moral code which saw the morality of Tejanos as "defective" and that they described without censure a society that permitted traditional violence to continue because that violence allowed Anglos to keep ethnic minorities "in their place."

De León's approach is psychohistorical. Many Anglos in nineteenth-century Texas saw Tejanos as lazy, lewd, un-American, subhuman. In De León's view, these attitudes were the product of a conviction that dark-skinned people were racially and culturally inferior, of a desire to see in others qualities that Anglos preferred not to see in themselves, and of a need to associate Mexicans with disorder so as to justify their continued subjugation.

As the Great Depression gripped the United States in the early 1930s, the Hoover administration sought to preserve jobs for Anglo-Americans by targeting Mexicans, including long-time residents and even US citizens, for deportation. Mexicans comprised more than 46 percent of all people deported between 1930 and 1939, despite being only 1 percent of the US population. In all, about half a million people of Mexican descent were deported to Mexico, a “homeland” many of them had never seen, or returned voluntarily in fear of deportation.

They Came to Toil investigates how the news reporting of this episode in immigration history created frames for representing Mexicans and immigrants that persist to the present. Melita M. Garza sets the story in San Antonio, a city central to the formation of Mexican American identity, and contrasts how the city’s three daily newspapers covered the forced deportations of Mexicans. She shows that the Spanish-language La Prensa not surprisingly provided the fullest and most sympathetic coverage of immigration issues, while the locally owned San Antonio Express and the Hearst chain-owned San Antonio Light varied between supporting Mexican labor and demonizing it. Garza analyzes how these media narratives, particularly in the English-language press, contributed to the racial “othering” of Mexicans and Mexican Americans. Adding an important new chapter to the history of the Long Civil Rights Movement, They Came to Toil brings needed historical context to immigration issues that dominate today’s headlines.

The companion teacher’s guide to They Came from Wisconsin offers educators in every setting—classroom, library, and at home—vocabulary lists, objectives, skills, strategies, standards-based activities, and dozens of blackline masters for worksheets and handouts. Engages students in hands-on exploration of the immigration theme.

Distributed for the Wisconsin Historical Society Press.

Born in 1912, Alice Ahenakew was brought up in a traditional Cree community in north-central Saskatchewan. As a young woman, she married Andrew Ahenakew, a member of the prominent Saskatchewan family, who later became an Anglican clergyman and a prominent healer. Alice Ahenakew's personal reminiscences include stories of her childhood, courtship and marriage, as well as an account of the 1928 influenza epidemic an encounters with a windigo. The centrepiece of this book is the fascinating account of Andrew Ahenakewís bear vision, through which he received healing powers. Written in original Cree text with a full English translation, They Knew both Sides of Medicine also includes an introduction discussing the historical background of the narrative and its style and rhetorical structure, as well as a complete Cree-English glossary.

After ten years as a foreign and military policy lobbyist in Washington and four as director of an interfaith lobby, Gretchen Eick, moved to Kansas, earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Kansas and became Professor of History at Friends University. She was awarded two Fulbright Scholar awards, teaching in Latvia and Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), and a Fulbright Hays to South Africa. Her book on the civil rights movement—Dissent in Wichita: The Civil Right Movement in the Midwest, 1954-1972 (U of IL Press, 2001/2007) won three awards: The Richard Wentworth award from the University of Illinois as the best book in American history that press published over two years, the University of Kansas’ Hall Center Award for the best book by a Kansas author (the first time the award went to someone not teaching at K.U.), and the William Rockhill Nelson award for the best nonfiction book by a Kansas or Missouri author. The book resulted in two museum exhibits, a 2009 Telly Award-winning public television documentary about the first successful student-led sit-in, the 1958 Dockum Drug Store Sit-in in Wichita, and mention in the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture.

 

No Native American groups placed more emphasis on the horse in their lives than did the Navajo and Apache of the Southwest. They Sang for Horses, first published in 1966 and now considered a classic, remains the only comprehensive treatment of the profound mystical influence that the horse has exerted for more than 300 years.

In this completely redesigned and expanded edition, LaVerne Harrell Clark examines how storytellers, singers, medicine men, and painters created the animal's evolving symbolic significance by adapting existing folklore and cultural symbols. Exploring the horse's importance in ceremonies, songs, prayers, customs, and beliefs, she investigates the period of the horse's most pronounced cultural impact on the Navajo and the Apache, starting from the time of its acquisition from the Spanish in the seventeenth century and continuing to the mid-1960s, when the pickup truck began to replace it as the favored means of transportation. In addition, she presents a look at how Navajos and Apaches today continue to redefine the horse's important role in their spiritual as well as material lives.

This classic work is a must for historians, readers interested in Native American folklore and mythology, and anyone who has ever been captivated by the magic and romance of the horse.

A hard-hitting investigation of the racist uses of statistics—now in paperback!

Tukufu Zuberi offers a concise account of the historical connections between the development of the idea of race and the birth of social statistics. Zuberi describes how race-differentiated data are misinterpreted in the social sciences and asks searching questions about the ways racial statistics are used. He argues that statistical analysis can and must be deracialized, and that this deracialization is essential to the goal of achieving social justice for all.

    Things No Longer There is a lovingly crafted collection of personal stories about the author's struggle toward enlightenment while losing her eyesight. It is also, more broadly, about invisible landscapes—places of the heart that linger long after they have disappeared from the world outside. In these ten brief tales and one novella-length intimate drama, Susan Krieger takes us on a series of adventures in vision, a journey both inward and to various parts of the country. We travel with her as she goes birdwatching before sunrise in the New Mexico desert, learns to walk with a white cane, revisits an old love, returns to a summer camp of her youth, and reflects on the nature of blindness and sight.
    Krieger's touching memoir explores the ways that outer landscapes may change and sight may be lost, but inner visions persist, giving meaning, jarring the senses with a very different picture than what appears before the eyes. This book will reward both the general reader and those interested in disability studies, feminist ethnography, and lesbian studies.

This volume brings together contributions by key researchers of first-millennium glass from the Eastern Mediterranean and Europe. Taking an integrative approach combining scientific, archaeological, and cultural studies, the contributors illuminate changes in production and distribution and contend that variations in trade patterns reflected larger political, social, and economic developments in the Roman, Byzantine, and Early Medieval/Early Islamic eras.

The first English-language translation of Vilém Flusser’s final series of lectures: the definitive introduction to his methods and ideas in new media theory

In summer 1991, shortly before his death, Vilém Flusser gave a series of lectures as guest professor at Ruhr University Bochum at the invitation of Friedrich Kittler. Flusser intended for these lectures to be the definitive introduction to his “communicology,” the study of human communication and the means by which acquired information is saved, processed, and passed on. In Thinking Further, Aaron Jaffe and Michael F. Miller have curated “fragments” from these lectures—first published in German in 2008—to present the most exciting and timely parts of Flusser’s foundational contributions to what is now known as media studies.

These fragments capture Flusser’s engagements with a wide range of theories, approaches, and interventions, including ecocriticism, posthumanities, game theory, cybernetics, and translinguistic exchanges. Offering sustained engagements with the ideas of Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Michel Serres, and Jean Baudrillard, Thinking Further models possibilities for thinking through and clarifying the most obscure and obdurate implications of technology and modernity.

As they demonstrate Flusser’s contextual positionality and antiuniversalism, the writings presented here also underscore the pleasures and the power of his aphoristic style. Focusing less on Flusser-as-philosopher and more on his role as wry sage at the end of history, Thinking Further is a comprehensive but approachable introduction to his boundary-transcending exploration of the possibilities for communication, writing, and the human condition.

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In Thinking Like a Climate Hannah Knox confronts the challenges that climate change poses to knowledge production and modern politics. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among policy makers, politicians, activists, scholars, and the public in Manchester, England—birthplace of the Industrial Revolution—Knox explores the city's strategies for understanding and responding to deteriorating environmental conditions. Climate science, Knox argues, frames climate change as a very particular kind of social problem that confronts the limits of administrative and bureaucratic techniques of knowing people, places, and things. Exceeding these limits requires forging new modes of relating to climate in ways that reimagine the social in climatological terms. Knox contends that the day-to-day work of crafting and implementing climate policy and translating climate knowledge into the work of governance demonstrates that local responses to climate change can be scaled up to effect change on a global scale.

Centered on the booming world of Bollywood and the dubbing industry based in Mumbai, Thinking in English, Speaking in Hindi illustrates the essential role translation plays in the political economy of media industries. Tejaswini Ganti draws on five years of extensive fieldwork to investigate the translation practices, linguistic ideologies, and regimes of value structuring mainstream media creation. By analyzing screenwriting and dubbing practices in Mumbai, she argues that translation is not merely a linguistic bridge but a constitutive and material force in media production. Foregrounding the symbiotic relationship between Hindi and English within Mumbai’s media industries, she demonstrates that translation operates beyond notions of linguistic purity or inherent hierarchy and is a dynamic and multimodal process of creating social, aesthetic, and economic value. By examining language labor in cultural production from a dominant media center in the Global South, Ganti offers new ways of thinking about global flows of culture, language politics, and ideologies of creativity and expertise in the contemporary world.