Results by title
22279 books match the query 'Social Science' and 356 start with u
Undesirable
Passionate Mobility and Women’s Defiance of French Colonial Policing, 1919–1952Jennifer Anne Boittin
University of Chicago Press, 2022
Examining little-known policing archives in France, Senegal, and Cambodia, Jennifer Anne Boittin unearths the stories of hundreds of women labeled “undesirable” by the French colonial police and society in the early twentieth century. These “undesirables” were often women traveling alone, women who were poor or ill, women of color, or women whose intimate lives were deemed unruly. To refute the label and be able to move freely, they spoke out or wrote impassioned letters: some emphasized their “undesirable” qualities to suggest that they needed the care and protection of the state to support their movements, while others used the empire’s own laws around Frenchness and mobility to challenge state or societal interference. Tacking between advocacy and supplication, these women summoned intimate details to move beyond, contest, or confound surveillance efforts, bringing to life a practice that Boittin terms “passionate mobility.” In considering how ordinary women pursued autonomy, security, companionship, or simply a better existence in the face of surveillance and control, Undesirable illuminates pressing contemporary issues of migration and violence.
Undisciplined Cuba
Tracing Continuities of Resistance and Archipelagic GeographiesChristina M. García
Rutgers University Press, 2027
Undisciplined Cuba brings scholars of diverse disciplines and moves through multiple temporalities and geographies, allowing Cuba to emerge as a negotiated reality. Rather than rehearse narratives of exceptionalism and Cold War relationships that have detached the nation from its Antillean neighbors, this edited volume understands Cuba as deeply embedded in the Caribbean archipelago. Its chapters encompass feminist activism, public health, cinema for social justice, marine geopoetics, racial geographies, and literary corporealities. Drawing from an archipelagic framework and a decolonial practice of undisciplining, the anthology counters the tendency to treat landscapes, and cultural and political manifestations as artifacts of a national identity or evidence of a discrete geopolitical entity. Instead, Undisciplined Cuba attends to processes, to dynamic relations and continuities of resistance that defy periodization and institutional representation. The book offers a granular view of Cuba and an approach to Caribbean studies that imagines networks in excess of traditional categories of thought.
UndocuAsians
Lived Experiences and Social Movement Activism Across the DiasporaKevin Escudero
Rutgers University Press, 2026
Undocumented Dominican Migration
By Frank Graziano
University of Texas Press, 2013
Undocumented Dominican Migration is the first comprehensive study of boat migration from the Dominican Republic to Puerto Rico. It brings together the interactive global, cultural, and personal factors that induce thousands of Dominicans to journey across the Mona Passage in attempts to escape chronic poverty. The book provides in-depth treatment of decision-making, experiences at sea, migrant smuggling operations, and U.S. border enforcement. It also explores several topics that are rare in migration studies. These include the psychology of migrant motivation, religious beliefs, corruption and impunity, procreation and parenting, compulsive recidivism after failed attempts, social values in relation to law, marriage fraud, and the use of false documents for air travel from Puerto Rico to the mainland United States.
Frank Graziano’s extensive fieldwork among migrants, smugglers, and federal agencies provides an authority and immediacy that brings the reader close to the migrants’ experiences. The exhaustive research and multidisciplinary approach, highly readable narrative, and focus on lesser-known emigrants make Undocumented Dominican Migration an essential addition to public and academic debates about migration.
Undocumented Fears
Immigration and the Politics of Divide and Conquer in Hazleton, PennsylvaniaJamie Longazel
Temple University Press, 2016
The Illegal Immigration Relief Act (IIRA), passed in the small Rustbelt city of Hazleton, Pennsylvania in 2006, was a local ordinance that laid out penalties for renting to or hiring undocumented immigrants and declared English the city’s official language. The notorious IIRA gained national prominence and kicked off a parade of local and state-level legislative initiatives designed to crack down on undocumented immigrants.
In his cogent and timely book, UndocumentedFears, Jamie Longazel uses the debate around Hazleton’s controversial ordinance as a case study that reveals the mechanics of contemporary divide and conquer politics. He shows how neoliberal ideology, misconceptions about Latina/o immigrants, and nostalgic imagery of “Small Town, America” led to a racialized account of an undocumented immigrant “invasion,” masking the real story of a city beset by large-scale loss of manufacturing jobs.
Offering an up-close look at how the local debate unfolded in the city that set off this broader trend, Undocumented Fears makes an important connection between immigration politics and the perpetuation of racial and economic inequality.
Undocumented Motherhood
Conversations on Love, Trauma, and Border CrossingElizabeth Farfán-Santos
University of Texas Press, 2022
2023 SANA Book Award, Society for the Anthropology of North America
2023 Honorable Mention, Outstanding Book Award NACCS Tejas Foco Award for Non-Fiction, National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies
2022 Nonfiction Discovery Prize, Writers' League of Texas
An intimate portrayal of the hardships faced by an undocumented family navigating the medical and educational systems in the United States.
Claudia Garcia crossed the border because her toddler, Natalia, could not hear. Leaving behind everything she knew in Mexico, Claudia recounts the terror of migrating alone with her toddler and the incredible challenges she faced advocating for her daughter’s health in the United States. When she arrived in Texas, Claudia discovered that being undocumented would mean more than just an immigration status—it would be a way of living, of mothering, and of being discarded by even those institutions we count on to care.
Elizabeth Farfán-Santos spent five years with Claudia. As she listened to Claudia’s experiences, she recalled her own mother’s story, another life molded by migration, the US-Mexico border, and the quest for a healthy future on either side. Witnessing Claudia’s struggles with doctors and teachers, we see how the education and medical systems enforce undocumented status and perpetuate disability. At one point, in the midst of advocating for her daughter, Claudia suddenly finds herself struck by debilitating pain. Claudia is lifted up by her comadres, sent to the doctor, and reminded why she must care for herself.
A braided narrative that speaks to the power of stories for creating connection, this book reveals what remains undocumented in the motherhood of Mexican women who find themselves making impossible decisions and multiple sacrifices as they build a future for their families.
Undocumented in the U.S. South
How Youth Navigate Racialization in Policy and School ContextsSophia Rodriguez
Rutgers University Press, 2025
Undoing Empire
Race And Nation In The Mulatto CaribbeanJose F. Buscaglia-Salgado
University of Minnesota Press, 2003
A revelatory account that places mulatto experience at the center of Caribbean history
This ambitious book brings to light the story of what José F. Buscaglia-Salgado terms mulataje—the ways Caribbean aesthetics offer the possibility of the ultimate erasure of racial difference. Undoing Empire gives a broad panorama stretching from the complex politics of medieval Iberian societies to the beginning of direct U.S. hegemony in the Caribbean at the end of the nineteenth century.
Buscaglia-Salgado begins with an examination of Washington Irving’s “American Columbiad” as an act of historical and territorial plundering. He then traces the roots of mulatto society to the pre-1492 Iberian world, not only finding a connection between the Moors of “Old Spain” and the morenos—the blacks and mulattoes of the New World—but also offering a profound critique of creole and imperial discourses. Buscaglia-Salgado reads the pursuit and contestation of what he terms the European Ideal in colonial texts, architecture, and paintings, then identifies the mulatto movement of “undoing” the Ideal in the wars that shook the nineteenth-century Caribbean from Haiti to Cuba, arguing that certain projects of national liberation have moved contrary to the historical claims to freedom in the mulatto world.
Undoing Modernity
Linguistics, Higher Education, and Indigeneity in YucatanCatherine R. Rhodes
University of Texas Press, 2025
An ethnography of the decolonization of Maya-ness.
On the Yucatan Peninsula today, undergraduates are inventing a new sense of being Maya by studying linguistics and culture in their own language: Maya. In this bold theoretical intervention informed by ethnographic research, Catherine Rhodes argues that these students are undoing the category of modernity itself. Created through colonization of the Americas, modernity is the counterpart to coloniality; the students, Rhodes suggests, are creating decoloniality’s companion: “demodernity.”
Disciplines like linguistics, anthropology, history, and archaeology invented “the Maya” as an essentialized ethnos in a colonial, modern mold. Undoing Modernity follows students and their teachers as they upset the seemingly stable ethnic definition of Maya, with its reliance on a firm dichotomy of Maya and modern. Maya linguistics does not prove that Maya is modern but instead rejects the Maya-ness that modernity built, while also fostering within the university an intellectual space in which students articulate identity on their own terms. An erudite and ultimately hopeful work of interdisciplinary scholarship that brings linguistic anthropology, Mesoamerican studies, and critical Indigenous studies into the conversation, Undoing Modernity dares to imagine the world on the other side of colonial/modern ideals of Indigeneity.
Undoing Monogamy
The Politics of Science and the Possibilities of BiologyAngela Willey
Duke University Press, 2016
Undoing Motherhood
Collaborative Reproduction and the Deinstitutionalization of U.S. MaternityKatherine M. Johnson
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Undoing Networks
Tero Karppi
University of Minnesota Press, 2020
Exploring and conceptualizing practices, technologies, and politics of disconnecting
How do we think beyond the dominant images and imaginaries of connectivity? Undoing Networks enables a different connectivity: “digital detox” is a luxury for stressed urbanites wishing to lead a mindful life. Self-help books advocate “digital minimalism” to recover authentic experiences of the offline. Artists envision a world without the internet. Activists mobilize against the expansion of the 5G network.
If connectivity brought us virtual communities, information superhighways, and participatory culture, disconnection comes with privacy tools, Faraday shields, and figures of the shy. This book explores nonusage and the “right to disconnect” from work and from the excessive demands of digital capitalism.
Undoing Suicidism
A Trans, Queer, Crip Approach to Rethinking (Assisted) SuicideAlexandre Baril
Temple University Press, 2023
Undoing Suicidism questions the belief that the best way to help suicidal people is through the logic of prevention. Alexandre Baril presents the thought-provoking argument that supporting assisted suicide for suicidal people could better prevent unnecessary deaths. Offering a new queercrip model of (assisted) suicide, he invites us to imagine what could happen if we started thinking about (assisted) suicide from an anti-suicidist and intersectional framework.
Baril provides a radical reconceptualization of (assisted) suicide and invaluable reflections for academics, activists, practitioners, and policymakers.
Undoing the Revolution
Comparing Elite Subversion of Peasant RebellionsVasabjit Banerjee
Temple University Press, 2019
Undoing the Revolution looks at the way rural underclasses ally with out-of-power elites to overthrow their governments—only to be shut out of power when the new regime assumes control. Vasabjit Banerjee first examines why peasants need to ally with dissenting elites in order to rebel. He then shows how conflict resolution and subsequent bargains to form new state institutions re-empower allied elites and re-marginalize peasants.
Banerjee evaluates three different agrarian societies during distinct time periods spanning the twentieth century: revolutionary Mexico from 1910 to 1930; late-colonial India from 1920 until 1947; and White-dominated Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) from the mid-1960s to 1980. This comparative approach also allows examination of both the underclass need for elite participation and the variety of causes that elites use to incentivize peasant classes to participate, extending from religious-ethnic identity and common political targets to the peasants’ and elites’ own economic grievances.
Undoing the Revolution demonstrates that both international and domestic investors in cash crops, natural resources, and finance can ally with peasant rebels; and, after threatened or actual state collapse, they can bargain with each other to select new state institutions.
Unearthing Conflict
Corporate Mining, Activism, and Expertise in PeruFabiana Li
Duke University Press, 2015
Unearthing Gender
Folksongs of North IndiaSmita Tewari Jassal
Duke University Press, 2012
The significance of these folksongs, Jassal argues, lies in their suggesting and hinting at themes, rather than directly addressing them: women sing what they often cannot talk about. Women’s lives, their feelings, their relationships, and their social and familial bonds are persuasively presented in song. For the ethnographer, the songs offer an entry into the everyday cultures of marginalized groups of women who have rarely been the focus of systematic analytical inquiry.
Unearthing Indian Land
Living with the Legacies of AllotmentKristin T. Ruppel
University of Arizona Press, 2008
Under the General Allotment Act of 1887, also known as the Dawes Act,individual Indians were issued title to land allotments while so-called “surplus”Indian lands were opened to non-Indian settlement. During the forty-seven years that the act remained in effect, American Indians lost an estimated 90 million acres of land—about two-thirds of the land they had held in 1887. Worse, the loss of control over the land left to them has remained an ongoing and insidious result.
Unearthing Indian Land traces the complex legacies of allotment, including numerous instructive examples of a policy gone wrong. Aside from the initial catastrophic land loss, the fractionated land ownership that resulted from the act’s provisions has disrupted native families and their descendants for more than a century. With each new generation, the owners of tribal lands grow in number and therefore own ever smaller interests in parcels of land. It is not uncommon now to find reservation allotments co-owned by hundreds of individuals.Coupled with the federal government’s troubled trusteeship of Indian assets,this means that Indian landowners have very little control over their own lands.
Illuminated by interviews with Native American landholders, this book is essential reading for anyone who is interested in what happened as a result of the federal government’s quasi-privatization of native lands.
Uneasy Allies
Working for Labor Reform in Nineteenth-Century BostonDavid A. Zonderman
University of Massachusetts Press, 2011
In addition to analyzing what motivated these workers and reformers to create cross-class organizations, David Zonderman examines the internal tactical debates and external political pressures that fractured them, even as new alliances were formed, and shows how these influences changed over time. He describes what workers and reformers learned about politics and social change within these complex and volatile alliances, and speculates as to whether those lessons have relevance for activists and reformers today.
What emerges from this investigation is a narrative of progress and decline that spans nearly three-quarters of a century, as an ever-shifting constellation of associations debated the meaning of labor reform and the best strategy to secure justice for workers. But the quest for ideological consistency and organizational coherence was not easily achieved. By century's end, not only did Boston look dramatically different from its antebellum ancestor, but its labor reform alliances had lost some of their earlier openhearted optimism and stubborn resilience.
Uneasy Virtue
The Politics of Prostitution and the American Reform TraditionBarbara Meil Hobson
University of Chicago Press, 1990
Uneasy in Babylon
Southern Baptist Conservatives and American CultureBarry Hankins
University of Alabama Press, 2002
The definitive account of how conservative Southern Baptists came to dominate the nation's largest Protestant denomination
In 1979 a group of conservative members of the Southern Baptists Convention (SBC) initiated a campaign to reshape the denomination’s seminaries and organizations by installing new conservative leaders who made belief in the inerrancy of the Bible a condition of service. They succeeded. This book is a definitive account of that takeover.
Barry Hankins argues that the conservatives sought control of the SBC not or not only to secure the denomination's orthodoxy but to mobilize Southern Baptists for a war against secular culture. The best explanation of the beliefs and behavior of Southern Baptist conservatives, Hankins concludes, lies in their adoption of the culture war model of American society. Believing that "American culture has turned hostile to traditional forms of faith,” they sought to deploy the Southern Baptist Convention in a "full-scale culture war" against secularism in the United States. Hankins traces the roots of this movement to the ideas of such post-WWII northern evangelicals as Carl F. H. Henry and Francis Schaeffer. Henry and Schaeffer viewed America's secular culture as hostile to Christianity and called on evangelicals to develop a robust Christian opposition to secular culture. As the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, SBC positions on divisive cultural issues like abortion have remade the American political landscape, most notably in the reversal of Roe v. Wade.
Hankins also argues, however, that Southern Baptist conservatives sought more than orthodox adherence to Biblical inerrancy. They also sought an identity that was authentically Baptist and Southern. Hankin’s excellent and prescient work will fascinate readers interested in contemporary American religion, culture, and public policy, as well as in the American South.
Unequal Choices
How Social Class Shapes Where High-Achieving Students Apply to CollegeYang Va Lor
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Unequal City
Race, Schools, and Perceptions of InjusticeCarla Shedd is assistant professor of sociology and African American studies at Columbia University.
Russell Sage Foundation, 2015
Shedd draws from an array of data and in-depth interviews with Chicago youth to offer new insight into this understudied group. Focusing on four public high schools with differing student bodies, Shedd reveals how the predominantly low-income African American students at one school encounter obstacles their more affluent, white counterparts on the other side of the city do not face. Teens often travel long distances to attend school which, due to Chicago’s segregated and highly unequal neighborhoods, can involve crossing class, race, and gang lines. As Shedd explains, the disadvantaged teens who traverse these boundaries daily develop a keen “perception of injustice,” or the recognition that their economic and educational opportunities are restricted by their place in the social hierarchy.
Adolescents’ worldviews are also influenced by encounters with law enforcement while traveling to school and during school hours. Shedd tracks the rise of metal detectors, surveillance cameras, and pat-downs at certain Chicago schools. Along with police procedures like stop-and-frisk, these prison-like practices lead to distrust of authority and feelings of powerlessness among the adolescents who experience mistreatment either firsthand or vicariously. Shedd finds that the racial composition of the student body profoundly shapes students’ perceptions of injustice. The more diverse a school is, the more likely its students of color will recognize whether they are subject to discriminatory treatment. By contrast, African American and Hispanic youth whose schools and neighborhoods are both highly segregated and highly policed are less likely to understand their individual and group disadvantage due to their lack of exposure to youth of differing backgrounds.
Unequal Higher Education
Wealth, Status, and Student OpportunityBarrett J. Taylor
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Unequal Partners
In Search of Transnational Catholic SisterhoodCasey Ritchie Clevenger
University of Chicago Press, 2020
Taking us from Belgium and the United States to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, sociologist Casey Clevenger offers rare insight into how the sisters of this order work across national boundaries, shedding light on the complex relationships among individuals, social groups, and formal organizations. Throughout, Clevenger skillfully weaves the sisters’ own voices into her narrative, helping us understand how the order has remained whole over time. A thoughtful analysis of the ties that bind—and divide—the sisters, Unequal Partners is a rich look at transnationalism’s ongoing impact on Catholicism.
Unequal Time
Gender, Class, and Family in Employment SchedulesDan Clawson is professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Naomi Gerstel is a distinguished university professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Russell Sage Foundation, 2014
Unequal under Law
Race in the War on DrugsDoris Marie Provine
University of Chicago Press, 2007
Doris Marie Provine’s engaging analysis traces the history of race in anti-drug efforts from the temperance movement of the early 1900s to the crack scare of the late twentieth century, showing how campaigns to criminalize drug use have always conjured images of feared minorities. Explaining how alarm over a threatening black drug trade fueled support in the 1980s for a mandatory minimum sentencing scheme of unprecedented severity, Provine contends that while our drug laws may no longer be racist by design, they remain racist in design. Moreover, their racial origins have long been ignored by every branch of government. This dangerous denial threatens our constitutional guarantee of equal protection of law and mutes a much-needed national discussion about institutionalized racism—a discussion that Unequal under Law promises to initiate.
Uneven Developments
The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian EnglandMary Poovey
University of Chicago Press, 1988
Asserting that the organization of sexual difference is a social, not natural, phenomenon, Poovey shows how representations of gender took the form of a binary opposition in mid-Victorian culture. She then reveals the role of this opposition in various discourses and institutions—medical, legal, moral, and literary. The resulting oppositions, partly because they depended on the subordination of one term to another, were always unstable. Poovey contends that this instability helps explain why various institutional versions of binary logic developed unevenly. This unevenness, in turn, helped to account for the emergence in the 1850s of a genuine oppositional voice: the voice of an organized, politicized feminist movement.
Drawing on a wide range of sources—parliamentary debates, novels, medical lectures, feminist analyses of work, middle-class periodicals on demesticity—Poovey examines various controversies that provide glimpses of the ways in which representations of gender were simultaneously constructed, deployed, and contested. These include debates about the use of chloroform in childbirth, the first divorce law, the professional status of writers, the plight of governesses, and the nature of the nursing corps. Uneven Developments is a contribution to the feminist analysis of culture and ideology that challenges the isolation of literary texts from other kinds of writing and the isolation of women's issues from economic and political histories.
Uneven Encounters
Making Race and Nation in Brazil and the United StatesMicol Seigel
Duke University Press, 2009
Seigel explores the circulation of images of Brazilian coffee and of maxixe in the United States during the period just after the imperial expansions of the early twentieth century. Exoticist interpretations structured North Americans’ paradoxical sense of themselves as productive “consumer citizens.” Some people, however, could not simply assume the privileges of citizenship. In their struggles against racism, Afro-descended citizens living in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, New York, and Chicago encountered images and notions of each other, and found them useful. Seigel introduces readers to cosmopolitan Afro-Brazilians and African Americans who rarely traveled far from home but who nonetheless absorbed ideas from abroad. She suggests that studies comparing U.S. and Brazilian racial identities as two distinct constructions are misconceived. Racial formation transcends national borders; attempts to understand it must do the same.
Uneven Tides
Rising Inequality in AmericaSheldon H. Danziger
Russell Sage Foundation, 1993
Unexceptional Women
Female Proprietors in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Albany, New York, 1830–1885Susan Ingalls Lewis
The Ohio State University Press, 2009
Although the growing city did produce several remarkable businesswomen in trades as diverse as hotel management, plumbing, and the marketing of pianos on the installment plan, Albany’s female proprietors were most often self-employed artisans, shopkeepers, petty manufacturers, and service providers. These women used business as a method of self-employment and survival, as a means of both individual and family mobility, and as a strategy for immigrant assimilation into an urban economy and middle-class lifestyle.
Intriguingly, among the ranks of Albany’s female proprietors Lewis discovered substantial evidence of such supposedly recent phenomena as self-employment, dual-income marriages, working motherhood, home-based business, and the juggling of domestic and professional priorities. The stories of these businesswomen make fascinating reading while simultaneously providing the basis for a theoretical discussion of how to define and understand enterprise for mid-nineteenth-century women.
Unexpected Grace
Stories of Faith, Science, and AltruismBill Kramer
Templeton Press, 2007
In Unexpected Grace Bill Kramer offers a rare look into the human side of the world of scientific research. He goes behind the scenes of four scientific investigations on diverse aspects of the study of unlimited love and offers uplifting portraits of human beings struggling to understand and improve the complex issues facing them. He explores the dynamics between the researchers, the subjects they study, and the participants in the studies, and eloquently tells their personal stories. The stories touch on vastly different social and human issues, but all are connected by love.
The third study, from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, focused on the benefits of religion on mental and physical health, which led its researcher to a greater understanding of forgiveness, humility, and grace. The final powerful story is about a physiology of love study conducted in Iowa City. Here, a functional MRI is the vehicle for measuring empathy and brings the researcher to wonder, "Is there a point at which empathy shuts down and we turn away?" Ultimately she comes to recognize that past experiences influences our ability to respond emphatically.
Unexpected Subjects
Intimate Partner Violence, Testimony, and the LawAlessandra Gribaldo
HAU, 2020
Unfastened
Globality and Asian North American NarrativesEleanor Ty
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
Unfinished Gestures
Devadasis, Memory, and Modernity in South IndiaDavesh Soneji
University of Chicago Press, 2011
Unfinished
The Anthropology of BecomingJoão Biehl and Peter Locke, editors
Duke University Press, 2017
Contributors. Lucas Bessire, João Biehl, Naisargi N. Dave, Elizabeth A. Davis, Michael M. J. Fischer, Angela Garcia, Peter Locke, Adriana Petryna, Bridget Purcell, Laurence Ralph, Lilia M. Schwarcz
Unfit For Marriage
Impotent Spouses On Trial In The Basque Region Of Spain, 1650-1750Edward J. Behrend-Martinez
University of Nevada Press, 2014
The Catholic Church of early modern Europe intended the sacrament of matrimony to represent a lifelong commitment, and it allowed few grounds for the dissolution of an unhappy marriage. One was nonconsummation owing to the sexual impotency of one of the partners. Even then, an annulment was granted only after a church court had conducted a lengthy investigation of the case, soliciting testimony from numerous witnesses as well as from the aggrieved couple, and had subjected the allegedly impotent spouse (and sometimes both spouses) to an intimate physical examination.
Edward J. Behrend-Martinez has studied the transcripts of eighty-three impotency trials conducted by the ecclesiastical court of Calahorra (La Rioja), a Spanish diocese with urban and rural parishes, both Basque and Castilian. From these records, he draws a detailed, fascinating portrait of private life and public sexuality in early modern Europe. These trials were far more than a salacious inquiry into the intimate details of other people’s lives. The church valued marital sex as a cornerstone of stable society, intended not only for procreation but also for maintaining domestic harmony. Every couple’s sex life, however private in practice or intention, was a matter of public and ecclesiastical concern. Unfit for Marriage offers vivid accounts of marital sex and the role that property, gender, and personal preference played in marriage in early modern Europe. It is essential reading for anyone interested in social history, sexuality, gender studies, canon law, legal history, and the history of divorce in western Europe.
Unfolding Corpus
Radical Creativity and Vulnerability in Times of PlagueGeorge Ayala
Rutgers University Press, 2027
UnfoldingCorpus is a carefully curated collection of visual and textual works by artists and writers from past issues of Corpus, a community produced journal, which was originally published between 2003 and 2008 by the AIDS Project Los Angeles (APLA). Corpus was a publication that held open valuable space for Black, Brown, and queer people to see themselves reflected in an honest exploration of HIV and sex, but it was also a celebration of sexuality, connectivity, curiosity, and resilience.
Unfolding Corpus uses contributions from the original journal to draw parallels between HIV, COVID, and monkey pox, all of which have disproportionately affected the queer community. By centering the experiences of communities historically excluded from public health decision-making, the mix of art, poetry, essays, and radical storytelling throughout the collection aims to disrupt and reveal the wrongs waged on low income, Black, Brown, and queer bodies across time and across pandemics. This collection once again confronts a hostile state and cultural environment by celebrating a world in which queer and trans sexuality can flourish, be seen, and be understood as a tool to envision radical futures rooted in equality and unfurling justice.
Unfolding the City
Women Write the City in Latin AmericaAnne Lambright
University of Minnesota Press, 2007
Unforgiving Places
The Unexpected Origins of American Gun ViolenceJens Ludwig
University of Chicago Press, 2025
In 2007, economist Jens Ludwig moved to the South Side of Chicago to research two big questions: Why does gun violence happen, and is there anything we can do about it? Almost two decades later, the answers aren’t what he expected. Unforgiving Places is Ludwig’s revelatory portrait of gun violence in America’s most famously maligned city.
Disproving the popular narrative that shootings are the calculated acts of malicious or desperate people, Ludwig shows how most shootings actually grow out of a more fleeting source: interpersonal conflict, especially arguments. By examining why some arguments turn tragic while others don't, Ludwig shows gun violence to be more circumstantial—and more solvable—than our traditional approaches lead us to believe.
Drawing on decades of research and Ludwig’s immersive fieldwork in Chicago, including “countless hours spent in schools, parks, playgrounds, housing developments, courtrooms, jails, police stations, police cars, and lots and lots of McDonald'ses,” Unforgiving Places is a breakthrough work at the cutting edge of behavioral economics. As Ludwig shows, progress on gun violence doesn’t require America to solve every other social problem first; it only requires that we find ways to intervene in the places and the ten-minute windows where human behaviors predictably go haywire.
Unfracked
The Struggle to Ban Fracking in New YorkRichard Buttny
University of Massachusetts Press, 2024
Since fracking emerged as a way of extracting natural gas, through intense deep drilling and the use of millions of gallons of water and chemicals to fracture shale, it has been controversial. It is perceived in different ways by different people—by some as an opportunity for increased resources and possibly jobs and other income; by others as a public health and environmental threat; and for many, an unknown. Richard Buttny, a scholar who works on rhetoric and discursive practices, read a story in his local paper in New York about hydrofracking coming to his area and had to research what it was, and what it could mean for his community. Soon he joined neighbors in fighting to have the practice banned state-wide. At the same time, he turned his scholarly eye to the messaging from both sides of the fight, using first-person accounts, interviews, and media coverage.
The activists fighting fracking won. New York is now the only state in the US with sizable deposits of natural gas that has banned hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Unfracked explains the competing rhetoric and discourses on fracking among New York-based advocates, experts, the grassroots, and political officials. Buttny examines how these positions evolved over time and how eventually the state arrived at a decision to ban this extractive technology. His accessible approach provides both a historical recounting of the key events of this seven-year conflict, along with four in-depth case studies: a grassroots citizen group, a public hearing with medical physicians, a key intergovernmental hearing, and a formal debate among experts. The result is a look at a very recent, important historical moment and a useful examination of environmental activist and fossil fuel advocate rhetoric around an issue that continues to cause debate nationwide.
Unfreezing the Arctic
Science, Colonialism, and the Transformation of Inuit LandsAndrew Stuhl
University of Chicago Press, 2016
In Unfreezing the Arctic, Andrew Stuhl brings a fresh perspective to this defining challenge of our time. With a compelling narrative voice, Stuhl weaves together a wealth of distinct episodes into a transnational history of the North American Arctic, proving that a richer understanding of its social and environmental transformation can come only from studying the region’s past. Drawing on historical records and extensive ethnographic fieldwork, as well as time spent living in the Northwest Territories, he closely examines the long-running interplay of scientific exploration, colonial control, the testimony and experiences of Inuit residents, and multinational investments in natural resources. A rich and timely portrait, Unfreezing the Arctic offers a comprehensive look at scientific activity across the long twentieth century. It will be welcomed by anyone interested in political, economic, environmental, and social histories of transboundary regions the world over.
The author intends to donate all royalties from this book to the Alaska Youth for Environmental Action (AYEA) and East Three School's On the Land Program.
Unfurl
Survivals, Sorrows, and DreamingEli Clare
Duke University Press, 2025
Ungendering Menstruation
przybylo
University of Minnesota Press, 2025
Why and how menstrual pain needs to be incorporated into discussions of gender, embodiment, and disability
Honing a “cranky” approach to being a menstruating body expected to accept and embrace trauma, Ungendering Menstruation examines menstrual suppression, toxicity, and the cooptation of menstrual positivity rhetoric. Drawing on their own experiences as a toxic shock survivor and a menstrual pain and period dysphoria sufferer, Ela Przybyło questions why, on what terms, and for whom menstruation has been fixed around experiences of pain. Instead, they present a vision for menstrual justice that refuses the womaning of bleeding and the further erasure, dismissal, and denial of menstrual pain as real pain.
If menstruating is framed as somatechnically elective, Przybyło contends, it provides avenues for both celebrating and appreciating cultures of bleeding as well as for remaining critical of the ways in which bleeding has been used as a transphobic and sexist tool to fix gender in place.
Unhappy Valley, Book One
Conflict in Kenya & AfricaBruce Berman
Ohio University Press, 1992
The authors investigate major themes. These include the conquest origins and subsequent development of the colonial state, the contradictory social forces that articulated African societies to European capitalism, and the creation of new political communities and changing meanings of ethnicity in Africa, in the context of social differentiation and class formation. There is substantial new work on the problems of Mau Mau and of wealth, poverty and civic virtue in Kikuyu political thought.
The authors make a fresh contribution to a deeper historical understanding of the development of contemporary Kenyan society and, in particular, of the British and Kukuyu origins of Mau Mau and the emergency of the 1950s.
They also highlight some of the shortcomings of ideas about development, explore the limitations of narrowly structuralist Marxist theory of the state, and reflect on the role of history in the future of Africa.
Book One on State and Class will be used by students of African history as well as of colonial Kenya; it is also concerned with the theory of history and of political science.
Unhappy Valley, Book Two
Conflict in Kenya & AfricaBruce Berman
Ohio University Press, 1992
The authors investigate major themes. These include the conquest origins and subsequent development of the colonial state, the contradictory social forces that articulated African societies to European capitalism, and the creation of new political communities and changing meanings of ethnicity in Africa, in the context of social differentiation and class formation. There is substantial new work on the problems of Mau Mau and of wealth, poverty and civic virtue in Kikuyu political thought.
The authors make a fresh contribution to a deeper historical understanding of the development of contemporary Kenyan society and, in particular, of the British and Kukuyu origins of Mau Mau and the emergency of the 1950s.
They also highlight some of the shortcomings of ideas about development, explore the limitations of narrowly structuralist Marxist theory of the state, and reflect on the role of history in the future of Africa.
Book Two on Violence and Ethnicity gives new insights into popular consciousness, into revolutionary change and into the subtle realities of ethnicity; it will be of particular value to readers of Ngugi.
Unhappy Valley
Clan, Class & State In Colonial KenyaBruce Berman
Ohio University Press, 1991
Unheard Witness
The Life and Death of Kathy Leissner WhitmanJo Scott-Coe
University of Texas Press, 2023
2025 San Antonio Conservation Society Publication Award
Unheard Witness foregrounds a young woman’s experience of domestic abuse, resistance, and survival before the mass shooting at the University of Texas at Austin in 1966.
In 1966, Kathy Leissner Whitman was a twenty-three-year-old teacher dreaming of a better future. She was an avid writer of letters, composing hundreds in the years before she was stabbed to death by her husband, Charles Whitman, who went on to commit a mass shooting from the tower at the University of Texas at Austin. Kathy’s writing provides a rare glimpse of how one woman described, and sought to change, her short life with a coercive, controlling, and violent partner.
Unheard Witness provides a portrait of Kathy’s life, doing so at a time when Americans are slowly grasping the link between domestic abuse and mass shootings. Public violence often follows violence in the home, yet such private crimes continue to be treated separately and even erased in the public imagination. Jo Scott-Coe shows how Kathy's letters go against the grain of the official history, which ignored Kathy’s perspective. With its nuanced understanding of abuse and survival, Unheard Witness is an intimate, real-time account of trust and vulnerability—in its own way, a prologue to our age of atrocities.
Uniform Feelings
Scenes from the Psychic Life of PolicingJessi Lee Jackson
University of Michigan Press, 2022
Union Divided
Black Musicians' Fight for Labor EqualityLeta E. Miller
University of Illinois Press, 2024
In the 1910s and 1920s, Black musicians organized more than fifty independent locals within the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) in an attempt to control audition criteria, set competitive wages, and secure a voice in national decision-making. Leta Miller follows the AFM’s history of Black locals, which competed directly with white locals in the same territories, from their origins and successes in the 1920s through Depression-era crises to the fraught process of dismantling segregated AFM organizations in the 1960s and 70s. Like any union, Black AFM locals sought to ensure employment and competitive wages for members with always-evolving solutions to problems. Miller’s account of these efforts includes the voices of the musicians themselves and interviews with former union members who took part in the difficult integration of Black and white locals. She also analyzes the fundamental question of how musicians benefitted from membership in a labor organization.
Broad in scope and rich in detail, Union Divided illuminates the complex working world of unionized Black musicians and the AFM’s journey to racial inclusion.
Union Renegades
Miners, Capitalism, and Organizing in the Gilded AgeDana M. Caldemeyer
University of Illinois Press, 2021
Nuanced and eye-opening, Union Renegades challenges popular notions of workers attitudes during the Gilded Age.