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Developing a cybernetic model of subjectivity and personhood that honors disability experiences to reconceptualize the category of the human

Twentieth-century neuroscience fixed the brain as the basis of consciousness, the self, identity, individuality, even life itself, obscuring the fundamental relationships between bodies and the worlds that they inhabit. In Unraveling, Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer draws on narratives of family and individual experiences with neurological disorders, paired with texts by neuroscientists and psychiatrists, to decenter the brain and expose the ableist biases in the dominant thinking about personhood. 

Unraveling articulates a novel cybernetic theory of subjectivity in which the nervous system is connected to the world it inhabits rather than being walled off inside the body, moving beyond neuroscientific, symbolic, and materialist approaches to the self to focus instead on such concepts as animation, modularity, and facilitation. It does so through close readings of memoirs by individuals who lost their hearing or developed trauma-induced aphasia, as well as family members of people diagnosed as autistic—texts that rethink modes of subjectivity through experiences with communication, caregiving, and the demands of everyday life.

Arguing for a radical antinormative bioethics, Unraveling shifts the discourse on neurological disorders from such value-laden concepts as “quality of life” to develop an inclusive model of personhood that honors disability experiences and reconceptualizes the category of the human in all of its social, technological, and environmental contexts.

In 1998, when Mona Al-Habanin was twenty-eight years old and pregnant with her sixth child, she stood before a council of al-Naqab Bedouin shaykhs and faced the most difficult decision of her life: give up her children or be responsible for more killings in her tribe.

This book tells the extraordinary story of Mona Al-Habanin (b. 1970), the first Bedouin woman to run for elected office in Israel's Negev Desert. Through Mona's life, it illuminates Indigenous Bedouin women's traumas and resilience while documenting a genealogy of contemporary Palestinian Bedouin feminism. It traces her journey from desert tent dwelling through forced dislocation, her community's struggles with violence against women, and her battle for her children—against state-sanctioned tribal justice rooted in British colonial paradigms and Zionist settler-native relations—and to her turn to fierce and irreverent activism, taboo-breaking, and political trailblazing. This book tells the story of an unrecognized community under siege and of a new form of Indigenous feminism that bravely defies the violence of silencing. 

What does it mean, and take, to repay the unrepayable?

Unrepayable Debt explores belated attempts to reckon with the savage plundering of labor and life under the Japanese empire. Located within global conversations on reparations for colonialism and slavery, and centered on slave labor lawsuits brought by Chinese victims seeking overdue justice in Japanese courts, Yukiko Koga traces a sea change in the legal sphere propelled by an unprecedented transnational redress movement. The lawsuits exposed not only the original violence but also a structure of transitional injustice etched onto the unmaking of the Japanese empire, which left victims silenced and unredressable for decades.

Challenging the idea of reckoning as a discrete event that brings closure through settlements, apology, or compensation, Koga’s ethnography details the slow and messy intergenerational work of reconciliation on the ground. The book shows how the re-pairing of severed relations, separated by lineages of victimhood and perpetration, lies at the core of repair. By bringing to the surface the prolonged and entangled processes of decolonization and deimperialization, Unrepayable Debt compels a rethinking of what redress, repair, and reconciliation mean, how they are practiced, and where accountability lies.

The first book to examine the visual art legacy of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots.

On April 29, 1992, a jury’s acquittal of four white Los Angeles police officers who had beaten Rodney King, a Black man, incited five days of intense protests. The 1992 Los Angeles Riots resulted in nearly four thousand fires, over $1 billion in property damage, fourteen thousand arrests, two thousand injuries, and sixty-three deaths. While many scholars have studied the period leading up to and following the riots, few have focused on how contemporary artists reacted to and continued to respond to this traumatic event.

In Unrest, Rose Salseda provides the first major art historical account of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots that chronicles the works of two generations of artists. Closely examining visual art that explores overlooked cross-racial, immigrant, and intergenerational experiences of the events, Salseda provocatively frames unrest as an act of the bereaved that makes visible the unrelenting experiences of injustice. She provides important insights into how we process violence through imagery; how the criminal justice system visualizes race and tolerates racial and xenophobic violence; and how we adapt racialized modes of viewing, normalize violence and oppression, and perhaps unwittingly contribute to these injustices. Ultimately, Unrest highlights how the experience of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots has driven artists to address the King beating and related episodes of racial violence for over thirty years—underscoring unrest as the inability to rest in the face of state-sanctioned violence, which persists to this day.

2024 Flora Tristán Book Award, Sección Perú, Latin American Studies Association

How the international war on poverty shapes identities, relationships, politics, and urban space in Peru.

Unruly Domestication investigates how Peru’s ongoing, internationally endorsed "war on poverty" shapes politics, intimate identities, and urban space in Lima. Drawing on a decade of embedded, ethnographic research in Lima’s largest and most recently founded “extreme poverty zone,” Kristin Skrabut demonstrates how Peru’s efforts to fight poverty by formalizing property, identity, and family status perpetuate environmentally unsustainable urban sprawl, deepen discrimination against single mothers, and undermine Peruvians’ faith in public officials and in one another. In the process, Skrabut reveals myriad entanglements of poverty, statecraft, and private life, exploring how families are made and unmade through political practices, how gender inequalities are perpetuated through policy, and how Peruvians’ everyday pursuits of state-sanctioned domestic ideals reproduce informality and landscapes of poverty in the urban periphery.

The only full-length ethnography written about Lima’s iconic and policy-inspiring shantytowns in thirty years, Unruly Domestication provides valuable insight into the dynamics of housing and urban development in the Global South, elucidating the most intimate and profound effects of global efforts to do good.

Since the 1990s, when Reviving Ophelia became a best seller and "Girl Power" a familiar anthem, girls have assumed new visibility in the culture. Yet in asserting their new power, young women have redefined femininity in ways that have often mystified their mothers. They have also largely disavowed feminism, even though their new influence is a likely legacy of feminism's Second Wave. At the same time, popular culture has persisted in idealizing, demonizing, or simply erasing mothers, rarely depicting them in strong and loving relationships with their daughters.

Unruly Girls, Unrepentant Mothers, a companion to Kathleen Rowe Karlyn's groundbreaking work, The Unruly Woman, studies the ways popular culture and current debates within and about feminism inform each other. Surveying a range of films and television shows that have defined girls in the postfeminist era—from Titanic and My So-Called Life to Scream and The Devil Wears Prada, and from Love and Basketball to Ugly Betty—Karlyn explores the ways class, race, and generational conflicts have shaped both Girl Culture and feminism's Third Wave. Tying feminism's internal conflicts to negative attitudes toward mothers in the social world, she asks whether today's seemingly materialistic and apolitical girls, inspired by such real and fictional figures as the Spice Girls and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, have turned their backs on the feminism of their mothers or are redefining unruliness for a new age.

A vivid account of the powerful ideas and remarkable lives of eleven women philosophers across two centuries.

When you think of modern philosophers, who comes to mind? Likely, they are popular figures such as Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche. But what if the history of philosophy we know is missing some of its most vital voices?

As Kristin Gjesdal shows us in Unruly Women, there is an abundance of important thinkers who were famous in their time, helped shape philosophy as we know it, and yet have been pushed into oblivion. She introduces eleven iconic women philosophers, from Germaine de Staël in Paris during the French Revolution to Angela Davis during the Black freedom movement in the US, whose ideas challenged and revolutionized the intellectual orthodoxies of their time. Moving across centuries, traditions, and political contexts, Unruly Women illustrates how the work of these philosophers engaged with questions that remain urgent now: What does freedom imply? How are power and inequality produced and sustained? What roles do gender, race, and class play in shaping our lives? And who gets to define what counts as knowledge, reason, and philosophy?

More than just an act of historical recovery, this book places these forgotten thinkers in conversation with one another, revealing a new history of philosophy—one shaped not only by abstract systems and canonical texts, but also by struggles over justice, emancipation, and political change. The result is a vibrant and accessible account of philosophy as something lived, contested, and deeply connected to the world around us—with unruly ideas that still matter today.

Fame-shaming suggests that those who identify as women and openly pursue public recognition transgress the bounds of propriety and good taste. In Unseemly, Lorraine York analyzes fame-hunger accusations that have been directed at “fame whores” and “drama queens” from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries, showing how these women have creatively handled such accusations. From Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Barbara Strozzi, Eliza Haywood, and Sarah Bernhardt to Helen Frankenthaler, Yoko Ono, Madonna, Kim Kardashian, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, York shows how fame-shaming has been informed by expectations of gender, sexuality, race, and class.

The unease that gives rise to public shaming of women who desire fame, says York, is a reaction to their skillful use of emergent media, whether print, film, secular song, science fiction, reality television, political speech, or social media. Fame hunger is not, as some assume, the last refuge of the untalented. To the contrary, women who have been accused of an unseemly thirst for celebrity turn out to be especially adept at emergent and boundary-breaking forms of cultural expression.

In Unseen Art, Claudia Brittenham unravels one of the most puzzling phenomena in Mesoamerican art history: why many of the objects that we view in museums today were once so difficult to see. She examines the importance that ancient Mesoamerican people assigned to the process of making and enlivening the things we now call art, as well as Mesoamerican understandings of sight as an especially godlike and elite power, in order to trace a gradual evolution in the uses of secrecy and concealment, from a communal practice that fostered social memory to a tool of imperial power.

Addressing some of the most charismatic of all Mesoamerican sculptures, such as Olmec buried offerings, Maya lintels, and carvings on the undersides of Aztec sculptures, Brittenham shows that the creation of unseen art has important implications both for understanding status in ancient Mesoamerica and for analyzing art in the present. Spanning nearly three thousand years of the Indigenous art of Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and Belize, Unseen Art connects the dots between vision, power, and inequality, providing a critical perspective on our own way of looking.

Time is at the core of how we think about colonialism in North America, with many seeing the first footfalls of newly arrived Europeans as indelibly marking the end of one era and the beginning of another. However, this understanding of time often serves to perpetuate outdated narratives about Indigenous people, normalizing colonial domination.

This volume unsettles conventional understandings of time in the study of Indigenous-colonial interactions in North America, acknowledging both the enduring nature of colonial legacies and the radical possibilities of Indigenous futures. The contributors largely approach this goal from the perspective of archaeology, with a particular concern for how we can effectively employ archaeological and related historical methods in collaboration with tribal nations and other descendant communities. The chapters engage with broader interdisciplinary questions about time, periodization, and temporality to build more nuanced and responsive understandings of Native-lived colonialism. 
 

Contributors
Nathan Acebo
Kaitlin M. Brown
Wade Campbell
Emily Clark
Ruben Cu:k Ba’ak
Jacob Holland-Lulewicz
Nicholas V. Kessler
Nicholas C. Laluk
Koji Lau-Ozawa
Heather Law Pezzarossi
Lindsay Martel Montgomery
Lee M. Panich
Michelle M. Pigott
Robert W. Preucel
Christopher B. Rodning
Sarah Simeonoff

Analyzes favela, quilombola, and indigenous communities’ responses to settler colonialism in urban Brazil. Based on ethnographic research and her experiences growing up in Brazil, the author tells the stories of communities in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Belo Horizonte

Unsettling Brazil offers a powerful account of five urban Indigenous and Black communities and movements in Brazil that illuminates their struggle for land, dignity, and their ways of life amid historic and ongoing settler colonialism, marked by militarization and dependent capitalist development. The in-depth case studies are the Indigenous movement Aldeia Maracanã and the quilombola community Sacopã in Rio, the Quilombo dos Luízes in Belo Horizonte, the Indigenous movement behind the Pindorama scholarship program in São Paulo, and the Complexo da Maré favela in Rio. For each, Poets vividly documents the intersectional and transnational structures of power that perpetuate the erasure, dispossession, and exploitation of nonwhite populations and the creative ways that Black and Indigenous communities have mobilized to unsettle these structures.

Drawing on the knowledge produced by Black and Indigenous organizers and thinkers, Poets argues for an interdisciplinary framework that prioritizes the voices and experiences of these communities. Addressing increasingly salient calls for decolonization, Poets ponders the paradoxical role of rights, citizenship, and the state in the fight for freedom and justice. Unsettling Brazil urges readers to confront the uncomfortable truths about the nation's history and stands in solidarity with those fighting to reclaim their heritage, identity, and land.

How the Great Recession revealed a system of school choice built on crisis, precarity, and exclusion

What do universal rights to public goods like education mean when codified as individual, private choices? Is the “problem” of school choice actually not about better choices for all but, rather, about the competition and exclusion that choice engenders—guaranteeing a system of winners and losers? Unsettling Choice addresses such questions through a compelling ethnography that illuminates how one path of neoliberal restructuring in the United States emerged in tandem with, and in response to, the Civil Rights movement.

Drawing on ethnographic research in one New York City school district, Unsettling Choice traces the contestations that surfaced when, in the wake of the 2007–2009 Great Recession, public schools navigated austerity by expanding choice-based programs. Ujju Aggarwal argues that this strategy, positioned as “saving public schools,” mobilized mechanisms rooted in market logics to recruit families with economic capital on their side, thereby solidifying a public sphere that increasingly resembled the private—where contingency was anticipated and rights for some were marked by intensified precarity for poor and working-class Black and Latinx families.

As Unsettling Choice shows, these struggles over public schools—one of the last remaining universal public goods in the United States—were entrapped within neoliberal regimes that exceeded privatization and ensured exclusion even as they were couched in language of equity, diversity, care, and rights. And yet this richly detailed and engaging book also tracks an architecture of expansive rights, care, and belonging built among poor and working-class parents at a Head Start center, whose critique of choice helps us understand how we might struggle for—and reimagine—justice, and a public that remains to be won.

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Unsettling Land brings together anthropologists and geographers examining land relations across South Asia, the Americas, Northeast Africa, Eastern Europe, and Oceania to show how land’s forms, affordances, and meanings shift across diverse historical contexts and uses. Land is not a fixed, passive surface or static resource but a dynamic entity with agency that is shaped by social, historical, and material relations. As such, land is crucial to understanding contemporary political challenges around climate change, capitalism, and conflict.

Unsettling Land offers vital conceptual and methodological tools that challenge the familiar sociomaterial binaries centered on nature/culture, Indigenous/capitalist, and land/water dichotomies. Scholars make land sensible across its diverse relational forms and by placing it at the center of contemporary politics. Land’s relationalities manifest in animal sanctuaries, wetlands, plantations, forests, conflict zones, urban settlements, and in extractive, infrastructural, and national frontiers. They emerge as identities mobilized through historical, social, and institutional relations of power, and through relationships tied to financialization, assetization, rentierism, and extractivism.

Accessible and theoretically ambitious, Unsettling Land investigates new and old political projects based on questions of care, solidarity, identity, rights, and power across the world. It is essential reading for students and scholars of anthropology, geography, political ecology and economy, and environmental, development, Indigenous, urban, and agrarian studies, as well as readers interested in climate justice and the future of land politics worldwide.