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COVID-19 vaccines were a historic triumph, with less than a year between the initial identification of the microbe and effective vaccines being administered. They were also a public administration challenge, demanding that governments of the world procure and administer billions of doses in widely different contexts. In many countries they were intensely polarizing, catalyzing a rise in anti-vaccination politics.

Vaccination Politics brings together public health and political science expertise for a global, systematic comparison of vaccination politics. The authors look at 32 countries’ experiences—from Austria to Malawi and the United States to Hong Kong—to understand how trust, wealth, pharmaceutical industries, regulators, international organizations, and health systems succeeded or failed at acquiring vaccines and vaccinating citizens. It shows how different governments and populations navigated challenges. Global inequality, political trust, contestation over health system priorities, and opportunistic politicians all played roles in shaping the subsequent politics of health and vaccination around the world. A conclusion brings together lessons for policy and key issues for further research. While the next pandemic is unknown to us today, the response to it will be shaped by the positive and negative legacies of COVID-19 vaccination politics.

Can public schools still educate America's children, particularly in poor and working class communities? Many advocates of school reform have called for dismantling public education in favor of market-based models of reform such as privatization and vouchers. By contrast, this pathfinding book explores how community organizing and activism in support of public schools in one of America's most economically disadvantaged regions, the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, has engendered impressive academic results.

Dennis Shirley focuses the book around case studies of three schools that have benefited from the reform efforts of a community group called Valley Interfaith, which works to develop community leadership and boost academic achievement. He follows the remarkable efforts of teachers, parents, school administrators, clergy, and community activists to take charge of their schools and their communities and describes the effects of these efforts on students' school performance and testing results.

Uniting gritty realism based on extensive field observations with inspiring vignettes of educators and parents creating genuine improvement in their schools and communities, this book demonstrates that public schools can be vital "laboratories of democracy," in which students and their parents learn the arts of civic engagement and the skills necessary for participating in our rapidly changing world. It persuasively argues that the American tradition of neighborhood schools can still serve as a bedrock of community engagement and academic achievement.

Chosen as a Lawyer's Literary Club Selection, this book looks behind stated legal rules and doctrines in the field of labor law to clearly formulate the often hidden values and assumptions that motivate those who make labor law decisions. The author demonstrates that the “received wisdom” in labor law, which is that decisions are based on analyses of the rational implications of statutory policy, language, or legislative history, fails to account for the actual history of decision-making, particularly the interpretation of the Wagner Act of 1935 that established collective bargaining and the National Labor Relations Board. Through close interpretation, Atleson shows the legal decisions that have been reached are better explained by such factors as notional of inherent property rights, the need for capital mobility, and the interest in continued productivity.

This volume presents a far-ranging conversation on the topic of Hohokam platform mounds in the history of the southern Arizona desert, exploring why they were built, how they were used, and what they meant in the lives of the farming communities who built them. Vapaki brings together diverse theoretical approaches, a mix of big-picture and tightly focused perspectives, detailed coverage for regional specialists of variation in the mounds, a broad synthesis useful for those working from other regional and topical foundations, and a rich corpus of perspectives and ideas for further research. Contributors grapple with questions about platform mounds, including the social, political, ideological, symbolic, and adaptive factors that contributed to their development, spread, and eventual cessation.

The differing perspectives presented here about what motivated Ancestral O’Odham populations of the Hohokam Period to build these monuments, whether as displays of status, identity, political ability, membership in regional networks, or architectural models of the cosmological order, offer insights to researchers studying monumental architecture in other contexts. O’Odham knowledge of the history and uses of mounds is combined with archaeological data to understand the place of platform mounds in the lives of the Ancestors and their continued presence among modern descendants.

Herding cattle from horseback has been a tradition in northern Mexico and the American West since the Spanish colonial era. The first mounted herders were the Mexican vaqueros, expert horsemen who developed the skills to work cattle in the brush country and deserts of the Southwestern borderlands. From them, Texas cowboys learned the trade, evolving their own unique culture that spread across the Southwest and Great Plains. The buckaroos of the Great Basin west of the Rockies trace their origin to the vaqueros, with influence along the way from the cowboys, though they, too, have ways and customs distinctly their own.

In this book, three long-time students of the American West describe the history, working practices, and folk culture of vaqueros, cowboys, and buckaroos. They draw on historical records, contemporary interviews, and numerous photographs to show what makes each group of mounted herders distinctive in terms of working methods, gear, dress, customs, and speech. They also highlight the many common traits of all three groups.

This comparative look at vaqueros, cowboys, and buckaroos brings the mythical image of the American cowboy into focus and detail and honors the regional and national variations. It will be an essential resource for anyone who would know or portray the cowboy—readers, writers, songwriters, and actors among them.

In Varieties of Muslim Experience, anthropologist Lawrence Rosen explores aspects of Arab Muslim life that are, at first glance, perplexing to Westerners. He ranges over such diverse topics as why Arabs eschew portraiture, why a Muslim scientist might be attracted to fundamentalism, and why the Prophet must be protected from blasphemous cartoons. What connects these seemingly disparate features of Arab social, political, and cultural life? Rosen argues that the common thread is the importance Arabs place on the negotiation of interpersonal relationships—a link that helps to explain actions as seemingly unfathomable as suicide bombing and as elusive as Quranic interpretation.

 Written with eloquence and a deep knowledge of the entire spectrum of Muslim experience, Rosen’s book will interest not only anthropologists and Islamicists but anyone invested in better understanding the Arab world.

Dispelling the notion of “generative” AI

Neural networks are designed to dissolve all media into the vector space—a universal space of commensurability. In Vector Media, Leonardo Impett and Fabian Offert parse theories of automatic vision to trace contemporary artificial intelligence’s technical ideology of epistemic reduction, where sensory data is turned into abstracted forms of meaning. Under this regime, bias is not just a question of what is represented but of the logic of representation itself. Drawing on Phil Agre’s notion of a critical technical practice, Vector Media reveals how artificial intelligence systems embed new epistemologies of media beneath the surface of their architectures.

Analyzing the techniques underpinning large multimodal artificial intelligence models like DALL-E, Midjourney, Flux, or Stable Diffusion, Impett and Offert offer the concept of neural exchange value: the value cultural artifacts acquire not through meaning or context but through their capacity to function as vectors. In such a system, commensurability becomes a condition of existence: what matters is not what something is but that it can be embedded. Rather than focusing solely on datasets, Vector Media proposes a critical study of vector spaces—and the machine cultures they produce—as a necessary complement to prevailing approaches in AI critique.

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Examining the border-enclosure strategy Israel uses to impose Palestinian im/mobilization, Maryam Griffin considers the ways public transportation in the Palestinian West Bank is a constant site of social struggle. Her illuminating book, Vehicles of Decolonization, studies collective movement, resistance, and everyday life in the West Bank to show how Palestinians assert a kind of Indigenous self-determination over mobility that Israeli settler colonialism seeks to undermine. 

Having immersed herself in a year of fieldwork, Griffin maps multiple engagements with the flexible bus, shared van, and private taxi services to demonstrate that the politics of mobility are shaped by ongoing settler colonialism and Indigenous struggle. Griffin uses critical border studies to look at the contested nature of mobility at the sites of transit, where Palestinians practice self-determination through routine participation, spectacular political organizing and demonstration, and artistic renderings. 

Featuring a variety of street images, Vehicles of Decolonization shows that multiple registers of people power work in concert not only to resist settler colonial logics but to reinhabit the land through the practice and preservation of alternative relations of mobility.

Reputed to be the richest city of Etruria, Veii was one of the most important cities in the ancient Mediterranean world. It was located ten miles northwest of Rome, and the two cities were alternately allied and at war for over three hundred years until Veii fell to Rome in 396 BCE, although the city continued to be inhabited until the Middle Ages. Rediscovered in the seventeenth century, Veii has undergone the longest continuous excavation of any of the Etruscan cities.

The most complete volume on the city in English, Veii presents the research and interpretations of multiple generations of Etruscan scholars who are at the forefront of the discipline. Their essays are grouped into four parts. The first provides a general overview of archaeological excavation at Veii and discusses the different types of methodologies employed over the years. The second part narrates the history of Etruscan occupation of the city and its role in the greater Mediterranean world. The third section examines the surviving material culture of Veii, including pottery, painting, sculpture, metalworking, and architectural terracottas. Finally, the legacy of Veii is discussed, and a chronology of the site is presented. This pioneering research offers all students of the ancient Mediterranean a new understanding of the development of Veii and its territory from the late Bronze Age to the Roman conquest, as well as of the interactions of Veii with nearby sites and territories in central Tyrrhenian Italy.

With nearly half a million Iranian Americans living in and around Los Angeles, Southern California is home to more Iranians than anywhere outside Iran itself. Although many community members identify as secular, stereotypes characterize Iranian Americans, like other populations from Muslim-majority countries, as pejoratively religious and culturally suspect. For Iranian American women who do practice Islam, navigating their religious, ethnic, and political identities, on both personal and communal levels, is complex and fraught, influenced not only by racialized discourses but also by intra-community narratives that equate Islamic practice with the authoritarian state in Iran.

Folklorist Afsane Rezaei applies theories of vernacular religion to explore how these women shape their religious identities in this particularly delicate diasporic context, how they engage with external imaginaries in their practices and narratives, and how they develop a sense of agency over their religious identification. For many, Islamic religiosity in the diaspora is an integrated and embodied aspect of folklife, closely tied to the sense of self, social networks, and communal identity, and is negotiated and reimagined in everyday, improvised, and sometimes contradictory ways. Rezaei’s detailed, respectful ethnography reaches beyond the binary of piety and resistance and offers new and nuanced understandings of Iranian American lived religion.

Roman women were the procreators and nurturers of life, both in the domestic world of the family and in the larger sphere of the state. Although deterred from participating in most aspects of public life, women played an essential role in public religious ceremonies, taking part in rituals designed to ensure the fecundity and success of the agricultural cycle on which Roman society depended. Thus religion is a key area for understanding the contributions of women to Roman society and their importance beyond their homes and families.

In this book, Sarolta A. Takács offers a sweeping overview of Roman women's roles and functions in religion and, by extension, in Rome's history and culture from the republic through the empire. She begins with the religious calendar and the various festivals in which women played a significant role. She then examines major female deities and cults, including the Sibyl, Mater Magna, Isis, and the Vestal Virgins, to show how conservative Roman society adopted and integrated Greek culture into its mythic history, artistic expressions, and religion. Takács's discussion of the Bona Dea Festival of 62 BCE and of the Bacchantes, female worshippers of the god Bacchus or Dionysus, reveals how women could also jeopardize Rome's existence by stepping out of their assigned roles. Takács's examination of the provincial female flaminate and the Matres/Matronae demonstrates how women served to bind imperial Rome and its provinces into a cohesive society.

Despite calls from industry associations for a diverse workforce to meet a changing client base, racial and gendered occupational segregation persists in the veterinary profession. As of 2018, nearly 90% of veterinarians identify as White and more than 70% are women. Adilia James explains the causes and effects of this growing and alarming trend in Vetting for Passion.

James interviews aspiring and employed veterinarians about why marginalized groups are, ironically, not making equitable progress in an elite labor market that encourages diversity and inclusion policies. She shows how cultural and structural barriers exclude people of color from the profession and how relationships with animals are used as racialization tools. People of color are also hindered by factors such as social and lived experiences, the debt-to-income ratio, and an uncomfortable working environment.

Additionally, James finds that hiring managers, veterinary schools, and mentors rely on “constrained choice narratives” to justify their assumption that only White women are likely to appreciate the unique benefits of a career in veterinary medicine, leading these gatekeepers to excuse their opportunity hoarding as benevolent.

Vetting for Passion offers a critical case study of a profession whose associations, colleges, and workplaces justify and perpetuate a culture of racial exclusion. 

Victims and Warriors examines contemporary violence in the context of political and economic processes that transcend local events. Casey High explores how popular imagery of Amazonian violence has become part of Waorani social memory in oral histories, folklore performances, and indigenous political activism. As Amazonian forms of social memory merge with constructions of masculinity and other intercultural processes, the Waorani absorb missionaries, oil development, and logging depredations into their legacy of revenge killings and narratives of victimhood. High shows that these memories of past violence form sites of negotiation and cultural innovation, and thus violence comes to constitute a central part of Amazonian sociality, identity, and memory.