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Modeling a disability culture perspective on performance practice toward socially just futures

In Eco Soma, Petra Kuppers asks readers to be alert to their own embodied responses to art practice and to pay attention to themselves as active participants in a shared sociocultural world. Reading contemporary performance encounters and artful engagements, this book models a disability culture sensitivity to living in a shared world, oriented toward more socially just futures.

Eco soma methods mix and merge realities on the edges of lived experience and site-specific performance. Kuppers invites us to become moths, sprout gills, listen to our heart’s drum, and take starships into crip time. And fantasy is central to these engagements: feeling/sensing monsters, catastrophes, golden lines, heartbeats, injured sharks, dotted salamanders, kissing mammoths, and more. Kuppers illuminates ecopoetic disability culture perspectives, contending that disabled people and their co-conspirators make art to live in a changing world, in contact with feminist, queer, trans, racialized, and Indigenous art projects. By offering new ways to think, frame, and feel “environments,” Kuppers focuses on art-based methods of envisioning change and argues that disability can offer imaginative ways toward living well and with agency in change, unrest, and challenge.

Traditional somatics teach us how to fine-tune our introspective senses and to open up the world of our own bodies, while eco soma methods extend that attention toward the creative possibilities of the reach between self, others, and the land. Eco Soma proposes an art/life method of sensory tuning to the inside and the outside simultaneously, a method that allows for a wider opening toward ethical cohabitation with human and more-than-human others.

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

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

A celebration and exploration of the idea of pleasure and the unique role it serves in bringing individuals and communities together. 

There are innumerable ways to take pleasure in life: a bite of cake in the late afternoon, a walk in the warm springtime air after a long winter, a listen to the opening chords of your favorite song. But each of these pleasures is transformed by the presence of others. In Joy to the World, sociologist Gary Alan Fine takes up one of the major themes of his lifetime of work: pleasure. Fine gives us the conceptual basis for a sociology of pleasure: a joyous view of the world that, at times, inspires us, through expectations of interaction, shared cultures, and routine practices that make life worth living in community. 

Fine focuses on the impact of group relations as the platform for satisfaction, emphasizing the power of communities of practice. While pleasures may be enjoyed alone, the pleasure that occurs in social spaces performs a unique function in our personal and social lives; they help us understand ourselves as individuals who are part of a group. What is pleasurably transgressive in one context might seem inappropriate, cruel, or just plain nonsensical in another, and these shades of difference serve to solidify the bonds of the group. 

Joy to the World urges us to understand what draws us together as well as to appreciate what drives us apart. Our joys, as well as our challenges, help us to be a part of a caring, conscientious, committed community.

Joy is a politicized form of pleasure that goes beyond gratification to challenge norms of gender, sexuality, race, and class. Kristie Soares focuses on the diasporic media of Puerto Rico and Cuba to examine how music, public activist demonstrations, social media, sitcoms, and other areas of culture resist the dominant stories told about Latinx joy. As she shows, Latinx creators compose versions of joy central to social and political struggle and at odds with colonialist and imperialist narratives that equate joy with political docility and a lack of intelligence. Soares builds her analysis around chapters that delve into gozando in salsa music, precise joy among the New Young Lords Party, choteo in the comedy ¿Qué Pasa U.S.A.?, azúcar in the life and death of Celia Cruz, dale as Pitbull’s signature affect, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s use of silliness to take seriously political violence.

Daring and original, Playful Protest examines how Latinx creators resist the idea that joy only exists outside politics and activist struggle.

An intimate and revelatory memoir on personal challenges, political turmoil, and the state of American democracy―now in paperback with a new preface

During the past few years, as our country has faced unprecedented challenges, Senator Amy Klobuchar has been in the room where it happens―on the Senate floor for critical votes during the pandemic, at the debate podium during one of the most crucial presidential primaries in U.S. history, and in the Capitol on January 6, 2021, when insurrectionists stormed the building, interrupting the certification of the Electoral College. It was well past midnight when Klobuchar stood beside then–Vice President Pence to officially certify President Biden's victory.

In her candid, honest, and at times bitingly funny memoir, the pragmatic senator shares insider stories from these historic moments, while also inviting readers into her personal life. An underdog in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary campaign, she built surprising early momentum, only to suspend her candidacy in order to support Joe Biden. Within weeks of returning to work in the Senate, the sudden onslaught of Covid-19 hit her family directly: her husband was hospitalized for a week and spent a month in isolation. Klobuchar shares her experience facing a cancer diagnosis while her beloved father succumbs to Alzheimer's. She recounts the dramatic narrative of January 6 and how close we came to losing our democracy. And, with her signature humor, she reveals what it's like to work with some of her more . . . well, interesting . . . colleagues.

At the crux of these stories is a narrative of resilience—of personal resilience and the resilience of a nation—and, improbably, joy.

The Pipeline Is Broken explores the reality of racial exclusion and bias in graduate student education, arguing that the insidious effects of structural and institutional racism substantially chip away at the very pipeline of future BIPOC academics—already limited for other racialized reasons.

A series of letters written by graduate students of color, this collection offers a multifaceted account of the challenges, oppositions, microaggressions, and outright discrimination that these students face in higher education settings. Graduate students describe navigating hostile mentoring relationships and unwelcoming campus cultures and peers and laboring for poverty wages to earn their degrees. Yet these letters celebrate joy, community, and agency, offering a more complete and affirming view of graduate student life. Through these brave personal stories, The Pipeline Is Broken asks readers to interrogate what it means to navigate higher education as a person of color and to understand that the reality of faculty of color’s numerical-minority status is a complicated phenomenon whose genesis rests not at the moment of job interview. Rather, these letters show, this status is an intricate manifestation of a process that begins in elementary schools, is reinforced in high schools and colleges, and is part and parcel of the minefield that is graduate education in America.

Essential reading for anyone who cares about racial equity in education, mentorship, leadership development, or student well-being, The Pipeline Is Broken is a guide, a mirror, and a call to action all in one, challenging graduate programs, faculty, and administrators to examine their complicity in maintaining inequitable systems and offering suggestions for building cultures of care.