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We see it all the time: organizations strive to persuade the public to change beliefs or behavior through expensive, expansive media campaigns. Designers painstakingly craft clear, resonant, and culturally sensitive messaging that will motivate people to buy a product, support a cause, vote for a candidate, or take active steps to improve their health. But once these campaigns leave the controlled environments of focus groups, advertising agencies, and stakeholder meetings to circulate, the public interprets and distorts the campaigns in ways their designers never intended or dreamed. In Best Laid Plans, Terence E. McDonnell explains why these attempts at mass persuasion often fail so badly.
            McDonnell argues that these well-designed campaigns are undergoing “cultural entropy”: the process through which the intended meanings and uses of cultural objects fracture into alternative meanings, new practices, failed interactions, and blatant disregard. Using AIDS media campaigns in Accra, Ghana, as its central case study, the book walks readers through best-practice, evidence-based media campaigns that fall totally flat. Female condoms are turned into bracelets, AIDS posters become home decorations, red ribbons fade into pink under the sun—to name a few failures. These damaging cultural misfires are not random. Rather, McDonnell makes the case that these disruptions are patterned, widespread, and inevitable—indicative of a broader process of cultural entropy.

At 5:30 p.m. on May 6, 1970, an embattled Ohio State University President Novice G. Fawcett took the unprecedented step of closing down the university. Despite the presence of more than 1,500 armed highway patrol officers, Ohio National Guardsmen, deputy sheriffs, and Columbus city police, university and state officials feared they could not maintain order in the face of growing student protests. Students, faculty, and staff were ordered to leave; administrative offices, classrooms, and laboratories were closed. The campus was sealed off. Never in the first one hundred years of the university’s existence had such a drastic step been necessary.
 
Just a year earlier the campus seemed immune to such disruptions. President Nixon considered it safe enough to plan an address at commencement. Yet a year later the campus erupted into a spasm of violent protest exceeding even that of traditional hot spots like Berkeley and Wisconsin. How could conditions have changed so dramatically in just a few short months?
 
Using contemporary news stories, long overlooked archival materials, and first-person interviews, The Ohio State University in the Sixties explores how these tensions built up over years, why they converged when they did and how they forever changed the university.

In recent years, the capacity of civil society to respond to crises has been increasingly constrained by rising authoritarianism. Yet in West Africa, where civil society has historically played a pivotal role in democratization, this trend reveals deeper structural challenges. Unraveling of Civil Society examines how international aid strategies emphasizing technical capacity and professionalization have inadvertently contributed to the politicization and fragmentation of civil society in Guinea and Sierra Leone.

Drawing on extensive fieldwork—including interviews with representatives of more than a hundred locally led organizations, analysis of 260 strategic plans, and collection of cross-national survey data—this book offers a rare longitudinal and comparative study of civil society in the region. It traces how donor-driven models have led organizations to become sector specific, mimic donor institutions, or align with political interests—ultimately reducing organizational diversity and weakening the social infrastructure necessary for collective action and crisis resilience.

The book situates these findings within broader debates on democratic backsliding, noting that three of the nine countries that transitioned to autocracy between 2021 and 2023—Guinea, Chad, and Mali—are in West Africa. Despite significant international investment, “coup culture” and unconstitutional power shifts have resurged, raising urgent questions about the effectiveness of aid and the role of civil society in sustaining democratic norms.

Combining comparative historical analysis with a mixed-methods approach, Unraveling of Civil Society challenges prevailing assumptions about capacity building and offers practical recommendations for democratizing local organizations from within. It advocates for participatory governance and funding mechanisms and engages with ongoing conversations around the localization and decolonization of aid in a shifting geopolitical landscape.

This book is essential reading for scholars of African studies, political science, development studies, and global civil society as well as for practitioners in crisis management and political reform.

Unraveling the Garment Industry is an ambitious investigation of the politics of labor and protest within an industry that has come to define the possibilities and abuses of globalization and its feminized labor: the garment industry. Focusing on three labor rights movements—against GAP clothing in El Salvador, child labor in Bangladesh, and sweatshops in New York City—Ethel C. Brooks examines how transnational consumer protest campaigns effect change, sometimes with unplanned penalties for those they intend to protect.

Brooks analyzes a two-pronged problem in consumer boycott campaigns against labor abuse in the garment industry. First, how are we to understand the political necessities of local protest such as the right to unionize against the emphasis placed on consumer boycotts? Second, what and whose agency is privileged or obscured within the symbolic economies and the politics of information deployed by these campaigns? Tying both of these questions together is a commitment to seeing globalization as embedded in the everyday realities of the local. 

Drawing attention to the race, class, and gender assumptions central to powerful consumer boycotts, Brooks reveals how these movements unintentionally reinforce the global economic forces they denounce.

Ethel C. Brooks is assistant professor of women’s and gender studies and sociology at Rutgers University.

In literary and cinematic fictions, the fantastic blurs the lines between reality and fantasy. Lacking a consensus on definition, critics often describe the fantastic as supernatural, or similar to, but quite different from fantasy, science fiction, and magical realism.

In Unraveling the Real Cynthia Duncan provides a new theoretical framework for discussing how the fantastic explores both metaphysical and socially relevant themes in Spanish American fictions. Duncan deftly shows how authors and artists have used this literary genre to convey marginalized voices as well as critique colonialism, racism, sexism, and classism. Selecting examples from the works of such noted writers as Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, and Carlos Fuentes, among others, she shows how capacious the concept is, and why it eludes standard definition.

Challenging the notion that the fantastic is escapist in nature, Unraveling the Real shows how the fantastic has been politically engaged throughout the twentieth century, often questioning what is real or unreal. Presenting a mirror image of reality, the fantastic does not promoting a utopian parallel universe but rather challenges the way we think about the world around us and the cultural legacy of colonialism.