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In the shadow of Mexico’s ongoing human rights crisis, Digging for Hope offers a powerful feminist ethnography of resistance, care, and collective memory. Drawing on nearly a decade of fieldwork, R. Aída Hernández Castillo documents the courageous work of women-led search collectives who, in the face of extreme violence, search for their disappeared loved ones.
 
Through physical and spiritual practices such as exhumation, mourning, and poetic remembrance, these women reclaim dignity for the dead and challenge a society that has normalized disappearance. At the heart of this book is a profound exploration of what Hernández Castillo calls a “pedagogy of love”—a political and ethical framework rooted in care, solidarity, and the refusal to forget. These women are not only searching for bodies; they are building emotional communities, crafting new languages of justice, and offering a reimagining of what it means to resist violence. Their practices, often overlooked by traditional scholarship, restore humanity and dignify the disappeared.
 
Digging for Hope is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the gendered dimensions of violence and the grassroots movements that rise in response. With clarity and compassion, Hernández Castillo brings readers into the intimate spaces of grief and resistance, offering a model for feminist ethnography that is both rigorous and deeply humane.

The 1992–95 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina following the dissolution of socialist Yugoslavia became notorious for “ethnic cleansing” and mass rapes targeting the Bosniac (Bosnian Muslim) population. Postwar social and political processes have continued to be dominated by competing nationalisms representing Bosniacs, Serbs, and Croats, as well as those supporting a multiethnic Bosnian state, in which narratives of victimhood take center stage, often in gendered form. Elissa Helms shows that in the aftermath of the war, initiatives by and for Bosnian women perpetuated and complicated dominant images of women as victims and peacemakers in a conflict and political system led by men. In a sober corrective to such accounts, she offers a critical look at the politics of women’s activism and gendered nationalism in a postwar and postsocialist society.

Goler Teal Butcher (1925–93), a towering figure in international human rights law, was a scholar and advocate who advanced an intersectional approach to human empowerment influenced by Black women’s intellectual traditions. Practical Audacity follows the stories of fourteen women whose work honors and furthers Butcher’s legacy. Their multilayered and sophisticated contributions have critically reshaped human rights scholarship and activism—including their major role in developing critical race feminism, community-based applications, and expanding the boundaries of human rights discourse.
 
Stanlie M. James weaves narratives by and about these women throughout the history of the field, illustrating how they conceptualize, develop, and implement human rights. By centering the courage and innovative interventions of capable and visionary Black women, she places them rightfully alongside such figures as Thurgood Marshall and Charles Hamilton Houston. This volume fundamentally shifts the frame through which human rights struggles are understood, illuminating how those who witness and experience oppression have made some of the biggest contributions to building a better world.

A balanced appraisal of the bitter debate surrounding the autobiography of Guatemala’s 1992 Nobel Peace Prize recipient.

Guatemalan indigenous rights activist Rigoberta Menchú first came to international prominence following the 1983 publication of her memoir, I, Rigoberta Menchú, which chronicled in compelling detail the violence and misery that she and her people suffered during her country’s brutal civil war. The book focused world attention on Guatemala and led to her being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992. In 1999, a book by David Stoll challenged the veracity of key details in Menchú’s account, generating a storm of controversy. Journalists and scholars squared off regarding whether Menchú had lied about her past and, if so, what that would mean about the larger truths revealed in her book.

In The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy, Arturo Arias has assembled a casebook that offers a balanced perspective. The first section of this volume collects the primary documents-newspaper articles, interviews, and official statements-in which the debate raged, many translated into English for the first time. In the second section, a distinguished group of international scholars assesses the political, historical, and cultural contexts of the debate and considers its implications for such issues as the “culture wars,” historical truth, and the politics of memory. Included is a new essay by David Stoll in which he responds to his critics.Contributors: Luis Aceituno; Juan Jesús Aznárez; John Beverley, U of Pittsburgh; Allen Carey-Webb, Western Michigan U; Margarita Carrera; Duncan Earle, U of Texas, El Paso; Carolina Escobar Sarti; Claudia Ferman, U of Richmond; Dina Fernández García; Eduardo Galeano; Dante Liano, U of Milan; W. George Lovell, Queen’s U, Canada; Christopher H. Lutz; Octavio Martí; Victor D. Montejo, UC Davis; Rosa Montero; Mario Roberto Morales, U of Northern Iowa; Jorge Palmieri; Daphne Patai, U of Massachusetts, Amherst; Mary Louise Pratt, Stanford U; Danilo Rodríguez; Ileana Rodríguez, Ohio State U; Larry Rohter; Jorge Skinner-Kleé; Elzbieta Sklodowska, Washington U; Carol A. Smith, UC Davis; Doris Sommer, Harvard U; David Stoll, Middlebury College; Manuel Vásquez Montalbán; and Kay B. Warren, Harvard U.