Social Science

A wave of innovation driven by the convergence of digital and molecular technologies is transforming food production and ways of eating in the US, Western Europe and Australasia. This book explores a range of contemporary agri-food issues, such as the digitalisation of farm production, aka Precision Agriculture, farmer independence, gene editing, alternative proteins and the rise of app-based home food deliveries.

This is the first book to provide a systemic analysis of technological innovation and its socio-economic consequences in modern food systems, including the ‘hollowing out’ of rural communities and pronounced industrial concentration. The food system is under growing public pressure to respond to global climate change, but this book finds little evidence of transition to sustainable low-carbon trajectories.

From seed to plate – the seasons of a remarkable crop

Cultivated from sea level to mountaintop, from parched deserts to sodden rain forests, from the rocky Gaspé Peninsula to the plains of Argentina, corn is the grain of the Americas. In terms of culinary uses, it is amazingly diverse, reflecting the breathtaking variety of the continents and environments from which it evolved. The consummate immigrant, corn is grown extensively on every continent except Antarctica.

Market farmer and naturalist Anthony Boutard weaves together this unique plant's contribution to our culture, its distinctive biology, and the practical information needed to grow and enjoy it at home. Beautiful Corn advocates a return to the nourishing whole grain that built America, in place of today's genetically modified crops processed by industrial agriculture into synthetic sweeteners and cheap meat. Come along on this lyrical and inspiring journey through the seasons, learning about growing and using corn in the traditional way.

Gardeners and market farmers can lead the way to a healthier country by restoring heritage corn varieties to our tables. An unabashed celebration of a much-maligned culinary treasure, Beautiful Corn will forever change the way you view this remarkable plant.

Anthony Boutard is a widely recognized advocate in the local food movement, well-known for his efforts in reviving long-lost crops and bringing little-known varieties to market. He and his wife Carol own Ayers Creek Farm, a 144-acre organic market farm in Gaston, Oregon, specializing in berries, beans, grains, and greens for sale to local restaurants and markets.

Rebecca Solnit offers a thrilling account of the sheer breadth and scale of social, political, scientific, and cultural change over the past three quarters of a century.

In this sequel to her enduring bestseller Hope in the Dark, Solnit surveys a world that has changed dramatically since the year 1960. Despite the forces seeking to turn back the clock on history, change is not a possibility; it is an inevitability.

The changes amount to nothing less than dismantling an old civilization and building a new one, whose newness is often the return of the old ways and wisdoms. In this rising worldview, interconnection is a core idea and value. But because the transformation is obscured within a longer arc of history, its scale is seldom recognized.

While the white nationalist and authoritarian backlash drives individualism and isolation, this new world embraces antiracism, feminism, a more expansive understanding of gender, environmental thinking, scientific breakthroughs, and Indigenous and non-Western ideas, pointing toward a more interconnected, relational world.

At a time when real-life heroes or role models can be scarce, these ordinary people are making a difference in human rights, not for glory but for good…

Voices Against Trafficking is a compelling collection of firsthand accounts of people who found themselves face-to-face with human rights events and did something about it.

Many people shy away from getting involved when they see something they think might not be okay. They tell themselves that they’re only one person so they can’t make a difference. The stories in this compilation prove otherwise. These people saw something and decided to say something. Here they share their journey of how they were able to make a difference and rally to the aid of those who were being victimized. One person taking the risk and getting involved can change the life of someone in need.

Voices Against Trafficking is inspiring not only for those interested in the human rights movement but also for anyone in dire circumstances who may be able to get out of it, like fearless author Andi Buerger who shares her story.

Migrant activism is key in today’s world, where countries in the Global North employ border regimes to reinforce racial hierarchies, limit freedom of movement and exploit migrant labour. But how do migrant-led movements engage with human rights—do they see them as limited tools, or as frameworks that can be reimagined in the fight for border justice?

In this compelling study, Perolini critically examines the various ways migrants challenge these border regimes and highlights the transformative potential of constructing human rights from below, moving beyond the state and legal norms.

Drawing on rich ethnographic research in Berlin, the book offers a fresh and provocative perspective on the intersections of migrant activism, human rights and racial and border justice

What if doubt, hesitation and ambivalence weren’t barriers to activism but powerful tools for change?

Challenging the idea that activism is fuelled only by anger or hope, this bold collection explores how activists across anti-racism, climate justice and mental health navigate uncertainty to sustain their work. Blending scholarship with on-the-ground perspectives, this book highlights ambivalence not as a weakness but as a dynamic force.

This is essential reading for anyone engaged in activism or emotional research, redefining what it means to feel and act for justice in a complex world.

What if doubt, hesitation and ambivalence weren’t barriers to activism but powerful tools for change?

Challenging the idea that activism is fuelled only by anger or hope, this bold collection explores how activists across anti-racism, climate justice and mental health navigate uncertainty to sustain their work. Blending scholarship with on-the-ground perspectives, this book highlights ambivalence not as a weakness but as a dynamic force.

This is essential reading for anyone engaged in activism or emotional research, redefining what it means to feel and act for justice in a complex world.

None of us are free until all of us are free—overcoming systemic oppression through transformative group work.

The Work That Reconnects has helped countless individuals to move through denial and despair into meaningful, collaborative action. This essential guide is ideal for those seeking to deepen this work by addressing systemic racism, injustice, and oppression.

Rooted in the deceptively simple premise that none of us are free until all of us are free, Coming Together in the Great Turning represents a decade-long interrogation and expansion of the revolutionary practices of the Work That Reconnects. Powerful contributions from practitioners:

• Address the false split between environmental and social justice and identify the common roots of human rights abuses and ecological destruction
• Explore how intersectional systems of oppression manifest in group settings and provide strategies for shifting these dynamics to interconnected systems of support
• Demonstrate how to move beyond "-isms" and identity politics toward true diversity, equity, inclusion, allyship, solidarity, collective liberation, and a "Just Transition"
• Share powerful perspectives, teachings, exercises, and rituals drawn from the practical experience of facilitators worldwide
• Offer specific guidance for creating safer spaces and expanding cultural competency through anti-oppressive and trauma-informed facilitation.

This vital resource is required reading for facilitators and participants, change agents and activists, visionaries, and anyone who feels pain for our world and is committed to catalyzing change for a just and thriving world.

Rebecca Solnit offers a thrilling account of the sheer breadth and scale of social, political, scientific, and cultural change over the past three quarters of a century.

In this sequel to her enduring bestseller Hope in the Dark, Solnit surveys a world that has changed dramatically since the year 1960. Despite the forces seeking to turn back the clock on history, change is not a possibility; it is an inevitability.

The changes amount to nothing less than dismantling an old civilization and building a new one, whose newness is often the return of the old ways and wisdoms. In this rising worldview, interconnection is a core idea and value. But because the transformation is obscured within a longer arc of history, its scale is seldom recognized.

While the white nationalist and authoritarian backlash drives individualism and isolation, this new world embraces antiracism, feminism, a more expansive understanding of gender, environmental thinking, scientific breakthroughs, and Indigenous and non-Western ideas, pointing toward a more interconnected, relational world.

Racial politics in the United States are as tumultuous as ever. A resurgent white nationalism finds broadening support while the Movement for Black Lives marks a newly consolidated and highly visible iteration of the centuries-long Black Freedom struggle. The question of what it would take to get more white people to fight for racial justice is as urgent as ever. Chandra Russo takes up this question in White Flank.

White people's participation in antiracist action has always been fraught, with competing narratives about what meaningful allyship looks like, and what one should do with their white privilege. Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) has emerged as the largest national effort explicitly seeking to organize white people. Beyond just book clubs and discussion circles, and against the seductions of virtue signaling, SURJ invites and equips white communities to take part in concrete antiracist action and to organize for lasting change.

Using the case of SURJ, this book tells the story of a new generation of white antiracist efforts in a range of local contexts, from Los Angeles to rural Appalachia. White Flank documents the promises and complexities of antiracist organizing. Russo argues that shifting white communities' understanding of antiracism away from a focus on individual morality and towards collective action is a crucial achievement.

Growing the white flank of a multiracial justice movement is bound to be messy. Yet our present moment requires that white people join with Black, Indigenous, and People of Color in the fight for collective liberation.

Racial politics in the United States are as tumultuous as ever. A resurgent white nationalism finds broadening support while the Movement for Black Lives marks a newly consolidated and highly visible iteration of the centuries-long Black Freedom struggle. The question of what it would take to get more white people to fight for racial justice is as urgent as ever. Chandra Russo takes up this question in White Flank.

White people's participation in antiracist action has always been fraught, with competing narratives about what meaningful allyship looks like, and what one should do with their white privilege. Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) has emerged as the largest national effort explicitly seeking to organize white people. Beyond just book clubs and discussion circles, and against the seductions of virtue signaling, SURJ invites and equips white communities to take part in concrete antiracist action and to organize for lasting change.

Using the case of SURJ, this book tells the story of a new generation of white antiracist efforts in a range of local contexts, from Los Angeles to rural Appalachia. White Flank documents the promises and complexities of antiracist organizing. Russo argues that shifting white communities' understanding of antiracism away from a focus on individual morality and towards collective action is a crucial achievement.

Growing the white flank of a multiracial justice movement is bound to be messy. Yet our present moment requires that white people join with Black, Indigenous, and People of Color in the fight for collective liberation.

The long-awaited convergence of climate, economic, political, intellectual, faith and social failures gives many reasons for despair. The authors of this volume have spent their lives around the trauma of race and poverty in South Africa and the United States working with Nobel prize winners and those in townships and tenements. We have learned that hope is not delusional and accountability not naïve. But one must think clearly and deeply, untethered from the inadequate simplicities and false choices. We must be here now, with eyes wide open for when systems break down, as so many are today, knowing that they also break open new space for creative action.
The authors lead the global web of thinker-doers through the Leading Causes of Life Initiative and national networks in Africa, Europe and the United States. They find coherence among profound thinking from fields never brought into alignment before drawn from by economists, mycelial researchers, anthropologists and health sciences working in the Artic to South Africa, and the tough neighbourhoods in between. This includes a consideration of the human capacities that allow us to act in and transform the world we inhabit, of the radical nature of joy in the face of despair, of the judgement of Nemesis on hubris and privilege, of the ‘value of everything’ contra price as definitive, of the idea of involution as distinguished from evolution, of the concept of ‘meshworks’ in our entanglement with others, and, finally, of the ‘theatre of the soul’ as the unity of the physical, the psychological, the political and the spiritual.
Sharply sensitive to the urgency of careful thought and wise action, the authors help us see that life does find a way towards deep accountability for the life of complex human ecosystems. They ask us to take responsibility for this as a key to human flourishing and well-being.

Investigates how Lebanese activists work through failure to keep the possibility of political change alive

A Break in the Future considers how activists keep hope alive and work toward future change when social movements fall apart and protests fail. Anthropologist Fuad Musallam investigates the endurance of political possibility in Beirut, Lebanon, between the Arab uprisings of 2010–11 and the Lebanese uprising of October 2019. Despite a regional collapse of political hope and a local inability to effect change in the context of political stasis, postponed elections, and the degradation of civil infrastructure, between every protest cycle a sizable number of people remained engaged and built toward future political opportunities. Through an analysis of activist strategies, Musallam explores the ways in which we grasp different phases of political (dis)engagement together. The book is motivated by a desire to better understand how to keep political possibility alive.

To make sense of how possibility endures, this book looks at the ebb and flow of political engagement together, that is, not only at the peaks of recent mobilizations but also at the times in between when, at first glance, little seems to be happening on the ground. Musallam explores how activists cultivated and maintained their political subjectivity—the active and engaged sense of self that motivates political action—across the decade’s high and low points. He finds this political subjectivity to be the product of heartbreak and defeat as much as victory, as it underlies several movements at any one time and can sustain activists through multiple setbacks.

Musallam discovers that when political change seems most unlikely, a moment of rupture—or a “break in the future”—becomes central to Lebanese activists’ belief that their actions can and will transform their world. A Break in the Future ultimately argues that the experience of moments of rupture radically transforms what seems possible, and that the cultivation of these experiences keeps movements going even when things appear to fall apart.

"A smart, well-documented book about a group of people determined to hold the powerful to account."—2021 NPR "Books We Love" 
"Journalism at its best."—2022 Southwest Books of the Year: Top Pick
A 2021 Immigration Book of the Year, Immigration Prof Blog
Investigative Reporters & Editors Book Award Finalist 2021

How Latino activists brought down powerful Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio.

Journalists Terry Greene Sterling and Jude Joffe-Block spent years chronicling the human consequences of Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s relentless immigration enforcement in Maricopa County, Arizona. In Driving While Brown, they tell the tale of two opposing movements that redefined Arizona’s political landscape—the restrictionist cause advanced by Arpaio and the Latino-led resistance that rose up against it.

The story follows Arpaio, his supporters, and his adversaries, including Lydia Guzman, who gathered evidence for a racial-profiling lawsuit that took surprising turns. Guzman joined a coalition determined to stop Arpaio, reform unconstitutional policing, and fight for Latino civil rights. Driving While Brown details Arpaio's transformation—from "America’s Toughest Sheriff," who forced inmates to wear pink underwear, into the nation’s most feared immigration enforcer who ended up receiving President Donald Trump’s first pardon. The authors immerse readers in the lives of people on both sides of the battle and uncover the deep roots of the Trump administration's immigration policies.

The result of tireless investigative reporting, this powerful book provides critical insights into effective resistance to institutionalized racism and the community organizing that helped transform Arizona from a conservative stronghold into a battleground state.

A literary mixtape of transformative dialogues on justice with a cast of visionary rebel activists, organizers, artists, culture workers, thought leaders, and movement builders.

Rebel Speak sounds the alarm for a global movement to end systemic injustice led by people doing the day-to-day rebel work in the prison capital of the world. Prison activist, artist, and scholar Bryonn Rolly Bain brings us transformative oral history ciphers, rooted in the tradition of call-and-response, to lay bare the struggle and sacrifice on the front lines of the fight to abolish the prison industrial complex.

Rebel Speak investigates the motives that inspire and sustain movements for visionary change. Sparked by a life-changing interview with working-class heroes Dolores Huerta and Harry Belafonte, Bryonn invites us to join conversations with change-makers whose diverse critical perspectives and firsthand accounts expose the crisis of prisons and policing in our communities. Through dialogues with activists including Albert Woodfox, founder of the first Black Panther Party prison chapter, and Susan Burton, founder of Los Angeles's A New Way of Life Reentry Project; a conversation with a warden pushing beyond traditions at Sing Sing Correctional Facility; and an intimate exchange with his brother returning from prison, Bryonn reveals countless unseen spaces of the movement to end human caging. Sampling his provocative sessions with influential artists and culture workers, like Public Enemy leader Chuck D and radical feminist MC Maya Jupiter, Bryonn opens up and guides discussions about the power of art and activism to build solidarity across disciplines and demand justice.

With raw insight and radical introspection, Rebel Speak embodies the growing call for "credible messengers" on prisons, policing, racial justice, abolitionist politics, and transformative organizing. Reimagining the role of the writer and scholar as a DJ and MC, Bryonn moves the crowd with this unforgettable mix of those working within the belly of the beast to change the world. This is a new century's sound of movement-building and Rebel Speak.

To heal a world in crisis, we must rethink “legacy”—and commit to something bigger than ourselves.

From the time he was born, Martin Luther King III has carried the weight of his father’s legacy—and his dream of a Beloved Community built on justice, love and equal rights for all. Today, in a world burdened by histories of violence, oppression, racism, poverty, fear and disconnectedness, that dream seems more remote than ever.

In answer to these challenges, Martin has teamed up with his wife and fellow activist, Arndrea Waters King, and legacy architects Marc Kielburger and Craig Kielburger to find a new way forward. Drawing on breakthroughs in neuroscience, psychology, epigenetics and their own lived experiences, they have created a groundbreaking new framework called Living Legacy. It’s based on the simple but profound recognition that our small, day-to-day actions create legacies that have the power to transform, uplift and unite us all. It’s time to reevaluate, recognize, and reclaim those legacies. Living Legacy invites us to live our best lives and lives larger than ourselves—and in doing so, discover the most sought-after yet elusive state of being: fulfillment.

In conjunction with the Realize the Dream campaign, What Is My Legacy? kicks off an essential conversation on how to best refocus our individual stories to achieve collective change. Featuring never-been-told stories from the King family and contributions from celebrities and thought leaders—including His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Jay Shetty, Julia Roberts, Yara Shahidi, Rev. Al Sharpton and Sanjay Gupta—it’s an extraordinary road map for finding genuine connection, bringing us closer to Dr. King’s dream of a Beloved Community.

A moving exploration of the crisis of homeless youth—told through the inspiring stories of a woman on the frontlines and the kids themselves.

They hide in plain sight. They survive on free school breakfasts and lunches, join school sports teams in order to shower, sleep on friends’ couches, in parks, or on the streets. Their official designation is “unaccompanied homeless youth”—they are not "runaways" breaking free from strict parenting; these are kids seeking safety. They have escaped abusive parents, have been abandoned, or have never had a home to begin with.

When Vicki Sokolik’s son brought home a classmate who was living on her own and was dropping out of school to support herself, Vicki stepped in to help. As she learned more about the invisible population of young people navigating life alone, she discovered the countless ways they are overlooked and impeded by the system. She founded a nonprofit and worked to change legislation in her home state of Florida to give these kids agency over their lives.

If You See Them wakes us up to the issue of youth homelessness in America, through Sokolik’s own story of advocacy and through the voices of the kids themselves. Her grassroots action demonstrates the world-shifting power of compassion, acceptance, belonging, and self-determination, and the capacity each of us has to change our communities for the better.

*ONE OF TIME’S MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2025*

An inspiring collection of essays, personal and political, from the leading environmental justice activist of our time, that frames the challenges we face as a society and—with grace, generosity, and hope—charts the way toward equity, respect, and a brighter future.

Described by Bryan Stevenson as “the center of the quest for environmental justice in America,” Catherine Coleman Flowers has dedicated her life to fighting for the most vulnerable communities—rural, poor, of color—who have been deprived of the basic civil right to a clean, safe, and sustainable environment. Both deeply personal and urgently political, the essays in Holy Ground draw on history to illuminate and contextualize the most pressing issues of this moment: from climate change to human rights, from rural poverty to reproductive justice, from the notorious history of Lowndes County, Alabama, to the broader crisis of racialized disinvestment in the South. Flowers maps the distance and direction toward justice, examining her own diverse ancestry as evidence of our interconnectedness. She reflects on trailblazers who have fought for social and environmental justice. She writes about her mother, a civil rights activist who lost her life to gun violence, and her own deeply personal experience with reproductive justice. And in a remarkably candid and moving piece, she writes about a traumatic attack that occurred at a moment of collective triumph, in which she weighs her fight for the common good against her own well-being. Flowers’s faith shines throughout the collection, guiding her work and inspiring her vision of our responsibility to one another and to our shared home.

Drawn from a lifetime of organizing, activism, and change-making, Holy Ground equips us with clarity, lights a way forward, and rouses us to action—for ourselves and for each other, for our communities, and, ultimately, for our planet.

Investigates how Lebanese activists work through failure to keep the possibility of political change alive

A Break in the Future considers how activists keep hope alive and work toward future change when social movements fall apart and protests fail. Anthropologist Fuad Musallam investigates the endurance of political possibility in Beirut, Lebanon, between the Arab uprisings of 2010–11 and the Lebanese uprising of October 2019. Despite a regional collapse of political hope and a local inability to effect change in the context of political stasis, postponed elections, and the degradation of civil infrastructure, between every protest cycle a sizable number of people remained engaged and built toward future political opportunities. Through an analysis of activist strategies, Musallam explores the ways in which we grasp different phases of political (dis)engagement together. The book is motivated by a desire to better understand how to keep political possibility alive.

To make sense of how possibility endures, this book looks at the ebb and flow of political engagement together, that is, not only at the peaks of recent mobilizations but also at the times in between when, at first glance, little seems to be happening on the ground. Musallam explores how activists cultivated and maintained their political subjectivity—the active and engaged sense of self that motivates political action—across the decade’s high and low points. He finds this political subjectivity to be the product of heartbreak and defeat as much as victory, as it underlies several movements at any one time and can sustain activists through multiple setbacks.

Musallam discovers that when political change seems most unlikely, a moment of rupture—or a “break in the future”—becomes central to Lebanese activists’ belief that their actions can and will transform their world. A Break in the Future ultimately argues that the experience of moments of rupture radically transforms what seems possible, and that the cultivation of these experiences keeps movements going even when things appear to fall apart.

When women have full socioeconomic citizenship as well as equitable and respectful partnerships with men, transformative justice can be sustained in postconflict societies

In Women’s Work, Jennifer Moore presents a reimagined theory of peacebuilding and transformative justice based on the experiences and insights of women farmers and microentrepreneurs who lived through protracted civil conflicts, drawing on seven years of interviews with women activists across ten communities—five in the Acholi region of Northern Uganda and five in the Moyamba and Koinadugu Districts of Sierra Leone. Despite the important differences between the preconflict and conflict histories and demographics of the two countries, Moore finds commonalities in the practical, yet visionary, approaches to community life emerging from the core values, daily activities, and long-range goals shared by rural cooperative members in both regions.

Collective survival, communal healing, and conflict resolution define the rhythm of these women’s daily lives as they go about building peace, piecemeal. They reject punitive retribution models and demand, instead, a peacebuilding model that advocates for advances in material well-being, the acknowledgment of state accountability for community suffering, and reconciliation and restoration of community networks. But most important, Moore amplifies these women’s voices when they insist that legal equality for women and healthy partnerships between women and men are also essential components to enduring transformation of their societies.

Moore theorizes what peacebuilding look like if it were modeled on these women-led, matriarchically structured communities that proved not only to be effective at holding governments accountable but also to have the capacity to feed their people and revitalize their local economies. Women’s Work shows that when women have full socioeconomic citizenship as well as equitable and respectful partnerships with men, transformative justice can be sustained through the arts of collective livelihood, violence-free conflict management, and celebration.

One in ten children worldwide is involved in some form of child labor. While almost half are in occupations that put their safety at risk, the other half have "gray" jobs like industrial farming or selling candy on the street. Children in these positions often defend the value of their work, and some even join social movements to demand the "right to work with dignity." In Good Kids, Isabel Jijon reveals how global campaigns against child labor are often met with resistance from the very children they are meant to protect. Conducting interviews in Bolivia and Ecuador with children who defend their labor, Jijon explores what they mean by "value," "rights," and "dignity" in this context. She finds that working children seek a sense of self-worth, as well as worthiness in their closest relationships; they use work to prove that they are "good sons/daughters," "good friends," or simply "good kids." Drawing, also, on interviews with reformers invested in ending child labor, Jijon produces a nuanced picture of the ways that global campaigns can, unintentionally, undermine these relationships and make working children feel stigmatized rather than protected. This fascinating and challenging study of moral meaning-making upends simple understandings of harm and worthiness in a vast but poorly understood labor market.

One in ten children worldwide is involved in some form of child labor. While almost half are in occupations that put their safety at risk, the other half have "gray" jobs like industrial farming or selling candy on the street. Children in these positions often defend the value of their work, and some even join social movements to demand the "right to work with dignity." In Good Kids, Isabel Jijon reveals how global campaigns against child labor are often met with resistance from the very children they are meant to protect. Conducting interviews in Bolivia and Ecuador with children who defend their labor, Jijon explores what they mean by "value," "rights," and "dignity" in this context. She finds that working children seek a sense of self-worth, as well as worthiness in their closest relationships; they use work to prove that they are "good sons/daughters," "good friends," or simply "good kids." Drawing, also, on interviews with reformers invested in ending child labor, Jijon produces a nuanced picture of the ways that global campaigns can, unintentionally, undermine these relationships and make working children feel stigmatized rather than protected. This fascinating and challenging study of moral meaning-making upends simple understandings of harm and worthiness in a vast but poorly understood labor market.

Upon the tenth anniversary of the Gezi protests, this rousing collection takes on the task of critically re-examining the social uprising of June 2013 in Turkey and in the process fills in blind spots in the academic corpus. Gezi at Ten braves into subjects largely neglected by the extant scholarship, in particular, the organizational aspects of the Gezi upheaval, which bear heavily on the course of social and political affairs that have taken dramatic turns in recent years. By delving into the question of political practice, whether on the part of the state, the government or the opposition, the book re-evaluates how the emergent collective momentum was managed by the contesting parties. In other words, Gezi at Ten concentrates on the multifaceted political organizing of social forces in conflict both during and in the aftermath of the protests.

Contributors are: Athina Arampatzi, Gökhan Atılgan, Özgür Balkılıç, Selin Dingiloğlu, Antoine Dolcerocca, Çağlar Dölek, Kürşad Ertuğrul, Ufuk Gürbüzdal, Ezgi Kaya Hayatsever, Eren Karaca, Sebla Ayşe Kazancı, Arca Özçoban, Ezgi Pınar, Sungur Savran, Ozan Siso, Aylin Topal, Fatih Yaşlı and Adem Yeşilyurt.

A Ms. Magazine Most Anticipated Feminist Book of 2025

This helpful how-to guide introduces the practices, history, and politics of youth movements for justice in the United States
 
Grounded in the struggles and worldmaking of queer and trans youth and people of color, Youth Organizing for Reproductive Justice shows us how all youth organizing is reproductive justice as young people resist systems of oppression that limit bodily autonomy and self-determination. Through case studies, activist spotlights, and organizing “how-tos,” this book provides a powerful tool for understanding the interconnected struggles at the center of youth activism.
 
From the school-to-prison pipeline to transgender youth’s access to gender-affirming care to support for pregnant and parenting teens, Chris Barcelos shows that reproductive justice inspires political organizing across a range of issues. This book will help mobilize scholars, activists, policy makers, reproductive justice nonprofit workers, and youth organizers toward collective liberation.

The gap between personal and formal politics has been widening globally and locally. As personal politics have become more inclusive and egalitarian inspired by new social movements, neoliberal ideologies have undermined democracy, increasing isolation, inequality, poverty, disease and environmental threat. Yet this paradox may also offer a path to transformation.

Using international evidence and examples, The Antidote explores what we can learn from the equalisation of personal roles and relationships that’s been taking place, to help us reconnect with ourselves and each other and make possible more participatory and liberatory policy and politics. It sets out the barriers we face and offers a route map to bring an end to the destructive effects of unfettered neoliberal ideology, economics, policy and politics.

The gap between personal and formal politics has been widening globally and locally. As personal politics have become more inclusive and egalitarian inspired by new social movements, neoliberal ideologies have undermined democracy, increasing isolation, inequality, poverty, disease and environmental threat. Yet this paradox may also offer a path to transformation.

Using international evidence and examples, The Antidote explores what we can learn from the equalisation of personal roles and relationships that’s been taking place, to help us reconnect with ourselves and each other and make possible more participatory and liberatory policy and politics. It sets out the barriers we face and offers a route map to bring an end to the destructive effects of unfettered neoliberal ideology, economics, policy and politics.

A collection of essays from the Stop Cop City movement on the fight for police abolition and for a liveable planet for all, with gripping reporting from activists on the ground and rousing articles from renowned radical academics

The Stop Cop City movement is a decentralized effort to stop the construction of a $120 million police training facility and the destruction of 170 acres of the Weelaunee Forest outside of Atlanta, Georgia. This is the first collection of essays bringing together organizers and activists who have been involved in the years-long struggle to Stop Cop City. Connecting movements for environmental justice, police abolition, and Indigenous sovereignty, this expansive collection highlights the strategy, tactics, and ideologies that transformed a local collective action into a powerful international movement.

Featuring the voices of forest defenders, environmental justice advocates, political prisoners, Indigenous activists, abolitionists, educators, legal scholars, and academics, these wide-ranging essays explore the history of the intersectional movement, the diverse tactics embraced by activists, tributes to Tortuguita, the 26-year-old queer Indigenous forest defender murdered by Georgia State Patrol troopers, and the intense police and legal repression faced by organizers. Making critical connections between oppression and resistance at home and abroad, the movement to Stop Cop City has expanded to a fight against a Cop World.

A pathbreaking book about world history, global justice, and the climate crisis—featuring a new preface by the author.

“Coursing with moral urgency and propelled by brilliant prose, this is more than argument. It's how we build the power needed to win.”
—Naomi Klein

A clear, new case for reparations as a “constructive,” future-oriented project that responds to the weight of history’s injustices with the equitable distribution of benefits and burdens. Centuries ago, Táíwò explains, European powers engineered the systems through which advantages and disadvantages still flow. Colonialism and transatlantic slavery forged schemes of injustice on an unprecedented scale, a world order he calls “global racial empire.” The project of justice must meet the same scope.

Táíwò’s analysis not only discourages despair, it demands global resistance. Reconsidering Reparations suggests policies, goals, and organizing strategies. And it leaves readers with clear and powerful advice: act like an ancestor. Do what we can to shape the world we want our moral descendants to inherit, and have faith that they will continue the long struggle for justice. This understanding, Táíwò shows, has deep roots in the thought of Black political thinkers such as James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Cedric Robinson, and Nkechi Taifa.

Reconsidering Reparations is a book with profound implications for our views of justice, racism, the legacies of slavery and colonialism, and climate change policy.

Building on the pioneering radical approach of Research Justice: Methodologies for Social Change—a seminal text born out of the innovative work of the DataCenter: Research for Justice—this updated edition explores the nexus of research, power, and legitimacy, advocating for equitable knowledge construction.

Challenging traditional models, internationally recognized author Andrew J. Jolivétte offers a much-needed analysis of the intersections between Research Methods, Public Policy, Cultural Studies, Anthropology, Ethnic Studies, and Sociology. Complete with a new introductory chapter, the book champions diverse forms of knowledge, envisioning a future where cultural, spiritual, and experiential insights have equal impact on policy making.

Interdisciplinary and thought-provoking, this is a vital resource for scholars and students alike.

Building on the pioneering radical approach of Research Justice: Methodologies for Social Change—a seminal text born out of the innovative work of the DataCenter: Research for Justice—this updated edition explores the nexus of research, power, and legitimacy, advocating for equitable knowledge construction.

Challenging traditional models, internationally recognized author Andrew J. Jolivétte offers a much-needed analysis of the intersections between Research Methods, Public Policy, Cultural Studies, Anthropology, Ethnic Studies, and Sociology. Complete with a new introductory chapter, the book champions diverse forms of knowledge, envisioning a future where cultural, spiritual, and experiential insights have equal impact on policy making.

Interdisciplinary and thought-provoking, this is a vital resource for scholars and students alike.

Abolish Rent takes aim at one of the foremost engines of inequality and injustice.

Rent drives millions into debt, despair, and onto the streets. The social cost of rent is too damn high. Written for anyone fed up with the permanent housing crisis, complicit politicians, and real estate greed, Abolish Rent dissects our housing system from the perspective of those it immiserates. Through unsparing analysis and striking stories of resistance, it shows us how tenants can, through organizing and collective action, harness our power and win the housing we deserve.

From two co-founders of the largest tenants union in the country, this deeply reported account of the resurgent tenant movement centers poor and working-class people who are fighting back, staying put, and remaking the city in the process. Authors Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis take us to trilingual strategy meetings, raucous marches against gentrification, and daring eviction defenses where immigrants put their lives on the line. These are the seeds of the revolutionary movement we need to make our housing, our cities, and the world our home.

An oral history and critical genealogy of “accountability,” the complex abolitionist concept that pushes us to ask: just what do we mean by “community?"

A concept just short of a program, accountability has been taken up as a core principle within leftist organizing and activity over the past quarter century. While it invokes a particular vocabulary and set of procedures, it has also come to describe a more expansive, if often vague, approach to addressing harm within movement work. The term’s sudden, widespread adoption as abolitionist concepts began to circulate broadly in recent years cast light on certain shifts in its meaning, renewing the urgency of understanding its relation to militant leftist history and practice.

After Accountability gathers interviews conducted by members of the Pinko collective with nine transformative justice practitioners, socialist labor organizers, incarcerated abolitionists, and activists on the left, and also includes framing essays by the Pinko collective in which its members situate and reflect on those illuminating conversations. An investigation into the theoretical foundations and current practice of accountability, this volume explores the term’s potential and limits, discovering in it traces of the past half-century’s struggles over the absence of community and the form revolutionary activity should take.

Contributors: Kim Diehl, Michelle Foy, Peter Hardie, Emi Kane and Hyejin Shim, Esteban Kelly, Pilar Maschi, and Stevie Wilson, and Pinko collective members Lou Cornum, Max Fox, M.E. O'Brien, and Addison Vawters.

This is a handbook for change. Because we all know ways in which life could be better. And it can be better. We can make it better.

We don’t need to wait for a leader or savior. We don’t need to limit ourselves to comments and clicks. In this stunningly original comic-book tour of a serious topic, Jeff Sparrow and Sam Wallman explore 12 powerful ideas distilled from the history of struggle for better lives, better working conditions, and a better world. They show how solidarity can be built across growing divisions—without compromising our values.

‘Strife’ is just another word for making yourself heard. In fun, short, shareable chapters, 12 Rules for Strife shows how together we can change everything.

Progressive activism today is increasingly spearheaded by the nation’s youngest voters. Gen Z—those born between 1997 and 2012—has come of age in a decade of upheavals. They have witnessed the election of Donald Trump, the murder of George Floyd, and the Dobbs Supreme Court decision, and they have lived under the constant threats of mass shootings and climate change. In response, left-leaning Zoomers, particularly women and LGBTQ people, have banded together to take action.

This book tells the story of Gen Z’s growing political participation—and why it is poised to drive U.S. politics leftward. Bringing together original data and compelling narrative—including nearly one hundred interviews with Gen Z activists and several national surveys—political scientist Melissa Deckman explores the world of youth-led progressive organizing, highlighting the crucial importance of gender and sexuality. She reveals why women and LGBTQ Zoomers are participating in politics at higher levels than their straight male peers, creating a historic “reverse gender gap.” Deckman takes readers inside Gen Z’s fight for a more inclusive and just future, sharing stories of their efforts to defend reproductive rights, prevent gun violence, stem climate change, and win political office. A deep dive into the politics of Gen Z, this book sheds new light on how young voters view politics and why their commitment to progressive values may transform the country in the years ahead.

Progressive activism today is increasingly spearheaded by the nation’s youngest voters. Gen Z—those born between 1997 and 2012—has come of age in a decade of upheavals. They have witnessed the election of Donald Trump, the murder of George Floyd, and the Dobbs Supreme Court decision, and they have lived under the constant threats of mass shootings and climate change. In response, left-leaning Zoomers, particularly women and LGBTQ people, have banded together to take action.

This book tells the story of Gen Z’s growing political participation—and why it is poised to drive U.S. politics leftward. Bringing together original data and compelling narrative—including nearly one hundred interviews with Gen Z activists and several national surveys—political scientist Melissa Deckman explores the world of youth-led progressive organizing, highlighting the crucial importance of gender and sexuality. She reveals why women and LGBTQ Zoomers are participating in politics at higher levels than their straight male peers, creating a historic “reverse gender gap.” Deckman takes readers inside Gen Z’s fight for a more inclusive and just future, sharing stories of their efforts to defend reproductive rights, prevent gun violence, stem climate change, and win political office. A deep dive into the politics of Gen Z, this book sheds new light on how young voters view politics and why their commitment to progressive values may transform the country in the years ahead.

From the cooks who have quietly fed rebels and revolutionaries to the collective kitchens set up after hurricanes and floods, food has long played a crucial role in resistance, protest, and mutual aid. Until very recently, food-based work—steadfast and not particularly flashy—slipped under the radar or was centered on celebrity chefs and well-funded nonprofits. Adding to a growing constellation of conversations that push against this narrative, Nourishing Resistance centers the role of everyday people in acts of culinary solidarity.

Twenty-three contributors—cooks, farmers, writers, organizers, academics, and dreamers—write on queer potlucks, BIPOC-centered farms and gardens, rebel ancestors, disability justice, indigenous food sovereignty, and the fight against toxic diet culture, among many other topics. They recount bowls of biryani at a Delhi protest, fricasé de conejo on a Puerto Rican farm, pay-as-you-want dishes in a collectively-run Hong Kong restaurant, and lemon cake cooked in a New Jersey disaster relief kitchen. They chronicle the communal kitchens and food distribution programs that emerged in Buenos Aires and New York City in the wake of COVID-19, which caused surging food insecurity worldwide. They look to the past, revealing how “Bella Ciao” was composed by striking women rice workers, and the future, speculating on postcapitalist worlds that include both high-tech collective farms and herbs gathered beside highways.

Through essays, articles, poems, and stories, Nourishing Resistance argues that food is a central, intrinsic part of global struggles for autonomy and collective liberation.

No Cow Left Behind

From investigative journalist and bestselling author John Robbins comes a collection of essays on food politics, sustainability, and revolution.

Holy cow. With words like food additives, GMOs, and Big Food buzzing around, it’s getting harder to choose what to eat. And even the most well-informed eaters have a thing or two to learn about real food and the food system. Gathering and updating articles from his Huffington Post column, Robbins’s No Happy Cows features recent observations along with never before published material on today’s food revolution.

Moo-ve over, food corporations. You have to know food to eat food, but what happens when food companies leave some facts out? With commentaries on what we should and shouldn’t eat (and why), Robbins brings us to the frontlines of the food revolution. From his undercover investigations of feedlots and slaughterhouses, to the slave trade behind chocolate and coffee, he gives readers a look into the importance of working for a more compassionate and environmentally responsible world.

Inside read more about:

• Greed and salmonella
• Soy and Alzheimer's
• And much more!

If you enjoyed books by Marion Nestle or reads like How Not to Die, Feeding You Lies or The Way We Eat Now; then you’ll want to learn more by reading No Happy Cows.

What makes fad diets so appealing to so many people? How did there get to be so many different ones, often with eerily similar prescriptions? Why do people cycle on and off diets, perpetually searching for that one simple trick that will solve everything? And how did these fads become so central to conversations about food and nutrition?

Anxious Eaters shows that fad diets are popular because they fulfill crucial social and psychological needs—which is also why they tend to fail. Janet Chrzan and Kima Cargill bring together anthropology, psychology, and nutrition to explore what these programs promise yet rarely fulfill for dieters. They demonstrate how fad diets help people cope with widespread anxieties and offer tantalizing glimpses of attainable self-transformation. Chrzan and Cargill emphasize the social contexts of diets, arguing that beliefs about nutrition are deeply rooted in pervasive cultural narratives. Although people choose to adopt new eating habits for individual reasons, broader forces shape why fad diets seem to make sense.

Considering dietary beliefs and practices in terms of culture, nutrition, and individual psychological needs, Anxious Eaters refrains from moralizing or promoting a “right” way to eat. Instead, it offers new ways of understanding the popularity of a wide range of eating trends, including the Atkins Diet and other low- or no-carb diets; beliefs that ingredients like wheat products and sugars are toxic, allergenic, or addictive; food avoidance and “Clean Eating” practices; and paleo or primal diets. Anxious Eaters sheds new light on why people adopt such diets and why these diets remain so attractive even though they often fail.

The industrial food system, from production to consumption and waste, is a major contributor to environmental, social, and economic problems. A few powerful multinational corporations have consolidated control of agricultural markets and wealth while many farmers struggle to make a living and millions of people go hungry every day. Consumer access to healthy and culturally appropriate food remains largely an option for only those who can afford it.

Responding to these destructive practices, global agrarian movements are calling for a transition to agroecology. Agroecological farming follows ecological principles for growing food in a way that respects diverse sociocultural contexts, connects urban eaters and rural growers, and attends to power dynamics.

Growing and Eating Sustainably shines light on the process of agroecological transition by showcasing the experiences of growers and eaters in southern Brazil, a country where agrarian movements have long been at the forefront of pushing for more sustainable and just food systems. Through stories and photographs of people, landscapes, farms and farming practices, and urban spaces, this book communicates how to advance systems-level agroecological transitions by linking rural and urban areas and connecting diverse agroecological experiences, with insights that have relevance for supporting similar transitions around the world.

This book reports findings from surveys conducted by the Foundation for Agrarian Studies’ Project on Agrarian Relations in India (PARI) in different agro-climatic regions in three villages in West Bengal in June–July 2010 and in May–June 2015. The villages studied were Panahar in the old alluvial region in Bankura district, Amarsinghi in new alluvial region in Malda district and Kalmandasguri in Terai region in Koch Behar district. The chapters in the book portray the production conditions, incomes, employment, poverty, and human development of rural households in West Bengal at an important juncture in the state’s development and political trajectory.

Published in association with Foundation for Agrarian Studies.

This is the story of Just Us! Coffee Roasters Co-op, Canada’s first fair trade coffee roaster. This book describes its successes and its failures and details how a small group of people — “just us” — worked against adversity and defied many of the norms associated with building a business. In this fascinating tale, general readers, business owners and community activists will find hope and the courage to forge new paths, build new organizations and shape a new society. This story is also about the fair trade movement, providing a snapshot of the struggle of the small coffee producers in the South to control their own production, find a fair market for their coffee and get a fair hearing for their concerns. Just Us! Coffee Roasters Co-op is an experiment in a radical business model — one rooted in cooperation, social justice and meaningful social change.

In Speculative Harvests, Clapp and Isakson investigate the evolving relationship between the agrifood and financial sectors, paying particular attention to how the contemporary process of financialization is reshaping agrarian development and food systems. Understood as the growing prevalence of financial actors, markets, motives and profits in an economy, financialization is a defining feature of modern-day capitalism that is reconfiguring the distribution of wealth and economic power in a variety of contexts across the globe. In a clear and accessible manner, Clapp and Isakson explain the character and ramifications of these changes for the world food economy and systematically detail how different elements of agrifood provisioning — including commodity trading, farmland tenure, the management of agricultural risk, and food trading, processing, and retailing — have been reconfigured for financial purposes.
Clapp and Isakson highlight the importance of confronting the financialization of food and agriculture, identify the challenges of conventional approaches to food system reform and consider innovative alternatives. Speculative Harvests is essential reading for food scholars and activists who not only seek a better understanding of the problems inherent to the contemporary food system but also are also in search of effective interventions towards its positive transformation.

Our global food system is largely based on unsustainable industrial agricultural practices, is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, is controlled by a handful of large corporations and produces unhealthy food. Agroecology is a solution to these increasingly urgent problems.
After decades of being dismissed by mainstream institutions and defended in obscurity by grassroots movements and farmers, agroecology is suddenly in fashion. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization, government ministries and even corporations are jumping on the bandwagon. But, are they pushing the same agroecology as developed by pioneering farmers and scientists and pushed for by peasant social movements, or are they seeking to co-opt the concept and give it different content?
Rosset and Altieri, two of the world’s leading agroecologists, outline the principles, history and currents of agroecological thought, the scientific evidence for agroecology, the social aspects of bringing agroecology to scale and the contemporary politics of agroecology.

Free trade does not make a significantly positive contribution to a society’s well being, nor does real free trade exist. In Alternative Trade, Gavin Fridell confronts these assumptions through a passionate and rigorous appraisal of alternative trade and its imperfect legacy. Examining the history of alternative trade models – the International Coffee Agreement, the Canadian Wheat Board and the European-Caribbean banana regime – Fridell exposes the unbridgeable gap between “free trade” proclamations and the lack of actually existing free trade, arguing that the alternative trade models are much more socially efficient than what followed in their wake.
Additionally, Fridell places politics, history, social change, class power and violence front-and-centre in his analysis and examines alternative trade within a broader social and historical context to uncover lessons for a more cooperative, socially just world order.

This book aims to explore the role of generational relations in the reproduction of agrarian communities in their confrontation with emerging capitalist relations.
Generational dimensions are obviously important in the social reproduction of agrarian communities, and deserving the attention of all those interested in agricultural futures, but they have been relatively neglected compared to class and gender. With some exceptions, especially in Africa (Sumberg et al., 2012) researchers and activists have given little attention to intergenerational differences and tensions in rural people’s engagement with smallholder farming, and with expanding corporate agribusiness.

Agriculture and Industry in Brazil is a study of the economics of Brazilian agriculture and industry, with a special focus on the importance of innovation to productivity growth. Albert Fishlow and José Eustáquio Ribeiro Vieira Filho examine technological change in Brazil, highlighting the role of public policy in building institutions and creating an innovation-oriented environment.

Fishlow and Vieira Filho tackle the theme of innovation from various angles. They contrast the relationship between state involvement and the private sector in key parts of the Brazilian economy and compare agricultural expansion with growth in the oil and aviation sectors. Fishlow and Vieira Filho argue that modern agriculture is a knowledge-intensive industry and its success in Brazil stems from public institution building. They demonstrate how research has played a key role in productivity growth, showing how prudent innovation policies can leverage knowledge not only within a particular company but also across whole sectors of the economy. The book discusses whether and how Brazil can serve as a model for other middle-income countries eager to achieve higher growth and a more egalitarian distribution of income. An important contribution to comparative, international, and development economics, Agriculture and Industry in Brazil shows how the public success in agriculture became a prototype for advance elsewhere.

Public spaces have become platforms for the invention and display of self-identity, especially in the affluent West where the restaurant, from local café to Michelin-starred establishment, deftly stages these performances. In this follow-up to her classic Dining Out: A Sociology of Modern Manners, Joanne Finkelstein takes a fragment of social life—restaurant dining—and uses it to examine the dramatic effect our public behavior and social habits have on our private desires and sense of identity.

In Fashioning Appetite, the restaurant becomes a liminal space in which public and private boundaries are constantly renegotiated, where our personal celebrations and seductions are conducted within full view of the next table, and where eating alone has become a perilous social minefield. When food is fetishized and identity becomes a capitalist commodity, the experience of the restaurant transforms appetite into both a pleasure and a torment in which being satisfied with one's meal is linked to being satisfied with oneself. Applying new research in emotional capitalism to popular culture's pervasive images of conspicuous consumption, Finkelstein builds a cultural portrait in which every forkful is weighted with meaning.

Public spaces have become platforms for the invention and display of self-identity, especially in the affluent West where the restaurant, from local café to Michelin-starred establishment, deftly stages these performances. In this follow-up to her classic Dining Out: A Sociology of Modern Manners, Joanne Finkelstein takes a fragment of social life—restaurant dining—and uses it to examine the dramatic effect our public behavior and social habits have on our private desires and sense of identity.

In Fashioning Appetite, the restaurant becomes a liminal space in which public and private boundaries are constantly renegotiated, where our personal celebrations and seductions are conducted within full view of the next table, and where eating alone has become a perilous social minefield. When food is fetishized and identity becomes a capitalist commodity, the experience of the restaurant transforms appetite into both a pleasure and a torment in which being satisfied with one's meal is linked to being satisfied with oneself. Applying new research in emotional capitalism to popular culture's pervasive images of conspicuous consumption, Finkelstein builds a cultural portrait in which every forkful is weighted with meaning.

Literature on the ethics and politics of food and that on human–animal relationships have infrequently converged. Representing an initial step toward bridging this divide, Messy Eating features interviews with thirteen prominent and emerging scholars about the connections between their academic work and their approach to consuming animals as food. The collection explores how authors working across a range of perspectives—postcolonial, Indigenous, black, queer, trans, feminist, disability, poststructuralist, posthumanist, and multispecies—weave their theoretical and political orientations with daily, intimate, and visceral practices of food consumption, preparation, and ingestion.

Each chapter introduces a scholar for whom the tangled, contradictory character of human–animal relations raises difficult questions about what they eat. Representing a departure from canonical animal rights literature, most authors featured in the collection do not make their food politics or identities explicit in their published work. While some interviewees practice vegetarianism or veganism, and almost all decry the role of industrialized animal agriculture in the environmental crisis, the contributors tend to reject a priori ethical codes and politics grounded in purity, surety, or simplicity. Remarkably free of proscriptions, but attentive to the Eurocentric tendencies of posthumanist animal studies, Messy Eating reveals how dietary habits are unpredictable and dynamic, shaped but not determined by life histories, educational trajectories, disciplinary homes, activist experiences, and intimate relationships.

These accessible and engaging conversations offer rare and often surprising insights into pressing social issues through a focus on the mundane—and messy— interactions that constitute the professional, the political, and the personal.

Contributors: Neel Ahuja, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Matthew Calarco, Lauren Corman, Naisargi Dave, Maneesha Deckha, María Elena García, Sharon Holland, Kelly Struthers Montford, H. Peter Steeves, Kim TallBear, Sunaura Taylor, Harlan Weaver, Kari Weil, Cary Wolfe

Literature on the ethics and politics of food and that on human–animal relationships have infrequently converged. Representing an initial step toward bridging this divide, Messy Eating features interviews with thirteen prominent and emerging scholars about the connections between their academic work and their approach to consuming animals as food. The collection explores how authors working across a range of perspectives—postcolonial, Indigenous, black, queer, trans, feminist, disability, poststructuralist, posthumanist, and multispecies—weave their theoretical and political orientations with daily, intimate, and visceral practices of food consumption, preparation, and ingestion.

Each chapter introduces a scholar for whom the tangled, contradictory character of human–animal relations raises difficult questions about what they eat. Representing a departure from canonical animal rights literature, most authors featured in the collection do not make their food politics or identities explicit in their published work. While some interviewees practice vegetarianism or veganism, and almost all decry the role of industrialized animal agriculture in the environmental crisis, the contributors tend to reject a priori ethical codes and politics grounded in purity, surety, or simplicity. Remarkably free of proscriptions, but attentive to the Eurocentric tendencies of posthumanist animal studies, Messy Eating reveals how dietary habits are unpredictable and dynamic, shaped but not determined by life histories, educational trajectories, disciplinary homes, activist experiences, and intimate relationships.

These accessible and engaging conversations offer rare and often surprising insights into pressing social issues through a focus on the mundane—and messy— interactions that constitute the professional, the political, and the personal.

Contributors: Neel Ahuja, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Matthew Calarco, Lauren Corman, Naisargi Dave, Maneesha Deckha, María Elena García, Sharon Holland, Kelly Struthers Montford, H. Peter Steeves, Kim TallBear, Sunaura Taylor, Harlan Weaver, Kari Weil, Cary Wolfe

Michael Drew’s review of the causes and effects of food poverty in Ireland offers the first full-length study of this significant and protracted issue that has been exacerbated by COVID-19.

The book brings together the complex picture emerging from interviews with users of food aid. Their pathways into and through food poverty are impacted by the policies and practices of government and employers with wide-ranging implications. The work explores the international landscape of food poverty and situates both experiences and responses in a comparative context. It considers how these results contribute to an understanding of the problem and what action should be taken.

Exploring why food aid exists and the deeper causes of food poverty, this book addresses neglected dimensions of traditional food aid and food poverty debates.

It argues that the food aid industry is infused with neoliberal governmentality and shows how food charity upholds Christian ideals and white privilege, maintaining inequalities of class, race, religion and gender. However, it also reveals a sector that is immensely varied, embodying both individualism and mutual aid.

Drawing upon lived experiences, it documents how food sharing amid poverty fosters solidarity and gives rise to alternative modes of food redistribution among communities. By harnessing these alternative ways of being, food aid and communities can be part of movements for economic and racial justice.

Drawing on empirical research with the UK's two largest charitable food organisations, this book explores the prolific rise of food charity over the last 15 years and its implications for overcoming food insecurity.

As the welfare state withdraws, leaving food banks to protect the most vulnerable, the author questions the sustainability of this system and asks where responsibility lies - in practice and in theory - for ensuring everyone can realise their human right to food.

The book argues that effective, policy-driven solutions require a clear rights-based framework, which enables a range of actors including the state, charities and the food industry to work together towards, and be held accountable for, the progressive realisation of the right to food for all in the UK.

Drawing on empirical research with the UK's two largest charitable food organisations, this book explores the prolific rise of food charity over the last 15 years and its implications for overcoming food insecurity.

As the welfare state withdraws, leaving food banks to protect the most vulnerable, the author questions the sustainability of this system and asks where responsibility lies - in practice and in theory - for ensuring everyone can realise their human right to food.

The book argues that effective, policy-driven solutions require a clear rights-based framework, which enables a range of actors including the state, charities and the food industry to work together towards, and be held accountable for, the progressive realisation of the right to food for all in the UK.

WINNER OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY PETER TOWNSEND PRIZE 2017

Welcome to Foodbank Britain, where emergency food provision is an increasingly visible and controversial feature of ongoing austerity. We know the statistics, but what does it feel like to be forced to turn to foodbanks for help? What does it take to get emergency food, and what's in the food parcel?

Kayleigh Garthwaite conducted hundreds of hours of interviews while working in a Trussell Trust foodbank. She spoke to people like Anna and her 11 year old daughter Daisy who were eating out of date food since Anna left her job due to mental health problems. Glen explained the shame he felt using the foodbank having taken on a zero hours contract. Pregnant Jessica walked two miles to the foodbank because she couldn't afford public transport.

This provocative book provides a much needed voice for foodbank users and volunteers in the UK, and a powerful insight into the realities of foodbank use from the inside.

Eat Local, Taste Global: How Ethnocultural Food Reaches Our Tables shows how the demand for ethnocultural vegetables on the part of Toronto’s South Asian, Chinese, and Afro-Caribbean Canadians is at odds with the corporate food regime. How does that regime affect the local food movement and ethnic groups’ access to their preferred foods? This book addresses that question and suggests that the protection of ethnic and national food security and sovereignty strengthens immigrant integration while producing healthy crossover effects for other Canadians.


The authors show how culture, food, and migration are intertwined and how access to ethnocultural vegetables is affected by ethnicity, social class, shopping venues, and food prices. Most ethnic vegetables are imported by corporations and ethnic intermediaries and pass through Toronto’s Food Terminal; however, local farmers are now producing some of these vegetables, and alternative forms of agriculture and markets play a significant role in bringing ethnocultural vegetables to our tables.


Social justice requires that people have both food security and food sovereignty. Eat Local, Taste Global offers solutions to identified contradictions that include making farmers’ markets more inclusive, improving conditions for migrant farm workers, and making alternative forms of agriculture more feasible. This book will be of interest to rural sociologists and political scientists as well as policy-makers, food activists, farmers, and food security organizations.

In 2013, a Dutch scientist unveiled the world’s first laboratory-created hamburger. Since then, the idea of producing meat, not from live animals but from carefully cultured tissues, has spread like wildfire through the media. Meanwhile, cultured meat researchers race against population growth and climate change in an effort to make sustainable protein. Meat Planet explores the quest to generate meat in the lab—a substance sometimes called “cultured meat”—and asks what it means to imagine that this is the future of food.

Neither an advocate nor a critic of cultured meat, Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft spent five years researching the phenomenon. In Meat Planet, he reveals how debates about lab-grown meat reach beyond debates about food, examining the links between appetite, growth, and capitalism. Could satiating the growing appetite for meat actually lead to our undoing? Are we simply using one technology to undo the damage caused by another? Like all problems in our food system, the meat problem is not merely a problem of production. It is intrinsically social and political, and it demands that we examine questions of justice and desirable modes of living in a shared and finite world.

Benjamin Wurgaft tells a story that could utterly transform the way we think of animals, the way we relate to farmland, the way we use water, and the way we think about population and our fragile ecosystem’s capacity to sustain life. He argues that even if cultured meat does not “succeed,” it functions—much like science fiction—as a crucial mirror that we can hold up to our contemporary fleshy dysfunctions.

Caroline Bancroft History Prize 2021, Denver Public Library
Armitage-Jameson Prize 2021, Coalition of Western Women's History
David J. Weber Prize 2021, Western History Association
W. Turrentine Jackson Prize 2021, Western History Association

It seems unthinkable that citizens of one of the most powerful nations in the world must risk their lives and livelihoods in the search for access to necessary health care. And yet it is no surprise that in many places throughout the United States, getting an abortion can be a monumental challenge. Anti-choice politicians and activists have worked tirelessly to impose needless restrictions on this straightforward medical procedure that, at best, delay it and, at worst, create medical risks and deny women their constitutionally protected right to choose. 

Obstacle Course tells the story of abortion in America, capturing a disturbing reality of insurmountable barriers people face when trying to exercise their legal rights to medical services. Authors David S. Cohen and Carole Joffe lay bare the often arduous and unnecessarily burdensome process of terminating a pregnancy: the sabotaged decision-making, clinics in remote locations, insurance bans, harassing protesters, forced ultrasounds and dishonest medical information, arbitrary waiting periods, and unjustified procedure limitations.
 
Based on patients’ stories as well as interviews with abortion providers and allies from every state in the country, Obstacle Course reveals the unstoppable determination required of women in the pursuit of reproductive autonomy as well as the incredible commitment of abortion providers. Without the efforts of an unheralded army of medical professionals, clinic administrators, counselors, activists, and volunteers, what is a legal right would be meaningless for the almost one million people per year who get abortions. There is a better way—treating abortion like any other form of health care—but the United States is a long way from that ideal. 

El acto de resistir trasciende por mucho la indignación que le dio origen. Es un encuentro con el destino, la última y desesperada exhortación de justicia. Los migrantes que llegan a la gran ciudad escapando del hambre y la carencia, los estudiantes del movimiento del 68, la huelga de hambre de las madres de los presos y desaparecidos políticos, la sorprendente hazaña del Güero Medrano y la colonia Rubén Jaramillo; las crónicas reunidas en este libro son el testimonio de una lucha inclemente, de una historia escrita desde abajo con la convicción de que la libertad y la igualdad son valores presentes que se renuevan todos los días.

La Biblioteca Elena Poniatowska reúne la obra narrativa, ensayística y de denuncia de la escritora que le dio voz a los grandes héroes de nuestro tiempo, luchadores de carne y hueso olvidados por los libros de historia. En Fuerte es el silencio compendia algunas de sus más célebres crónicas que la han convertido en la portavoz de las causas que importan.

An oral history and critical genealogy of “accountability,” the complex abolitionist concept that pushes us to ask: just what do we mean by “community?"

A concept just short of a program, accountability has been taken up as a core principle within leftist organizing and activity over the past quarter century. While it invokes a particular vocabulary and set of procedures, it has also come to describe a more expansive, if often vague, approach to addressing harm within movement work. The term’s sudden, widespread adoption as abolitionist concepts began to circulate broadly in recent years cast light on certain shifts in its meaning, renewing the urgency of understanding its relation to militant leftist history and practice.

After Accountability gathers interviews conducted by members of the Pinko collective with nine transformative justice practitioners, socialist labor organizers, incarcerated abolitionists, and activists on the left, and also includes framing essays by the Pinko collective in which its members situate and reflect on those illuminating conversations. An investigation into the theoretical foundations and current practice of accountability, this volume explores the term’s potential and limits, discovering in it traces of the past half-century’s struggles over the absence of community and the form revolutionary activity should take.

Contributors: Kim Diehl, Michelle Foy, Peter Hardie, Emi Kane and Hyejin Shim, Esteban Kelly, Pilar Maschi, and Stevie Wilson, and Pinko collective members Lou Cornum, Max Fox, M.E. O'Brien, and Addison Vawters.

Abolish Rent takes aim at one of the foremost engines of inequality and injustice.

Rent drives millions into debt, despair, and onto the streets. The social cost of rent is too damn high. Written for anyone fed up with the permanent housing crisis, complicit politicians, and real estate greed, Abolish Rent dissects our housing system from the perspective of those it immiserates. Through unsparing analysis and striking stories of resistance, it shows us how tenants can, through organizing and collective action, harness our power and win the housing we deserve.

From two co-founders of the largest tenants union in the country, this deeply reported account of the resurgent tenant movement centers poor and working-class people who are fighting back, staying put, and remaking the city in the process. Authors Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis take us to trilingual strategy meetings, raucous marches against gentrification, and daring eviction defenses where immigrants put their lives on the line. These are the seeds of the revolutionary movement we need to make our housing, our cities, and the world our home.

Embodying Irish Abortion Reform has been shortlisted for the 2025 BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize.

Offering a unique perspective, this book explores the lived, embodied and affective experiences of reproductive rights activists living under, and mobilizing against, Ireland’s constitutional abortion ban.

Through qualitative research and in-depth interviews with activists, the author exposes the subtle influence of the 8th Amendment on Irish women and their (reproductive) bodies, whether or not they have ever attempted to access a clandestine abortion.

It explains how the everyday embodied practices, bodily labours and affective experiences of women and gestating people were shaped by the 8th amendment and through the need to ‘prepare’ for crisis pregnancies. In addition, it reveals the integral role of women’s bodies and emotions in changing the political and social landscape in Ireland, through the historical transformation of the country’s abortion laws.

Andy Blunden completes his immanent critique of Activity Theory, begun in 2010 with An Interdisciplinary Theory of Activity.

A summary of the ontological foundations of Activity Theory introduces a critical review of the work of activity theorists across the world with a focus of applications in medical and educational contexts, and concludes with a review of the ethics of collaboration. Blunden expands the domain of Activity Theory to address the pressing problems facing humanity today and activities lacking in clear objects, collaboration in voluntary projects and social movements, the life projects of individuals and emerging practices. Blunden brings an understanding of Marxist and Hegelian philosophy to bear on the application of Activity Theory to problems of social change.

Hongkongers' Fight for Freedom: Voices from the 2019 Anti-extradition Movement documents this momentous episode in the history of Hong Kong through the voices of its participants.

Drawing on the interviews of 56 participants, this book portrays how normally acquiescent Hongkongers joined the Movement en masse, driven by government intransigence, police brutality and flagrant injustice. It also conveys the deep emotions and strong sense of commitment and identity which evolved in the process. The Movement was a courageous effort by its citizens to defend their freedoms, but sadly, it also marked the beginning of the city's sharp descent into Chinese tyranny. While a curtain of silence now enshrouds Hong Kong, it is imperative that these voices of resistance be preserved and heard.

*ONE OFTIME’S MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2025*

An inspiring collection of essays, personal and political, from the leading environmental justice activist of our time, that frames the challenges we face as a society and—with grace, generosity, and hope—charts the way toward equity, respect, and a brighter future.

Described by Bryan Stevenson as “the center of the quest for environmental justice in America,” Catherine Coleman Flowers has dedicated her life to fighting for the most vulnerable communities—rural, poor, of color—who have been deprived of the basic civil right to a clean, safe, and sustainable environment. Both deeply personal and urgently political, the essays in Holy Ground draw on history to illuminate and contextualize the most pressing issues of this moment: from climate change to human rights, from rural poverty to reproductive justice, from the notorious history of Lowndes County, Alabama, to the broader crisis of racialized disinvestment in the South. Flowers maps the distance and direction toward justice, examining her own diverse ancestry as evidence of our interconnectedness. She reflects on trailblazers who have fought for social and environmental justice. She writes about her mother, a civil rights activist who lost her life to gun violence, and her own deeply personal experience with reproductive justice. And in a remarkably candid and moving piece, she writes about a traumatic attack that occurred at a moment of collective triumph, in which she weighs her fight for the common good against her own well-being. Flowers’s faith shines throughout the collection, guiding her work and inspiring her vision of our responsibility to one another and to our shared home.

Drawn from a lifetime of organizing, activism, and change-making, Holy Ground equips us with clarity, lights a way forward, and rouses us to action—for ourselves and for each other, for our communities, and, ultimately, for our planet.

Conflict and resolution are the lifeblood of social movements. How, and with whom, do we find lasting friendship, support, and joy in a world in need of so much repair?

In On Activism, Friendships, and Fighting veteran organizer and social worker Benjamin Heim Shepard traces a pressing dynamic of social movements: friendship and conflict. The project builds on oral histories with more than  thirty movement organizers—from AIDS, queer, trade union, community, Occupy, and harm reduction-based movements—reflecting on the lessons, meanings, and future directions of movements and collective organizing efforts. “There is a hunger for radical history – to give credit to past struggles, to learn from our mistakes and to improve our strategies for the future,” writes Lesley Wood. Oral histories trace the stories of these movements.

The book goes in depth into the reasons and ways the interviewees became involved in activism, the friendships they formed, and the conflicts they faced. This includes asking questions such as: where do friendships support or undermine these efforts? How can conflicts be resolved?  And where do people find lasting support?

Taking the State out of the Body is a guidebook in deconstructing nationalism through trauma-informed praxis.

Embedded in the political theory and practice of Jewish anti-Zionism, it invites readers of all backgrounds to build an embodied sense of safety that has the power to make militarized borders, policing, and nation-states obsolete. We need the resources offered in this book: from understanding geopolitical impacts of intergenerational trauma, to self-regulation in conflict, to transformative approaches to harm, to cultivating long-haul relationships, to building solidarity across our movements. The book’s framework is situated in the lineages of healing justice and politicized healers including many antifascist Ashkenazi Jewish practitioners in 1930s Europe.