Social Science

The definitive reference guide to artifacts representing 14,000 years of cultural evolution

Pennsylvania is geographically, ecologically, and culturally diverse. The state is situated at the crossroads of several geographic zones and drainage basins which resulted in a great deal of variation in Native American societies. The Archaeology of Native Americans in Pennsylvania is the definitive reference guide to rich artifacts that represent 14,000 years of cultural evolution. This authoritative work includes environmental studies, descriptions and illustrations of artifacts and features, settlement pattern studies, and recommendations for directions of further research.

Containing previously unpublished data and representing fifty years of collaborative findings gathered under historic preservation laws, the book is organized into five parts, reflecting five major time periods. Essential for anyone conducting archaeological research in Pennsylvania and surrounding regions, especially professionals conducting surveys and research in compliance with state and federal preservation laws, as well as professors and students engaging in research on specific regions or topics in Middle Atlantic archaeology.

Explores the power of faith to drive resistance to anti-immigration policies in the United States

God’s Resistance chronicles the work of faith-based activists who have mobilized to counter the effects
of mass detention and deportation. Focusing on Southern California, home to a large undocumented
population, the authors examine which strategies have been most effective, as well as the obstacles that faith presents to organizing effectively. In-depth interviews with over forty activists, leaders of
congregations, lay participants, and immigrants allow us to hear at first hand the challenges and
occasional triumphs of this work.

The authors show how faith-based organizations have a distinctive set of advantages to leverage in
social movements that are often overlooked and underappreciated by secular activist organizations, but they also face particular challenges that can hinder their effectiveness. The volume offers insights into how these advantages can be maximized, and how the obstacles can be overcome. The powerful
testimony from asylum seekers and detained immigrants found in these pages, along with the concrete
examples of effective strategies, are indispensable for anyone invested in the fight to recognize the
humanity of one of the nation’s most vulnerable populations.

The first book-length critical reception of Barrie Thorne’s classic book, Gender Play

Barrie Thorne’s Gender Play was a landmark study of the social worlds of primary school children that sparked a paradigm shift in our understanding of how kids and the adults around them contest and reinforce gender boundaries. Thirty years later, Gender Replay celebrates and reflects on this classic, extending Thorne’s scholarship into a new and different generation.

Freeden Blume Oeur and C. J. Pascoe’s new volume brings together many of the foremost scholars on youth from an array of disciplines, including sociology, childhood studies, education, gender studies, and communication studies. Together, these scholars reflect on many contemporary issues that were not covered in Thorne’s original text, exploring new dimensions of schooling, the sociology of gender, social media, and feminist theory. Over fourteen essays, the authors touch on topics such as youth resistance in the Trump era; girls and technology; the use of play to challenge oppressive racial regimes; youth activism against climate change; the importance of taking kids seriously as social actors; and mentoring as a form of feminist praxis. Gender Replay picks up where Thorne’s text left off, doing the vital work of applying her teachings to a transformed world and to new configurations of childhood.

Reimagines black and brown sensuality to develop new modes of knowledge production

In Sensual Excess, Amber Jamilla Musser imagines epistemologies of sensuality that emerge from fleshiness. To do so, she works against the framing of black and brown bodies as sexualized, objectified, and abject, and offers multiple ways of thinking with and through sensation and aesthetics. Each chapter draws our attention to particular aspects of pornotropic capture that black and brown bodies must always negotiate. Though these technologies differ according to the nature of their encounters with white supremacy, together they add to our understanding of the ways that structures of domination produce violence and work to contain bodies and pleasures within certain legible parameters.

To do so, Sensual Excess analyzes moments of brown jouissance that exceed these constraints. These ruptures illuminate multiple epistemologies of selfhood and sensuality that offer frameworks for minoritarian knowledge production which is designed to enable one to sit with uncertainty. Through examinations of installations and performances like Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, Patty Chang’s In Love and Nao Bustamante’s Neapolitan, Musser unpacks the relationships between racialized sexuality and consumption to interrogate foundational concepts in psychoanalytic theory, critical race studies, feminism, and queer theory. In so doing, Sensual Excess offers a project of knowledge production focused not on mastery, but on sensing and imagining otherwise, whatever and wherever that might be.

A different look at heterosexuality in the twenty-first century

A straight white girl can kiss a girl, like it, and still call herself straight—her boyfriend may even encourage her. But can straight white guys experience the same easy sexual fluidity, or would kissing a guy just mean that they are really gay? Not Gay thrusts deep into a world where straight guy-on-guy action is not a myth but a reality: there’s fraternity and military hazing rituals, where new recruits are made to grab each other’s penises and stick fingers up their fellow members’ anuses; online personal ads, where straight men seek other straight men to masturbate with; and, last but not least, the long and clandestine history of straight men frequenting public restrooms for sexual encounters with other men. For Jane Ward, these sexual practices reveal a unique social space where straight white men can—and do—have sex with other straight white men; in fact, she argues, to do so reaffirms rather than challenges their gender and racial identity.

Ward illustrates that sex between straight white men allows them to leverage whiteness and masculinity to authenticate their heterosexuality in the context of sex with men. By understanding their same-sex sexual practice as meaningless, accidental, or even necessary, straight white men can perform homosexual contact in heterosexual ways. These sex acts are not slippages into a queer way of being or expressions of a desired but unarticulated gay identity. Instead, Ward argues, they reveal the fluidity and complexity that characterizes all human sexual desire. In the end, Ward’s analysis offers a new way to think about heterosexuality—not as the opposite or absence of homosexuality, but as its own unique mode of engaging in homosexual sex, a mode characterized by pretense, dis-identification and racial and heterosexual privilege. Daring, insightful, and brimming with wit, Not Gay is a fascinating new take on the complexities of heterosexuality in the modern era.

At the turn of the millennium, Middle Eastern and Muslim Germans had rather unexpectedly become central to the country's Holocaust memory culture—not as welcome participants, but as targets for re-education and reform. Since then, Turkish- and Arab-Germans have been considered as the prime obstacles to German national reconciliation with its Nazi past, a status shared to a lesser degree by Germans from the formerly socialist East Germany. It is for this reason that the German government, German NGOs, and Muslim minority groups have begun to design Holocaust education and anti-Semitism prevention programs specifically tailored for Muslim immigrants and refugees, so that they, too, can learn the lessons of the Holocaust and embrace Germany's most important postwar democratic political values.

Based on ethnographic research conducted over a decade, Subcontractors of Guilt explores when, how, and why Muslim Germans have moved to the center of Holocaust memory discussions. Esra Özyürek argues that German society "subcontracts" guilt of the Holocaust to new minority immigrant arrivals, with the false promise of this process leading to inclusion into the German social contract and equality with other members of postwar German society. By focusing on the recently formed but already sizable sector of Muslim-only anti-Semitism and Holocaust education programs, this book explores the paradoxes of postwar German national identity.

Waste Siege offers an analysis unusual in the study of Palestine: it depicts the environmental, infrastructural, and aesthetic context in which Palestinians are obliged to forge their lives. To speak of waste siege is to describe a series of conditions, from smelling wastes to negotiating military infrastructures, from biopolitical forms of colonial rule to experiences of governmental abandonment, from obvious targets of resistance to confusion over responsibility for the burdensome objects of daily life. Within this rubble, debris, and infrastructural fallout, West Bank Palestinians create a life under settler colonial rule.

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins focuses on waste as an experience of everyday life that is continuous with, but not a result only of, occupation. Tracing Palestinians' own experiences of wastes over the past decade, she considers how multiple authorities governing the West Bank—including municipalities, the Palestinian Authority, international aid organizations, NGOs, and Israel—rule by waste siege, whether intentionally or not. Her work challenges both common formulations of waste as "matter out of place" and as the ontological opposite of the environment, by suggesting instead that waste siege be understood as an ecology of "matter with no place to go." Waste siege thus not only describes a stateless Palestine, but also becomes a metaphor for our besieged planet.

How one nation can grow rich at the expense of another is one of the central problems of economics in the era of neo-colonialism. Traditional doctrine, resting on Ricardo’s theory of comparative costs, which has dominated investigation of this issue for a century and a half, has proven itself incapable of providing an answer. Emmanuel’s path-breaking study, now itself a classic, upends the conventional assumptions, subjecting the phenomena of international trade to critical scrutiny, both systematically and with logical rigor. It integrates the theory of international value (and unequal exchange) into the general theory of value as propounded by the classical economists and Marx.

Enmanuel’s theory of unequal exchange generated a widespread world debate on its first appearance, part of which, emanating from French economist Charles Bettelheim, is included in this volume. It has remained the foundation of critical analysis of international exchange relations ever since, and has gained even more importance today in the age of global value chains.

The Pathogens of Finance is an exploration of how the rising power and profits of Wall Street underpin the contemporary increases in and inadequate responses to vector-borne disease. Over the past fifty years, insects have transmitted infectious diseases to humans with greater frequency and in more unexpected places. To examine this phenomenon, Brent Z. Kaup and Kelly F. Austin take readers to the exurban homes of northern Virginia; the burgeoning agricultural outposts of Mato Grosso, Brazil; and the smallholder coffee farms of the Bududa District of eastern Uganda. Through these case studies, the authors illuminate how the broader financialization of society is intimately intertwined with both the creation of landscapes more conducive to vector-borne disease and the failure to prevent and cure such diseases throughout the world.
 

Provides a child’s-eye perspective on how the culture wars are playing out in our nation’s schools

Kids are at the center of today’s “culture wars”—pundits, politicians, and parents alike are debating which books they should be allowed to read, which version of history they should learn in school, and what decisions they can make about their own bodies. And yet, no one asks kids what they think about these issues.

In Children of a Troubled Time, award-winning sociologist Margaret A. Hagerman amplifies the voices of children who grew up during Trump’s presidency and explores how they learn about race in America today. Hagerman interviewed nearly fifty children between the ages of ten to thirteen in two dramatically different political landscapes: Mississippi and Massachusetts. Hagerman interviewed kids who identified as conservative and liberal in both places as well as kids from different racial groups. She discovered remarkably similar patterns in the ideas expressed by these children. Racism, she asserts, is not just a local or regional phenomenon: it is a broad American project affecting childhoods across the country.

In Hagerman’s emotionally compelling interviews, children describe what it is like to come of age during years of deep political and racial divide, and how being a kid during the Trump era shaped their views on racism, democracy, and America as a whole. Children’s racialized emotions are also central to this book: disgust and discomfort, fear and solidarity, dominance and apathy.

As administrators, teachers, and parents struggle to help children make sense of our racially and politically polarized nation, Hagerman offers concrete examples of the kinds of interventions necessary to help kids learn how to become members of a multi-racial democracy and to avoid the development of far-right thinking in the white youth of today. Children of a Troubled Time expands our understanding of how the rising generation grapples with the complexities of racism and raises critical questions about the future of American society.

In recent decades, authenticity has become an American obsession. It animates thirty years' worth of reality TV programming and fuels the explosive virality of one hot social media app after another. It characterizes Donald Trump's willful disregard for political correctness (and proofreading) and inspires multinational corporations to stake activist claims in ways that few "woke" brands ever dared before. It buttresses a multibillion-dollar influencer industry of everyday folks shilling their friends with #spon-con and burnishes the street cred of rock stars and rappers alike. But, ironically, authenticity's not actually real: it's as fabricated as it is ubiquitous.

In The Authenticity Industries, journalist and scholar Michael Serazio combines eye-opening reporting and lively prose to take readers behind the scenes with those who make "reality"—and the ways it tries to influence us. Drawing upon dozens of rare interviews with campaign consultants, advertising executives, tech company leadership, and entertainment industry gatekeepers, the book slyly investigates the professionals and practices that make people, products, and platforms seem "authentic" in today's media, culture, and politics. The result is a spotlight on the power of authenticity in today's media-saturated world and the strategies to satisfy this widespread yearning. In theory, authenticity might represent the central moral framework of our time: allaying anxieties about self and society, culture and commerce, and technology and humanity. It infects and informs our ideals of celebrity, aesthetics, privacy, nostalgia, and populism. And Serazio reveals how these pretenses are crafted, backstage, for audiences, consumers, and voters.

Introduces key terms, research traditions, debates, and histories for American Studies and Cultural Studies in an updated edition

Since its initial publication, scholars and students alike have turned to Keywords for American Cultural Studies as an invaluable resource for understanding key terms and debates in the fields of American studies and cultural studies. As scholarship has continued to evolve, this revised and expanded third edition offers indispensable meditations on new and developing concepts used in American studies, cultural studies, and beyond.

Designed as a uniquely print-digital hybrid publication, this Keywords volume collects 114 essays, each focused on a single term such as “America,” “culture,” “diversity,” or “religion.” More than forty of the essays have been significantly revised for this new edition, and there are nineteen completely new keywords, including crucial additions such as “biopolitics,” “data,” “debt,” and “intersectionality.” Throughout the volume, interdisciplinary scholars explore these terms and others as nodal points in many of today’s most dynamic and vexed discussions of political and social life, both inside and outside of the academy. The Keywords website features forty-eight essays not in the print volume; it also provides pedagogical tools for instructors using print and online keywords in their courses.

The publication brings together essays by interdisciplinary scholars working in literary studies and political economy, cultural anthropology and ethnic studies, African American history and performance studies, gender studies and political theory. Some entries are explicitly argumentative; others are more descriptive. All are clear, challenging, and critically engaged. As a whole, Keywords for American Cultural Studies provides an accessible A-to-Z survey of prevailing academic buzzwords and a flexible tool for carving out new areas of inquiry.

Winner, 2020 Senior Book Prize, given by the Association of Feminist Anthropology

Winner, 2020 Eileen Basker Memorial Prize, given by the Society for Medical Anthropology

Honorable Mention, 2020 Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing, given by the Society for Humanistic Anthropology

Finalist, 2020 PROSE Award in the Sociology, Anthropology and Criminology category, given by the Association of American Publishers


A troubling study of the role that medical racism plays in the lives of Black women who have given birth to premature and low birth weight infants

Black women have higher rates of premature birth than other women in America. This cannot be simply explained by economic factors, with poorer women lacking resources or access to care. Even professional, middle-class Black women are at a much higher risk of premature birth than low-income white women in the United States. Dána-Ain Davis looks into this phenomenon, placing racial differences in birth outcomes into a historical context, revealing that ideas about reproduction and race today have been influenced by the legacy of ideas which developed during the era of slavery.

While poor and low-income Black women are often the “mascots” of premature birth outcomes, this book focuses on professional Black women, who are just as likely to give birth prematurely. Drawing on an impressive array of interviews with nearly fifty mothers, fathers, neonatologists, nurses, midwives, and reproductive justice advocates, Dána-Ain Davis argues that events leading up to an infant’s arrival in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), and the parents’ experiences while they are in the NICU, reveal subtle but pernicious forms of racism that confound the perceived class dynamics that are frequently understood to be a central factor of premature birth.

The book argues not only that medical racism persists and must be considered when examining adverse outcomes—as well as upsetting experiences for parents—but also that NICUs and life-saving technologies should not be the only strategies for improving the outcomes for Black pregnant women and their babies. Davis makes the case for other avenues, such as community-based birthing projects, doulas, and midwives, that support women during pregnancy and labor are just as important and effective in avoiding premature births and mortality.

Winner, 2019 William J. Goode Book Award, given by the Family Section of the American Sociological Association

Finalist, 2019 C. Wright Mills Award, given by the Society for the Study of Social Problems


Riveting stories of how affluent, white children learn about race

American kids are living in a world of ongoing public debates about race, daily displays of racial injustice, and for some, an increased awareness surrounding diversity and inclusion. In this heated context, sociologist Margaret A. Hagerman zeroes in on affluent, white kids to observe how they make sense of privilege, unequal educational opportunities, and police violence. In fascinating detail, Hagerman considers the role that they and their families play in the reproduction of racism and racial inequality in America.

White Kids, based on two years of research involving in-depth interviews with white kids and their families, is a clear-eyed and sometimes shocking account of how white kids learn about race. In doing so, this book explores questions such as, “How do white kids learn about race when they grow up in families that do not talk openly about race or acknowledge its impact?” and “What about children growing up in families with parents who consider themselves to be ‘anti-racist’?”

Featuring the actual voices of young, affluent white kids and what they think about race, racism, inequality, and privilege, White Kids illuminates how white racial socialization is much more dynamic, complex, and varied than previously recognized. It is a process that stretches beyond white parents’ explicit conversations with their white children and includes not only the choices parents make about neighborhoods, schools, peer groups, extracurricular activities, and media, but also the choices made by the kids themselves. By interviewing kids who are growing up in different racial contexts—from racially segregated to meaningfully integrated and from politically progressive to conservative—this important book documents key differences in the outcomes of white racial socialization across families. And by observing families in their everyday lives, this book explores the extent to which white families, even those with anti-racist intentions, reproduce and reinforce the forms of inequality they say they reject.

Evaluating Jewish donors over time


The American Jewish philanthropic enterprise is unparalleled in scope, dynamism, and the diversity of funders and the causes they support. Yet even as Jewish giving has been largely successful in responding with alacrity to emergencies, it has been subjected to severe criticism. What once was regarded as a point of pride has become the object of scorn and dismissal, with skepticism—if not harsh criticism—about its work rife both within and outside Jewish communal circles.

Based on 320 interviews with professionals at Jewish not-for-profits across the United States, principals of foundations and their top staff personnel, and also tax filings of major foundations, Jewish Giving provides readers with fresh perspectives to evaluate the efforts of Jewish donors, large and small. The book traces the evolution of Jewish giving from the colonial era to the present, charting the changing profile of those who give to Jewish causes and what funders have aimed to achieve through their largesse. It makes the case that philanthropy serves as a prism through which broader themes in communal life are illuminated. As society or politics change, the priorities of charitable giving adjust in response. These changes in targeted funding can help to sharpen our understanding of demographic and social patterns. Devoting much attention to twenty-first century developments in contemporary Jewish giving, the book pays special attention to the changing landscape of donors who are remaking Jewish philanthropy, including women, Orthodox Jews, Sephardi givers, and young funders.

Against the backdrop of the global refugee crisis, Unsettled Families investigates the parameters that Global North governments and international humanitarian organizations use to classify most displaced families—more than 99% globally—as ineligible for resettlement, and often as fraudulent. But "fraud" as a category is not as self-evident as it may first appear. Nor is "the family." Based on long-term fieldwork between Nairobi, Kenya and Columbus, Ohio, Sophia Balakian tells stories of Somali and Congolese refugees navigating a complicated global assemblage of humanitarian organizations, immigration bureaucracies, and national security agencies as they seek permanent, new homes. Viewing the concepts of "fraud" and "family" from different vantage points in this context, Balakian shows how the categories begin to blur out of focus, sometimes to evaporate altogether; what seems to be contained within them scatter outside their received boundaries. Practices that resettlement organizations deem fraudulent are often understood by people living as refugees to be moral actions in an unequal world. Such practices allow them to fulfill obligations to kin—kin defined expansively, in ways that at times exceed the boundaries of normative, US frameworks. Bringing questions of kinship into current discussions on humanitarianism, Balakian locates "the family" as a crucial category in processes of producing, policing, and contesting the boundaries of nation-states in the 21st century.

David R. Maines (1940-2021), one of the most important sociological scholars of the 20th and 21st centuries, constructed a vast area of research to advance the field of symbolic interactionism during his career. Highlighting the significance of Maines’ works in symbolic interactionism, Festschrift in Honor of David R. Maines documents his most celebrated areas of scholarship, including social structure, narrative sociology, social interaction, dialectic perspective, temporality, and mesostructure.

Including stories from individuals who knew Maines via kinship, friendship, or professional relationship, the chapters conclude with two new empirical studies to reflect Maines’ interest in continually advancing the field with cutting-edge research. The collection also features a list of Maines’ selected works for further reading to guide other symbolic interactionists in their research endeavors.

Volume 57 of Studies in Symbolic Interaction is a source of both consolation and celebration for those who knew David R. Maines, as well as those who have just begun to discover his inspiring work.

The popularity of pornography is predicated on the idea that those participating have given their consent. That is what allows the porn industry to dominate the media economy today, generating staggering sums of money. Looking at behind-the-scenes negotiations and abuses in Japan's adult video industry, author Akiko Takeyama challenges this pervasive notion with the idea of "involuntary consent." This phenomenon, she argues, is ubiquitous, not only in the porn industry, but in our everyday lives. And yet modern society, built on beliefs of autonomy, free choice, and equality, renders it all but invisible.

Japan's AV industry alone generates a conservatively estimated $5 billion a year. In recent years, it has drawn public attention, and criticism, because of a series of arrests and trials of former talent agency owners and executives. This led to a report calling for a systematic investigation of the industry over the issue of "forced performance." This report has had ripple effects beyond Japan, as the US Department of State subsequently also cited forced performance as a human rights violation. Using this moment as an entry point, Takeyama argues that contract-making writ large is based on fundamentally dualistic terms, implying consent and pleasure on the one hand, and coercion and pain on the other. Because sex workers are employed on a contract basis, they fall outside of the purview of standard labor and employment laws. As a result, they are frequently pressured to comply with what production companies (mostly run by men) expect and often demand. In this ethnography of Japan's porn industry, Akiko Takeyama investigates the paradox of involuntary consent in modern liberal democratic societies. Taking consent as her starting point, Takeyama illustrates the nuances of contract making and the legal structures, or lack thereof, that govern Japan's adult video and sex entertainment industries.

An inside look at Black LGBTQ college students and their experiences

Black and Queer on Campus offers an inside look at what life is like for LGBTQ college students on campuses across the United States. Michael P. Jeffries shows that Black and queer college students often struggle to find safe spaces and a sense of belonging when they arrive on campus at both predominantly white institutions and historically black colleges and universities. Many report that in predominantly white queer social spaces, they feel unwelcome and pressured to temper their criticisms of racism amongst their white peers. Conversely, in predominantly straight Black social spaces, they feel ignored or pressured to minimize their queer identity in order to be accepted. This fraught dynamic has an impact on Black LGBTQ students in higher education, as they experience different forms of marginalization at the intersection of their race, gender, and sexuality.

Drawing on interviews with students from over a dozen colleges, Jeffries provides a new, much-needed perspective on the specific challenges Black LGBTQ students face and the ways they overcome them. We learn through these intimate portraits that despite the gains of the LGBTQ rights movement, many of the most harmful stereotypes and threats to black queer safety continue to haunt this generation of students. We also learn how students build queer identities. The traditional narrative of “coming out” does not fit most of these students, rather, Jeffries describes a more gradual transition to queer acceptance and pride.

Black and Queer on Campus sheds light on the oft-hidden lives of Black LGBTQ students, and how educational institutions can better serve them. It also highlights the quiet beauty and joy of Black queer social life, and the bonds of friendship that sustain the students and fuel their imagination.

Offers a compelling look at how Orthodox Jewish LGBT persons in Israel became more accepted in their communities.

Until fairly recently, Orthodox people in Israel could not imagine embracing their LGBT sexual or gender identity and staying within the Orthodox fold. But within the span of about a decade and a half, Orthodox LGBT people have forged social circles and communities and become much more visible. This has been a remarkable shift in a relatively short time span. Queer Judaism offers the compelling story of how Jewish LGBT persons in Israel created an effective social movement.

Drawing on more than 120 interviews, Orit Avishai illustrates how LGBT Jews accomplished this radical change. She makes the case that it has taken multiple approaches to achieve recognition within the community, ranging from political activism to more personal interactions with religious leaders and community members, to simply creating spaces to go about their everyday lives. Orthodox LGBT Jews have drawn from their lived experiences as well as Jewish traditions, symbols, and mythologies to build this movement, motivated to embrace their sexual identity not in spite of, but rather because of, their commitment to Jewish scripture, tradition, and way of life. Unique and timely, Queer Judaism challenges popular conceptions of how LGBT people interact and identify with conservative communities of faith.

How serialized crime shows became an American obsession

TV shows and podcasts like Making a Murderer, Serial, and Atlanta Monster have taken the cultural zeitgeist by storm, and contributed to the release of wrongly imprisoned people—such as Adnan Syed. The popularity of these long-form true crime docuseries has sparked greater attention to issues of inequality, power, social class, and structural racism. More and more, the American public is asking, Who is and is not deserving of punishment, and who is and is not protected by the law? In The New True Crime, Diana Rickard argues that these new true crime series deserve our attention for what they reveal about our societal understanding of crime and punishment, and for the new light they shine on the inequalities of the criminal justice system. Questioning the finality of verdicts, framing facts as in the eye of the beholder—these new series unmoor our faith in what is knowable, even as, Rickard critically notes, they often blur the lines between “fact” and “fiction.”

With a focus on some of the most popular true crime podcasts and streaming series of the last decade, Rickard provides an in-depth analysis of the ways in which this new media—which allows for binge-listening or watching—makes crime into a public spectacle and conveys ideological messages about punishment to its audience. Entertainment values have always been entwined with crime news reporting. Newsworthy stories, Rickard reminds us, need to involve sex, violence, or a famous person, and contain events that can be framed in terms of individualism and conservative ideologies about crime. Even as these old tropes of innocent victims and deviant bad guys still dominate these docuseries, Rickard also unpacks how the new true crime has been influenced by the innocence movement, a diverse group of organizers and activists, be they journalists, lawyers, formerly incarcerated people, or family members, who now have a place in mainstream consciousness as DNA evidence exonerates the wrongly convicted.

The New True Crime questions the knowability of truth and probes our anxieties about the “real” nature of true crime media. For fans of true crime shows and anyone concerned about justice in America, this book will prove to be essential reading.

An important understanding of the role public opinion plays in crime prevention policy

"Defund the police.” This slogan became a rallying cry among Black Lives Matter protesters following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020. These three words evoke a fundamental question about America’s policy priorities: should the nation rely predominantly upon the branches of the criminal justice system to arrest, prosecute, and imprison offenders, or should the nation prioritize fixing structural causes of crime by investing more heavily in the infrastructure and institutions of disadvantaged communities? To put it simply, do Americans actually prefer punishment over crime prevention?

The Politics of Crime Prevention examines American public opinion about crime prevention in the twenty-first century with a particular focus on how average citizens would choose to prioritize resources between the criminal justice system and community-based institutions. Kevin H. Wozniak analyzes differences of opinion across lines of race, social class, and political partisanship, and investigates whether people’s willingness to invest in communities depends upon the kind of communities that would receive money. This book moves beyond criminologists’ typical focus on public opinion about punishment that follows acts of crime to instead examine public attitudes toward crime prevention. In this brilliant and compelling study, Wozniak reveals that politicians profoundly underestimate the American public’s desire to prioritize community investment and that it is long past time to help communities thrive instead of turning to the criminal justice system to respond to every social problem.

2023 C. Wright Mills Award Finalist

How race and racism shape middle-class families’ decisions to homeschool their children

While families of color make up 41 percent of homeschoolers in America, little is known about the racial dimensions of this alternate form of education. In The Color of Homeschooling, Mahala Dyer Stewart explores why this percentage has grown exponentially in the past twenty years, and reveals how families’ schooling decisions are heavily shaped by race, class, and gender.

Drawing from almost a hundred interviews with Black and white middle-class homeschooling and nonhomeschooling families, Stewart’s findings contradict many commonly held beliefs about the rationales for homeschooling. Rather than choosing to homeschool based on religious or political beliefs, many middle-class Black mothers explain their schooling choices as motivated by their concerns of racial discrimination in public schools and the school-to-prison pipeline. Indeed, these mothers often voiced concerns that their children would be mistreated by teachers, administrators, or students on account of their race, or that they would be excessively surveilled and policed. Conversely, middle-class white mothers had the privilege of not having to consider race in their decision-making process, opting for homeschooling because of concerns that traditional schools would not adequately cater to their child's behavioral or academic needs. While appearing nonracial, these same decisions often contributed to racial segregation.

The Color of Homeschooling is a timely and much-needed study on how homeschooling serves as a canary in the coal mine, highlighting the perils of school choice policies for reproducing, rather than correcting, long-standing race, class, and gender inequalities in America.

Winner, 2021 Harry Shaw and Katrina Hazzard-Donald Award for Outstanding Work in African-American Popular Culture Studies, given by the Popular Culture Association

Winner, 2021 Nancy Baym Annual Book Award, given by the Association of Internet Researchers

An explanation of the digital practices of the Black Internet

From BlackPlanet to #BlackGirlMagic, Distributed Blackness places Blackness at the very center of internet culture. André Brock Jr. claims issues of race and ethnicity as inextricable from and formative of contemporary digital culture in the United States. Distributed Blackness analyzes a host of platforms and practices (from Black Twitter to Instagram, YouTube, and app development) to trace how digital media have reconfigured the meanings and performances of African American identity. Brock moves beyond widely circulated deficit models of respectability, bringing together discourse analysis with a close reading of technological interfaces to develop nuanced arguments about how “Blackness” gets worked out in various technological domains.

As Brock demonstrates, there’s nothing niche or subcultural about expressions of Blackness on social media: internet use and practice now set the terms for what constitutes normative participation. Drawing on critical race theory, linguistics, rhetoric, information studies, and science and technology studies, Brock tabs between Black-dominated technologies, websites, and social media to build a set of Black beliefs about technology. In explaining Black relationships with and alongside technology, Brock centers the unique joy and sense of community in being Black online now.

Introduces key terms, interdisciplinary research, debates, and histories for African American Studies

As the longest-standing interdisciplinary field, African American Studies has laid the foundation for critically analyzing issues of race, ethnicity, and culture within the academy and beyond. This volume assembles the keywords of this field for the first time, exploring not only the history of those categories but their continued relevance in the contemporary moment. Taking up a vast array of issues such as slavery, colonialism, prison expansion, sexuality, gender, feminism, war, and popular culture, Keywords for African American Studies showcases the startling breadth that characterizes the field.

Featuring an august group of contributors across the social sciences and the humanities, the keywords assembled within the pages of this volume exemplify the depth and range of scholarly inquiry into Black life in the United States. Connecting lineages of Black knowledge production to contemporary considerations of race, gender, class, and sexuality, Keywords for African American Studies provides a model for how the scholarship of the field can meet the challenges of our social world.

A bold and contemporary discourse of the intersection of disability studies and queer studies

Crip Theory attends to the contemporary cultures of disability and queerness that are coming out all over. Both disability studies and queer theory are centrally concerned with how bodies, pleasures, and identities are represented as “normal” or as abject, but Crip Theory is the first book to analyze thoroughly the ways in which these interdisciplinary fields inform each other.

Drawing on feminist theory, African American and Latino/a cultural theories, composition studies, film and television studies, and theories of globalization and counter-globalization, Robert McRuer articulates the central concerns of crip theory and considers how such a critical perspective might impact cultural and historical inquiry in the humanities. Crip Theory puts forward readings of the Sharon Kowalski story, the performance art of Bob Flanagan, and the journals of Gary Fisher, as well as critiques of the domesticated queerness and disability marketed by the Millennium March, or Bravo TV’s Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. McRuer examines how dominant and marginal bodily and sexual identities are composed, and considers the vibrant ways that disability and queerness unsettle and re-write those identities in order to insist that another world is possible.

Raising Two Fists is a historically grounded ethnography of Afro-Colombian political mobilization after the multicultural turn that swept Latin America in the 1990s, when states began to recognize and legally enshrine rights for Afro-descendants. Roosbelinda Cárdenas explores three major strategies that Afro-Colombians' developed in their struggles against racialized dispossession—the defense of culturally specific livelihoods through the creation of Black Territories; the demand for differential reparations for Afro-Colombian war victims; and the fight for inclusion in Colombia's peace negotiations and post-conflict rebuilding—illustrating how they engage in this work both as participants of organized political movements and in their everyday lives.

Although rights-based claims to the state have become necessary and pragmatic tools in the intersecting struggles for racial, economic, and social justice, Cárdenas argues that they continue to be ineffective due to Colombia's entrenched colonial racial hierarchies. She shows that while Afro-Colombians pursue rights-based claims, they also forge African Diasporic solidarities and protect the flourishing of their lives outside of the frame of rights, and with or without the state's sanction—a "two-fisted" strategy for Black citizenship.

The future of Honduras begins and ends on the white sand beaches of Tela Bay on the country's northeastern coast where Garifuna, a Black Indigenous people, have resided for over two hundred years. In The Ends of Paradise, Christopher A. Loperena examines the Garifuna struggle for life and collective autonomy, and demonstrates how this struggle challenges concerted efforts by the state and multilateral institutions, such as the World Bank, to render both their lands and their culture into fungible tourism products. Using a combination of participant observation, courtroom ethnography, and archival research, Loperena reveals how purportedly inclusive tourism projects form part of a larger neoliberal, extractivist development regime, which remakes Black and Indigenous territories into frontiers of progress for the mestizo majority. The book offers a trenchant analysis of the ways Black dispossession and displacement are carried forth through the conferral of individual rights and freedoms, a prerequisite for resource exploitation under contemporary capitalism.

By demanding to be accounted for on their terms, Garifuna anchor Blackness to Central America—a place where Black peoples are presumed to be nonnative inhabitants—and to collective land rights. Steeped in Loperena's long-term activist engagement with Garifuna land defenders, this book is a testament to their struggle and to the promise of "another world" in which Black and Indigenous peoples thrive.

Explores the roots of modern understandings of bodily identity

In the mid-nineteenth-century United States, as it became increasingly difficult to distinguish between bodies understood as black, white, or Indian; able-bodied or disabled; and male or female, intense efforts emerged to define these identities as biologically distinct and scientifically verifiable in a literally marked body. Combining literary analysis, legal history, and visual culture, Ellen Samuels traces the evolution of the “fantasy of identification”—the powerful belief that embodied social identities are fixed, verifiable, and visible through modern science. From birthmarks and fingerprints to blood quantum and DNA, she examines how this fantasy has circulated between cultural representations, law, science, and policy to become one of the most powerfully institutionalized ideologies of modern society.

Yet, as Samuels demonstrates, in every case, the fantasy distorts its claimed scientific basis, substituting subjective language for claimed objective fact. From its early emergence in discourses about disability fakery and fugitive slaves in the nineteenth century to its most recent manifestation in the question of sex testing at the 2012 Olympic Games, Fantasies of Identification explores the roots of modern understandings of bodily identity.

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.

Analyzes the impact of International Conflict Feminism’s alliance with powerful global institutions

In this book, Vasuki Nesiah tells the story of the astonishing uptake of International Conflict Feminism (ICF) in the most powerful institutions of global governance. ICF refers to a repertoire of policy agendas and legal strategies allied with those institutions to focus on women’s vulnerabilities, fight impunity for sexual violence, and promote women’s roles in peace-building processes. ICF emerged from feminist networks anchored in the Global North that gained momentum in the aftermath of the Cold War. Although this volume offers a testament to ICF’s remarkable success, it also analyzes how this success was intertwined with the defeat of alternative visions and agendas, including a range of dissident and heterodox feminisms that were eclipsed as ICF gained traction.

Emerging from Nesiah’s dual occupations in academia and international law and policy practice, International Conflict Feminism shows how centrally the ICF agenda has shaped fields such as peace building, international criminal law, transitional justice, and post-conflict economic policy. Each section pauses at different sites in the international governance architecture to analyze the distributive impact of ICF and its allied global policy agendas to examine what is privileged, legitimized, and empowered, and what is subordinated, marginalized, and further excluded.

ICF is a project of ideas and passions, legal proposals, and policy orientations. Today, when the most powerful countries of the world are describing their military, economic, and political interventions as a “feminist foreign policy,” the task of understanding and assessing the ICF project is especially urgent. Nesiah argues that, rather than obfuscating and denying the power of the ICF agenda, grappling with ICF’s power is essential to achieving solidarity with feminisms that don’t have a seat at the table, in particular those dissident feminist traditions with priorities and interests that challenge the dominant world order and its injustices and hierarchies.

Palestinians living on different sides of the Green Line make up approximately one-fifth of Israeli citizens and about four-fifths of the population of the West Bank. In both groups, activists assert that they share a single political struggle for national liberation. Yet, obstacles inhibit their ability to speak to each other and as a collective. Geopolitical boundaries fragment Palestinians into ever smaller groups. Crossing a Line enters these distinct environments for political expression and action of Palestinians who carry Israeli citizenship and Palestinians subject to Israeli military occupation in the West Bank, and considers how Palestinians are differently impacted by dispossession, settler colonialism, and militarism.

Amahl Bishara looks to sites of political practice—journalism, historical commemorations, street demonstrations, social media, in prison, and on the road—to analyze how Palestinians create collectivities in these varied circumstances. She draws on firsthand research, personal interviews, and public media to examine how people shape and reshape meanings in circumstances of constraint. In considering these different environments for political expression and action, Bishara illuminates how expression is always grounded in place—and how a people can struggle together for liberation even when they cannot join together in protest.

How Korean adoptees went from being adoptable orphans to deportable immigrants

Since the early 1950s, over 125,000 Korean children have been adopted in the United States, primarily by white families. Korean adoptees figure in twenty-five percent of US transnational adoptions and are the largest group of transracial adoptees currently in adulthood. Despite being legally adopted, Korean adoptees' position as family members did not automatically ensure legal, cultural, or social citizenship. Korean adoptees routinely experience refusals of belonging, whether by state agents, laws, and regulations, in everyday interactions, or even through media portrayals that render them invisible. In Out of Place, SunAh M Laybourn, herself a Korean American adoptee, examines this long-term journey, with a particular focus on the race-making process and the contradictions inherent to the model minority myth.

Drawing on in-depth interviews with Korean adoptee adults, online surveys, and participant observation at Korean adoptee events across the US and in Korea, Out of Place illustrates how Korean adoptees come to understand their racial positions, reconcile competing expectations of citizenship and racial and ethnic group membership, and actively work to redefine belonging both individually and collectively. In considering when and how Korean adoptees have been remade, rejected, and celebrated as exceptional citizens, Out of Place brings to the fore the features of the race-making process.

How digital networks are positioned within the enduring structures of coloniality

The revolutionary aspirations that fueled decolonization circulated on paper—as pamphlets, leaflets, handbills, and brochures. Now—as evidenced by movements from the Arab Spring to Black Lives Matter—revolutions, protests, and political dissidence are profoundly shaped by information circulating through digital networks.

Digital Unsettling is a critical exploration of digitalization that puts contemporary “decolonizing” movements into conversation with theorizations of digital communication. Sahana Udupa and Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan interrogate the forms, forces, and processes that have reinforced neocolonial relations within contemporary digital environments, at a time when digital networks—and the agendas and actions they proffer—have unsettled entrenched hierarchies in unforeseen ways.

Digital Unsettling examines events—the toppling of statues in the UK, the proliferation of #BLM activism globally, the rise of Hindu nationalists in North America, the trolling of academics, among others—and how they circulated online and across national boundaries. In doing so, Udupa and Dattatreyan demonstrate how the internet has become the key site for an invigorated anticolonial internationalism, but has simultaneously augmented conditions of racial hierarchy within nations, in the international order, and in the liminal spaces that shape human migration and the lives of those that are on the move. Digital Unsettling establishes a critical framework for placing digitalization within the longue durée of coloniality, while also revealing the complex ways in which the internet is entwined with persistent global calls for decolonization.

Provides a variety of queer, interdisciplinary interventions upon the social and legal regulation of sex,
gender, reproduction, and family.

In Enticements, an exceptional group of interdisciplinary scholars comes together to contribute to the field of Queer Legal Studies. The essays investigate a wildly proliferating assortment of genders, sexualities, and intimacies, questioning how they have been regulated, criminalized, or privileged by law and other regulatory forces.

Enticements expands and expounds on the discipline of queer legal studies. Contributors focus on a wide range of sex/gender regulatory regimes, interrogating the use and abuse of queer history for impact litigation and social change, colonial and postcolonial sex laws otherwise obscured by the modern LGBT paradigm of sexual identity, and the policing of trans and cis men. Moving beyond a focus on LGBT identities, contributors consider limits to reproductive freedom, the Christianization of social justice movements, and the politicization of care within and across Black and feminist studies. Accessible and forward-looking, Enticements consolidates and emboldens queer legal studies as a critical, necessary field for the historical present.

With noted contributions from Libby Adler, Chris Ashford, Matthew Ball, Noa Ben-Asher, Mary Anne Case, Brenda Cossman, Joseph J. Fischel, Janet Halley, Zachary Herz, Ratna Kapur, Ido Katri, Evelyn Kessler, Ummni Khan, Kyle Kirkup, Jennifer C. Nash, Senthorun Raj, and Matthew Waites.

How American symbols inspired enslaved people and their allies to fight for true freedom

In the early United States, anthems, flags, holidays, monuments, and memorials were powerful symbols of an American identity that helped unify a divided people. A language of freedom played a similar role in shaping the new nation. The Declaration of Independence’s assertion “that all men are created equal,” Patrick Henry’s cry of “Give me liberty, or give me death!,” and Francis Scott Key’s “star-spangled banner” waving over “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” were anthemic celebrations of a newly free people. Resonating across the country, they encouraged the creation of a republic where the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” was universal, natural, and inalienable.

For enslaved people and their allies, the language and symbols that served as national touchstones made a mockery of freedom. Deriding the ideas that infused the republic’s founding, they encouraged an empty American culture that accepted the abstract notion of equality rather than the concrete idea. Yet, as award-winning author Matthew J. Clavin reveals, it was these powerful expressions of American nationalism that inspired forceful and even violent resistance to slavery.

Symbols of Freedom is the surprising story of how enslaved people and their allies drew inspiration from the language and symbols of American freedom. Interpreting patriotic words, phrases, and iconography literally, they embraced a revolutionary nationalism that not only justified but generated open opposition. Mindful and proud that theirs was a nation born in blood, these disparate patriots fought to fulfill the republic’s promise by waging war against slavery.

In a time when the US flag, the Fourth of July, and historical sites have never been more contested, this book reminds us that symbols are living artifacts whose power is derived from the meaning with which we imbue them.

What bisexual youth can tell us about today’s gender and sexual identities

Despite the increasing visibility of LGBTQ people in American culture, our understanding of bisexuality remains superficial, at best. Yet, five times as many people identify as bisexual than as gay or lesbian, and as much as 25 percent of the population is estimated to be bisexual. In Bi, noted scholar of youth sexuality, Ritch Savin-Williams, brings bisexuality to centerstage at a moment when Gen Z and millennial youth and young adults are increasingly rejecting traditional labels altogether. Drawing on interviews with bisexual youth from a range of racial, ethnic, and social class groups, he reveals to us how bisexuals define their own sexual orientation and experiences—in their own words. Savin-Williams shows how and why people might identify as bisexual as a result of their biology or upbringing; as a bridge or transition to something else; as a consequence of their curiosity; or for a range of other equally valid reasons.

With an understanding that sexuality and romantic attachments are often influx, Savin-Williams offers us a way to think about bisexuality as part of a continuum. He shows that many of the young people who identify as bisexual often defy traditional views, dispute false notions, and reimagine sexuality with regard to both practice and identity. Broadly speaking, he shows that many young people experience a complex, nuanced existence with multiple sexual and romantic attractions as well as gender expressions, which are seldom static but fluctuate over their lives.

Savin-Williams provides an important new understanding of bisexuality as an orientation, behavior, and identity. Bi shows us that bisexuality is seen and embraced as a valid sexual identity more than ever before, giving us timely and much-needed insight into the complex, fascinating experiences of bisexual youth themselves.

Winner, 2021 Glenda Laws Award given by the American Association of Geographers

The first lesbian and queer historical geography of New York City

Over the past few decades, rapid gentrification in New York City has led to the disappearance of many lesbian and queer spaces, displacing some of the most marginalized members of the LGBTQ+ community. In A Queer New York, Jen Jack Gieseking highlights the historic significance of these spaces, mapping the political, economic, and geographic dispossession of an important, thriving community that once called certain New York neighborhoods home.

Focusing on well-known neighborhoods like Greenwich Village, Park Slope, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Crown Heights, Gieseking shows how lesbian and queer neighborhoods have folded under the capitalist influence of white, wealthy gentrifiers who have ultimately failed to make room for them. Nevertheless, they highlight the ways lesbian and queer communities have succeeded in carving out spaces—and lives—in a city that has consistently pushed its most vulnerable citizens away.

Beautifully written, A Queer New York is an eye-opening account of how lesbians and queers have survived in the face of twenty-first century gentrification and urban development.

A foundational collection of essays that demonstrate how to study race and media

From graphic footage of migrant children in cages to #BlackLivesMatter and #OscarsSoWhite, portrayals and discussions of race dominate the media landscape. Race and Media adopts a wide range of methods to make sense of specific occurrences, from the corporate portrayal of mixed-race identity by 23andMe to the cosmopolitan fetishization of Marie Kondo. As a whole, this collection demonstrates that all forms of media—from the sitcoms we stream to the Twitter feeds we follow—confirm racism and reinforce its ideological frameworks, while simultaneously giving space for new modes of resistance and understanding.

In each chapter, a leading media scholar elucidates a set of foundational concepts in the study of race and media—such as the burden of representation, discourses of racialization, multiculturalism, hybridity, and the visuality of race. In doing so, they offer tools for media literacy that include rigorous analysis of texts, ideologies, institutions and structures, audiences and users, and technologies. The authors then apply these concepts to a wide range of media and the diverse communities that engage with them in order to uncover new theoretical frameworks and methodologies. From advertising and music to film festivals, video games, telenovelas, and social media, these essays engage and employ contemporary dialogues and struggles for social justice by racialized communities to push media forward.

Contributors include:

Mary Beltrán
Meshell Sturgis
Ralina L. Joseph
Dolores Inés Casillas
Jennifer Lynn Stoever
Jason Kido Lopez
Peter X Feng
Jacqueline Land
Mari Castañeda
Jun Okada
Amy Villarejo
Aymar Jean Christian
Sarah Florini
Raven Maragh-Lloyd
Sulafa Zidani
Lia Wolock
Meredith D. Clark
Jillian M. Báez
Miranda J. Brady
Kishonna L. Gray
Susan Noh

Contemporary accounts of urban Native identity in two pan-Indian communities

In the last half century, changing racial and cultural dynamics in the United States have caused an explosion in the number of people claiming to be American Indian, from just over half a million in 1960 to over three million in 2013. Additionally, seven out of ten American Indians live in or near cities, rather than in tribal communities, and that number is growing.

In Indigenous Memory, Urban Reality, Michelle Jacobs examines the new reality of the American Indian urban experience. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted over two and a half years, Jacobs focuses on how some individuals are invested in reclaiming Indigenous identities whereas others are more invested in relocating their sense of self to the urban environment. These groups not only apply different meanings to indigeneity, but they also develop different strategies for asserting and maintaining Native identities in an urban space inundated with false memories and fake icons of “Indian-ness.” Jacobs shows that “Indianness” is a highly contested phenomenon among these two groups: some are accused of being "wannabes" who merely "play Indian," while others are accused of being exclusionary and "policing the boundaries of Indianness." Taken together, the interconnected stories of relocators and reclaimers expose the struggles of Indigenous and Indigenous-identified participants in urban pan-Indian communities. Indigenous Memory, Urban Reality offers a complicated portrait of who can rightfully claim and enact American Indian identities and what that tells us about how race is “made” today.

The history of Latina/o participation and representation in American television

Whose stories are told on television? Who are the heroes and heroines, held up as intriguing, lovable, and compelling? Which characters are fully realized, rather than being cardboard villains and sidekicks? And who are our storytellers?

The first-ever account of Latino/a participation and representation in US English-language television, Latino TV: A History offers a sweeping study of key moments of Chicano/a and Latino/a representation and authorship since the 1950s. Drawing on archival research, interviews with dozens of media professionals who worked on or performed in these series, textual analysis of episodes and promotional materials, and analysis of news media coverage, Mary Beltrán examines Latina/o representation in everything from children’s television Westerns of the 1950s, Chicana/o and Puerto Rican activist-led public affairs series of the 1970s, and sitcoms that spanned half a century, to Latina and Latino-led series in the 2000s and 2010s on broadcast, cable, and streaming outlets, including George Lopez, Ugly Betty, One Day at a Time, and Vida.

Through the exploration of the histories of Latina/o television narratives and the authors of those narratives, Mary Beltrán sheds important light on how Latina/os have been included—and, more often, not—in the television industry and in the stories of the country writ large.

In everyday language, masochism is usually understood as the desire to abdicate control in exchange for sensation—pleasure, pain, or a combination thereof. Yet at its core, masochism is a site where power, bodies, and society come together. Sensational Flesh uses masochism as a lens to examine how power structures race, gender, and embodiment in different contexts.





Drawing on rich and varied sources—from 19th century sexology, psychoanalysis, and critical theory to literary texts and performance art—Amber Jamilla Musser employs masochism as a powerful diagnostic tool for probing relationships between power and subjectivity. Engaging with a range of debates about lesbian S&M, racialization, femininity, and disability, as well as key texts such as Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, Pauline Réage’s The Story of O, and Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality, Musser renders legible the complex ways that masochism has been taken up by queer, feminist, and critical race theories. Furthering queer theory’s investment in affect and materiality, she proposes “sensation” as an analytical tool for illustrating what it feels like to be embedded in structures of domination such as patriarchy, colonialism, and racism and what it means to embody femininity, blackness, and pain. Sensational Flesh is ultimately about the ways in which difference is made material through race, gender, and sexuality and how that materiality is experienced.

Explores three generations of Black American Muslims pursuing education and liberation beyond the borders of the United States

Since the 1970s, hundreds of Black American Muslims in the Tijani Sufi order have sought refuge in a new world that would nurture their racial, religious and gendered identities away from anti-Black and anti-Muslim racism in the United States. This new world is in Medina Baye, a city in Senegal that is the headquarters of a pan-African Sufi movement with tens of millions of members in Africa alone.

Drawing on a decade and a half of ethnographic engagement, Black Muslim Freedom Dreams explores the Islamic educational opportunities created for and by Black American Muslims in Medina Baye, chronicling the dreams, sacrifices, struggles, and joys of young people and parents who live, learn, and strive for liberation between the United States and Senegal. The volume traces their journeys between these two worlds, zooming in to vividly portray everyday Black American and West African religious life, and zooming out to map the sociopolitical landscapes, educational conditions and Islamic and pan-African ideologies that shape believers' perspectives.

Black Muslim Freedom Dreams argues that Black Muslims’ experiences of Islamic education and pan-African exchange are oriented towards collective care – a radical way of being and belonging through which believers journey on the path towards Allah’s love by caring for one another and addressing the material inequities that constrain their communities. This notion disrupts narratives of religion that are limited to systems of personal belief, showcasing instead how their educational experiences foster a collective responsibility and solidarity. The book offers a compelling account of how Black Muslims engage with transnational religious and racial networks to build liberatory communities beyond the United States.

Ways of knowing against colonialism

In the 1990s, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), and US and Canadian boarding/residential schools’ practices led to an increase in cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women from the US-Mexico border, Guatemala, Canada, and the United States. Indigenous artists aiming to recontextualize these state-sponsored instances of violence created works grappling with time, ancestry, and relationality. Lilian Mengesha interprets the works of these artists within a decolonial context through an aesthetic frame she calls “critical dreaming.”

Using methods from performance studies, gender studies, and Indigenous studies, Critical Dreaming considers artists as expert world makers. Mengesha examines selected works by Lara Kramer, Regina José Galindo, Rebecca Belmore, Monique Mojica, LeAnne Howe, and Sky Hopinka, demonstrating how each materializes alternative modes of experiencing time, making kin, and communing with land.

Mengesha argues that critical dreaming is a performance that advances material and embodied practices of survival, both individual and collective, to challenge colonial and nationalist discourses invested in a teleology of disappeared people, history, and land. Her writing provides valuable insight into the intergenerational effects of settler colonialism on Indigenous communities throughout the Americas, looking at how artists build worlds anew through Indigenous ways of knowing and making inspired from the past and repurposed for the present.

Critical Dreaming offers a resonant framework for understanding Indigenous embodied ways of knowing that work against colonial attempts to discredit or disappear forms of imagination, relationality, and resistance connecting disparate Indigenous communities. This powerful book urges readers to recognize how Indigenous artists contribute to ongoing struggles against multiple forms of colonialism.

ASALH 2023 Book Prize Winner

A lively living history of anti-colonialist movements across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans

Oceania is a vast sea of islands, large scale political struggles and immensely significant historical phenomena. Pasifika Black is a compelling history of understudied anti-colonial movements in this region, exploring how indigenous Oceanic activists intentionally forged international connections with the African world in their fights for liberation.

Drawing from research conducted across Fiji, Australia, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, Britain, and the United States, Quito Swan shows how liberation struggles in Oceania actively engaged Black internationalism in their diverse battles against colonial rule. Pasifika Black features as its protagonists Oceania's many playwrights, organizers, religious leaders, scholars, Black Power advocates, musicians, environmental justice activists, feminists, and revolutionaries who carried the banners of Black liberation across the globe. It puts artists like Aboriginal poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal and her 1976 call for a Black Pacific into an extended conversation with Nigeria’s Wole Soyinka, the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific’s Amelia Rokotuivuna, Samoa’s Albert Wendt, African American anthropologist Angela Gilliam, the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins, West Papua’s Ben Tanggahma, New Caledonia’s Déwé Gorodey, and Polynesian Panther Will ‘Ilolahia. In so doing, Swan displays the links Oceanic activists consciously and painstakingly formed in order to connect Black metropoles across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans.

In a world grappling with the global significance of Black Lives Matter and state-sanctioned violence against Black and Brown bodies, Pasifika Black is a both triumphant history and tragic reminder of the ongoing quests for decolonization in Oceania, the African world, and the Global South.

A rigorous study of the social meaning and consequences of racist humor, and a damning argument for when the joke is not just a joke.

Having a "good" sense of humor generally means being able to take a joke without getting offended—laughing even at a taboo thought or at another's expense. The insinuation is that laughter eases social tension and creates solidarity in an overly politicized social world. But do the stakes change when the jokes are racist? In The Souls of White Jokes Raúl Pérez argues that we must genuinely confront this unsettling question in order to fully understand the persistence of anti-black racism and white supremacy in American society today.

W.E.B. Du Bois's prescient essay "The Souls of White Folk" was one of the first to theorize whiteness as a social and political construct based on a feeling of superiority over racialized others—a kind of racial contempt. Pérez extends this theory to the study of humor, connecting theories of racial formation to parallel ideas about humor stemming from laughter at another's misfortune. Critically synthesizing scholarship on race, humor, and emotions, he uncovers a key function of humor as a tool for producing racial alienation, dehumanization, exclusion, and even violence. Pérez tracks this use of humor from blackface minstrelsy to contemporary contexts, including police culture, politics, and far-right extremists. Rather than being harmless fun, this humor plays a central role in reinforcing and mobilizing racist ideology and power under the guise of amusement.

The Souls of White Jokes exposes this malicious side of humor, while also revealing a new facet of racism today. Though it can be comforting to imagine racism as coming from racial hatred and anger, the terrifying reality is that it is tied up in seemingly benign, even joyful, everyday interactions as well— and for racism to be eradicated we must face this truth.

At a time when movements for racial justice are front and center in U.S. national politics, this book provides essential new understanding to the study of race, its influence on people's lives, and what we can do to address the persistent and foundational American problem of systemic racism. Knowledge about race and racism changes as social and historical conditions evolve, as different generations of scholars experience unique societal conditions, and as new voices from those who have previously been kept at the margins have challenged us to reconceive our thinking about race and ethnicity. In this collection of essays by prominent sociologists whose work has transformed the understanding of race and ethnicity, each reflects on their career and how their personal experiences have shaped their contribution to understanding racism, both in scholarly and public debate.

Merging biography, memoir, and sociohistorical analysis, these essays provide vital insight into the influence of race on people's perspectives and opportunities both inside and outside of academia, and how racial inequality is felt, experienced, and confronted.

Women, and particularly poor women, have become essential cogs in the wheel of financialized capitalism. Globally, women are responsible for managing household debt, and that debt has exploded over the last decade, reaching an all-time high after the COVID-19 pandemic. Across various categories of loans, including subprime lending, microcredit policies, and consumer loans, as well as rent and utilities, women are overrepresented as clients and managers, and are being enfolded into the system. The Indebted Woman discusses the crucial yet invisible roles poor women play in making and consolidating debt and credit markets. Isabelle Guérin, Santosh Kumar, and G. Venkatasubramanian spent over two decades observing a credit market that specifically targets women in the Indian countryside of east-central Tamil Nadu. They found that paying off debts required labor, frequently involved sexual transactions, and shaped women's bodies and subjectivities. Bringing together ethnography, statistical surveys, and financial diaries, they offer for the first time a comprehensive theory for this sexual division of debt that goes far beyond the Indian case, exposing the ways capitalism transforms womanhood and how this transformation in turn fuels capitalism.

When Roya, an Iranian American high school student, is asked to identify her race, she feels anxiety and doubt. According to the federal government, she and others from the Middle East are white. Indeed, a historical myth circulates even in immigrant families like Roya's, proclaiming Iranians to be the "original" white race. But based on the treatment Roya and her family receive in American schools, airports, workplaces, and neighborhoods—interactions characterized by intolerance or hate—Roya is increasingly certain that she is not white. In The Limits of Whiteness, Neda Maghbouleh offers a groundbreaking, timely look at how Iranians and other Middle Eastern Americans move across the color line.

By shadowing Roya and more than 80 other young people, Maghbouleh documents Iranian Americans' shifting racial status. Drawing on never-before-analyzed historical and legal evidence, she captures the unique experience of an immigrant group trapped between legal racial invisibility and everyday racial hyper-visibility. Her findings are essential for understanding the unprecedented challenge Middle Easterners now face under "extreme vetting" and potential reclassification out of the "white" box. Maghbouleh tells for the first time the compelling, often heartbreaking story of how a white American immigrant group can become brown and what such a transformation says about race in America.

A chronicle of neighborhood redevelopment politics in West Philadelphia over 60 years

In twenty-first-century American cities, policy makers increasingly celebrate university-sponsored innovation districts as engines of inclusive growth. But the story is not so simple. In University City, Laura Wolf-Powers chronicles five decades of planning in and around the communities of West Philadelphia’s University City to illuminate how the dynamics of innovation district development in the present both depart from and connect to the politics of mid-twentieth-century urban renewal. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, Wolf-Powers concludes that even as university and government leaders vow to develop without displacement, what existing residents value is imperiled when innovation-driven redevelopment remains accountable to the property market.

The book first traces the municipal and institutional politics that empowered officials to demolish a predominantly Black neighborhood near the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University in the late 1960s to make way for the University City Science Center and University City High School. It also provides new insight into organizations whose members experimented during that same period with alternative conceptions of economic advancement. The book then shifts to the present, documenting contemporary efforts to position university-adjacent neighborhoods as locations for prosperity built on scientific knowledge. Wolf-Powers examines the work of mobilized civic groups to push cultural preservation concerns into the public arena and to win policies to help economically insecure families keep a foothold in changing neighborhoods.

Placing Philadelphia’s innovation districts in the context of similar development taking place around the United States, University City advocates a reorientation of redevelopment practice around the recognition that despite their negligible worth in real estate terms, the time, care, and energy people invest in their local environments—and in one another—are precious urban resources.

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Pictured on the book's cover is a luncheon on Melon Street between 37th and 38th Streets in West Philadelphia, May 31, 2014. The community meal was part of Funeral for a Home, a project that honored the life and passing of a house at 3711 Melon Street in Mantua. Photo by Jeffrey Stockbridge. Funeral for a Home was commissioned by Temple Contemporary, Temple University. Original support for Funeral for a Home was provided by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Philadelphia.

Reveals how young American Jewish children come to develop their views about Israel

Israel has long occupied a prominent place in the lives and imaginations of American Jews, serving as both a symbolic touchstone and a source of intercommunal conflict. In My Second-Favorite Country, Sivan Zakai offers the first longitudinal study of how American Jewish children come to think and feel about Israel, tracking their evolving conceptions from kindergarten to fifth grade.

This work sheds light on the perception of Israel in the minds of Jewish children in the US and provides a rich case study of how children more generally develop ideas and beliefs about self, community, nation, and world. In contrast to popular views of America’s youth as naive or uninterested, this book illuminates both the complexity of their thinking and their desire to be included in conversations about important civic and political matters. Zakai draws from compelling empirical data to prove that children spend considerable effort contemplating the very concepts that adults often assume they are not ready to discuss. Indeed, the book argues that over the course of their elementary school education, children develop and express deep interest in complex issues such as the intricacies of identity and belonging, conflicting ways of framing the past, and the demands of civic responsibility. Ultimately, Zakai argues that in order to take children’s ideas seriously and better prepare them for a world full of disagreement, a substantive shift in educational practices is necessary.

The role of disability and deafness in art

Distressing Language is full of mistakes—errors of hearing, speaking, writing, and understanding. Michael Davidson engages the role of disability and deafness in contemporary aesthetics, exploring how physical and intellectual differences challenge our understanding of art and poetry.

Where hearing and speaking are considered normative conditions of the human, what happens when words are misheard and misspoken? How have writers and artists, both disabled and non-disabled, used error as generative elements in contesting the presumed value of “sounding good”? Distressing Language grows out of the author’s experience of hearing loss in which misunderstandings have become a daily occurrence. Davidson maintains that verbal confusions are less an aberration in understanding than a component of new knowledge.

Davidson discusses a range of sites, from captioning errors and Bad Lip Reads on YouTube, to the deaf artist Christine Sun Kim’s audiovisual installations, and a poetic reinterpretation of the Biblical Shibboleth responding to the atrocities of the Holocaust. Deafness becomes a guide in each chapter of Distressing Language, giving us a closer look at a range of artistic mediums and how artists are working with the axiom of “error” to produce novel subjecthoods and possibilities.

Why LGBTQ adults don’t end troubled ties with parents and why (perhaps) they should

Families We Keep is a surprising look at the life-long bonds between LGBTQ adults and their parents. Alongside the importance of “chosen families” in the queer community, Rin Reczek and Emma Bosley-Smith found that very few LGBTQ people choose to become estranged from their parents, even if those parent refuse to support their gender identity, sexuality, or both.

Drawing on interviews with over seventy-five LGBTQ people and their parents, Reczek and Bosley-Smith explore the powerful ties that bind families together, for better or worse. They show us why many feel obliged to maintain even troubled—and sometimes outright toxic—relationships with their parents. They argue that this relationship persists because what we think of as the “natural” and inevitable connection between parents and adult children is actually created and sustained by the sociocultural power of compulsory kinship. After revealing what holds even the most troubled intergenerational ties together, Families We Keep gives us permission to break free of those family bonds that are not in our best interests.

Reczek and Bosley-Smith challenge our deep-rooted conviction that family—and specifically, our relationships with our parents—should be maintained at any cost. Families We Keep shines a light on the shifting importance of family in America, and how LGBTQ people navigate its complexities as adults.

Acclaimed historian Gerald Horne troubles America's settler colonialism's "creation myth"

August 2019 saw numerous commemorations of the year 1619, when what was said to be the first arrival of enslaved Africans occurred in North America. Yet in the 1520s, the Spanish, from their imperial perch in Santo Domingo, had already brought enslaved Africans to what was to become South Carolina. The enslaved people here quickly defected to local Indigenous populations, and compelled their captors to flee. Deploying such illuminating research, The Dawning of the Apocalypse is a riveting revision of the “creation myth” of settler colonialism and how the United States was formed. Here, Gerald Horne argues forcefully that, in order to understand the arrival of colonists from the British Isles in the early seventeenth century, one must first understand the “long sixteenth century”– from 1492 until the arrival of settlers in Virginia in 1607.

During this prolonged century, Horne contends, “whiteness” morphed into “white supremacy,” and allowed England to co-opt not only religious minorities but also various nationalities throughout Europe, thus forging a muscular bloc that was needed to confront rambunctious Indigenes and Africans. In retelling the bloodthirsty story of the invasion of the Americas, Horne recounts how the fierce resistance by Africans and their Indigenous allies weakened Spain and enabled London to dispatch settlers to Virginia in 1607. These settlers laid the groundwork for the British Empire and its revolting spawn that became the United States of America.

2018 Outstanding Academic Title, given by CHOICE Magazine

Introduces key terms, concepts, debates, and histories for Latinx Studies

Keywords for Latina/o Studies is a generative text that enhances the ongoing dialogue within a rapidly growing and changing field. The keywords included in this collection represent established and emergent terms, categories, and concepts that undergird Latina/o studies; they delineate the shifting contours of a field best thought of as an intellectual imaginary and experiential project of social and cultural identities within the US academy.

Bringing together 63 essays, from humanists, historians, anthropologists, sociologists, among others, each focused on a single term, the volume reveals the broad range of the field while also illuminating the tensions and contestations surrounding issues of language, politics, and histories of colonization, specific to this area of study. From “borderlands” to “migration,” from “citizenship” to “mestizaje,” this accessible volume will be informative for those who are new to Latina/o studies, providing them with a mapping of the current debates and a trajectory of the development of the field, as well as being a valuable resource for scholars to expand their knowledge and critical engagement with the dynamic transformations in the field.

The Labor of Architecture examines the social and historical narratives that led to the illusory division between the “working class” and the “creative class.” In popular imagination, as author C.G. Beck observes, the architect is a singular genius, obsessively working alone in the studio. Surrounded by beautiful drawings and intricate models, the architect wrestles only with themselves and the purity of their design. This is certainly no longer the case—and perhaps never was.

Today, a new generation of designers encounters a different reality: exploitative work places, a financial crisis that ravaged the housing sector, sexist and racist hiring practices, and a quickly worsening climate catastrophe in which designers have played no small. Providing insight through his direct experiences organizing and negotiating from within the world of architecture, Beck explains how a design-based union movement can create a new reality for the labor of architects and designers, arguing that they have more in common with other unionized industries than generally assumed. Ultimately, The Labor of Architecture is a call for designers to prioritize collective action over their own individualistic pursuits—not just for the betterment of their profession, but for the sake of the society they help to build each day.

Over the last several decades, life in Lahore has been undergoing profound transformations, from rapid and uneven urbanization to expanding state institutions and informal economies. What do these transformations look like if viewed from the lens of waste materials and the lives of those who toil with them? In Lahore, like in many parts of Pakistan and South Asia, waste workers—whether municipal employees or informal laborers—are drawn from low- or noncaste (Dalit) groups and dispose the collective refuse of the city's 11 million inhabitants. Bringing workers into contact with potentially polluting materials reinforces their stigmatization and marginalization, and yet, their work allows life to go on across Lahore and beyond. This historical and ethnographic account examines how waste work has been central to organizing and transforming the city of Lahore—its landscape, infrastructures, and life—across historical moments, from the colonial period to the present.

  Building upon conversations about changing configurations of work and labor under capitalism, and utilizing a theoretical framework of reproduction, Waqas H. Butt traces how forms of life in Punjab, organized around caste-based relations, have become embedded in infrastructures across Pakistan, making them crucial to numerous processes unfolding at distinct scales. Life Beyond Waste maintains that processes reproducing life in a city like Lahore must be critically assessed along the lines of caste, class, and religion, which have been constitutive features of urbanization across South Asia.

A new edition of a seminal text in Critical Race Theory

Since the publication of the third edition of Critical Race Theory: An Introduction in 2017, the United States has experienced a dramatic increase in racially motivated mass shootings and a pandemic that revealed how deeply entrenched medical racism is and how public disasters disproportionately affect minority communities. We have also seen a sharp backlash against Critical Race Theory, and a president who deemed racism a thing of the past while he fanned the flames of racial intolerance and promoted nativist sentiments among his followers. Now more than ever, the racial disparities in all aspects of
public life are glaringly obvious.

Taking note of all these developments, this fourth edition covers a range of new topics and events and addresses the rise of a fierce wave of criticism from right-wing websites, think tanks, and foundations, some of which insist that America is now colorblind and has little use for racial analysis and study. Award-winning authors Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic also address the rise in legislative efforts to curtail K–12 teaching of racial history.

Critical Race Theory, Fourth Edition, is essential for understanding developments in this burgeoning field, which has spread to other disciplines and countries. The new edition also covers the ways in which other societies and disciplines adapt its teachings and, for readers wanting to advance a progressive race agenda, includes new readings and questions for discussion aimed at outlining practical steps to achieve this objective.

Explores the cultural role of screen storytelling in society

With significant evolutions in digital technologies and media distribution in the past two decades, the business of storytelling through screens has shifted dramatically. In the past, blockbuster movies and TV shows like Friends aimed first for domestic mass audiences, although the biggest hits circulated globally. Now, transnational distribution plays a primary role and imagined audiences are global. At the same time, the once-mass audience has significantly fragmented to enable an expansion in the range of commercially viable stories, as evident in series as varied as Atlanta, Better Things, and dozens of others that are not widely known, but deeply loved by their microaudiences.

Delving into the changing landscape of commercial screen storytelling, After Mass Media explores how industrial shifts and technological advancements have remade the narrative landscape over the past two decades. Television and movies have long shaped society, whether by telling us about the worlds around us or far away. By examining the internationalization of screen businesses, the rise of streaming services with multi-territory reach, and the stories made for this environment, this book sheds light on the profound transformations in television and film production and circulation. With a keen focus on major changes in the types of screen stories being told, Amanda D. Lotz unravels the industrial roots that made these transformations possible, challenges some conventional distinctions of screen storytelling, and provides new conceptual tools to make sense of the abundance and range of screen stories on offer.

Through its comprehensive analysis, After Mass Media exposes how contemporary industrial dynamics, particularly the erosion of traditional distribution models based on geography and mass audience reach, have far-reaching implications for our understanding of national video cultures.

Frames restorative justice as a form of moral and spiritual practice with the capacity to transform injustice

In the United States “restorative justice” typically refers to small-scale measures that divert alleged wrongdoers from a standard path through the criminal justice system by funneling them into alternative justice programs. These aim not to punish the offender, but to constructively address the harm that wrongdoing may have caused to individuals or to the community, engaging with the wrongdoer to come to a response that might heal and repair the harm.

Yet restorative justice initiatives generally fail to challenge and transform the racist system of mass incarceration. This book argues that these initiatives have the potential to do so, but that we need to better understand what restorative justice is, and how it should be implemented. It claims that restorative justice can achieve its desired effect only insofar as it provides a mode of association between people that is, at its core, moral and spiritual. The book explores the ways in which restorative justice ethics and practices exhibit moral and spiritual dynamics, and what difference such “lived religious” dynamics can make for purposes of transforming structural violence.

Looking to Chicago’s restorative justice network as a model for developing these transformational and sustainable social changes, the volume showcases real-life examples of the kinds of practices and initiatives needed to shift the entrenched dynamics that fuel the prison-industrial complex across the United States.

Highlights the work trans youth do to create inclusive spaces in schools

Fierce, Fabulous, and Fluid presents a poignant critique of educational policies aimed at supporting trans and gender-nonconforming youth in schools. Over the years, caring adults have recognized these students as vulnerable and have tried to create inclusive environments to address their unique challenges. However, the book argues that these approaches have inadvertently perpetuated a narrow definition of trans identity, leaving many trans, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming youth feeling excluded and unseen.

Based on a year-long ethnographic study conducted in a high school, LJ Slovin closely observes the experiences of gender-nonconforming youth who were often overlooked in the discussions about trans issues. Despite the lack of recognition, these hard-working young individuals persevered, navigating their identities and striving to thrive within the education system.

Through their daily efforts, these young people tried to expand notions of gender in their school environment, building more inclusive spaces that embraced all trans identities. By sharing their stories, Slovin emphasizes the need for educators to shift away from a focus on risk and concern, to instead foster a celebration of trans and gender-nonconforming youth. The book urges educators to cultivate a genuine desire to understand and support trans youth, paving the way for a brighter and queerer future within educational settings.

Influencers are more than social media personalities who attract attention for brands, argue Grant Bollmer and Katherine Guinness. They are figures of a new transformation in capitalism, in which the logic of the self is indistinguishable from the logic of the corporation.

Influencers are emblematic of what Bollmer and Guinness call the "Corpocene": a moment in capitalism in which individuals achieve the status of living, breathing, talking corporations. Behind the veneer of leisure and indulgence, most influencers are laboring daily, usually for pittance wages, to manufacture a commodity called "the self"—a raw material for brands to use—with the dream of becoming corporations in human form by owning and investing in the products they sell. Refuting the theory that digital labor and economies are immaterial, Bollmer and Guinness search influencer content for evidence of the material infrastructure of capitalism. Each chapter looks to what literally appears in the backgrounds of videos and images: the houses, cars, warehouses, and spaces of the market that point back to the manufacturing and circulation of consumer goods. Demonstrating the material reality of producing the self as a commodity, The Influencer Factory makes a crucial contribution to our understanding of contemporary economic life.