Editor’s Note: Ernesto Martínez is a member of the CSWS Advisory Board. His creative work has been supported in part through CSWS Faculty Research Grants and CSWS Special Project funding.
We include here books, film, and other creative publications that relate to our mission: Generating, supporting and disseminating research on the intersecting nature of gender identities and inequalities. Many of these projects received CSWS funding.
"Black thinkers in the antebellum United States grappled with what it meant to inhabit a place, a history, and a violent legal regime. In newspapers and pamphlets, political speeches, and fiction, Black writers persistently imagined alternative and liberatory legal futures. In reading these writers as architects of legal possibility, Faith Barter mobilizes the coincidental intimacy of prose and the legal term pro se, which refers to litigants who represent themselves in court.
"This collection brings together the experiences and voices of anthropologists whose engaged work with im/ migrant communities pushes the boundaries of ethnography toward a feminist, care-based, decolonial mode of ethnographic engagement called ‘accompaniment.’ Accompaniment as anthropological research and praxis troubles the boundaries of researcher-participant, scholaractivist, and academic-community to explicitly address issues of power, inequality, and the broader social purpose of the work.
"California Medieval is an intriguing hybrid memoir, interspersed with poetry, song, and lyrical vignettes. It explores the world of a Franciscan convent during the heyday of the 1960s in San Francisco at the birth of the flower-power era, as seen through the eyes of a novitiate nun, newly arrived in the Bay Area from a rural community in southwestern Washington State. This book is a stylistically and structurally adventurous narrative that forms a literary intersection of music, spirituality, nature, sociology, and sexuality.
"Women’s creative labour in publishing has often been overlooked. This book draws on dynamic new work in feminist book history and publishing studies to offer the first comparative collection exploring women’s diverse, deeply embedded work in modern publishing. Highlighting the value of networks, collaboration, and archives, the companion sets out new ways of reading women’s contributions to the production and circulation of global print cultures.
"Unhomely life, different from houselessness, refers to a fluctuating condition between losing home feelings and the search for home—a prevalent condition in post-Mao China. The faster that Chinese society modernizes, the less individuals feel at home, and the more they yearn for a sense of home. This is the central paradox that Xiaobo Su explores: how mobile individuals—lifestyle migrants and retreat tourists from China’s big cities, displaced natives and rural migrants in peripheral China—handle the loss of home and try to experience a homely way of life.
"Since the late twentieth century, multicultural reforms to benefit minorities have swept through Latin America; however, in Colombia ethno-racial inequality remains rife. Becoming Heritage evaluates how heritage policies affected the Afro-Colombian community of San Basilio de Palenque after it was proclaimed by UNESCO as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2005. Although the designation partially delivered on its promise of multicultural inclusion, it also created ethno-racial exclusion and conflict among groups within the Palenquero community.
"Coloring into Existence documents the emergence of a North American queer of color children’s literary archive, focusing on the creation, distribution, and potential impact of picture books by and about queer and trans of color authors. This comparative study across Canada, the United States, and Mexico from 1990 to 2020 fuses literary criticism and close readings with historical analysis and interviews.
"This book explores Roman love elegy from postcolonial perspectives, arguing that the tropes, conventions, and discourses of the Augustan genre serve to reinforce the imperial identity of its elite, metropolitan audience. Love elegy presents the phenomena and discourses of Roman imperialism—in terms of visual spectacle (the military triumph), literary genre (epic in relation to elegy), material culture (art and luxury goods), and geographic space—as intersecting with ancient norms of gender and sexuality in a way that reinforces Rome’s dominance in the Mediterranean."
"One Sunday afternoon in February 1977, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, and several other Black women writers met at June Jordan’s Brooklyn apartment to eat gumbo, drink champagne, and talk about their work. Calling themselves “The Sisterhood,” the group—which also came to include Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall, Margo Jefferson, and others—would get together once a month over the next two years, creating a vital space for Black women to discuss literature and liberation.
"Focusing on Clara Schumann’s central contributions to the genre of the Lied (or German art song), this is the first book-length critical study of her songs. Although relatively few in number, they were published and reviewed favorably in the press during her lifetime, and they continue to be programmed regularly in recitals by professional and amateur performers alike.
"Most books present research and pedagogies. We do something different: We share lives—personal stories of how women scholars earned graduate degrees and began careers bridging Japan and North America between the 1950s and 1980 and balanced professional and personal responsibilities. We challenge the common narrative that Japanese Studies was established by men who worked for the US military after World War II or were from missionary families in Japan. This is only part of the story—the field was also created by women who took advantage of postwar opportunities for studying Japan.
"Castoffs of Capital examines how female garment workers experience their work and personal lives within the stranglehold of global capital. Drawing on fieldwork in Bangladesh, anthropologist Lamia Karim focuses attention on the lives of older women aged out of factory work, heretofore largely ignored, thereby introducing a new dimension to the understanding of a female-headed workforce that today numbers around four million in Bangladesh.
"In this queer bilingual children’s book, Chabelita’s hopes come true when Jimena, the new student whose eyes sparkle like stars, sits next to her. Through shared language and experience they easily connect. The more they learn about each other, the more time they spend together, and the more they like each other. When Chabelita shares her special bow tie with Jimena on picture day, everyone will know that they like one another.
“This book challenges the clichéd understanding of comics as a “universal” language, circulating without regard for cultures or borders. Instead, she develops a new methodology of reading for difference. Kelp Stebbins’s anticolonial, feminist, and antiracist analytical framework engages with comics as sites of struggle over representation in a diverse world.
"The Art of the News is the first museum exhibition and catalogue devoted to the remarkable international emergence of comics journalism in the two decades since Joe Sacco first published Palestine in 1993. This project —and the scholarship it represents—fittingly emerge from Sacco’s alma mater, the University of Oregon, where he first studied journalism.
"Incorporating an international scope of essays, this volume reaches beyond traditional national or euroamerican boundaries to locate North American Indigenous modernities and modernisms in a hemispheric context.
"In Bodies in Doubt, Elizabeth Reis traces the changing definitions, perceptions, and medical management of intersex (atypical sex development) in America from the colonial period to the present. Arguing that medical practice must be understood within its broader cultural context, Reis demonstrates how deeply physicians have been influenced by social anxieties about marriage, heterosexuality, and same-sex desire throughout American history.
"Indigenous Women and Violence offers an intimate view of how settler colonialism and other structural forms of power and inequality created accumulated violences in the lives of Indigenous women. This volume uncovers how these Indigenous women resist violence in Mexico, Central America, and the United States, centering on the topics of femicide, immigration, human rights violations, the criminal justice system, and Indigenous justice.
"Japan on American TV explores political, economic, and cultural issues underlying depictions of Japan on U.S. television comedies and the programs they inspired. Since the 1950s, U.S. television programs have taken the role of “curators” of Japan, displaying and explaining selected aspects for viewers. Beliefs in U.S. hegemony over Japan underpin this curation process.
"Littlejohn’s work encompasses the often-overlooked experiences of people who identify as women, gender nonconforming, and nonbinary who have used birth control to prevent pregnancy. Those experiences range from the societal pressure for women to be solely responsible for birth control to unsupportive partners and the importance of access to both birth control and abortion. She contends that preventing pregnancy is something that should be understood as shared between the individuals engaging in sexual activity that could potentially lead to a pregnancy."
"How has a game brought together Americans and defined separate ethnic communities? This book tells the first history of mahjong and its meaning in American culture. Click-click-click. The sound of mahjong tiles connects American expatriates in Shanghai, Jazz Age white Americans, urban Chinese Americans in the 1930s, incarcerated Japanese Americans in wartime, Jewish American suburban mothers, and Air Force officers’ wives in the postwar era.
"In the wake of the 1688 revolution, England’s transition to financial capitalism accelerated dramatically. Londoners witnessed the rise of credit-based currencies, securities markets, speculative bubbles, insurance schemes, and lotteries. Many understood these phenomena in terms shaped by their experience with another risky venture at the heart of London life: the public theater.
"From covering the massacre of students at Tlatelolco in 1968 and the 1985 earthquake to the Zapatista rebellion in 1994 and the disappearance of forty-three students in 2014, Elena Poniatowska has been one of the most important chroniclers of Mexican social, cultural, and political life. In Stories That Make History, Lynn Stephen examines Poniatowska’s writing, activism, and political participation, using them as a lens through which to understand critical moments in contemporary Mexican history.
“On September 8, 1922, the body of Xi Shangzhen was found hanging in the Shanghai newspaper office where she worked.... [As] Bryna Goodman shows, the suicide of an educated ‘new woman’ exposed the emptiness of republican democracy after a flash of speculative finance gripped the city....The Suicide of Miss Xi opens a window onto how urban Chinese in the early twentieth century navigated China’s early passage through democratic populism, in an illfated moment of possibility between empire and party dictatorship.
"This fully re-edited, modernised play text is accompanied by insightful commentary notes, while its lively introduction explains why Webster’s interests in complex female lead characters and questions of social tension related to sexuality, gender, race, and law and equity—unusual for the play’s time—have led to its increasing relevance for modern audiences and readers.
"Even as beauty pageants have been critiqued as misogynistic and dated cultural vestiges of the past in the US and elsewhere, the pageant industry is growing in popularity across the Global South, and Nigeria is one of the countries at the forefront of this trend.
"This book identifies and analyzes the impact of the various ways in which local people are responding, taking stands, recapturing their culture, and saying ‘stop’ to the violent extremism that has manifested over the past decade (even longer) in Pakistan. Based on close ethnographic study of ground realities, it looks at not only what people are doing but why they are selecting these kinds of actions, how they are creating alternative narratives about culture and identity, and their vision of a future without violence.
"The book tells the story of how American theater has shaped popular understandings of the environment throughout the 20th century as it argues for theater’s potential power in the age of climate change. Using cultural and environmental history, seven chapters illuminate key moments in American theater and American environmentalism over the course of the 20th century in the US.
"When the Nintendo Wii was released in 2006, it ushered forward a new era of casual gaming in which video games appealed to not just the stereotypical hardcore male gamer, but also to a much broader, more diverse audience. However, the GamerGate controversy six years later, and other similar public incidents since, laid bare the internalized misogyny and gender stereotypes in the gaming community. Today, even as women make up nearly half of all gamers, sexist assumptions about the what and how of women’s gaming are more actively enforced. In Gaming Sexism, Amanda C.
"It’s New Year’s Day and the residents of a small fishing town are ready to start their lives anew. Leo takes his two young sons out to the lake to write resolutions on paper boats. That same frigid morning, Vera sets out for a walk with her dog along the lake, leaving her husband in bed with a hangover. But she never returns. She places a call to the police saying she’s found a boy in the woods, but the call is cut short by a muffled cry. Did one of Leo’s sons see Vera? What are they hiding about that day?
This book examines the cultural, social, and political terrain of Indigenous education by providing accounts of Indigenous students and educators creatively navigating the colonial dynamics within public schools. Through a series of survivance stories, the book surveys a range of educational issues, including implementation of Native-themed curriculum, teachers’ attempts to support Native students in their classrooms, and efforts to claim physical and cultural space in a school district, among others.
"From countercultural resistance to world music craze, Balkan music captured the attention of global audiences. Balkanology, the 1991 quintessential album of Bulgarian music, highlights this moment of unbridled creativity. Seasoned musicians all over the world are still in awe of the technical abilities of the musicians in Ansambl Trakia-their complex additive rhythms, breakneck speeds, stunning improvisations, dense ornamentation, chromatic passages, and innovative modulations.
"Living with Animals brings a pragmatist ecofeminist perspective to discussions around animal rights, animal welfare, and animal ethics to move the conversation beyond simple use or non-use decisions. Erin McKenna uses a case study approach with select species to question how humans should live and interact with various animal beings through specific instances of such relationships.
"Theoretically wide-ranging and deeply personal and poetic, Queer Freedom : Black Sovereignty is based on more than three years of fieldwork in the Dominican Republic. Ana-Maurine Lara draws on her engagement in traditional ceremonies, observations of national Catholic celebrations, and interviews with activists from peasant, feminist, and LGBT communities to reframe contemporary conversations about queerness and blackness.
"Spain has for too long been considered peripheral to the human catastrophes of World War II and the Holocaust. This volume is the first broadly interdisciplinary, scholarly collection to situate Spain in a position of influence in the history and culture of the Second World War.
"This book is an exploration of the ways that lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer persons exercise power in a Catholic Hispanic heteropatriarchal nation-state, namely the Dominican Republic. Lara presents the specific strategies employed by LGBTQ community leaders in the Dominican Republic in their struggle for subjectivity, recognition, and rights.
“Naylor discusses the racialized and historical backdrop of coffee production and rebel autonomy in the highlands, underscores the divergence of movements for fairer trade and the so-called alternative certified market, traces the network of such movements from the highlands and into the United States, and evaluates existing food sovereignty and diverse economic exchanges.
"Elizabeth A. Wheeler invokes the fantasy of HandiLand, an ideal society ready for young people with disabilities before they get there, as a yardstick to measure how far we’ve come and how far we still need to go toward the goal of total inclusion. The book moves through the public spaces young people with disabilities have entered, including schools, nature, and online communities. As a disabled person and parent of children with disabilities, Wheeler offers an inside look into families who collude with their kids in shaping a better world.
Directed by Adelina Anthony Written by Ernesto Javier Martínez 2019 | Short Film / Aderisa Productions
Synopsis: A Mexican-American boy learns from his parents about serenatas, and why demonstrating romantic affection proudly, publicly, and through song is such a treasured Mexican tradition. One day, the boy asks his parents if there is a song for a boy who loves a boy. The parents, surprised by the question and unsure of how to answer, must decide how to honor their son and how to reimagine a beloved tradition.
“Specifically designed for use on a range of undergraduate and graduate courses, [this book] offers an up-todate overview of a wide variety of media forms. It uses more than 40 particular case studies as a way into examining the broader themes in Japanese culture and provides a thorough analysis of the historical and contemporary trends that have shaped artistic production, as well as, politics, society, and economics.
"This book begins with a section of research-based, broad-level considerations of student motivation as it relates to short-term information literacy instruction, both in person and online. It then moves into activities and lesson plans that highlight specific motivational strategies and pedagogies: Each encourages the spirit of play, autonomy, and active learning in a grade-free environment. Activities and plans cover everything from game-based learning to escape rooms to role playing to poetry, and are thoroughly explained to be easily incorporated at your campus."
"The authors show that while racial subordination is an enduring feature of U.S. political history, it continually changes in response to shifting economic and political conditions, interests, and structures. From the militia movement to the Alt-Right to the mainstream Republican Party, Producers, Parasites, Patriots brings to light the changing role of race in right-wing politics."
University of Minnesota Press, 208 pages
"Since time before memory, large numbers of salmon have made their way up and down the Klamath River. Indigenous management enabled the ecological abundance that formed the basis of capitalist wealth across North America. These activities on the landscape continue today, although they are often the site of intense political struggle. Not only has the magnitude of Native American genocide been of remarkable little sociological focus, the fact that this genocide has been coupled with a reorganization of the natural world represents a substantial theoretical void.
"Exploring key moments in the formation of modern US race relations, The Race Card charts a new course in gaming scholarship by reorienting our focus away from games as vehicles for empowerment that allow people to inhabit new identities, and toward the ways that games are used as instruments of soft power to advance top-down political agendas.
"Mondloch examines how new media installation art intervenes in technoscience and new materialism, showing how three diverse artists— Pipilotti Rist, Patricia Piccinini, and Mariko Mori— address everyday technology and how it constructs our bodies. Mondloch establishes the unique insights that feminist theory offers to new media art and new materialisms, offering a fuller picture of human– nonhuman relations."
University of Minnesota Press
"Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics brings together groundbreaking essays that speak to the relationship between Asian American feminisms, feminist of color work, and transnational feminist scholarship.
"While Native Hawaiian artists, activists, scholars, and other performers have labored to educate diverse publics about the complexity of Indigenous Hawaiian identity, ongoing acts of violence against Indigenous communities have undermined these efforts. In this multidisciplinary work, Teves argues that Indigenous peoples must continue to embrace the performance of their identities in the face of this violence in order to challenge settler-colonialism and its efforts to contain and commodify Hawaiian Indigeneity."
University of North Carolina Press, 240 pages
“Engaging the development of Heidegger’s non-public writings on the event between 1936 and 1941, Daniela Vallega-Neu reveals what Heidegger's private writings kept hidden. Vallega-Neu takes readers on a journey through these volumes, which are not philosophical works in the traditional sense as they read more like fragments, collections of notes, reflections, and expositions.”
Indiana University Press, Series: Studies in Continental Thought, 256 pages
"This deeply informative text reveals that the animals we commonly see as livestock have rich evolutionary histories, species-specific behaviors, breed tendencies, and individual variation, just as those we respect in companion animals such as dogs, cats, and horses. To restore a similar level of respect for livestock, McKenna examines ways we can balance the needs of our livestock animals with the environmental and social impacts of raising them, and she investigates new possibilities for humans to be in relationships with other animals.
"Part I provides an overview of ideas of race and ethnicity in the philosophical canon, egalitarian traditions, race in biology, and race in American and Continental Philosophy. Part II addresses race as it operates in life through colonialism and development, social constructions and institutions, racism, political philosophy, and gender. This book constructs an outline that will serve as a resource for students, nonspecialists, and general readers in thinking, talking, and writing about philosophy of race."
Palgrave Macmillan, 258 pages
“This book addresses current political and social upheaval and distress with new concepts for the relationship between citizens and government. Politics has become turbo-charged as a form of agonistic contest where candidates and the public become more focused on winning than on governing or holding the government accountable for the benefit of the people. This failure of the government to fulfill its part of the social contract calls for a new social compact wherein citizens as a collective whole make long-term resolutions outside of government institutions.”
"This book brings together sociological, psychological, historical, cultural, and environmental ways of thinking about nonhuman animals and our relationships with them. In particular, ecopsychological thinking locates and identifies the connections between how we re-present animals and the impact on their lived experiences in terms of distancing, generating a false sense of intimacy, and stereotyping. Re-presentations of animals are discussed in terms of the role the media do or do not play in perpetuating status quo beliefs about them and their relationship with humans.
"This children’s book tells the story of a Mexican-American boy who learns from his parents about serenatas and why demonstrating romantic affection proudly, publicly, and through song is such a treasured Mexican tradition. One day, the boy asks his parents if there is a song for a boy who loves a boy. The parents, surprised by the question and unsure of how to answer, must decide how to honor their son and how to reimagine a beloved tradition."
Reflections Press, 32 pages
"This book explores the importance to Romantic literature of a concept of human interest. It examines a range of literary experiments to engage readers through subjects and styles that were at once "interesting" and that, in principle, were in their "interest." These experiments put in question relationships between poetry and prose; lyric and narrative; and literature and popular media. The book places literary works by a range of nineteenth-century writers."
Bucknell University Press /copublished with Rowman & Littlefield, 206 pages
"Global inequalities make it difficult for parents in developing nations to provide for their children. Some determine that migration in search of higher wages is their only hope. Many studies have looked at how migration transforms the child–parent relationship. But what happens to other generational relationships when mothers migrate?
"Development Drowned and Reborn is a “Blues geography” of New Orleans, one that compels readers to return to the history of the Black freedom struggle there to reckon with its unfinished business. Reading contemporary policies of abandonment against the grain, Clyde Woods explores how Hurricane Katrina brought long-standing structures of domination into view. In so doing, Woods delineates the roots of neoliberalism in the region and a history of resistance."
University of Georgia Press, 396 pages
"In How Development Projects Persist Erin Beck examines microfinance NGOs working in Guatemala and problematizes the accepted wisdom of how NGOs function. Drawing on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork, she shows how development models and plans become entangled in the relationships among local actors in ways that alter what they are, how they are valued, and the conditions of their persistence. Beck focuses on two NGOs that use drastically different methods in working with poor rural women in Guatemala.
"Specifically designed for use on a range of undergraduate and graduate courses, [this book] offers an up-to-date overview of a wide variety of media forms. It uses more than 40 particular case studies as a way into examining the broader themes in Japanese culture and provides a thorough analysis of the historical and contemporary trends that have shaped artistic production, as well as, politics, society, and economics.
“Ana Lara's Kohnjehr Woman evokes a world such as only narrative poetry can. In a series of concise, orally grounded and visually vivid poems, she introduces the mysterious avenger, Shee, who upends daily life, and all the lives, on an antebellum plantation. Kohnjehr Woman's spell endures.”—John Keene, author, Counternarratives
RedBone Press, 73 pages
"Choosing whom to marry involves more than emotion, as racial politics, cultural mores, and local demographics all shape romantic choices. In Marriage Vows and Racial Choices, sociologist Jessica Vasquez-Tokos explores the decisions of Latinos who marry either within or outside of their racial and ethnic groups.
"The Life of Paper offers a wholly original and inspiring analysis of how people facing systematic social dismantling have written letters to remake themselves—from bodily integrity to subjectivity and collective and spiritual being.
"Naomi Zack pioneers a new theory of justice starting from a correction of current injustices. While the present justice paradigm in political philosophy and related fields begins from John Rawls’s 1970 Theory of Justice, Zack insists that what people in reality care about is not justice as an ideal, but injustice as a correctable ill. Zack's theory of applicative justice offers a revolutionary reorientation of society's pursuit of justice, seeking to undo injustice in a practical and fully achievable way."
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 250 pages
"Exploring the interplay between deep theory and intricate computation, this volume is a compilation of research and survey papers in number theory, written by members of the Women In Numbers (WIN) network, principally by the collaborative research groups formed at Women In Numbers 3, a conference at the Banff International Research Station in Banff, Alberta, on April 21-25, 2014. The papers span a wide range of research areas: arithmetic geometry; analytic number theory; algebraic number theory; and applications to coding and cryptography."
"This book investigates major Chinese-language films from mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong in order to unpack a hypercompressed capitalist modernity with distinctive Chinese characteristics.… A deeply cultural, determinedly historical, and deliberately interdisciplinary study, it approaches ‘culture’ anthropologically, as a way of life emanating from the everyday, and aesthetically, as imaginative forms and creative expressions."
Routledge, 246 Pages
"This book is a comprehensive and contemporary reader for the growing field of men's and masculinities studies. It takes a conceptual approach by covering the wide range of scholarship being done on masculinities beyond the model of hegemonic masculinity. C.J. Pascoe and Tristan Bridges extend the boundaries of the field and provide a new framework for understanding masculinities studies.
"Fractional Freedoms explores how thousands of slaves in colonial Peru were able to secure their freedom, keep their families intact, negotiate lower self-purchase prices, and arrange transfers of ownership by filing legal claims. Through extensive archival research, Michelle McKinley excavates the experiences of enslaved women whose historical footprint is barely visible in the official record.
"The postcolonial states of Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu operate today in a global arena in which human rights are widely accepted. As ratifiers of UN treaties such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, these Pacific Island countries have committed to promoting women’s and girls’ rights, including the right to a life free of violence.
"This book examines a group of multicultural Jewish poets to address the issue of multilingualism within a context of minor languages and literatures, nationalism, and diaspora. It introduces three writers working in minor or threatened languages who challenge the usual consensus of Jewish literature: Algerian Sadia Lévy, Israeli Margalit Matitiahu, and Argentine Juan Gelman.
"Musical listening was pervasive for U.S. troops fighting the wars in Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom) and Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom). Recent technological developments enabled troops to carry with them vast amounts of music and easily acquire new music, for themselves and to share with others in their immediate vicinity and far away.…This study examines U.S.
“As a neuroscientist, Marjorie Woollacott had no doubts that the brain was a purely physical entity controlled by chemicals and electrical pulses. When she experimented with meditation for the first time, however, her entire world changed. Woollacott’s journey through years of meditation has made her question the reality she built her career upon and has forced her to ask what human consciousness really is. Infinite Awareness pairs Woollacott’s research as a neuroscientist with her self-revelations about the mind’s spiritual power.
“When Lauren Kessler was twelve, her ballet instructor crushed not just her dreams of being a ballerina but also her youthful self-assurance. Now, many decades and three children later, Kessler embarks on a journey to join a professional company to perform in The Nutcracker. Raising the Barre is more than just one woman's story; it is a story about shaking things up, taking risks and ignoring good sense, and forgetting how old you are and how you're "supposed" to act. It's about testing limits and raising the bar(re) on your own life.”
This documentary “explores the differential rights that U.S. citizen children and their undocumented parents have through the story of one extended Zapotec family. Shot in Oregon and Oaxaca, Mexico, and narrated by eleven-year old Cinthya, the film follows Cinthya’s trip to her parent’s home community of Teotitlán del Valle with her godmother, anthropologist Lynn Stephen. There she meets her extended family and discovers her indigenous Zapotec and Mexican roots. At a larger level, Cinthya’s story illuminates the desires and struggles of the millions of families divided between the U.S.
“Best-selling author Lauren Kessler offers insights on the art of writing and the joys of reading that are provocative and heartening, thoughtful and funny, reassuring and real. In graceful prose (laced with get-on-it attitude), Kessler distills lessons from a 25-year career to inspire writers to embrace challenges, push through the tough stuff and love the life they've chosen. A perfect book for both aspiring and experienced writers, The Write Path speaks intimately, wisely and encouragingly to all who toil in -- and passionately love -- the world of words.”
“In recent years, UNESCO and intangible cultural heritage (ICH) have become key terms for the analysis of expressive culture, with folklorists and anthropologists playing increasingly significant roles in the theorization, creation and implementation of global cultural policy. While UNESCO meetings are generally held in cities such as Paris and New York, their decisions affect people in communities around the globe, where they can have unforeseen ramifications for national and regional politics, economics, and ethnic concerns.
“Examining racial profiling in American policing, Naomi Zack argues against white privilege discourse while introducing a new theory of applicative justice. Zack draws clear lines between rights and privileges and between justice and existing laws to make sense of the current crisis. This urgent and immediate analysis of the killings of unarmed black men by police officers shows how racial profiling matches statistics of the prison population with disregard for the constitutional rights of the many innocent people of all races.
“In Pakistan, myriad constituencies are grappling with reinterpreting women’s rights.
"One of the few collections of plays by Irish women, this volume contextualizes the political and sociological climate in which these playwrights developed. As theatre practitioners—actors and directors—as well as scholars, Kearney and Headrick have devoted years of research to discovering and rediscovering the contributions these women have made—and continue to make—in the Irish and world theatre scenes."
Syracuse University Press, 343 pages
“Beset by the forces of European colonialism, US imperialism, and neoliberalism, the people of the Antilles have had good reasons to band together politically and economically, yet not all Dominicans, Haitians, and Puerto Ricans have heeded the calls for collective action. So what has determined whether Antillean solidarity movements fail or succeed? In this comprehensive new study, Alaí Reyes-Santos argues that the crucial factor has been the extent to which Dominicans, Haitians, and Puerto Ricans imagine each other as kin.
"After a devastating fish kill on the Klamath River, tribal members and theatre artist Theresa May developed a play to give voice to the central spiritual and cultural role of salmon in tribal life. Salmon Is Everything presents the script of that play, along with essays by artists and collaborators that illuminate the process of creating and performing theatre on Native and environmental issues. This revised and expanded second edition includes a new introduction by the author, and new chapters by Kirby Brown and Marta Lu Clifford."
“[This] textbook explores … how media and other social institutions use sex and sexuality (the capacity to have erotic experiences and responses) to advance economic and ideological interests. Cinema, music, music videos, television programs, advertising, and the Internet are discussed as carriers of deliberately constructed messages that contribute to and support a master narrative that privileges heterosexuality and monogamy.
"The luminous poems in Karen McPherson’s Skein of Light pull and gather toward horizons of reflection. In language that repeatedly reveals what it can and cannot do, the poet maps landscapes of memory where sharp-edged questions disturb the stillness. The personal and human are deftly threaded through a natural world made legible in flights of birds, bending grasses, rock striations. And through this open work, the reader steps into a place both familiar and unknown."
Airlie Press
Short List, Eric Hoffer Grand Prize
“With the help of recent theories of space and place, the book examines the writings of planters, enslaved people, soldiers, sailors and travelers whose diverse geographical and social locations inflect their representation of British slavery, analyzing the ways in which these writers use discourses of aesthetics, natural history, cultural geography, and gendered domesticity to intervene in Britain's protracted national debate over slavery.”
Cambridge University Press, 280 pages
“Through examining practices of torture, extra-judicial assassination, and first person accounts of soldiers on the ground, Bonnie Mann develops a new theory of gender. It is neither a natural essence nor merely a social construct. Gender is first and foremost an operation of justification which binds the lived existence of the individual subject to the aspirations of the regime.
"The Librarian Stereotype: Deconstructing Presentations and Perceptions of Information Work serves as a response to passionate discussions regarding how librarians are perceived. Through twelve chapters, the book reignites an examination of librarian presentation within the field and in the public eye, employing theories and methodologies from throughout the social sciences. The ultimate goal of this volume is to launch productive discourse and inspire action in order to further the positive impact of the information professions.
“Many universities in the 21st century claim ‘diversity’ as a core value, but fall short in transforming institutional practices. The disparity between what universities claim as a value and what they accomplish in reality creates a labyrinth of barriers, challenges, and extra burdens that junior faculty of color must negotiate, often at great personal and professional risk.
“Betrayal is fundamental to the human condition and yet because of betrayal blindness often goes unseen. Drawing on empirical research, clinical thought, and real stories, this book explores central questions about betrayal and betrayal blindness: What is betrayal? What is its scope? How do we become aware of it and heal from its effects?”
John Wiley & Sons, 201 pages
”Guided by both intense curiosity and healthy skepticism, a sense of adventure and a sense of humor, Kessler sets out to discover just what’s required to prolong those healthy, vital, and productive years called the ‘health span.’ In her yearlong journey, Kessler investigates and fully immerses herself in the hope and hype of the anti-aging movement.”
Rodale Books, 256 pages
“Although scholars and practitioners have identified explicit structural impediments that constrain countries’ efforts to alleviate poverty and promote sustainable social development, there has been limited research conducted to identify the specific barriers to development that prevail in Pakistan today. The authors … go far toward filling this void….”
Kumarian Press, 280 pages
“Throughout the Americas, a boom in oil, gas, and mining development has pushed the extractive frontier deeper into indigenous territories. Centering on a long-term study of Enron and Shell’s Cuiabá pipeline, From Enron to Evo traces the struggles of Bolivia’s indigenous peoples for self-determination over their lives and territories”
University of Arizona Press, 280 pages
"This 54-minute documentary tells the story of Guatemala’s National Police Historical Archive (Archivo Histórico de la Policia Nacional—AHPN) intertwined with narratives of past human rights abuses and the dramatic effects they had on specific individuals and the nation as a whole. In addition, it highlights present-day efforts to preserve collective memories and bring justice and reconciliation to the country."
This documentary is the result of a collaboration between academic units at the UO and AHPN.
“This book examines work in several genres of life writing—autobiography, memoir, case history, autobiographical fiction—focused either on what it means to live with schizophrenia or what it means to understand and ‘treat’ people who have received that diagnosis. Challenging the romanticized connection between literature and madness, Life Writing and Schizophrenia explores how writers who hear voices and experience delusions write their identities into narrative, despite popular and medical representations of schizophrenia as chaos, violence, and incoherence.
“This spirited and engaging multidisciplinary volume pins its focus on the lived experiences and cultural depictions of women’s mobility and labor in Japan. The theme of ‘modern girls’ continues to offer a captivating window into the changes that women’s roles have undergone during the course of the last century.”
Stanford University Press, 304 pages
“Latin American Studies as a fully recognized field of scholarly inquiry only exists for those accustomed to viewing the region from north of the U.S.-Mexican border. Although never completely stable or uncontested, Latin American Studies had its first heyday between the mid1960s and late 1980s, at the height of the Cold War, when the region became the focus of intense geopolitical contention.
“Amanda Powell‘s poems are dark, witty, and intimate; at once autobiographical and formally sophisticated; sound-rich; and full of linguistic surprises. These poems are both deeply embedded in our literary traditions and right on the edge of contemporary poetics. Moving, unflinching and alive, they reward the closest attention with a cornucopia of unexpected pleasures.” –Linda Bamber, author of Metropolitan Tang: Poems and Taking What I Like: Stories (both from Black Sparrow/Godine), and Comic Women, Tragic Men: Gender and Genre in Shakespeare (Stanford U.
“Literature played a crucial role in constructing and contesting the modern culture of empire that was fully in place by the start of the Victorian period. Postcolonial criticism’s concern with issues of geopolitics, race and gender, subalternity and exoticism shape discussions of works by major authors such as Blake, Coleridge, both Shelleys, Austen and Scott, as well as their less familiar contemporaries.”
Edinburgh University Press, 224 pp
“Trafalgar, a novel-in-stories, was originally published in Argentina in 1979. It starts off light and refreshing right from the very first short “Who’s Who in Rosario” listing for Trafalgar, although there are occasional clouds that pass through Trafalgar Medrano’s bright and happy stories.”
Small Beer Press, 256 pages
"A massive uprising against the Mexican state of Oaxaca began with the emergence of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO) in June 2006. A coalition of more than 300 organizations, APPO disrupted the functions of Oaxaca's government for six months. It began to develop an inclusive and participatory political vision for the state. Testimonials were broadcast on radio and television stations appropriated by APPO, shared at public demonstrations, debated in homes and in the streets, and disseminated around the world via the Internet.
“Thorsson reconsiders the gender, genre, and geography of African American nationalism as she explores the aesthetic history of African American writing by women. … Identifying five forms of women’s work as organizing, dancing, mapping, cooking, and inscribing, she shows how these writers reclaimed and revised cultural nationalism to hail African America.”
University of Virginia Press, 240 pages
This book project, supported by a CSWS Faculty Research Grant, “puts actual poetic dialogues…at the center of contemporary theoretical debates about sex and gender. The book recovers the poems’ original dialogic setting, and by freeing them from the limitations of conventional aesthetic discourses it empowers the poems to participate in more complex cultural debates.
