“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.”

“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.”

“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. Putting decolonial thinking in conversation with diverse economies theory, Fair Trade Rebels evaluates fair trade not by the measure of its success or failure but through a unique, place-based approach that expands our understanding of the relationship between fair trade, autonomy, and economic development.”

This project was funded in part by a CSWS grant.
"Daring new theories of masculinity, built from a large and geographically diverse interview study of transgender men. American masculinity is being critiqued, questioned, and reinterpreted for a new era. In Men in Place, Miriam J. Abelson makes an original contribution to this conversation through in-depth interviews with trans men in the U.S. West, Southeast, and Midwest, showing how the places and spaces men inhabit are fundamental to their experiences of race, sexuality, and gender."

“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. Through comparative case studies of Metro, Tintin, Persepolis, and more, she explores the ways in which graphic narratives locate and dislocate readers in every phase of a transnational comic’s life cycle according to distinct visual, linguistic, and print cultures."

This project was funded in part by a CSWS grant.
“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. Xi Shangzhen became a symbol of the failures of the Chinese Republic as well as the broken promises of citizen’s rights, gender equality, and financial prosperity betokened by liberal democracy and capitalism.”

"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. The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the university is proud to present the exhibition and publish the catalogue, featuring not only Sacco’s work, but that of the other comics journalists whose work is also presented here..."

"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. More than two dozen contributors show how accompaniment is not merely a mode of knowledge production but an ethical commitment that calls researchers to action in solidarity with those whose lives we seek to understand."

This project was funded in part by a CSWS grant.
"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."

"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. The Sisterhood tells the story of how this remarkable community transformed American writing and cultural institutions."