ISSI Books

Mothering While Black: Boundaries and Burden of Middle-Class Parenthood

Dawn Marie Dow
2019

By: Dawn Marie Dow

Mothering While Black examines the complex lives of the African American middle class—in particular, black mothers and the strategies they use to raise their children to maintain class status while simultaneously defining and protecting their children’s “authentically black” identities. Sociologist Dawn Marie Dow shows how the frameworks typically used to research middle-class families focus on white mothers’ experiences, inadequately capturing the experiences of African American middle- and upper-middle-class mothers....

Expecting Inequity: How the Maternal Health Crisis Affects Even the Wealthiest Black Americans

Khiara M. Bridges
2026

Racism in maternal healthcare is not reserved for the poor. An unsparing picture of inequities in prenatal care and childbirth in the United States, Expecting Inequity reveals that not only are black people three to four times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause, but racial disparities in maternal mortality persist across income levels. That is, wealthier black people are much more likely to die during pregnancy, childbirth, or the postpartum period than their white counterparts. Focusing on a San Francisco obstetrics clinic that caters to the...

The Poverty of the Ethnography of Poverty

Loïc Wacquant
2025

Recapitulating the three ages of urban ethnography born in Chicago a century ago, this book puts into historical and analytical perspective a controversy over the ethnography of the nexus of race, class, and morality in and around the black American ghetto in the age of triumphant neoliberalism, in order to draw from it positive lessons for the theory and practice of fieldwork. Thoughtless empiricism, acceptance of problematics prefabricated by ordinary and political common sense, confusion between folk and analytical categories, confinement to the immediate perimeter of interaction...

We Are Not Dreamers: Undocumented Scholars Theorize Undocumented Life in the United States

Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales
2020

By: Leisy J. Abrego and Genevieve Negron-Gonzales

The widely recognized “Dreamer narrative” celebrates the educational and economic achievements of undocumented youth to justify a path to citizenship. While a well-intentioned, strategic tactic to garner political support of undocumented youth, it has promoted the idea that access to citizenship and rights should be granted only to a select group of “deserving” immigrants. The contributors to We Are Not Dreamers—themselves currently or formerly undocumented—poignantly counter the Dreamer...

Divided by the Wall: Progressive and Conservative Immigration Politics at the U.S.-Mexico Border

Emine Fidan Elcioglu
2020

By: Emine Fidan Elcioglu

The construction of a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border—whether to build it or not—has become a hot-button issue in contemporary America. A recent impasse over funding a wall caused the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, sharpening partisan divisions across the nation. In the Arizona borderlands, groups of predominantly white American citizens have been mobilizing for decades—some help undocumented immigrants bypass governmental detection, while others help law enforcement agents to apprehend immigrants. Activists...

Mourning my inner [blackgirl]child

Reelaviolette Botts-Ward
2021

Poetry. African & African American Studies. Women's Studies. MOURNING MY INNER[BLACKGIRL]CHILD is an unabashed exposure of girlhood fragility, ancestral grieving, and embodied remembering. In her excavation of multiple pasts and multiple selves, reelaviolette botts-ward journeys through intimate encounters with her mother(s), her home, her body, and her precarity. As she mourns her deepest wounds, reelaviolette lays bare the im/possibilities of Black girlhood, slippages of Black motherhood, and matrilineal legacies of abuse. In telling her story, she tells so many of our...

Race and Class in the Southwest and Other Essays Studies in Political Economy

Rodolfo D. Torres
Mario Barrera
William I. Robinson
2025

Edited by Rodolfo D. Torres: In Race and Class in the Southwest and Other Essays, Mario Barrera puts forth his seminal theory of racial inequality based on a synthesis of class and colonial analysis, together with several essays and selections from Barrera’s memoir that show how his thinking developed throughout his work.

Reprinted here for the first time after becoming a modern classic of Chicano studies, Race and Class in the Southwest focuses on the economic foundations of inequality as they have affected Chicanos in the Southwest from the...

Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape

Youjin B. Chung
2023

Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape brings us to the mid-2000s, when the Tanzanian government struck a deal with a foreign investor to convert more than 20,000 hectares of long-settled coastal land to establish a sugarcane plantation. Ten years on, the deal was abruptly abandoned. Popularly deemed a case of hubristic global development, critics classified this project another in a line of failed modern resource grabs.

Youjin B. Chung argues such tidy accounts conceal myriad and profound implications: not only how gender...

World Yearbook of Education 2023: Racialization and Educational Inequality in Global Perspective

Janelle Scott
Monisha Bajaj
2022

Edited by Janelle Scott and Monisha Bajaj. The World Yearbook of Education 2023 centers on the intersection of racialization, inequality, and education. It critically examines how racial formation and its associated logics about citizenship, belonging, justice, equality, and humanity manifest in early childhood education, primary, secondary, and higher education, as well as non-formal, community-based education settings. The chapters offer multisited perspectives into how racialization has and continues to shape educational inequality, with an eye towards the...

Subtle Webs: How Local Organizations Shape US Education

Eos Trinidad
2025

By Jose Eos Trinidad: In Subtle Webs, Jose Eos Trinidad reveals how organizations outside schools have created an invisible infrastructure not only to affect local school districts but also to shape US education. He illustrates this by providing a behind-the-scenes look at how local organizations in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York City have transformed data and worked with high schools to address the problem of students dropping out. The book argues that changes in a decentralized system happen less through top-down policy mandates or bottom-...