CRSC Books

Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality

Loïc Wacquant
2008

Loïc Wacquant - Urban Outcasts sheds new light on the explosive mix of mounting misery, stupendous affluence and festering street violence resurging in the big cities of the First World. By specifying the different causal paths and experiential forms assumed by relegation in the American and the French metropolis, this book offers indispensable tools for rethinking urban marginality and for reinvigorating the public debate over social inequality and citizenship at century's dawn.

Solving Latino Psychosocial and Health Problems: Theory, Practice, and Populations

Kurt Organista
2007

Kurt Organista - It is estimated that in just two generations, the United States will follow Mexico with the second largest Latino population in the world. Optimistic and timely, Solving Latino Psychosocial and Health Problems addresses the social welfare of this important ethnic community. Noted expert Kurt Organista employs a practice-oriented approach to addressing the interwoven psychosocial and health-related concerns that impact this community and offers thoughtful and much-needed solutions.

This important book realistically...

The Conditions for Admission: Access, Equity, and the Social Contract of Public Universities

John Douglass
2007

John Douglass - The social contract of public universities—the progressive idea that any citizen who meets specified academic conditions can gain entry to their state university—has profoundly shaped American society. This book offers the first comprehensive examination of admission policies and practices at public universities. Using the University of California, the nation's largest public research university and among its most selective, as an illuminating case study, it explores historical and contemporary debates over affirmative action, gender, class, standardized...

Getting Saved in America: Taiwanese Immigration and Religious Experience

Carolyn Chen
2008

Carolyn Chen - What does becoming American have to do with becoming religious? Many immigrants become more religious after coming to the United States. Taiwanese are no different. Like many Asian immigrants to the United States, Taiwanese frequently convert to Christianity after immigrating. But Americanization is more than simply a process of Christianization. Most Taiwanese American Buddhists also say they converted only after arriving in the United States even though Buddhism is a part of Taiwan’s dominant religion. By examining the experiences of Christian and...

Black Europe and the African Diaspora

Stephen Small
Trica Danielle Keaton
Darlene Clark Hine
2009

Edited by Darlene Clark Hine, Trica Danielle Keaton, and Stephen Small - The presence of Blacks in a number of European societies has drawn increasing interest from scholars, policymakers, and the general public. This interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary collection penetrates the multifaceted Black presence in Europe, and, in so doing, complicates the notions of race, belonging, desire, and identities assumed and presumed in revealing portraits of Black experiences in a European context. In focusing on contemporary intellectual currents and themes,...

Do Prisons Make Us Safer? The Benefits and Costs of the Prison Boom

Steven Raphael
Michael A. Stoll
2009

Edited by Steven Raphael and Michael StollDo Prisons Make Us Safer? asks whether it makes sense to maintain such a large and costly prison system. The contributors expand the scope of previous analyses to include a number of underexplored dimensions, such as the fiscal impact on states, effects on children, and employment prospects for former inmates. Steven Raphael and Michael Stoll assess the reasons behind the explosion in incarceration rates and find that criminal behavior itself accounts for only a small fraction of the prison boom. Eighty-five percent...

Between Good and Ghetto: African American Girls and Inner-City Violence

Nikki Jones
2009

Nikki Jones - With an outward gaze focused on a better future, Between Good and Ghetto reflects the social world of inner city African American girls and how they manage threats of personal violence.

Drawing on personal encounters, traditions of urban ethnography, Black feminist thought, gender studies, and feminist criminology, Nikki Jones gives readers a richly descriptive and compassionate account of how African American girls negotiate schools and neighborhoods governed by the so-called "code of the street"ùthe form of street justice...

Prisons of Poverty

Loic Wacquant
2009

Loïc Wacquant - In the early 1990s, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani launched a zero-tolerance campaign aimed at street disorders and petty offenders, incarnated in the infamous “squeegee man.” New York City soon became a planetary showcase for an aggressive approach to law enforcement that, despite its extravagant costs and the absence of connection to the crime drop, came to be admired and imitated by other cities in the United States, Western Europe, and Latin America.

In Prisons of Poverty, Loïc Wacquant tracks the incubation and internationalization of the...

The Outsourced Self: What Happens When We Pay Others to Live Our Lives for Us

Arlie R Hochschild
2012

Arlie Hochschild - The family has long been a haven in a heartless world, the one place immune to market forces and economic calculations, where the personal, the private, and the emotional hold sway. Yet as Arlie Russell Hochschild shows in The Outsourced Self, that is no longer the case: everything that was once part of private life―love, friendship, child rearing―is being transformed into packaged expertise to be sold back to confused, harried Americans.

Drawing on hundreds of interviews and original research, Hochschild...

Three Worlds of Relief: Race, Immigration, and the American Welfare State from the Progressive Era to the New Deal

Cybelle Fox
2012

Cybelle Fox - Three Worlds of Reliefexamines the role of race and immigration in the development of the American social welfare system by comparing how blacks, Mexicans, and European immigrants were treated by welfare policies during the Progressive Era and the New Deal. Taking readers from the turn of the twentieth century to the dark days of the Depression, Cybelle Fox finds that, despite rampant nativism, European immigrants received generous access to social welfare programs. The communities in which they lived invested heavily in relief....