GFP Alum Books

Mass Incarceration: Keynotes in Criminology and Criminal Justice Series

Keramet Reiter
2017

By Keramet Reiter. In this brief, timely text, Keramet Reiter explores the least visible, but arguably most important, characteristics of mass incarceration in the United States: the systematic constriction of prisoners' constitutional rights; the treatment of the mentally ill in prison; the long-term consequences of having served time in prison; the problem of prisoner disenfranchisement; and the privatization of multiple aspects of the prison industry. Each chapter begins with a narrative account of one individual's experience within the prison system, drawn from actual...

Claiming Home, Shaping Community: Testimonios de los valles

Gloria H. Cuadraz
Yolanda Flores
2017

Edited by Gloria H. Cuadraz and Yolanda Flores. To offer testimonio is inherently political, a vehicle that counters the hegemony of the state and illuminates the repression and denial of human rights. Claiming Home, Shaping Community shares testimonios from and about the lives of Mexican-origin people who left the rural, agricultural Imperial and San Joaquín Valleys to pursue higher education at a University of California campus.

While symbolically their journeys embody the master...

23/7: Pelican Bay Prison and the Rise of Long-Term Solitary Confinement

Keramet Reiter
2018

By Keramet Reiter. Originally meant to be brief and exceptional, solitary confinement in U.S. prisons has become long-term and common. Prisoners spend twenty-three hours a day in featureless cells, with no visitors or human contact for years on end, and they are held entirely at administrators’ discretion. Keramet Reiter tells the history of one “supermax,” California’s Pelican Bay State Prison, whose extreme conditions recently sparked a statewide hunger strike by 30,000 prisoners. This book describes how Pelican Bay was created without legislative oversight, in fearful...

Human Targets: Schools, Police, and the Criminalization of Latino Youth

Victor Rios
2017

By Victor M. Rios. In Human Targets, Rios takes us to the streets of California, where we encounter young men who find themselves in much the same situation as fifteen-year-old Victor. We follow young gang members into schools, homes, community organizations, and detention facilities, watch them interact with police, grow up to become fathers, get jobs, get rap sheets—and in some cases get killed. What is it that sets apart young people like Rios who succeed and survive from the ones who don’t? Rios makes a powerful case that the traditional good kid/bad kid, street kid/...

Migrant Returns: Manila, Development, and Transnational Connectivity

Eric J. Pido
2017

By Eric Pido: In Migrant Returns Eric J. Pido examines the complicated relationship among the Philippine economy, Manila’s urban development, and balikbayans—Filipino migrants visiting or returning to their homeland—to reconceptualize migration as a process of connectivity. Focusing on the experiences of balikbayans returning to Manila from California, Pido shows how Philippine economic and labor policies have created an economy reliant upon property speculation, financial remittances, and the affective labor of Filipinos living abroad. As...

The Dark Side of European Integration: Social Foundations and Cultural Determinants of the Rise of Radical Right Movements in Contemporary Europe

Alina Polyakova
2015

Alina Polyakova - Across Europe, radical right-wing parties are winning increasing electoral support. The Dark Side of European Integration argues that this rising nationalism and the mobilization of the radical right are the consequences of European economic integration. The European economic project has produced a cultural backlash in the form of nationalist radical right ideologies. This assessment relies on a detailed analysis of the electoral rise of radical right parties in Western and Eastern Europe. Contrary to popular belief, economic performance...

Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party

Joshua Bloom
Waldo Martin
2016

By Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin - This timely special edition, published on the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party, features a new preface by the authors that places the Party in a contemporary political landscape, especially as it relates to Black Lives Matter and other struggles to fight police brutality against black communities.

In Oakland, California, in 1966, community college students Bobby Seale and Huey Newton armed themselves, began patrolling the police, and promised to prevent police...

The End Game: How Inequality Shapes our Final Years

Corey M. Abramson
2017

Corey Abramson - Senior citizens from all walks of life face a gauntlet of physical, psychological, and social hurdles. But do the disadvantages some people accumulate over the course of their lives make their final years especially difficult? Or does the quality of life among poor and affluent seniors converge at some point? The End Game investigates whether persistent socioeconomic, racial, and gender divisions in America create inequalities that structure the lives of the elderly.

Corey Abramson’s portraits of seniors from diverse backgrounds offer...

Grateful Nation: Student Veterans and the Rise of the Military-Friendly Campus

Ellen Moore
2017

Ellen Moore - In today's volunteer military many recruits enlist for the educational benefits, yet a significant number of veterans struggle in the classroom, and many drop out. The difficulties faced by student veterans have been attributed to various factors: poor academic preparation, PTSD and other postwar ailments, and allegedly antimilitary sentiments on college campuses. In Grateful Nation Ellen Moore challenges these narratives by tracing the experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans at two California college campuses. Drawing on...

South Central Dreams: Finding Home and Building Community in South L.A.

Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo
Manuel Pastor
2021

By Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo - Over the last five decades, South Los Angeles has undergone a remarkable demographic transition. In South Central Dreams, eminent scholars Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Manuel Pastor follow its transformation from a historically Black neighborhood into a predominantly Latino one, providing a fresh, inside look at the fascinating—and constantly changing—relationships between these two racial and ethnic groups in California.

Drawing on almost two hundred interviews and statistical data, Hondagneu-Sotelo and Pastor explore the...