GFP Alum Books

Unequal Choices: How Social Class Shapes Where High-Achieving Students Apply To College

Yang Va Lor
2023

By: Yang Va Lor

High-achieving students from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely to end up at less selective institutions compared to their socioeconomically advantaged peers with similar academic qualifications. A key reason for this is that few highly able, socioeconomically disadvantaged students apply to selective institutions in the first place. In Unequal Choices, Yang Va Lor examines the college application choices of high-achieving students, looking closely at the ways the larger contexts of family...

Organizing at the Margins: The Symbolic Politics of Labor in South Korea and the United States

Jennifer Jihye Chun
2009

The realities of globalization have produced a surprising reversal in the focus and strategies of labor movements around the world. After years of neglect and exclusion, labor organizers are recognizing both the needs and the importance of immigrants and women employed in the growing ranks of low-paid and insecure service jobs. In Organizing at the Margins, Jennifer Jihye Chun focuses on this shift as it takes place in two countries: South Korea and the United States.

Domestica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning & Caring in the Shadows of Affluence

Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo
2007

By Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo: In this enlightening and timely work, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo highlights the voices, experiences, and views of Mexican and Central American women who care for other people's children and homes, as well as the outlooks of the women who employ them in Los Angeles. The new preface looks at the current issues facing immigrant domestic workers in a global context.

Witchcraft, Sorcery or Medical Practice?: The Demand, Supply and Regulation of Indigenous Medicines in Durban, South Africa (1844-2002)

Thokozani Xaba
2010

This study argues that the survival of indigenous medicines in urban areas is rooted in the nature, development and administration of African settlement in South African cities. Specifically, this study argues that the socio-economic conditions of African existence in urban areas, together with the application of influx control laws, had an unintended effect of dissuading Africans from approaching state institutions for the resolution of their concerns. Instead, Africans were forced into relying on using unofficial means in negotiating their physical, social, economic, political and...

Choosing Ethnicity, Negotiating Race: Korean Adoptees in America

Mia Tuan
Jiannbiin Lee Shiao
2011

Transnational adoption was once a rarity in the United States, but Americans have been choosing to adopt children from abroad with increasing frequency since the mid-twentieth century. Korean adoptees make up the largest share of international adoptions—25 percent of all children adopted from outside the United States—but they remain understudied among Asian American groups. What kind of identities do adoptees develop as members of American families and in a cultural climate that often views them as foreigners? Choosing Ethnicity, Negotiating Race is the only study of this...

Tainted Tap: Flint's Journey from Crisis to Recovery

Katrinell Davis
2021

By Katrinell M. Davis: Urgent sociological assessment of Flint’s water crisis and environmental racism.

After a cascade of failures left residents of Flint, Michigan, without a reliable and affordable supply of safe drinking water, citizens spent years demanding action from their city and state officials. Complaints from the city’s predominantly African American residents were ignored until independent researchers confirmed dangerously elevated blood lead levels among Flint children and in the city’s tap water. Despite a 2017 federal court ruling in favor of...

The Latinx Guide to Graduate School

Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales
2023

By Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales and Magdalena L. Barrera: In The Latinx Guide to Graduate School Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales and Magdalena L. Barrera provide prospective and current Latinx graduate students in the humanities and social sciences fields with a roadmap for surviving and thriving in advanced-degree programs. They document the unwritten rules of graduate education that impact Latinx students, demystifying and clarifying the essential requirements for navigating graduate school that Latinx students may not know because they are often the first in their families to...

Code Work: Hacking across the US/México Techno-Borderlands

Héctor Beltrán
2023

By Héctor Beltrán: In Code Work, Héctor Beltrán examines Mexican and Latinx coders’ personal strategies of self-making as they navigate a transnational economy of tech work. Beltrán shows how these hackers apply concepts from the code worlds to their lived experiences, deploying batches, loose coupling, iterative processing (looping), hacking, prototyping, and full-stack development in their daily social interactions—at home, in the workplace, on the dating scene, and in their understanding of the economy, culture, and geopolitics. Merging...

Abolition and Social Work: Possibilities, Paradoxes, and the Practice of Community Care

Mimi E. Kim
2024

Edited by Mimi E. Kim, Cameron Rasmussen, and Durrell M. Washington: A critical anthology exploring the debates, conundrums, and promising practices around abolition and social work in academia and within impacted communities.

Within social work—a profession that has been intimately tied to and often complicit in the building and sustaining of the carceral state—abolitionist thinking, movement-building, and radical praxis are shifting the field. Critical scholarship and organizing have helped to name and examine the realities of...

When Care is Conditional: Immigrants and the U.S. Safety Net

Dani Carrillo
2024

By Dani Carrillo:From its inception, the public safety net in the United States has excluded many people because of their race, gendered roles, or other factors. As a result, they must prove their moral worthiness to get resources for themselves and their families. In When Care Is Conditional, sociologist Dani Carrillo reveals the ramifications of this conditional safety net by focusing on one particularly vulnerable population: undocumented immigrants.

Through in-depth interviews with Latinx immigrants in northern California, Carrillo examines...