ISSI Books

Racial Domination

Loïc Wacquant
2024

By Loïc Wacquant. Race is arguably the single most troublesome and volatile concept of the social sciences in the early 21st century. It is invoked to explain all manner of historical phenomena and current issues, from slavery to police brutality to acute poverty, and it is also used as a term of civic denunciation and moral condemnation. In this erudite and incisive book based on a panoramic mining of comparative and historical research from around the globe, Loïc Wacquant pours cold analytical water on this hot topic and infuses it with...

Making Health Public: How News Coverage Is Remaking Media, Medicine, and Contemporary Life

Charles Briggs
Daniel C. Hallin
2024

By Charles L. Briggs and Daniel C. Hallin: This book examines the relationship between media and medicine. Drawing on insights from anthropology, linguistics, and media studies, it considers the fundamental role of news coverage in constructing wider cultural understandings of health and disease. The authors advance the notion of ‘biomediatization’ and demonstrate how health knowledge is co-produced through connections between dispersed sites of knowledge making and through multiple forms of expertise.

The chapters offer an innovative combination of media content...

Authoritarian Absorption: The Transnational Remaking of Epidemic Politics in China

Yan Long
2024

By Yan Long: Authoritarian Absorption portrays the rebuilding of China's pandemic response system through its anti-HIV/AIDS battle from 1978 to 2018. Going beyond the conventional domestic focus, Yan Long analyzes the influence of foreign interventions which challenged the post-socialist state's inexperience with infectious diseases and pushed it towards professionalizing public health bureaucrats and embracing more liberal, globally aligned technocratic measures. This transformation involved a mix of confrontation and collaboration among transnational...

Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right

Arlie R Hochschild
2024

By Arlie Russell Hochschild: For all the attempts to understand the state of American politics and the blue/red divide, we’ve ignored what economic and cultural loss can do to pride. What happens, Arlie Russell Hochschild asks, when a proud people in a hard-hit region suffer the deep loss of pride and are confronted with a powerful political appeal that makes it feel “stolen”?

Hochschild’s research drew her to Pikeville, Kentucky, in the heart of Appalachia, within the whitest and second-poorest congressional district in the nation, where...

At Home in the City: Growing Old in Urban America

Stacy Torres
2025

By Stacy Torres: At Home in the City Uncovers how people aged 60 and older struggle, survive, and thrive in twenty-first-century urban America.

To understand elders' experiences of aging in place, sociologist Stacy Torres spent five years with longtime New York City residents as they coped with health setbacks, depression, gentrification, financial struggles, the accumulated losses of neighbors, friends, and family, and other everyday challenges. The sensitive portrait Torres paints in At Home in the City moves us beyond...

Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the Twentieth Century

Hannah Zeavin
2025

By Hannah Zeavin: An essential history for understanding how we mother now, and how motherhood itself became a medium—winner of the Brooke Hindle Award from the Society for the History of Technology.

From the nursery to the prison, from the clinic to the commune, Mother Media tells the story of how we arrived at our contemporary understanding of what a mother is and how understandings of “bad” mothering formed our contemporary panics about “bad” media. In this book, leading historian of psychology Hannah Zeavin examines twentieth-...

Asian American Histories of the United States

Catherine Ceniza Choy
2022

By Catherine Ceniza Choy - Original and expansive, Asian American Histories of the United States is a nearly 200-year history of Asian migration, labor, and community formation in the US. Reckoning with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the surge in anti-Asian hate and violence, award-winning historian Catherine Ceniza Choy presents an urgent social history of the fastest growing group of Americans. The book features the lived experiences and diverse voices of immigrants, refugees, US-born Asian Americans, multiracial Americans, and workers...

Native Lands: Culture and Gender in Indigenous Territorial Claims

Shari Huhndorf
2024
Native Lands analyzes the role of visual and literary culture in contemporary Indigenous campaigns for territorial rights. In the post-1960s era, Indigenous artists and writers have created works that align with the goals and strategies of new Native land-based movements. These works represent Native histories and epistemologies in ways that complement activist endeavors, while also probing the limits of these political projects, especially with regard to gender. The social marginalization of Native women was integral to dispossession. And yet its enduring consequences have remained largely...

1981 – Black Liverpool Past and Present

Stephen Small
Jimi Jagne
2022

By Stephen Small and Jimi Jagne. 1981 – Black Liverpool Past and Present provides insight into the history of Liverpool’s Black communities through the eyes of two Liverpudlians: Jimi Jagne and Stephen Small. Centred around the 1981 Uprising as a pinnacle moment, the book contextualises Liverpool’s Black history before and after. In doing so, the book recognises the people who have shaped Liverpool and their stories of resistance and self-determination.

The Ordinal Society

Marion Fourcade
2024

By Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy: We now live in an “ordinal society.” Nearly every aspect of our lives is measured, ranked, and processed into discrete, standardized units of digital information. Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy argue that technologies of information management, fueled by the abundance of personal data and the infrastructure of the internet, transform how we relate to ourselves and to each other through the market, the public sphere, and the state.

The personal data we give in exchange for convenient tools like Gmail and Instagram provides the...