ISSI Books

By Janet K. Shim. Heart disease, the leading cause of death in the United States, affects people from all walks of life, yet who lives and who dies from heart disease still depends on race, class, and gender. While scientists and clinicians understand and treat heart disease more effectively than ever before, and industrialized countries have made substantial investments in research and treatment over the past six decades, patterns of inequality persist. In Heart-Sick, Janet K. Shim argues that official accounts of cardiovascular health inequalities...

By Loïc Wacquant. The Invention of the “Underclass”: A Study in the Politics of Knowledge (2022) is an exercise in epistemic reflexivity in the mold of Bachelard, Canguilhem, and Bourdieu. It charts the rise, metamorphoses, and fall of the racialized folk devil of the “underclass” in the long shadow of the ghetto riots of the 1960s. It draws out the implications of the strange career of this academic-journalistic-policy myth for the social epistemology of dispossessed and dishonored categories. It uses this case study to uncover the...

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...

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...