ISSI Books

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...

Japanese American Millennials: Rethinking Generation, Community, and Diversity

Michael Omi
Dana Y. Nakano
Jeffrey T. Yamashita
2019

Edited by Michael Omi, Dana Y. Nakano, and Jeffrey T. Yamashita - Whereas most scholarship on Japanese Americans looks at historical case studies or the 1.5 generation assimilating, this pioneering anthology, Japanese American Millennials, captures the experiences, perspectives, and aspirations of Asian Americans born between 1980 and 2000. The editors and contributors present multiple perspectives on who Japanese Americans are, how they think about notions of community and culture, and how they engage and negotiate...

Biomedicalization: Technoscience, Health, and Illness in the U.S.

Adele E. Clarke
Laura Mamo
Jennifer Ruth Fosket
Jennifer R. Fishman
Janet Shim
2010

Edited by:Adele E. Clarke, Laura Mamo, Jennifer Ruth Fosket, Jennifer R. Fishman, Janet K. Shim. The rise of Western scientific medicine fully established the medical sector of the U.S. political economy by the end of the Second World War, the first “social transformation of American medicine.” Then, in an ongoing process called medicalization, the jurisdiction of medicine began expanding, redefining certain areas once deemed moral, social...

Heart-Sick: The Politics of Risk, Inequality, and Heart Disease

Janet Shim
2014

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...