ISSI Books

Hawai'i Is My Haven: Race and Indigeneity in the Black Pacific

Nitasha Tamar Sharma
2021

By: Nitasha Tamar Sharma

Patricia Zavella experienced firsthand the trials and judgments imposed on a working professional mother of color: her own commitment to academia was questioned during her pregnancy, as she was shamed for having children "too young." And when she finally achieved her professorship, she felt out of place as one of the few female faculty members with children. These experiences sparked Zavella’s interest in the movement for reproductive justice. In this book, she draws on five years of ethnographic research to explore...

The Movement for Reproductive Justice: Empowering Women of Color Through Social Activism

Patricia Zavella
2020

By: Patricia Zavella

These experiences sparked Zavella’s interest in the movement for reproductive justice. In this book, she draws on five years of ethnographic research to explore collaborations among women of color engaged in reproductive justice activism. While there are numerous organizations focused on reproductive justice, most are racially specific, such as the National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum and Black Women for Wellness. Yet Zavella reveals that many of these organizations have built coalitions among themselves, sharing...

Cartographic Memory: Social Movement Activism and the Production of Space

Juan Herrera
2022

By: Juan Herrera

In Cartographic Memory, Juan Herrera maps 1960s Chicano movement activism in the Latinx neighborhood of Fruitvale in Oakland, California, showing how activists there constructed a politics forged through productions of space. From Chicano-inspired street murals to the architecture of restaurants and shops, Herrera shows how Fruitvale’s communities and spaces serve as a palpable, living record of movement politics and achievements. Drawing on oral histories with Chicano activists, ethnography, and archival research, Herrera analyzes how...

The Black Geographic

November 9, 2023

Co-edited by ISSI Advisory Committee member Jovan Lewis, the new book The Black Geographic (Duke Press) explores the theoretical innovations of Blackness by drawing on ethnography, archival records, digital humanities, literary criticism, and art to understand how the spatial dimensions of Black life...

Solving Latino Psychosocial and Health Problems

Kurt Organista
2023

By Kurt Organista

How do we understand the tendency for Latinos to underutilize certain social services and what types of outreach and intervention strategies are beginning to remedy this longstanding problem? How are Latino psychosocial and health problems shaped by historical and current conditions of acculturation and adjustment, social stratification, ethnic/racial identity development, diversity within Latinos, and politics and social policy? And what are the best and most promising practices for addressing Latino psychosocial and health problems and how...

Terracene: A Crude Aesthetics

Salar Mameni
2023

By: Salar Mameni

In Terracene Salar Mameni historicizes the popularization of the scientific notion of the Anthropocene alongside the emergence of the global war on terror. Mameni theorizes the Terracene as an epoch marked by a convergence of racialized militarism and environmental destruction. Both the Anthropocene and the war on terror centered the antagonist figures of the Anthropos and the terrorist as responsible for epochal changes in the new geological and geopolitical world orders. In response, Mameni shows how the Terracene requires...

Fruta fresca, cuerpos marchitos

Seth M. Holmes
2017

Seth Holmes - Este libro muestra la realidad de los migrantes mexicanos a Estados Unidos, para el trabajo agrícola. Además de un texto académico, es un libro que puede leerse como libro de aventuras. Su autor hace una crónica descarnada de lo que han tenido que pasar los indígenas mexicanos en su proceso migratorio, el cruce del desierto, el peligro, la explotación laboral y la realidad de salud. Un texto que resulta sobrecogedor. El libro ha sido ganador de varios premios como el premio Margaret Mead en 2014, el Premio de la Antropología del Trabajo en el 2013 o el...

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

Charles Briggs
Daniel C. Hallin
2016

By Charles L. Briggs and Daniel HallinThis book examines the relationship between media and medicine, considering 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 and forms of expertise. The chapters offer an innovative combination of media content analysis and ethnographic data on the production and circulation of health news, drawing on work with journalists,...

Tell Me Why My Children Died: Rabies, Indigenous Knowledge, and Communicative Justice

Charles Briggs
Clara Mantini-Briggs
2016

Charles L. Briggs and Clara Mantini-Briggs -Tell Me Why My Children Died tells the gripping story of indigenous leaders' efforts to identify a strange disease that killed thirty-two children and six young adults in a Venezuelan rain forest between 2007 and 2008. In this pathbreaking book, Charles L. Briggs and Clara Mantini-Briggs relay the nightmarish and difficult experiences of doctors, patients, parents, local leaders, healers, and epidemiologists; detail how journalists first created a smoke screen, then projected the epidemic worldwide; discuss the Chávez...

Epidemic Illusions: On the Coloniality of Global Public Health

Eugene Richardson
2020

By Eugene T. Richardson - In Epidemic Illusions, Eugene Richardson, a physician and an anthropologist, contends that public health practices—from epidemiological modeling and outbreak containment to Big Data and causal inference—play an essential role in perpetuating a range of global inequities. Drawing on postcolonial theory, medical anthropology, and critical science studies, Richardson demonstrates the ways in which the flagship discipline of epidemiology has been shaped by the colonial, racist, and patriarchal system that had its inception in 1492.

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