ISSI Books

Grateful Nation: Student Veterans and the Rise of the Military-Friendly Campus

Ellen Moore
2017

Ellen Moore - In today's volunteer military many recruits enlist for the educational benefits, yet a significant number of veterans struggle in the classroom, and many drop out. The difficulties faced by student veterans have been attributed to various factors: poor academic preparation, PTSD and other postwar ailments, and allegedly antimilitary sentiments on college campuses. In Grateful Nation Ellen Moore challenges these narratives by tracing the experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans at two California college campuses. Drawing on...

Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs and Street Gangs: Scheming Legality, Resisting Criminalization

Tereza Kuldova
Martin Sanchez-Jankowski
2018
Edited by Tereza Kuldova and Martín Sánchez-Jankowski - This edited collection offers in-depth essays on outlaw motorcycle clubs and street gangs. Written by sociologists, anthropologists and criminologists, it asks the question of how the self-proclaimed ‘outlaws’ integrate into society. While these groups may cultivate a deviant image, these original studies show that we should not let ourselves be deceived by appearances. These ‘outlaws’ are, paradoxically, well integrated into mainstream society. The essays read the relationship of these groups to the media, law...

Unlearning: Rethinking Poetics, Pandemics, and the Politics of Knowledge

Charles Briggs
2021

By Charles Briggs - Unlearning questions intellectual foundations and charts new paths forward. Briggs argues, through an expansive look back at his own influential works as well as critical readings of the field, that scholars can disrupt existing social and discourse theories across disciplines when they collaborate with theorists whose insights are not constrained by the bounds of scholarship.

Eschewing narrow Eurocentric modes of explanation and research foci, Briggs brings together colonialism, health, media, and psychoanalysis to rethink...

Microverses: Observations from a Shattered Present

Dylan Riley
2022

By Dylan Riley. Microverses comprises over a hundred short essays inviting us to think about society—and social theory—in new ways. Lockdown created the conditions for what Adorno once termed ‘enforced contemplation’. Dylan Riley responded with the tools of his trade, producing an extraordinary trail of notes exploring how critical sociology can speak to this troubled decade. Microverses analyses the intellectual situation, the political crisis of Trump’s last months in office, and love and illness in a period when both were fraught with the public emergency of the...

In the Shadows of the Big House: Twenty-First-Century Antebellum Slave Cabins and Heritage Tourism in Louisiana

Stephen Small
2023

By Stephen Small. In the midst of calls for the removal of Confederate monuments across the South, tens of thousands of museums, buildings, and other historical sites currently comprise a tourist infrastructure of the southern heritage industry. Louisiana, one of the most prominent and frequently visited states that benefit from this tourism, has more than sixty heritage sites housed in former slave plantations. These sites contain the remains, restorations, reconstructions, and replicas of antebellum slave cabins and slave quarters. In the Shadows of the Big...

Freedom! The Story of the Black Panther Party

Jetta Grace Martin
Joshua Bloom
Waldo Martin
2022

By Jetta Grace Martin, Joshua Bloom, and Waldo Martin - There is a saying: knowledge is power. The secret is this. Knowledge, applied at the right time and place, is more than power. It's magic.

That's what the Black Panther Party did. They called up this magic and launched a revolution.

In the beginning, it was a story like any other. It could have been yours and it could have been mine. But once it got going, it became more than any one person could have imagined.

This is the story of Huey and Bobby....

Invisible Visits: Black Middle Class Women in the American Healthcare System

Tina K. Sacks
2018

Tina K. Sacks - Although the United States spends almost one-fifth of all its resources funding healthcare, the American system continues to be dogged by persistent inequities in the treatment of racial and ethnic minorities and women.ÂInvisible VisitsÂanalyzes how middle-class Black women navigate the complexities of dealing with doctors in this environment. It challenges the idea that race and gender discrimination-particularly in healthcare settings-is a thing of the past, and questions the persistent myth that discrimination only affects...

Slum Health: From the Cell to the Street

Jason Corburn
Lee Riley
2016

Jason Corburn - Urban slum dwellers—especially in emerging-economy countries—are often poor, live in squalor, and suffer unnecessarily from disease, disability, premature death, and reduced life expectancy. Yet living in a city can and should be healthy. Slum Health exposes how and why slums can be unhealthy; reveals that not all slums are equal in terms of the hazards and health issues faced by residents; and suggests how slum dwellers, scientists, and social movements can come together to make slum life safer, more just, and healthier. Editors Jason...

20 Questions & Answers on Black Europe

Stephen Small
2017

By Stephen Small - Europe is made up of at least 46 nations, and a population of more than 770 million people. Black people of African descent are estimated at more than 7 million, with at least 90% of them in just 12 nations. Stephen Small offers an in-depth analysis of what exactly is Black Europe, and what are the experiences of Black people in Europe. He defines Black Europe and addresses questions about gender and demography; about history and the legacies of slavery, colonialism and imperialism; the politics of racism, political representation and community...

Becoming Black Political Subjects: Movements and Ethno-Racial Rights in Colombia and Brazil

Tianna Paschel
2018

Tianna Paschel - After decades of denying racism and underplaying cultural diversity, Latin American states began adopting transformative ethno-racial legislation in the late 1980s. In addition to symbolic recognition of indigenous peoples and black populations, governments in the region created a more pluralistic model of citizenship and made significant reforms in the areas of land, health, education, and development policy. Becoming Black Political Subjects explores this shift from color blindness to ethno-racial legislation in two of the...