ISSI Books

We Are Not Dreamers: Undocumented Scholars Theorize Undocumented Life in the United States

Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales
2020

By: Leisy J. Abrego and Genevieve Negron-Gonzales

The widely recognized “Dreamer narrative” celebrates the educational and economic achievements of undocumented youth to justify a path to citizenship. While a well-intentioned, strategic tactic to garner political support of undocumented youth, it has promoted the idea that access to citizenship and rights should be granted only to a select group of “deserving” immigrants. The contributors to We Are Not Dreamers—themselves currently or formerly undocumented—poignantly counter the Dreamer...

Divided by the Wall: Progressive and Conservative Immigration Politics at the U.S.-Mexico Border

Emine Fidan Elcioglu
2020

By: Emine Fidan Elcioglu

The construction of a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border—whether to build it or not—has become a hot-button issue in contemporary America. A recent impasse over funding a wall caused the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, sharpening partisan divisions across the nation. In the Arizona borderlands, groups of predominantly white American citizens have been mobilizing for decades—some help undocumented immigrants bypass governmental detection, while others help law enforcement agents to apprehend immigrants. Activists...

Mourning my inner [blackgirl]child

Reelaviolette Botts-Ward
2021

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...

Race and Class in the Southwest and Other Essays Studies in Political Economy

Rodolfo D. Torres
Mario Barrera
William I. Robinson
2025

Edited by Rodolfo D. Torres: In Race and Class in the Southwest and Other Essays, Mario Barrera puts forth his seminal theory of racial inequality based on a synthesis of class and colonial analysis, together with several essays and selections from Barrera’s memoir that show how his thinking developed throughout his work.

Reprinted here for the first time after becoming a modern classic of Chicano studies, Race and Class in the Southwest focuses on the economic foundations of inequality as they have affected Chicanos in the Southwest from the...

Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape

Youjin B. Chung
2023

Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape brings us to the mid-2000s, when the Tanzanian government struck a deal with a foreign investor to convert more than 20,000 hectares of long-settled coastal land to establish a sugarcane plantation. Ten years on, the deal was abruptly abandoned. Popularly deemed a case of hubristic global development, critics classified this project another in a line of failed modern resource grabs.

Youjin B. Chung argues such tidy accounts conceal myriad and profound implications: not only how gender...

World Yearbook of Education 2023: Racialization and Educational Inequality in Global Perspective

Janelle Scott
Monisha Bajaj
2022

Edited by Janelle Scott and Monisha Bajaj. The World Yearbook of Education 2023 centers on the intersection of racialization, inequality, and education. It critically examines how racial formation and its associated logics about citizenship, belonging, justice, equality, and humanity manifest in early childhood education, primary, secondary, and higher education, as well as non-formal, community-based education settings. The chapters offer multisited perspectives into how racialization has and continues to shape educational inequality, with an eye towards the...

Subtle Webs: How Local Organizations Shape US Education

Eos Trinidad
2025

By Jose Eos Trinidad: In Subtle Webs, Jose Eos Trinidad reveals how organizations outside schools have created an invisible infrastructure not only to affect local school districts but also to shape US education. He illustrates this by providing a behind-the-scenes look at how local organizations in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York City have transformed data and worked with high schools to address the problem of students dropping out. The book argues that changes in a decentralized system happen less through top-down policy mandates or bottom-...

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...