ISSI Books

Mother While Black: Boundaries and Burden of Middle-Class Parenthood

Dawn Marie Dow
2019

By: Dawn Marie Dow

Mothering While Black examines the complex lives of the African American middle class—in particular, black mothers and the strategies they use to raise their children to maintain class status while simultaneously defining and protecting their children’s “authentically black” identities. Sociologist Dawn Marie Dow shows how the frameworks typically used to research middle-class families focus on white mothers’ experiences, inadequately capturing the experiences of African American middle- and upper-middle-class mothers....

Coloniality of the US/Mexico Border: Power, Violence, and the Decolonial Imperative

Roberto Hernandez
2019

By: Roberto Hernandez

In Coloniality of the U-S/Mexico Border, Hernández offers an exemplary case and lens for understanding what he terms the “epistemic and cartographic prison of modernity/coloniality.” He adopts “coloniality of power” as a central analytical category and framework to consider multiple forms of real and symbolic violence (territorial, corporeal, cultural, and epistemic) and analyzes the varied responses by diverse actors, including local residents, government officials, and cultural producers.

Values at the end of Life: the Logic of Palliative Care

Roi Livne
2019

By: Roi Livne

Values at the End of Life combines an in-depth historical analysis with an extensive study conducted in three hospitals, where Livne observed terminally ill patients, their families, and caregivers negotiating treatment. Livne describes the ambivalent, conflicted moments when people articulate and act on their moral intuitions about dying. Interviews with medical staff allowed him to isolate the strategies clinicians use to help families understand their options. As Livne discovered, clinicians are advancing the idea...

Mexican Workers and the Making of Arizona

Luis F.B. Plascencia
Gloria H. Cuadraz
2019

By: Luis F.B. Plascencia and Gloria H. Cuadraz

Mexican Workers and the Making of Arizona centers on the production of an elastic supply of labor, revealing how this long-standing approach to the building of Arizona has obscured important power relations, including the state’s favorable treatment of corporations vis-à-vis workers. Building on recent scholarship about Chicanas/os and others, the volume insightfully describes how U.S. industries such as railroads, mining, and agriculture have fostered the recruitment of...

The Activist Academic: Engaged Scholarship for Resistance, Hope and Social Change

Colette Cann
Eric Demeulenaere
2020

By: Colette Cann and Eric Demeulenaere

The Activist Academic serves as a guide for merging activism into academia. Following the journey of two academics, the book offers stories, frameworks and methods for how scholars can marry their academic selves, involved in scholarship, teaching and service, with their activist commitments to justice, while navigating the lived realities of raising families and navigating office politics. This volume invites academics across disciplines to enter into a dialogue about how to take knowledge to the...

Essential Dads: The Inequalities and Politics of Fathering

Jennifer M. Randles
2020

By: Jennifer M. Randles

In Essential Dads, sociologist Jennifer Randles shares the stories of more than 60 marginalized men as they sought to become more engaged parents through a government-supported “responsible” fatherhood program. Dads’ experiences serve as a unique window into long-standing controversies about the importance of fathering, its connection to inequality, and the state’s role in shaping men’s parenting. With a compassionate and hopeful voice, Randles proposes a more equitable political agenda for fatherhood, one...

The Spatial Contract: A new politics of provision for an urbanized planet

Alex Schafran
Stephen Hall
Matthew Noah Smith
2020

By: Alex Schafran, Matthew Noah Smith and Stephen Hall

Housing. Water. Energy. Transport. Food. Education. Health care. These are the core systems which make human life possible in the 21st century. Few of us are truly self-sufficient - we rely on the systems built into our cities and towns of all shapes and sizes in order to survive, let alone thrive. Despite how important these systems are, and how much we rely on them, contemporary politics and mainstream economics in most of the world largely ignore these core systems...

Teaching about Gender Diversity: Teacher-Tested Lesson Plans for K-12 Classrooms

Susan Woolley
Lee Airton
2020

By: Susan Woolley and Lee Airton

Teaching about Gender Diversity is an edited collection of teacher-tested interdisciplinary lesson plans that provides K–12 teachers with the tools to implement gender-inclusive practices into their curriculum and talk to their students about gender and sex. Divided into three sections dedicated to the elementary, middle, and secondary grade levels, this practical resource provides lessons for a variety of subject areas, including English language arts, STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), and...

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

Leisy J. Abrego
Genevieve Negron-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...