ISSI Books

The Black Geographic

Camilla Hawthorne
Jovan Scott Lewis
2023

Edited by: Camilla Hawthorne, Jovan Scott Lewis

The contributors to The Black Geographic explore the theoretical innovations of Black Geographies scholarship and how it approaches Blackness as historically and spatially situated. In studies that span from Oakland to the Alabama Black Belt to Senegal to Brazil, the contributors draw on ethnography, archival records, digital humanities, literary criticism, and art to show how understanding the spatial dimensions of Black life contributes to a broader understanding of race and space...

The Routledge Handbook of Chicana/o Studies

Francisco A. Lomeli
Denise A. Segura
Elytte Benjamin-Labarthe
2018

By: Francisco A. Lomeli, Denise A. Segura, and Elytte Benjamin-Labarthe

The Routledge Handbook of Chicana/o Studies is a unique interdisciplinary resource for students, libraries, and researchers interested in the largest and most rapidly growing racial-ethnic community in the United States and elsewhere which can either be identified as Chicano, Latino, Hispanic, or Mexican-American. Structured around seven comprehensive themes, the volume is for students of American studies, the Social Sciences, and...

Race and Crime: Geographies of Injustice

Elizabeth Brown
George Barganier
2018

By: Elizabeth Brown and George Barganier

Criminal justice practices such as policing and imprisonment are integral to the creation of racialized experiences in U.S. society. Race as an important category of difference, however, did not arise here with the criminal justice system but rather with the advent of European colonial conquest and the birth of the U.S. racial state. Race and Crime examines how race became a defining feature of the system and why mass incarceration emerged as a new racial management strategy....

Inland Shift: Race, Space, and Capital In Southern California

Juan De Lara
2018

By: Juan De Lara

The subprime crash of 2008 revealed a fragile, unjust, and unsustainable economy built on retail consumption, low-wage jobs, and fictitious capital. Economic crisis, finance capital, and global commodity chains transformed Southern California just as Latinxs and immigrants were turning California into a majority-nonwhite state. In Inland Shift, Juan D. De Lara uses the growth of Southern California’s logistics economy, which controls the movement of goods, to examine how modern capitalism was shaped by and helped to...

Girlhood in the Borderlands: Mexican Teens Caught in the Crossroads of the Migration

Lilia Soto
2018

By: Lilia Soto

This book examines the lived experiences of Mexican teenage girls raised in transnational families and the varied ways they make meaning of their lives. Under the Bracero Program and similar recruitment programs, Mexican men have for decades been recruited for temporary work in the U.S., leaving their families for long periods of time to labor in the fields, factories, and service industry before returning home again. While the conditions for these adults who cross the border for work has been extensively documented, very...

Leftism Reinvented: Western Parties from Socialism to Neoliberalism

Stephanie L. Mudge
2018

By: Stephanie L. Mudge

Leftism Reinvented shows how Keynesian economists came to speak for left parties by the early 1960s. These economists saw their task in terms of discretionary, politically-sensitive economic management. But in the 1980s a new kind of economist, who viewed the advancement of markets as left parties’ main task, came to the fore. Meanwhile, as voters’ loyalties to left parties waned, professional strategists were called upon to “spin” party messages. Ultimately, left parties undermined themselves, leaving a...

The Road to Resegregation: Northern California and the Failure of Politics

Alex Schafran
2018

By: Alex Schafran

How could Northern California, the wealthiest and most politically progressive region in the United States, become one of the earliest epicenters of the foreclosure crisis? How could this region continuously reproduce racial poverty and reinvent segregation in old farm towns one hundred miles from the urban core? This is the story of the suburbanization of poverty, the failures of regional planning, urban sprawl, NIMBYism, and political fragmentation between middle class white environmentalists and communities of...

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...