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...

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...

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...

Unequal Choices: How Social Class Shapes Where High-Achieving Students Apply To College

Yang Va Lor
2023

By: Yang Va Lor

High-achieving students from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely to end up at less selective institutions compared to their socioeconomically advantaged peers with similar academic qualifications. A key reason for this is that few highly able, socioeconomically disadvantaged students apply to selective institutions in the first place. In Unequal Choices, Yang Va Lor examines the college application choices of high-achieving students, looking closely at the ways the larger contexts of family...

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...

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...

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...