ISSI Books

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...

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.

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...

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 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...