ISSI Books

Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

Arlie R Hochschild
2016

By Arlie Russell Hochschild - When Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, a bewildered nation turned to Strangers in Their Own Land to understand what Trump voters were thinking when they cast their ballots. Arlie Hochschild, one of the most influential sociologists of her generation, had spent the preceding five years immersed in the community around Lake Charles, Louisiana, a Tea Party stronghold. As Jedediah Purdy put it in the New Republic, “Hochschild is fascinated by how people make sense of their lives. . . . [Her] attentive, detailed...

Metrics: What Counts in Global Health

Vincanne Adams
2016

Edited by Vincanne Adams - This volume's contributors evaluate the accomplishments, limits, and consequences of using quantitative metrics in global health. Whether analyzing maternal mortality rates, the relationships between political goals and metrics data, or the links between health outcomes and a program's fiscal support, the contributors question the ability of metrics to solve global health problems. They capture a moment when global health scholars and practitioners must evaluate the potential effectiveness and pitfalls of different metrics—even as they...

Burning Dislike: Ethnic Violence in High Schools

Martín Sánchez-Jankowski
2016

Martín Sánchez-Jankowski - Violence in schools has more potential to involve large numbers of students, produce injuries, disrupt instructional time, and cause property damage than any other form of youth violence. Burning Dislike is the first book to use direct observation of everyday violent interactions to explore ethnic conflict in high schools. Why do young people engage in violence while in school? What is it about ethnicity that leads to fights?

Through the use of two direct observational studies conducted twenty-six years...

What's Making Our Children Sick?

Michelle Perro
Vincanne Adams
2017

By Michelle Perro and Vincanne Adams - With chronic disorders among American children reaching epidemic levels, hundreds of thousands of parents are desperately seeking solutions to their children’s declining health, often with little medical guidance from the experts. What’s Making Our Children Sick? convincingly explains how agrochemical industrial production and genetic modification of foods is a culprit in this epidemic. Is it the only culprit? No. Most chronic health disorders have multiple causes and require careful disentanglement and complex treatments....

The End Game: How Inequality Shapes our Final Years

Corey M. Abramson
2017

Corey Abramson - Senior citizens from all walks of life face a gauntlet of physical, psychological, and social hurdles. But do the disadvantages some people accumulate over the course of their lives make their final years especially difficult? Or does the quality of life among poor and affluent seniors converge at some point? The End Game investigates whether persistent socioeconomic, racial, and gender divisions in America create inequalities that structure the lives of the elderly.

Corey Abramson’s portraits of seniors from diverse backgrounds offer...

International Scholarships in Higher Education Pathways to Social Change

Joan R. Dassin
Robin Marsh
Matt Mawer
2017

Edited by Joan R. Dassin, Robin R. Marsh, and Matt Mawer - This book explores the multiple pathways from scholarships for international study to positive social change. Bringing together studies from academic researchers, evaluators and program designers and policymakers from Africa, Asia, Latin and North America, Europe, and Australia, the book compiles the latest research and analysis on the policy, practice, and outcomes of international scholarship programs. Contributions examine the broad trends in sponsored overseas study, program design...

Grateful Nation: Student Veterans and the Rise of the Military-Friendly Campus

Ellen Moore
2017

Ellen Moore - In today's volunteer military many recruits enlist for the educational benefits, yet a significant number of veterans struggle in the classroom, and many drop out. The difficulties faced by student veterans have been attributed to various factors: poor academic preparation, PTSD and other postwar ailments, and allegedly antimilitary sentiments on college campuses. In Grateful Nation Ellen Moore challenges these narratives by tracing the experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans at two California college campuses. Drawing on...

Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs and Street Gangs: Scheming Legality, Resisting Criminalization

Tereza Kuldova
Martin Sanchez-Jankowski
2018
Edited by Tereza Kuldova and Martín Sánchez-Jankowski - This edited collection offers in-depth essays on outlaw motorcycle clubs and street gangs. Written by sociologists, anthropologists and criminologists, it asks the question of how the self-proclaimed ‘outlaws’ integrate into society. While these groups may cultivate a deviant image, these original studies show that we should not let ourselves be deceived by appearances. These ‘outlaws’ are, paradoxically, well integrated into mainstream society. The essays read the relationship of these groups to the media, law...

Unlearning: Rethinking Poetics, Pandemics, and the Politics of Knowledge

Charles Briggs
2021

By Charles Briggs - Unlearning questions intellectual foundations and charts new paths forward. Briggs argues, through an expansive look back at his own influential works as well as critical readings of the field, that scholars can disrupt existing social and discourse theories across disciplines when they collaborate with theorists whose insights are not constrained by the bounds of scholarship.

Eschewing narrow Eurocentric modes of explanation and research foci, Briggs brings together colonialism, health, media, and psychoanalysis to rethink...

1981 – Black Liverpool Past and Present

Stephen Small
Jimi Jagne
2022

By Stephen Small and Jimi Jagne. 1981 – Black Liverpool Past and Present provides insight into the history of Liverpool’s Black communities through the eyes of two Liverpudlians: Jimi Jagne and Stephen Small. Centred around the 1981 Uprising as a pinnacle moment, the book contextualises Liverpool’s Black history before and after. In doing so, the book recognises the people who have shaped Liverpool and their stories of resistance and self-determination.