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Shedding light on how we might end mass incarceration, The Price of Freedom compares the histories and goals of the US and German justice systems. Drawing on in-depth interviews with incarcerated young men in the United States and Germany, Michaela Soyer argues that the apparent lenience of the German criminal justice system is founded on the violent enforcement of cultural homogeneity at the hands of the German welfare state. Demonstrating how both societies have constructed a racialized underclass of outsiders, this book emphasizes that criminal justice reformers in the United States need to move beyond European models in order to build a truly just, diverse society.
“A provocative and deeply humane book.” — FRANÇOIS BONNET, author of The Upper Limit: How Low-Wage Work Defines Punishment and Welfare
“Drawing on sensitive interviews and nuanced comparative ethnography, Soyer points to what the German and American justice systems might learn from each other.” — PHILIP KASINITZ, coeditor of Growing Up Muslim in Europe and the United States
“This innovative book invites us to view both US and German criminal justice systems with fresh eyes.” — JAN DOERING, author of Us versus Them: Race, Crime, and Gentrification in Chicago Neighborhoods
“Soyer’s unique comparative analysis provides important insights into processes of racial and ethnic marginalization and criminalization.” — DANIELLE RAUDENBUSH, author of Health Care Off the Books: Poverty, Illness, and Strategies for Survival in Urban America
“This rare comparative work has much to offer prison scholars as well as those interested in poverty, social marginalization, and comparative social theory.” — SARA WAKEFIELD, coauthor of Children of the Prison Boom: Mass Incarceration and the Future of American Inequality
MICHAELA SOYER is Associate Professor of Sociology at Hunter College. She is author of A Dream Denied: Incarceration, Recidivism, and Young Minority Men in America and Lost Childhoods: Poverty, Trauma, and Violent Crime in the Post-Welfare Era.
Maverick Movies tells the improbable story of New Line Cinema, a company that cut a remarkable path through the American film industry and movie culture. Founded in 1967 as an art film distributor, New Line made a small fortune running John Waters’s Pink Flamingos at midnight screenings in the 1970s and found reliable returns with the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise in the 1980s. By 2001, the company competed with the major Hollywood studios and reached global box office success with the Lord of the Rings franchise. Blurring boundaries between high and low culture, between independent film and Hollywood, and between the margins and the mainstream, New Line Cinema epitomizes Hollywood’s shift in focus from the mass audience fostered by the classic studios to the multitude of niche audiences sought today.
“At long last, a top film scholar takes a deep dive into New Line Cinema’s remarkable and most unlikely history. Mining a wealth of primary sources and trade press accounts, and with access to New Line’s renegade founder Bob Shaye himself, Daniel Herbert deftly recounts the company’s rags-to-riches saga and firmly situates New Line as one of the most important Hollywood studios in the past half century.” — THOMAS SCHATZ, author of The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era
“Exhibiting the same archival dexterity he brought to Videoland, Herbert reconsiders how New Line’s eclecticism both predicted and reflected broader changes in US film culture of the late twentieth century. This book will revitalize the field of distribution studies.” — CAETLIN BENSON-ALLOTT, author of The Stuff of Spectatorship: Material Cultures of Film and Television
“Focusing on New Line Cinema, an indie outfit rooted in 1960s college-campus film culture that in the 1990s briefly became the tail that wagged the dog at the WB, Herbert crafts a compelling road map of the volatile movie industry of postclassical Hollywood.” — JON LEWIS, author of Road Trip to Nowhere: Hollywood Encounters the Counterculture
DANIEL HERBERT is Associate Professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Media at the University of Michigan and author of Videoland: Movie Culture at the American Video Store.
In a world increasingly shaped by displacement and migration, refuge is both a coveted right and an elusive promise for millions. While conventionally understood as legal protection, it also transcends judicial definitions. In Lived Refuge, Vinh Nguyen reconceptualizes refuge as an ongoing affective experience and lived relation rather than a fixed category with legitimacy derived from the state.
Focusing on Southeast Asian diasporas in the wake of the Vietnam War, Nguyen examines three affective experiences—gratitude, resentment, and resilience—to reveal the actively lived dimensions of refuge. Through multifaceted analyses of literary and cultural productions, Nguyen argues that the meaning of refuge emerges from how displaced people negotiate the kinds of safety and protection that are offered to (and withheld from) them. In so doing, he lays the framework for an original and compelling understanding of contemporary refugee subjectivity.
“Lived Refuge allows us to see refugees in a new way. Vinh Nguyen’s engagement with the experiments, negotiations, and refusals of refuge provides a unique window into understanding how refugee subjectivity is enacted today.” — PETER NYERS, McMaster University
“In haunting, lyrical prose with Walter Benjamin’s urgency and Raymond Williams’ political deftness, Nguyen’s illuminating study marks a milestone in migration studies at large.” — B. VENKAT MANI, author of Cosmopolitical Claims and Recoding World Literature
“Nguyen offers a masterful, unrelenting rebuttal to state-sanctioned narratives of ‘deserving’ refugees. After reading Lived Refuge, you’ll realize that we need refugees more than they need us.” — ERIC TANG, author of Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the NYC Hyperghetto
VINH NGUYEN is Associate Professor of English at Renison University College, University of Waterloo. He is coeditor of The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives and Refugee States: Critical Refugee Studies in Canada.
Becoming Global Asia centers Singapore as a crucial site for comprehending the uneven effects of colonialism and capitalism. In the wake of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, Singapore transformed its reputation as a culturally sterile and punitive nation to “Global Asia”—an alluring location ideal for economic flourishing. Cheryl Narumi Naruse analyzes how Singapore gained cultural capital and soft power by examining genres such as literary anthologies, demographic compilations, coming-of-career narratives, and princess fantasies. Tracing the trajectory of Singapore’s positioning as Global Asia, Naruse reveals how the country emerged as a celebrated postcolonial model nation and a site of imperial desire that enables subjugation of the so-called Third World. Her readings of Global Asia as an invention of postcolonial capitalism offer new conceptual paradigms for understanding postcolonialism, neoliberalism, and empire.
“Cheryl Narumi Naruse offers a lucid, much-needed theorization of postcolonial capitalism—a mode of sovereignty simultaneously forged against empire and productive of neoliberal governance. An important and original contribution to debates around Global Asia and its cultural forms, with ramifications far beyond Singapore.”— JINI KIM WATSON, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, New York University
“After Becoming Global Asia, criticism about cultural geopolitics and literary studies that disregards Singapore, or does not center Naruse’s cogent analysis on the aesthetics of postcolonial capitalism, will be incomplete.” — MOHAN AMBIKAIPAKER, author of Political Blackness in Multiracial Britain
“If you’ve ever wondered about the dark side of the idea of ‘Global Asia,’ read this book. And if you are looking for evidence that literature can be more than a mere tool of the state and capital, this book is also for you.” — COLLEEN LYE, author of America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893–1945
CHERYL NARUMI NARUSE is Assistant Professor of English and the Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor in the Humanities at Tulane University.
Palestinian writing imagines the nation not as a nation-in-waiting but as a living, changing structure that joins people, place, and time into distinct formations. Novel Palestine examines these imaginative structures so that we might move beyond the idea of an incomplete or fragmented reality and speak frankly about the nation that exists and the freedom it seeks. Engaging the writings of Ibrahim Nasrallah, Nora E. H. Parr traces a vocabulary through which Palestine can be discussed as a changing and flexible national network linking people across and within space, time, and community. Through an exploration of the Palestinian literary scene subsequent to its canonical writers, Parr makes the life and work of Nasrallah available to an English-language audience for the first time, offering an intervention in geography while bringing literary theory into conversation with politics and history.
“A welcome demonstration of the power of writing to redefine the political domain.” — LYNDSEY STONEBRIDGE, author of We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience
“An opportunity to reconsider and reinterpret the dominant discourses and motifs of Palestinian culture.” — JOSEPH R. FARAG, author of Politics and Palestinian Literature in Exile
“A must-read for everyone interested in Palestine, identity, and literature.” — WEN-CHIN OUYANG, author of Politics of Nostalgia in the Arabic Novel
“Novel Palestine stakes a claim about the relation between Palestinian literary writing and how it figures the experience of being Palestinian in excess of the terms of the settler state, its linear narrative and critical forms.” — JEFFREY SACKS, author of Iterations of Loss: Mutilation and Aesthetic Form, al-Shidyaq to Darwish
“Within a tradition of literary criticism charted by authors like Mary Layoun and Barbara Harlow.” — NAJAT RAHMAN, author of In the Wake of the Poetic: Palestinian Artists after Darwish
NORA E. H. PARR is a Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham and at the Center for Lebanese Studies. She coedits Middle Eastern Literatures.
Melodrama films dominated the North and South Korean industries in the period between liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945 and the hardening of dictatorship in the 1970s. The films of each industry are often read as direct reflections of Cold War and Korean War political ideologies and national historical experiences, and therefore as aesthetically and politically opposed. However, Political Moods develops a comparative analysis across the Cold War divide, analyzing how films in both North and South Korea convey political and moral ideas through the sentimentality of the melodramatic mode. Travis Workman reveals that the melancholic moods of film melodrama express the somatic and social conflicts between political ideologies and excesses of affect, meaning, and historical references. These moods dramatize the tension between the language of Cold War politics and the negative affects that connect cinema to what it cannot fully represent. The result is a new way of historicizing the cinema of the two Koreas in relation to colonialism, postcolonialism, war, and nation building.
“Deftly employing melodrama not so much as a genre as a domain of affect, Travis Workman provides a pathbreaking new framework for understanding post‑1945 Korean film. An important and highly original work.” — MICHAEL K. BOURDAGHS, University of Chicago
“In this bracing reading of melodramatic form in Korean films, Workman raises a bold question that haunts Korean studies: how to develop a comparative understanding of the vastly different scenarios in the films of North and South? His answer drives our attention to the subject of mood. A stupendous contribution to the scholarship on Korean cinema, Cold War culture, and melodrama studies.” — JINSOO AN, author of Parameters of Disavowal: Colonial Representation in South Korean Cinema
TRAVIS WORKMAN is Associate Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
Originally delivered in 2020 as the Biennial Ehsan Yarshater Lectures, Aspects of Kinship in Ancient Iran is an exploration of kinship in the archaeological and historical record of Iran’s most ancient civilizations. D. T. Potts brings together history, archaeology, and social anthropology to provide an overview of what we can know about the kith and kinship ties in Iran, from prehistory to Elamite, Achaemenid, and Sasanian times. In so doing, he sheds light on the rich body of evidence that exists for kin relations in Iran, a topic that has too often been ignored in the study of the ancient world.
“As always with this excellent authority on ancient Iranian history and cultures, D. T. Potts presents five highly innovative essays on forms of kinship and social organization in ancient Iran from the Elamites to the Sasanians that are full of new ideas and suggestions for further research.” — Josef Wiesehöfer, Professor Emeritus of Ancient History and Classics, University of Kiel, and author of Ancient Persia: From 550 BC to 650 AD
D.T. POTTS is Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology and History at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University.
The first book to offer a history of film activism in post-1945 South Korea, Celluloid Democracy tells the story of the Korean filmmakers, distributors, and exhibitors who reshaped cinema in radically empowering ways through decades of authoritarian rule. Employing tactics that ranged from representing the dispossessed on the screen to redistributing state-controlled resources through bootlegging, these film workers explored ideas and practices that simultaneously challenged repressive rule and pushed the limits of the cinematic medium. Drawing on archival research, film analysis, and interviews, Hieyoon Kim shows how Korean film workers during the Cold War reclaimed cinema as an ecology in which democratic discourses and practices could flourish.
“Celluloid Democracy is brilliant; the scholarship is admirable. Hieyoon Kim has written an extraordinarily captivating account of the film workers, educators, intellectuals, and radical film activists in Cold War South Korea who dreamed of a better world and struggled to achieve democracy through cinema until the end of military rule in 1987. This remarkably readable and well-researched study deserves a wide audience.” — SANGJOON LEE, author of Cinema and the Cultural Cold War: US Diplomacy and the Origins of the Asian Cinema Network
“A fascinating and polished piece of scholarship. I don’t know of any other book quite like this one. Moving away from the traditional focus on auteurs and film texts, Kim masterfully draws our attention to the critical yet often forgotten figures working on the margins of the postwar film scene, filling in some substantial gaps in our understanding of this period.” — CHRISTINA KLEIN, author of Cold War Cosmopolitanism: Period Style in 1950s Korean Cinema
HIEYOON KIM is a scholar of dissident culture and media with a focus on Korea. She teaches in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
How Hip Hop Became Hit Pop examines the programming practices at commercial radio stations in the 1980s and early 1990s to uncover how the radio industry facilitated hip hop’s introduction into the musical mainstream. Constructed primarily by the Top 40 radio format, the musical mainstream featured mostly white artists for mostly white audiences. With the introduction of hip hop to these programs, the radio industry was fundamentally altered, as stations struggled to incorporate the genre’s diverse audience. At the same time, as artists negotiated expanding audiences and industry pressure to make songs fit within the confines of radio formats, the sound of hip hop changed. Drawing from archival research, Amy Coddington shows how the racial structuring of the radio industry influenced the way hip hop was sold to the American public, and how the genre’s growing popularity transformed ideas about who constitutes the mainstream.
“Here it is—bam! The definitive story of rap, race, radio, and marketplace during hip hop’s Golden Age. Amy Coddington combines an archivist’s rigor and a raconteur’s wit in documenting what those of us of a certain age remember but, perhaps, never fully grasped: how, amidst expanding racial inequalities and against all odds, rap music became the most popular genre in America.” — Anthony Kwame Harrison, author of Hip Hop Underground: The Integrity and Ethics of Racial Identification
“Making use of trade publications that have received little scholarly attention, Coddington has crafted a provocative and lucid alternative history that tracks how the radio industry’s engagement with hip hop in the 1980s and 1990s both reflected and shaped changing ideas about race and music.” — Loren Kajikawa, author of Sounding Race in Rap Songs
Amy Coddington is Assistant Professor of Music at Amherst College. Her work has appeared in the Journal of the Society for American Music and The Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Music.
In less than half a century, people in Vietnam have gone from fearing war and famine to fretting over the best cell phone plan. This shift in the landscape of people’s anxieties is the result of policies that made Vietnam the second-fastest-growing economy in the world and a triumph of late capitalist development. Yet as much as people marvel at the speed of progress, all this change— even for the better—can be difficult to handle.
A Life of Worry unpacks an ethnographic puzzle. What accounts for the simultaneous increase in anxiety and economic prosperity among Ho Chi Minh City’s middle class? At a time when people around the world are turning to the pharmaceutical and wellness industries to soothe their troubled minds, it is worth asking whether these industries might be part of the problem.
“A fascinating study of an important global phenomenon.” — LI ZHANG, author of Anxious China: Inner Revolution and Politics of Psychotherapy
“A Life of Worry takes us from Ho Chi Minh City’s lively cafes to its burgeoning psychotherapy centers to offer an original phenomenological approach to anxiety as it is felt and enacted, often as a form of care for others, in Vietnam today.” — JOCELYN LIM CHUA, author of In Pursuit of the Good Life: Aspiration and Suicide in Globalizing South India
“Allen Tran compels readers to consider how economic growth can diminish collective well-being, how uncertainty structures our lives, and how we might mobilize our collective anxiety toward new political agendas and practices of care.” — THUY LINH NGUYEN TU, author of Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam
ALLEN L. TRAN is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Bucknell University.
Risible explores the forgotten history of laughter, from ancient Greece to the sitcom stages of Hollywood. Delia Casadei approaches laughter not as a phenomenon that can be accounted for by studies of humor and theories of comedy, but rather as a technique of the human body, knowable by its repetitive, clipped, and proliferating sound and its enduring links to the capacity for language and reproduction. This buried genealogy of laughter re-emerges with explosive force thanks to the binding of laughter to sound reproduction technology in the late nineteenth century. Analyzing case studies ranging from the early global market for phonographic laughing songs to the McCarthy-era rise of pre-recorded laugh tracks, Casadei convincingly demonstrates how laughter was central to the twentieth century's development of the very category of sound as not-quite-human, unintelligible, reproductive, reproducible, and contagious.
Muddy Thinking in the Mississippi River Delta uses the story of mud to answer a deceptively simple question: how could a place uniquely vulnerable to sea level rise be one of the nation’s most promiscuous producers and consumers of fossil fuels? Organized around New Orleans and South Louisiana as a case study, this book examines how the unruly Mississippi River and its muddy delta shaped the people, culture, and governance of the region. It proposes a framework of “muddy thinking” to gum the wheels of extractive capitalism and pollution that have brought us to the precipice of planetary collapse. Muddy Thinking calls upon our dirty, shared histories to address urgent questions of mutual survival and care in a rapidly changing world.
Conflicts about space and access to resources have shaped queer histories from at least 1965 to the present. As spaces associated with middle-class homosexuality enter mainstream urbanity in the United States, cultural assimilation increasingly erases insurgent aspects of these social movements. This gentrification itself leads to queer displacement. Combining urban history, architectural critique, and queer and trans theories, Queering Urbanism traces these phenomena through the history of a network of sites in the San Francisco Bay Area. Within that urban landscape, Stathis Yeros investigates how queer people appropriated existing spaces, how they expressed their distinct identities through aesthetic forms, and why they mobilized the language of citizenship to shape place and secure space. Here the legacies of LGBTQ+ rights activism meet contemporary debates about the right to housing and urban life.
One of the most hotly debated issues in contemporary Muslim ethics is the status of women in Islamic law. While Muslim conservatives argue that gender-differentiated legal rulings reflect complementary gender roles, Muslim feminists argue that Islamic law has subordinated women and is thus in need of reform. The shared assumption on both sides, however, is that gender fundamentally shapes an individual's legal status. Beyond the Binary explores an expansive cross section of topics in ninth- to twelfth-century Hanafi legal thought—from sexual crimes to consent to marriage—to show that early Muslim jurists imagined a world built not on a binary distinction between male and female but on multiple intersecting hierarchies of gender, age, enslavement, lineage, class, and other social roles. Saadia Yacoob offers a restorative reading of Islamic law, arguing that its intersectional and relational understanding of legal personhood offers a productive space for Muslim feminists to move beyond critique and instead to think with and through the Islamic legal tradition.
In this deeply archival work, Jennifer S. Clark explores the multiple ways in which women's labor in the American television industry of the 1970s furthered feminist ends. Carefully crafted around an impressive assemblage of interviews and primary sources (from television network memos to programming schedules, production notes to executive meeting agendas), Clark tells the story of how women organized in the workplace to form collectives, affect production labor, and develop reform-oriented policies and philosophies that reshaped television behind the screen. She urges us to consider how interventions, often at localized levels, can collectively shift the dynamics of a workplace and the cultural products created there.
Contemporary film and television production is extraordinarily mobile. Filming large-scale studio productions in Atlanta, Budapest, London, Prague, or Australia’s Gold Coast makes Hollywood jobs available to people and places far removed from Southern California—but it also requires individuals to uproot their lives as they travel around the world in pursuit of work. Drawing on interviews with a global contingent of film and television workers, Kevin Sanson weaves an analysis of the sheer scale and complexity of mobile production into a compelling account of the impact that mobility has had on job functions, working conditions, and personal lives. Mobile Hollywood captures how an expanded geography of production not only intensifies the often invisible pressures that production workers now face but also stretches the parameters of screen-media labor far beyond craftwork and creativity.
Indonesia is the world's second-largest cigarette market: two out of three men smoke, and clove-laced tobacco cigarettes called kretek make up 95 percent of the market. Each year, more than 250,000 Indonesians die of tobacco-related diseases. To account for the staggering success of this lethal industry, Kretek Capitalism examines how kretek manufacturers have adopted global tobacco technologies and enlisted Indonesians to labor on their behalf in fields and factories, at retail outlets and social gatherings, and online. The book charts how Sampoerna, a Philip Morris International subsidiary, uses contracts, competitions, and gender, age, and class hierarchies to extract labor from workers, influencers, artists, students, retailers, and consumers. Critically engaging nationalist claims about the commodity's cultural heritage and the jobs it supports, Marina Welker shows how global capitalism has transformed both kretek and the labor required to make and promote it.
When was the last time you participated in an election for a Facebook group, or sat on a jury for a dispute in a subreddit? Platforms nudge users to tolerate nearly all-powerful admins, moderators, and “benevolent dictators for life.” In Governable Spaces, Nathan Schneider argues that the internet has been plagued by a phenomenon he calls “implicit feudalism”: a bias, both cultural and technical, for building communities as fiefdoms. The consequences of this arrangement matter far beyond online spaces themselves, as feudal defaults train us to give up on our communities’ democratic potential, inclining us to be more tolerant of autocratic tech CEOs and authoritarian tendencies among politicians. But online spaces could be sites of a creative, radical, and democratic renaissance. Using media archaeology, political theory, and participant observation, Schneider shows how the internet can learn from governance legacies of the past to become a more democratic medium, responsive and inventive unlike anything that has come before.
What happens to the colonized after colonial industries leave? Set in the cinchona plantations of India's Darjeeling Hills, Quinine's Remains chronicles the history and aftermath of quinine. Harvested from cinchona bark, quinine was malaria's only remedy until the twentieth-century advent of synthetic drugs, and it was vital to the expansion of the British Empire. Today, the cinchona plantations—and the fifty thousand people who call them home—remain, and their futures are unclear. The Indian government has threatened to privatize or shut down this seemingly obsolete and crumbling industry, but local communities, led by strident trade unions, have successfully resisted. Overgrown cinchona fields and shuttered quinine factories may appear the stuff of postcolonial and postindustrial ruination, but quinine's remains are not dead. Rather, they have become the birthplace of urgent political efforts to redefine land and life for the twenty-first century. Quinine's Remains offers a vivid historical and ethnographic portrait of what it means to forge life after empire.
Since the end of the Cold War, globalization—both the process and the idea—has been reshaping the world. An array of new global studies scholarship has emerged to make sense of the various transnational manifestations of globalization: economic, social, cultural, ideological, technological, environmental, postcolonial, and technological. However, following a series of crises in the first two decades of the 21st century, the neoliberal globalization system of the 1990s has come under severe strain.
Are we witnessing a turn toward “deglobalization” intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, or a moment of “reglobalization” spearheaded by digital technology? The contributors to this book employ transdisciplinary research strategies to assess pertinent past developments, the current state, and future trajectories of globalization in light of the current dynamics of insecurity, volatility, and geopolitical tensions.
Higher Powers draws on four years of collaborative fieldwork carried out with Ugandans working to reconstruct their lives after attempting to leave problematic forms of alcohol use behind. Given the relatively recent introduction of biomedical ideas of alcoholism and addiction in Uganda, most of these people have used other therapeutic resources, including herbal aversion therapies, engagements with balubaalespirits, and forms of deliverance and spiritual warfare practiced in Pentecostal churches. While their engagements with possession, aversion, and deliverance are at times severe, they contain within them understandings of the self and practices of sociality that point away from models of addiction as a chronic relapsing brain disease and toward the possibility of release. In so doing, Higher Powers offers a reconceptualization of addiction and recovery that may prove relevant well beyond Uganda.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, working-class people across northern India found themselves negotiating rapid industrial change, emerging technologies, and class hierarchies. In response to these massive changes, Indian Muslim artisans began to publicly assert the deep relation between their religion and their labor, using the increasingly accessible popular press to redefine Islamic traditions "from below." Centering the stories and experiences of metalsmiths, stonemasons, tailors, press workers, and carpenters, Pious Labor tells the story of colonial-era social changes through the perspectives of the workers themselves. As Amanda Lanzillo shows, the colonial marginalization of these artisans is intimately linked with the continued exclusion of laboring voices today. By drawing on previously unstudied Urdu-language technical manuals and community histories, Lanzillo highlights not only the materiality of artisanal production but also the cultural agency of artisanal producers, filling in a major gap in South Asian history.
In Ritual Boundaries, Joseph E. Sanzo transforms our understanding of how early Christians experienced religion in lived practice through the study of magical objects, such as amulets and grimoires. Against the prevailing view of late antiquity as a time when only so-called elites were interested in religious and ritual differentiation, the magical evidence reveals that the desire to distinguish between religious and ritual insiders and outsiders cut across diverse social strata. The magical evidence also offers unique insight into early biblical reception, exposing a textual world in which scriptural reading was multisensory and multitraditional. As they addressed sickness, demonic struggle, and interpersonal conflicts, Mediterranean people thus acted in ways that challenge our conceptual boundaries between the Christian and non-Christian; elites and non-elites; and words, materials, and images. Sanzo helps us rethink how early Christians imagined similarity and difference among texts, traditions, groups, and rituals as they went about their daily lives.
This is the first book devoted entirely to summarizing the body of community-engaged research on environmental justice, how we can conduct more of it, and how we can do it better. It shows how community-engaged research makes unique contributions to environmental justice for Black, Indigenous, people of color, and low-income communities by centering local knowledge, building truth from the ground up, producing actionable data that can influence decisions, and transforming researchers’ relationships to communities so that they are more equitable and mutually beneficial. The book offers a critical synthesis of relevant research in many fields, outlines the main steps in conducting community-engaged research, evaluates the major research methods used, suggests new directions, and addresses overcoming institutional barriers to scholarship in academia. The coauthors employ an original framework that shows how community-engaged research and environmental justice align, which links research on the many topics treated in the chapters—from public health, urban planning, and conservation to law and policy, community economic development, and food justice and sovereignty.
Golden Ages is an ethnographic study of young singers in the Brooklyn Hasidic community who look to the gramophone-era cantorial golden age for the stylistic basis of their own aesthetic explorations. Jeremiah Lockwood proposes a view of their work as a nonconforming social practice within the conservative contemporary Hasidic community that calls upon the sounds and structures of Jewish sacred musical heritage to stage a disruption in the aesthetics and power hierarchies of their community. Beyond its role as a desirable art form, “golden age” cantorial music offers a model for aspiring Hasidic singers of a form of Jewish cultural productivity in which artistic excellence, maverick outsider status, and sacred authority were aligned. As Lockwood argues, Hasidic cantorial revivalists call upon the cantors of the golden age as a precedent for musical and social practices that defy institutional authority and push at normative boundaries of sacred and secular by foregrounding artist’s voices in the culturally intimate space of prayer.
