News and Publications

Sarah C. Bishop

A young woman flees violence in Mexico and seeks protection in the United States—only to be trafficked as a domestic worker in the Bronx. A decorated immigration judge leaves his post when the policies he proudly upheld capsize in the wake of political turmoil. A Gambian translator who was granted asylum herself talks with other African women about how immigration officers expect victims of torture to behave. A border patrol officer begins to question the training that instructs him to treat the children he finds in the Arizona desert like criminals.

Through these and other powerful firsthand accounts, A Story to Save Your Life offers new insight into the harrowing realities of seeking protection in the United States. Sarah C. Bishop argues that cultural differences in communication shape every stage of the asylum process, playing a major but unexamined role. Migrants fleeing persecution must reconstruct the details of their lives so governmental authorities can determine whether their experiences justify protection. However, Bishop shows, many factors influence whether an applicant is perceived as credible, from the effects of trauma on the ability to recount an experience chronologically to culturally rooted nonverbal behaviors and displays of emotion. For asylum seekers, harnessing the power of autobiographical storytelling can mean the difference between life and death. A Story to Save Your Life emphasizes how memory, communication, and culture intertwine in migrants’ search for safety.

Co-authors: Virginia Barber-Rioja, Sarah Vendzules

Every day, large numbers of immigrants undertake dangerous migration journeys only to face deportation or “removal” proceedings once they arrive in the U.S. Others who have been in the country for many years may face these proceedings as well, and either group may seek to gain lawful status by means of an application to USCIS, the benefits arm of the immigration system. Mental Health Evaluations in Immigration Court examines the growing role of mental health professionals in the immigration system as they conduct forensic mental health assessments that are used as psychological evidence for applications for deportation relief, write affidavits for the court about the course of treatment they have provided to immigrants, help prepare people emotionally to be deported, and provide support for immigrants in detention centers.

Many immigrants appear in immigration court—often without an attorney if they cannot afford one—as part of deportation proceedings. Mental health professionals can be deeply involved in these proceedings, from helping to buttress an immigrant’s plea for asylum to helping an immigration judge make decisions about hardship, competency or risks for violence. There are a whole host of psycho-legal and forensic issues that arise in immigration court and in other immigration applications that have not yet been fully addressed in the field. This book provides an overview of relevant issues likely to be addressed by mental health and legal professionals. Mental Health Evaluations in Immigration Court corrects a serious deficiency in the study of immigration law and mental health, offering suggestions for future scholarship and acting as a vital resource for mental health professionals, immigration lawyers, and judges.

by Leketi Makalela

Dynamic language practices of African multilingual speakers have not been cogently described in a book-length publication. This book challenges assumptions that have led to 11 languages being assigned official language status in South Africa, and it makes a case for mutual inter-comprehensibility and fluid multilingual practices in post-Apartheid South Africa. Students, teachers, and scholars in sociolinguistics, multilingualism, translanguaging, and teacher education will find this book thought-provoking. 

Makalela, University of the Witwatersrand, Languages, Literacies and Literatures Department, was a former ARC Scholar. 

Despite its image as an epicenter of progressive social policy, New York City continues to have one of the nation's most segregated school systems. Tracing the quest for integration in education from the mid-1950s to the present, The Battle Nearer to Home follows the tireless efforts by educational activists to dismantle the deep racial and socioeconomic inequalities that segregation reinforces. The fight for integration has shifted significantly over time, not least in terms of the way "integration" is conceived, from transfers of students and redrawing school attendance zones, to more recent demands of community control of segregated schools. In all cases, the Board eventually pulled the plug in the face of resistance from more powerful stakeholders, and, starting in the 1970s, integration receded as a possible solution to educational inequality. In excavating the history of New York City school integration politics, in the halls of power and on the ground, Christopher Bonastia unearths the enduring white resistance to integration and the severe costs paid by Black and Latino students. This last decade has seen activists renew the fight for integration, but the war is still far from won.

This volume demonstrates that migration- and diversity-related concepts are always contested, and provides a reflexive critical awareness and better comprehension of the complex questions driving migration studies. The main purpose of this volume is to enhance conceptual thinking on migration studies.

Examining interaction between concepts in the public domain, the academic disciplines, and the policy field, this book helps to avoid simplification or even trivialization of complex issues. Recent political events question established ways of looking at issues of migration and diversity and require a clarification or reinvention of political concepts to match the changing world. Applying five basic dimensions, each expert chapter contribution reflects on the role concepts play and demonstrates that concepts are ideology dependent, policy/politics dependent, context dependent, discipline dependent, and language dependent, and are influenced by how research is done, how policies are formulated, and how political debates extend and distort them.

This book will be essential reading for students, scholars, and practitioners in migration studies/politics, migrant integration, citizenship studies, racism studies, and more broadly of key interest to sociology, political science, and political theory.

Current ARC Scholar, Ricard Zapata-Barrero, is Full Professor in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.

Dirk Jacobs is Full Professor at the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, and Chairperson of the Brussels Studies Institute, Belgium.

Riva Kastoryano is Emerite Research Director at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), affiliated at Sciences Po - Center for International Studies (CERI-Sciences Po, Paris).

by Leketi Makalela

This book examines the intersections between education, identity formation, and language in post-apartheid South Africa with specific attention to higher education. It does so against the backdrop of the core argument that the sector plays a critical role in shaping, (re)producing and perpetuating sectoral, class, sub-national and national identities, which in turn, in the peculiar South African setting, are almost invariably analogous with the historical fault lines determined and dictated by language as a marker of ethnic and racial identity. The chapters in the book grapple with the nuances related to these intersections in the understanding that higher education language policies – overt and/or covert – largely structure institutional cultures, or what has been described as curriculum in higher education institutions. Together, the chapters examine the roles played by higher education, by language policies, and by the intersections of these policies and ethnolinguistic identities in either constructing and perpetuating, or deconstructing ethnolinguistic identities upon which the sector was founded. The introductory chapter lays out the background to the entire book with an emphasis on the policy and practice perspectives on the intersections. The middle chapters describe the so-called “White Universities”, “Black Universities” and “Middle-Man Minorities Universities”. The final chapter maps out future directions of the discourses on language and identity formation in South Africa’s higher education.

Makalela, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, was a former ARC Scholar. 

Andrew Ross

Today, a minimum-wage earner can afford a one-bedroom apartment in only 145 out of 3,143 counties in America. One of the very worst places in the United States to look for affordable housing is Osceola County, Florida. Once the main approach to Disney World, where vacationers found lodging on their way to the Magic Kingdom, the 15-mile Route 192 corridor in Osceola has become a site of shocking contrasts. At one end, global investors snatch up foreclosed properties and park their capital in extravagant vacation homes for affluent visitors, eliminating the county's affordable housing in the process. At the other, underpaid tourist industry workers, displaced families, and disabled and elderly people subsisting on government checks cram themselves into dilapidated, roach-infested motels, or move into tent camps in the woods. Through visceral, frontline reporting from the motels and encampments dotting central Florida, renowned social analyst Andrew Ross exposes the overlooked housing crisis sweeping America's suburbs and rural areas, where residents suffer ongoing trauma, poverty, and nihilism. As millions of renters face down evictions and foreclosures in the midst of the COVID-19 recession, Andrew Ross reveals how ineffective government planning, property market speculation, and poverty wages have combined to create this catastrophe. Urgent and incisive, Sunbelt Blues offers original insight into what is quickly becoming a full-blown national emergency.

Ross, professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University and a social activist, was a previous ARC Distinguished Scholar.

Leslie Paik

Trapped in a Maze provides a window into families' lived experiences in poverty by looking at their complex interactions with institutions such as welfare, hospitals, courts, housing, and schools. Families are more intertwined with institutions than ever as they struggle to maintain their eligibility for services and face the possibility that involvement with one institution could trigger other types of institutional oversight. Many poor families find themselves trapped in a multi-institutional maze, stuck in between several systems with no clear path to resolution. Tracing the complex and often unpredictable journeys of families in this maze, this book reveals how the formal rationality by which these institutions ostensibly operate undercuts what they can actually achieve. And worse, it demonstrates how involvement with multiple institutions can perpetuate the conditions of poverty that these families are fighting to escape.

Brigid O'Keeffe

Hoping to unite all of humankind and revolutionize the world, Ludwik Zamenhof launched a new international language called Esperanto from late imperial Russia in 1887. Ordinary men and women in Russia and all over the world soon transformed Esperanto into a global movement. Esperanto and Languages of Internationalism in Revolutionary Russia traces the history and legacy of this effort: from Esperanto's roots in the social turmoil of the pre-revolutionary Pale of Settlement; to its links to socialist internationalism and Comintern bids for world revolution; and, finally, to the demise of the Soviet Esperanto movement in the increasingly xenophobic Stalinist 1930s. In doing so, this book reveals how Esperanto – and global language politics more broadly – shaped revolutionary and early Soviet Russia. Based on extensive archival materials, Brigid O'Keeffe's book provides the first in-depth exploration of Esperanto at grassroots level and sheds new light on a hitherto overlooked area of Russian history. As such, Esperanto and Languages of Internationalism in Revolutionary Russia will be of immense value to both historians of modern Russia and scholars of internationalism, transnational networks, and sociolinguistics.

O'Keeffe, associate professor of history at Brooklyn College, is a former ARC Distinguished Scholar. 

Andrew M. Stauffer

In most college and university libraries, materials published before 1800 have been moved into special collections, while the post-1923 books remain in general circulation. But books published between these dates are vulnerable to deaccessioning, as libraries increasingly reconfigure access to public-domain texts via digital repositories such as Google Books. Even libraries with strong commitments to their print collections are clearing out the duplicates, assuming that circulating copies of any given 19th-century edition are essentially identical to one another. When you look closely, however, you see that they are not.

Many 19th-century books were donated by alumni or their families decades ago, and many of them bear traces left behind by the people who first owned and used them. In Book Traces, Andrew M. Stauffer adopts what he calls "guided serendipity" as a tactic in pursuit of two goals: first, to read nineteenth-century poetry through the clues and objects earlier readers left in their books and, second, to defend the value of keeping the physical volumes on the shelves. Finding in such books of poetry the inscriptions, annotations, and insertions made by their original owners, and using them as exemplary case studies, Stauffer shows how the physical, historical book enables a modern reader to encounter poetry through the eyes of someone for whom it was personal.

Stauffer, an associate professor of English at the University of Virginia, is a former ARC Distinguished Scholar. 

For four decades, the number of conservative parents who homeschool their children has risen. But unlike others who teach at home, conservative homeschool families and organizations have amassed an army of living-room educators ready to defend their right to instruct their children as they wish, free from government intrusion. Through intensive but often hidden organizing, homeschoolers have struck fear into state legislators, laying the foundations for Republican electoral success.

In Homeschooling the Right, the political scientist Heath Brown provides a novel analysis of the homeschooling movement and its central role in conservative efforts to shrink the public sector. He traces the aftereffects of the passage of state homeschool policies in the 1980s and the results of ongoing conservative education activism on the broader political landscape, including the campaigns of George W. Bush and the rise of the Tea Party. Brown finds that by opting out of public education services in favor of at-home provision, homeschoolers have furthered conservative goals of reducing the size and influence of government. He applies the theory of policy feedback — how public-policy choices determine subsequent politics — to demonstrate the effects of educational activism for other conservative goals such as gun rights, which are similarly framed as matters of liberty and freedom. Drawing on decades of county data, dozens of original interviews, and original archives of formal and informal homeschool organizations, this book is a groundbreaking investigation of the politics of the conservative homeschooling movement.

Adrian Blackledge and Angela Creese

This highly original book brings compelling narratives of migration and social diversity vividly to life. At once a play script and an outcome of ethnographic research, it is a rich resource for the interpretation and representation of life in the multilingual city. The book takes an inside view of a hidden space in the city: an advice and advocacy service in a Chinese community centre. Here, advisors translate and translanguage, making sense of the bureaucratic world for clients who need help to access rights and resources related to housing, employment, education, welfare benefits, insurance, taxation, health and much more.

Blackledge, professor of sociolinguistics at the University of Stirling, U.K., is a former ARC Distinguished Scholar.

Creese, professor of linguistic ethnography at the University of Stirling, U.K., is a former ARC Distinguished Scholar.

Patricia Oliart
 

Pedagogías de la disidencia en América Latina reúne diversas reflexiones de activistas, educadores y productores culturales de Chile, Perú, Argentina y Colombia. Los artículos analizan distintas posturas que cuestionan, desafían, proponen e invitan a la desobediencia y la acción política contra la lógica del mercado, el patriarcado, la hetero-normatividad, el ‘adultocentrismo’, el racismo y otros sentidos contemporáneos de exclusión.

Una poderosa y reveladora lista de ensayos para entender la creación y apropiación de ideas emancipadoras necesarias para confrontar el panorama desigual de América Latina.

Oliart, a Senior Lecturer and Head of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at Newcastle University, was a Distinguished ARC Fellow. 

Marius R. Busemeyer, Julian L. Garritzmann, and Erik Neimanns
 

This path-breaking addition to the Comparative Politics of Education series studies the influence of public opinion on the contemporary politics of education reform in Western Europe. The authors analyze new data from a survey of public opinion on education policy across eight countries, and they also provide detailed case studies of reform processes based on interviews with policy-makers and stakeholders. The book's core finding is that public opinion has the greatest influence in a world of 'loud' politics, when salience is high and attitudes are coherent. In contrast, when issues are salient but attitudes are conflicting, the signal of public opinion turns 'loud, but noisy' and party politics have a stronger influence on policy-making. In the case of 'quiet' politics, when issue salience is low, interest groups are dominant. This book is required reading for anyone seeking to make sense of policy-makers' selective responsiveness to public demands and concerns.

Busemeyer, a professor of political science with a focus on comparative political economy at the University of Konstanz, is a former ARC Distinguished Scholar.

Salar Abdoh

Saleh, the narrator of Out of Mesopotamia, is a middle-aged Iranian journalist who moonlights as a writer for one of Iran's most popular TV shows but cannot keep himself away from the front lines in neighboring Iraq and Syria. There, the fight against the Islamic State is a proxy war, an existential battle, a declaration of faith, and, for some, a passing weekend affair.

After weeks spent dodging RPGs, witnessing acts of savagery and stupidity, Saleh returns to civilian life in Tehran but finds it to be an unbearably dislocating experience. Pursued by his official handler from state security, opportunistic colleagues, and the woman who broke his heart, Saleh has reason to again flee from everyday life. Surrounded by men whose willingness to achieve martyrdom both fascinates and appalls him, Saleh struggles to make sense of himself and the turmoil in his midst.

An unprecedented glimpse into endless war" from a Middle Eastern perspective, Out of Mesopotamia follows in the tradition of the Western canon of martial writers--from Hemingway and Orwell to Tim O'Brien and Philip Caputo--but then subverts and expands upon the genre before completely blowing it apart. Drawing from his firsthand experience of being embedded with Shia militias on the ground in Iraq and Syria, Abdoh gives agency to the voiceless while offering a meditation on war that is moving, humane, darkly funny, and resonantly true.

Abdoh, Professor of English at the City College of New York, was an Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC) Distinguished Fellow at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

Dan Rabinowitz

Hotter and dryer than most parts of the world, the Middle East could soon see climate change exacerbate food and water shortages, aggravate social inequalities, and drive displacement and political destabilization. And as renewable energy eclipses fossil fuels, oil rich countries in the Middle East will see their wealth diminish. Amidst these imminent risks is a call to action for regional leaders. Could countries such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates harness the region's immense potential for solar energy and emerge as vanguards of global climate action?

The Power of Deserts surveys regional climate models and identifies the potential impact on socioeconomic disparities, population movement, and political instability. Offering more than warning and fear, however, the book highlights a potentially brighter future—a recent shift across the Middle East toward renewable energy. With his deep knowledge of the region and knack for presenting scientific data with clarity, Dan Rabinowitz makes a sober yet surprisingly optimistic investigation of opportunity arising from a looming crisis.

Rabinowitz, a Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel-Aviv University, was an Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC) Distinguished Fellow at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

Jan Willem Duyvendak, Nancy Foner, Philip Kasinitz (Editors)

Presenting several in-depth studies, this book explores how super-diversity operates in everyday relations and interactions in a variety of urban settings in Western Europe and the United States. The contributors raise a broad range of questions about the nature and effects of super-diversity. They ask if a quantitative increase in demographic diversity makes a qualitative difference in how diversity is experienced in urban neighborhoods, and what are the consequences of demographic change when people from a wide range of countries and social backgrounds live together in urban neighborhoods. The question at the core of the book is to what extent, and in what contexts, super-diversity leads to either the normalization of diversity or to added hostility towards and amongst those in different ethnic, racial, and religious groups. In cases where there is no particular ethno-racial or religious majority, are certain long-established groups able to continue to exert economic and political power, and is this continued economic and political dominance actually often facilitated by super-diversity? With contributions from a number of European countries as well as the U.S., this book will be of interest to researchers studying contemporary migration and ethnic diversity. It will also spark discussion amongst those focusing on multiculturalism in urban environments. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Jan Willem Duyvendak, distinguished research professor of sociology at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and the director of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, is a former ARC Distinguished Scholar. 

Colonial Migrants at the Heart of Empire is the first in-depth look at the experiences of Puerto Rican migrant workers in continental U.S. agriculture in the 20th century. The Farm Labor Program, established by the government of Puerto Rico in 1947, placed hundreds of thousands of migrant workers on U.S. farms and fostered the emergence of many stateside Puerto Rican communities. García-Colón investigates the origins and development of this program and uncovers the unique challenges faced by its participants.

A labor history and an ethnography, Colonial Migrants evokes the violence, fieldwork, food, lodging, surveillance, and coercion that these workers experienced on farms and conveys their hopes and struggles to overcome poverty. Island farmworkers encountered a unique form of prejudice and racism arising from their dual status as both U.S. citizens and as “foreign others,” and their experiences were further shaped by evolving immigration policies. Despite these challenges, many Puerto Rican farmworkers ultimately chose to settle in rural U.S. communities, contributing to the production of food and the Latinization of the U.S. farm labor force.

In Poor Queer Studies Matt Brim shifts queer studies away from its familiar sites of elite education toward poor and working-class people, places, and pedagogies. Brim shows how queer studies also takes place beyond the halls of flagship institutions: in night school; after a three-hour commute; in overflowing classrooms at no-name colleges; with no research budget; without access to decent food; with kids in tow; in a state of homelessness. Drawing on the everyday experiences of teaching and learning queer studies at the College of Staten Island, Brim outlines the ways the field has been driven by the material and intellectual resources of those institutions that neglect and rarely serve poor and minority students. By exploring poor and working-class queer ideas and laying bare the structural and disciplinary mechanisms of inequality that suppress them, Brim jumpstarts a queer-class knowledge project committed to anti-elitist and anti-racist education. Poor Queer Studies is essential for all of those who care about the state of higher education and building a more equitable academy.

Sharon Zukin

You hear a lot these days about "innovation and entrepreneurship" and about how "good jobs" in tech will save our cities. Yet these common tropes hide a stunning reality: local lives and fortunes are tied to global capital. You see this clearly in metropolises such as San Francisco and New York that have emerged as "superstar cities." In these cities, startups bloom, jobs of the future multiply, and a meritocracy trained in digital technology, backed by investors who control deep pools of capital, forms a new class: the tech-financial elite. In The Innovation Complex, the eminent urbanist Sharon Zukin shows the way these forces shape the new urban economy through a rich and illuminating account of the rise of the tech sector in New York City. Drawing from original interviews with venture capitalists, tech evangelists, and economic development officials, she shows how the ecosystem forms and reshapes the city from the ground up.

A video produced by Alice Arnold and the distinguished sociologist Sharon Zukin, for the publication of "The Innovation Complex: Cities, Tech and the New Economy" (Oxford University Press, 2020).

Elissa Bemporad

This book traces the legacies of the two classical and most extreme manifestations of tsarist antisemitism — pogroms and blood libels — in the Soviet Union, from 1917 to the early 1960s. Closely intertwined in history and memory, pogroms and blood libels were and are considered central to the Jewish experience in late Tsarist Russia. But their persistence and memory under the Bolsheviks — a chapter that is largely overlooked by the existing scholarship — significantly shaped the Soviet Jewish experience. By exploring the phenomenon and the memory of pogroms and blood libels in the Soviet territories of the interwar period as well as after World War II, in the newly annexed territories, this book studies the social realities of everyday antisemitism through the emergence of communities of violence and memories of violence. The fifty-year-span from the Bolshevik Revolution to the early years of Khrushchev included a living generation of Jews and non-Jews alike, who either experienced or remembered the Beilis Affair, the pogroms of the civil war, and in some cases even the violence of the pre-revolutionary years. By tracing the “afterlife” of pogroms and blood libels in the USSR, this book sheds light on the broader question of the changing position of Jews in Soviet society. And by doing so it tells the story of the solid yet ever changing and at times ambivalent relationship between the Soviet state and the Jewish minority group.

Bemporad holds the Ungar Chair in East European Jewish History and the Holocaust and is a professor of history at Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. She is a former ARC Distinguished Scholar.

Jonathan Senchyne

The true scale of paper production in America from 1690 through the end of the 19th century was staggering, with a range of parties participating in different ways, from farmers growing flax to textile workers weaving cloth and from housewives saving rags to peddlers collecting them. Making a bold case for the importance of printing and paper technology in the study of early American literature, Jonathan Senchyne presents archival evidence of the effects of this very visible process on American writers, such as Anne Bradstreet, Herman Melville, Lydia Sigourney, William Wells Brown, and other lesser-known figures. The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature reveals that book history and literary studies are mutually constitutive and proposes a new literary periodization based on materiality and paper production. In unpacking this history and connecting it to cultural and literary representations, Senchyne also explores how the textuality of paper has been used to make social and political claims about gender, labor, and race.

Senchyne, associate professor and director of the Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture at the Information School at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is a former ARC Distinguished Scholar.

Elena Frangakis-Syrett, Thierry Allain, and Sébastien Lupo, eds.​

The articles in this volume analyze the evolution of trade and related sectors in the Mediterranean, from 17th to 20th centuries, privileging the city-port of Smyrna/Izmir and its hinterland in Ottoman Anatolia. Smyrna was the leading commercial center in the region at the time with global market contacts and a symbiotic, though dominant, economic relationship with its hinterland.
 
Different aspects of long-distance trade are examined including business strategies of firms that ranged from small-cap family firms to large-cap limited liability incorporated companies and the role of networks in establishing effective and trustworthy channels of communication amongst economic actors from different ethnicities and religions located in different markets within and beyond the Mediterranean.

Philip Kasinitz and Marco Martiniello (Editors)
 

This volume brings together the work of social scientists and music scholars examining the role of migrant and migrant descended communities in the production and consumption of popular music in Europe and North America. The contributions to the collection include studies of language and local identity in hip hop in Liege and Montreal; the politics of Mexican folk music in Los Angeles; the remaking of ethnic boundaries in Naples; the changing meanings of Tango in the Argentine diaspora and of Alevi music among Turks in Germany; the history of Soca in Brooklyn; and the re-creation of "American" culture by the children of immigrants on the Broadway stage. Taken together, these works demonstrate how music affords us a window onto local culture, social relations, and community politics in the diverse cities of immigrant-receiving societies. Music is often one of the first arenas in which populations encounter newcomers, a place where ideas about identity can be reformulated and reimagined, and a field in which innovation and hybridity are often highly valued. This book highlights why it is a subject worthy of more attention from students of racial and ethnic relations in diverse societies. It was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Martiniello, research director at the FRS-FNRS, Brussels, Belgium, and director of CEDEM-Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Liège, Liège, Belgium, is a former ARC Distinguished Scholar. 

Jump Up! Caribbean Carnival Music in New York City is the first comprehensive history of Trinidadian calypso and steelband music in the diaspora. Carnival, transplanted from Trinidad to Harlem in the 1930s and to Brooklyn in the late 1960s, provides the cultural context for the study. Blending oral history, archival research, and ethnography, Jump Up! examines how members of New York's diverse Anglophile-Caribbean communities forged transnational identities through the self-conscious embrace and transformation of select Carnival music styles and performances. The work fills a significant void in our understanding of how Caribbean Carnival music-specifically calypso, soca (soul/calypso), and steelband-evolved in the second half of the twentieth century as it flowed between its Island homeland and its bourgeoning New York migrant community. Jump Up! addresses the issues of music, migration, and identity head on, exploring the complex cycling of musical practices and the back-and-forth movement of singers, musicians, arrangers, producers, and cultural entrepreneurs between New York's diasporic communities and the Caribbean.

David Abraham

In many countries around the world, the idea of the welfare state is currently being questioned, while the issue of flight and migration is giving right-wing populism a rapid boost. Paradigms that have been powerful for decades, such as that of social solidarity and global justice, are losing acceptance, while the fear of "uncontrolled immigration" undermines trust in the functioning of the welfare state. Answers to the question of who belongs to "us" and under what conditions and is allowed to participate in welfare state services are experiencing a dramatic shift. 
 
David Abraham examines the interrelationship between immigration, integration and solidarity in the capitalist West of the 20th and 21st centuries. Using Germany, the U.S., and Israel as examples, the lawyer and historian shows why "soft on the inside, hard on the outside", the formula that was once fundamental for establishing stable welfare states, will no longer be viable in the future. These insights are supplemented and deepened in a biographical interview about history and origins, about law and populism, but also about Abraham's varied academic career. 
 
Abraham, professor of law emeritus, University of Miami, is a former ARC Distinguished Scholar.  

Matt Brim and Amin Ghaziani (Editors)

Imagining Queer Methods showcases the methodological renaissance unfolding in queer scholarship. This volume brings together emerging and esteemed researchers from all corners of the academy who are defining new directions for the field.

From critical race studies, history, journalism, lesbian feminist studies, literature, media studies, and performance studies to anthropology, education, psychology, sociology, and urban planning, this impressive interdisciplinary collection covers topics such as humanistic approaches to reading, theorizing, and interpreting, as well as scientific appeals to measurement, modeling, sampling, and statistics.

By bringing together these diverse voices into an unprecedented single volume, Amin Ghaziani and Matt Brim inspire us with innovative ways of thinking about methods and methodologies in queer studies.

Charlotte Brooks

In the first decades of the 20th century, almost half of the Chinese Americans born in the United States moved to China—a relocation they assumed would be permanent. At a time when people from around the world flocked to the United States, this little-noticed emigration belied America’s image as a magnet for immigrants and a land of upward mobility for all. Fleeing racism, Chinese Americans who sought greater opportunities saw China, a tottering empire and then a struggling republic, as their promised land.

American Exodus is the first book to explore this extraordinary migration of Chinese Americans. Their exodus shaped Sino-American relations, the development of key economic sectors in China, the character of social life in its coastal cities, debates about the meaning of culture and “modernity” there, and the U.S. government’s approach to citizenship and expatriation in the interwar years. Spanning multiple fields, exploring numerous cities, and crisscrossing the Pacific Ocean, this book will appeal to anyone interested in Chinese history, international relations, immigration history, and Asian American studies.

Brooks, a Professor of History at Baruch College, CUNY, was an Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC) Distinguished Fellow. 

Mary Gibson

During a period dominated by the biological determinism of Cesare Lombroso, Italy constructed a new prison system that sought to reconcile criminology with nation building and new definitions of citizenship. Italian Prisons in the Age of Positivism, 1861-1914 examines this second wave" of global prison reform between Italian Unification and World War I, providing fascinating insights into the relationship between changing modes of punishment and the development of the modern Italian state. Mary Gibson focuses on the correlation between the birth of the prison and the establishment of a liberal government, showing how rehabilitation through work in humanitarian conditions played a key role in the development of a new secular national identity. She also highlights the importance of age and gender for constructing a nuanced chronology of the birth of the prison, demonstrating that whilst imprisonment emerged first as a punishment for women and children, they were often denied "negative" rights, such as equality in penal law and the right to a secular form of punishment. Employing a wealth of hitherto neglected primary sources, such as yearly prison statistics, this cutting-edge study also provides glimpses into the everyday life of inmates in both the new capital of Rome and the nation as a whole. Italian Prisons in the Age of Positivism, 1861-1914 is a vital study for understanding the birth of the prison in modern Italy and beyond.

Marta Gutman

Over the course of the twentieth century, education was a key site for envisioning opportunities for African Americans, but the very schools they attended sometimes acted as obstacles to black flourishing. Educating Harlem brings together a multidisciplinary group of scholars to provide a broad consideration of the history of schooling in perhaps the nation’s most iconic black community.

Gutman, an award-winning author and historian in The City College of New York’s Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture, was an Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC) Distinguished Fellow at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She has recently accepted a new leadership role as the president-elect of the Society for American City and Regional Planning History. 

Paul M. Ong and Silvia R. Gonzalez
 

Uneven Urbanscape takes a new theoretically grounded view of how society produces and reproduces ethnoracial economic inequality. Drawing on empirically rich documentation and quantitative analysis utilizing multiple data sources, including the U.S. Census Bureau, Ong and Gonzalez assess the patterns, causes, and consequences of urban spatial disparities, specifically in home ownership, employment, and education. They focus on the global city of Los Angeles in order to examine outcomes across small geographic units that approximate neighborhoods and places, and to analyze the location-specific effects of geographic access and isolation within the region. Using a mix of micro-level data and aggregated statistics, Uneven Urbanscape provides one of the most comprehensive understandings of urban ethnoracial disparities and inequalities from 1960 to the present day.

Ong, professor emeritus of urban planning, social welfare, and Asian American Studies at UCLA, is a former ARC Distinguished Scholar.

Brigitte Fielder and Jonathan Senchyne (Editors)
 

The work of black writers, editors, publishers, and librarians is deeply embedded in the history of American print culture, from slave narratives to digital databases. While the printed word can seem democratizing, it remains that the infrastructures of print and digital culture can be as limiting as they are enabling. Contributors to this volume explore the relationship between expression and such frameworks, analyzing how different mediums, library catalogs, and search engines shape the production and reception of written and visual culture. Topics include antebellum literature, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement; “post-Black” art, the role of Black librarians, and how present-day technologies aid or hinder the discoverability of work by African Americans. Against a Sharp White Background covers elements of production, circulation, and reception of African American writing across a range of genres and contexts. This collection challenges mainstream book history and print culture to understand that race and racialization are inseparable from the study of texts and their technologies.

Senchyne, associate professor of book history and print culture in the Information School and director of the Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is a former ARC Distinguished Scholar. 

Andrea Parmegiani
 

Emerging from a critical analysis of the glocal power of English and how it relates to academic literacy and culturally responsive pedagogy, this book presents translanguaging strategies for using ESL students' mother tongue as a resource for academic literacy acquisition and college success. Parmegiani offers a strong counterpoint to the "English-only" movement in the United States. Grounded in a case study of a learning community linking Spanish and English academic writing courses, he demonstrates that a mother tongue-based pedagogical intervention and the strategic use of minority home languages can promote English language acquisition and academic success.

Parmegiani, Associate Professor in the English Department at Bronx Community College, was an Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC) Distinguished Fellow at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

This volume brings together scholarship from two different, and until now, largely separate literatures―the study of the children of immigrants and the study of Muslim minority communities―in order to explore the changing nature of ethnic identity, religious practice, and citizenship in the contemporary western world. With attention to the similarities and differences between the European and American experiences of growing up Muslim, the contributing authors ask what it means for young people to be both Muslim and American or European, how they reconcile these, at times, conflicting identities, how they reconcile the religious and gendered cultural norms of their immigrant families with the more liberal ideals of the western societies that they live in, and how they deal with these issues through mobilization and political incorporation.

A transatlantic research effort that brings together work from the tradition in diaspora studies with research on the second generation, to examine social, cultural, and political dimensions of the second-generation Muslim experience in Europe and the United States, this book will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in migration, diaspora, race and ethnicity, religion and integration.

Cecelia Cutler with Unn Røyneland​ (Editors)
 

With an eye to the playful, reflexive, self-conscious ways in which global youth engage with each other online, this volume analyzes user-generated data from these interactions to show how communication technologies and multilingual resources are deployed to project local as well as trans-local orientations. With examples from a range of multilingual settings, each author explores how youth exploit the creative, heteroglossic potential of their linguistic repertoires, from rudimentary attempts to engage with others in a second language to hybrid multilingual practices. Often, their linguistic, orthographic, and stylistic choices challenge linguistic purity and prescriptive correctness, yet, in other cases, their utterances constitute language policing, linking 'standardness' or 'correctness' to piety, trans-local affiliation, or national belonging. Written for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers in linguistics, applied linguistics, education and media and communication studies, this volume is a timely and readymade resource for researching online multilingualism with a range of methodologies and perspectives.

Cutler, Associate Professor at Lehman College and The Graduate Center, was an ARC Distinguished Fellow. 

Leketi Makalela

The book begins with Leketi Makalela explaining his metaphor “shifting lenses,” which he contends is necessary to refocus our attention on the role that multilanguaging plays in decolonising education. He locates his discussion within the history of the colonisation of Africa, pointing to the Berlin Convention of 1884–1885, which is generally seen as the official balkanisation of the African states. This process gave rise to the monolingual state that was imposed on the new founded colonies, with the colonial language promoted to the exclusion of the other languages, so that the colonies resembled the colonial “motherland.”

Makalela,  a professor of languages and literacies at Wits University, South Africa, was a former Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC) distinguished scholar.

Janet Elise Johnson
 

This book argues that the primary political obstacle holding women back in the twenty-first century is a bait and switch promising but simultaneously undercutting gender equality. Through a comparison of Russia and Iceland, the book shows how this revised form of male dominance came about, how it constrains feminisms, and how activists are beginning to fight back. It argues that while feminist movements have made it harder for most countries to maintain formal rules discriminating against women, economic liberalization strengthened male-dominated elites in informal institutions. These elites offer women prominent roles as policymakers and in non-governmental organizations, but then box them in with little room to represent women’s interests. Activists’ attempts to shame countries for ignoring problems such as violence against women result in new laws, but, lacking the necessary funding and enforcement, violence and inequality intensify. Explaining this paradox is the principal focus for social scientists, policymakers, and activists concerned with gender equality, women's social inclusion, and human rights.  

Johnson, a Professor of Political Science & Women’s/Gender Studies at Brooklyn College, CUNY, was an Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC) Distinguished Fellow.

Elissa Bemporad and Joyce W. Warren
 

The genocides of modern history–Rwanda, Armenia, Guatemala, the Holocaust, and countless others–and their effects have been well documented, but how do the experiences of female victims and perpetrators differ from those of men? In Women and Genocide, human rights advocates and scholars come together to argue that the memory of trauma is gendered and that women's voices and perspectives are key to our understanding of the dynamics that emerge in the context of genocidal violence. The contributors of this volume examine how women consistently are targets for the sexualized violence that serves as an instrument of ethnic cleansing, how female perpetrators take advantage of the new power structures, and how women are involved in the struggle for justice in post-genocidal contexts. By placing women at center stage, Women and Genocide helps us to better understand the nexus existing between misogyny and violence in societies where genocide erupts.

Finex Ndhlovu
 

This book examines the linguistic and discursive elements of social and economic policies and national political leader statements to read new meanings into debates on border protection, national sovereignty, immigration, economic indigenisation, land reform and black economic empowerment. It adds a fresh angle to the debate on nationalisms and transnationalism by pushing forward a more applied agenda to establish a clear and empirically-based illustration of the contradictions in current policy frameworks around the world and the debates they invite. The author's novel vernacular discourse approach contributes new points of method and interpretation that will advance scholarly conversations on nationalisms, transnationalism and other forms of identity imaginings in a transient world.

Ndhlovu, associate professor of language in society at the University of New England, Australia, was a Distinguished ARC Fellow.

We live in a factory-made world: modern life is built on three centuries of advances in factory production, efficiency, and technology. But giant factories have also fueled our fears about the future since their beginnings, when William Blake called them "dark Satanic mills." Many factories that operated over the last two centuries―such as Homestead, River Rouge, and Foxconn―were known for the labor exploitation and class warfare they engendered, not to mention the environmental devastation caused by factory production from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution up to today.

In a major work of scholarship that is also wonderfully accessible, celebrated historian Joshua B. Freeman tells the story of the factory and examines how it has reflected both our dreams and our nightmares of industrialization and social change. He whisks readers from the textile mills in England that powered the Industrial Revolution and the factory towns of New England to the colossal steel and car plants of twentieth-century America, Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union and on to today’s behemoths making sneakers, toys, and cellphones in China and Vietnam.

The giant factory, Freeman shows, led a revolution that transformed human life and the environment. He traces arguments about factories and social progress through such critics and champions as Marx and Engels, Charles Dickens, Alexander Hamilton, Henry Ford, and Joseph Stalin. He chronicles protests against standard industry practices from unions and workers’ rights groups that led to shortened workdays, child labor laws, protection for organized labor, and much more.

In Behemoth, Freeman also explores how factories became objects of great wonder that both inspired and horrified artists and writers in their time. He examines representations of factories in the work of Charles Sheeler, Margaret Bourke-White, Charlie Chaplin, Diego Rivera, and Edward Burtynsky.

Behemoth tells the grand story of global industry from the Industrial Revolution to the present. It is a magisterial work on factories and the people whose labor made them run. And it offers a piercing perspective on how factories have shaped our societies and the challenges we face now.

Mira Song

The world's multiracial population is considered to be one of the fastest growing of all ethnic groups. In the United States alone, it is estimated that over 20% of the population will be considered "mixed race" by 2050. Public figures such as former President Barack Obama and Hollywood actress Ruth Negga further highlight the highly diverse backgrounds of those classified under the umbrella term of "multiracial."

Song, Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent's School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research (SSPSSR), was an Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC) Distinguished Fellow at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

Sujatha Fernandes

Storytelling has proliferated today, from TED Talks and Humans of New York to a plethora of story-coaching agencies and consultants. Heartbreaking accounts of poverty, mistreatment, and struggle may move us deeply. But what do they move us to do? And what are the stakes in the crafting and use of storytelling?

In Curated Stories, Sujatha Fernandes considers the rise of storytelling alongside the broader shift to neoliberal, free-market economies. She argues that stories have been reconfigured to promote entrepreneurial self-making and restructured as easily digestible soundbites mobilized toward utilitarian ends. Fernandes roams the globe and returns with stories from the Afghan Women's Writing Project, the domestic workers movement and the undocumented student Dreamer movement in the United States, and the Misión Cultura project in Venezuela. She shows how the conditions under which certain stories are told, the tropes through which they are narrated, and the ways in which they are responded to may actually disguise the deeper contexts of global inequality. Curated stories shift the focus away from structural problems and defuse the confrontational politics of social movements.

Not just a critical examination of the contemporary use of narrative and its wider impact on our collective understanding of pressing social issues, Curated Stories also explores how storytelling might be reclaimed to allow for the complexity of experience to be expressed in pursuit of transformative social change.

Fernandes, a professor in the departments of political economy and sociology at the University of Sydney, is a former ARC Distinguished Scholar.

Chad Alan Goldberg

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, prominent social thinkers in France, Germany, and the United States sought to understand the modern world taking shape around them. Although they worked in different national traditions and emphasized different features of modern society, they repeatedly invoked Jews as a touchstone for defining modernity and national identity in a context of rapid social change.

In Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought, Chad Alan Goldberg brings us a major new study of Western social thought through the lens of Jews and Judaism. In France, where antisemites decried the French Revolution as the "Jewish Revolution," 'mile Durkheim challenged depictions of Jews as agents of revolutionary subversion or counterrevolutionary reaction. When German thinkers such as Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, Werner Sombart, and Max Weber debated the relationship of the Jews to modern industrial capitalism, they reproduced, in secularized form, cultural assumptions derived from Christian theology. In the United States, William Thomas, Robert Park, and their students conceived the modern city and its new modes of social organization in part by reference to the Jewish immigrants concentrating there. In all three countries, social thinkers invoked real or purported differences between Jews and gentiles to elucidate key dualisms of modern social thought. The Jews thus became an intermediary through which social thinkers discerned in a roundabout fashion the nature, problems, and trajectory of their own wider societies. Goldberg rounds out his fascinating study by proposing a novel explanation for why Jews were such an important cultural reference point. He suggests a rethinking of previous scholarship on Orientalism, Occidentalism, and European perceptions of America, arguing that history extends into the present, with the Jews - and now the Jewish state - continuing to serve as an intermediary for self-reflection in the 21st century.

Goldberg, professor of sociology and affiliated with the Center for German and European Studies, the George L. Mosse/Laurence A. Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies, and the George L. Mosse Program in History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is a former ARC Distinguished Scho

Juliet Hooker

In 1845 two thinkers from the American hemisphere - the Argentinean statesman Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, and the fugitive ex-slave, abolitionist leader, and orator from the United States, Frederick Douglass - both published their first works. Each would become the most famous and enduring texts in what were both prolific careers, and they ensured Sarmiento and Douglass' position as leading figures in the canon of Latin American and U.S. African-American political thought, respectively. But despite the fact that both deal directly with key political and philosophical questions in the Americas, Douglass and Sarmiento, like African-American and Latin American thought more generally, are never read alongside each other. This may be because their ideas about race differed dramatically. Sarmiento advocated the Europeanization of Latin America and espoused a virulent form of anti-indigenous racism, while Douglass opposed slavery and defended the full humanity of black persons. Still, as Juliet Hooker contends, looking at the two together allows one to chart a hemispheric intellectual geography of race that challenges political theory's preoccupation with and assumptions about East / West comparisons, and questions the use of comparison as a tool in the production of theory and philosophy.

By juxtaposing four prominent nineteenth and twentieth-century thinkers - Frederick Douglass, Domingo F. Sarmiento, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Jos? Vasconcelos - her book will be the first to bring African-American and Latin American political thought into conversation. Hooker stresses that Latin American and U.S. ideas about race were not developed in isolation, but grew out of transnational intellectual exchanges across the Americas. In so doing, she shows that nineteenth and twentieth-century U.S. and Latin American thinkers each looked to political models in the 'other' America to advance racial projects in their own countries. Reading these four intellectuals as hemispheric thinkers, Hooker foregrounds elements of their work that have been dismissed by dominant readings, and provides a crucial platform to bridge the canons of Latin American and African-American political thought.

Hooker, Professor of Political Science at Brown University, was an Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC) Distinguished Fellow at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

Linda Tropp (Editor)

The landmark Brown v. Board of Education case, in which the U.S. Supreme Court cited psychological evidence in overturning school segregation, is just one example of the powerful and far-reaching impact social science research can have on the world beyond academia. But many researchers still find it challenging to share scientific knowledge with the broader public and to partner with key social institutions to have such impact. In this volume, prominent experts, including academic psychologists, government officials, and leaders of professional organizations, discuss how researchers can forge and strengthen vital links between scholarship and public engagement by lending their scientific expertise to debates around social issues and current events. The authors provide pointers on talking to the media, testifying as an expert witness, dealing with governmental organizations, working with schools and students, and influencing public policy.

Tropp, professor of social psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is a former ARC Distinguished Scholar.

Steven E. Jones

It's the founding myth of humanities computing and digital humanities: In 1949, the Italian Jesuit scholar, Roberto Busa, S.J., persuaded IBM to offer technical and financial support for the mechanized creation of a massive lemmatized concordance to the works of St. Thomas Aquinas. Using Busa's own papers, recently accessioned in Milan, as well as IBM archives and other sources, Jones illuminates this DH origin story. He examines relationships between the layers of hardware, software, human agents, culture, and history, and answers the question of how specific technologies afford and even constrain cultural practices, including in this case the academic research agendas of humanities computing and, later, digital humanities.

Jones, DeBartolo Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of South Florida, is a former ARC Distinguished Scholar.

Fifty years of large-scale immigration has brought significant ethnic, racial, and religious diversity to North America and Western Europe, but has also prompted hostile backlashes. In Fear, Anxiety, and National Identity, a distinguished multidisciplinary group of scholars examine whether and how immigrants and their offspring have been included in the prevailing national identity in the societies where they now live and to what extent they remain perpetual foreigners in the eyes of the long-established native-born. What specific social forces in each country account for the barriers immigrants and their children face, and how do anxieties about immigrant integration and national identity differ on the two sides of the Atlantic?

Strangers No More is the first book to compare immigrant integration across key Western countries. Focusing on low-status newcomers and their children, it examines how they are making their way in four critical European countries-France, Germany, Great Britain, and the Netherlands-and, across the Atlantic, in the United States and Canada. This systematic, data-rich comparison reveals their progress and the barriers they face in an array of institutions-from labor markets and neighborhoods to educational and political systems-and considers the controversial questions of religion, race, identity, and intermarriage.

Mojúbàolú Olúfúnké Okome (Editor)

Since the 1990s, attempts at democratic transition have generated hopes for 'civil society' as well as ambivalence about the state. The interdisciplinary studies gathered here explore this dynamic through the complex interactions of state fragility, self-help, and self-organization in Nigeria. Nigeria stands as a particularly interesting case, as its multifaceted associational life extends far beyond civil society organizations (CSOs) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs): as this volume reveals, there is a 'third sector' of Nigerian society encompassing everything from community self-help programs to ethno-religious affiliations to militias. Some of these formations have narrow, pragmatic aims, while others have an explicit socio-cultural or political agenda; most can be understood as compensating for the state's failure to deliver services and maintain regulatory frameworks. By examining the emergence of broader forms of civil society, this volume considers their successes while also assessing their costs and contradictions.

Okome, a professor of political science at Brooklyn College, is a former Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC) distinguished scholar.