The Darién Gap has become a mass migrant graveyard, as hundreds of thousands of refuge seekers navigate its perils in the hopes of reaching the United States. In the very first book on migration through the Gap, Belén Fernández puts the trajectory in compelling context, combining history, on-the-ground reporting, travelogue, memoir, and searing politico-economic analysis of a crisis that is itself largely Made-in-USA.

In a city reeling from Bolshevik revolution, a group of Ukrainian transplants formed the Factory of the Eccentric Actor—a collective devoted to the revolutionary overhaul of stagnant cultural institutions. The story of these artists and their first steps in cinema is perhaps the best kept secret in early Soviet culture.
 

Jenny Banh examines the attempt to transplant Disney's "happiest place on earth" to Hong Kong, delving into the three-way dynamics of American culture-corporation intentions; Hong Kong, China government investment; and Hong Kong and Chinese audiences. The situation poses special challenges for Disney's efforts to manage space, labor, and consumption to achieve local adaptation and business success.

Undocumented in the U. S. South is a rare look into the everyday realities of undocumented youth in K-12 public schools. In an anti-immigrant policy context, youth and their families navigate historical and current legacies and realities of segregation, racial discrimination and inequality. With a deep three-year ethnographic study, hundreds of hours of observational research, interviews, and policy analysis, Rodriguez traces the lives of undocumented youth across multiple public school settings, calling for policies that are humanizing and rooted in youth experience.

Techno-Orientalism 2.0 addresses the impact of a volatile post-COVID present on speculative futures by and about Asians. The volume engages with techno-Orientalist inflections in recent high-profile and lesser-known Asian and Asian American speculative fiction, film, television, anime, art, music, journalism, architecture, state-sponsored policy and infrastructural projects, and the now-dominant China Panic.

Techno-Orientalism 2.0 addresses the impact of a volatile post-COVID present on speculative futures by and about Asians. The volume engages with techno-Orientalist inflections in recent high-profile and lesser-known Asian and Asian American speculative fiction, film, television, anime, art, music, journalism, architecture, state-sponsored policy and infrastructural projects, and the now-dominant China Panic.

Steven Spielberg’s Children is the first book to investigate children, childhood, and Spielberg’s employment of child actors together and in depth. Through lively readings of both the celebrated performances he elicits from his young stars as well as less discussed roles this book shows children to be key players in the director’s articulation of childhood since the 1970s.
 

Race and Place considers the everyday experiences of community members throughout the process of school desegregation and how race, place, and truth came to matter in this process in Prince George’s County, Maryland from 1945 through 1973.

Decolonial Care examines the relationship between the legacies of colonialism and the dynamics of caregiving that have emerged from the French Caribbean. Putting in dialogue postcolonial studies and care studies, this book elucidates how caring and uncaring have been historically shaped by colonialism and shows how media and narratives help develop decolonial approaches to care that sustain human life and livable environments.

An ethnography of factory accidents and their attendant reconstructive plastic surgeries in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, Connective Tissue explores notions of risk, work and labor practices, and the way meaning is made from experiences of trauma, care, and recovery. The book charts a chronology of the accident and its future impacts.

The Negotiation of Urgency ethnographically explores the everyday life of an Italian ER, where aging, economic precarity, draconian migration policies, hospital overcrowding, life and death, intersect daily. The analysis of the different, shifting ways in which triage operates and attention circulates in the ER illuminates the practical effects of the changing nature of welfare state in Italy, as elsewhere.

Amidst escalating social tensions in the 1980s, five comedic pioneers—Eddie Murphy, Paul Mooney, Keenen Ivory Wayans, Robert Townsend, and Arsenio Hall—revolutionized American comedy joining forces as Hollywood’s “Black Pack.” In The Black Pack, Artel Great delivers a comprehensive analysis of their work, exploring their success, creative strategies, defiance of systemic barriers, and enduring cultural legacy.

This edited volume brings together an exciting cross-regional inter-disciplinary group of scholars, scholar activists, artists and others. Each chapter focuses on a different form of “creative resistance” to the last two decades of social disconnection, increased income disparity and new burdens placed on reproductive labor and the environment taking place in China, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Korea. Each chapter demonstrates how individuals and communities across East Asia are making their stands in the everyday--focused on making more liveable presents and more possible futures.