Bold Ideas, Essential Reading since 1936.

Rutgers University Press is dedicated to the advancement and dissemination of knowledge for a wide range of readers. The Press reflects and extends the University’s core mission of research, instruction, and service. They enhance the work of their authors through exceptional publications that shape critical issues, spark debate, and enrich teaching. Core subjects include: film and media studies, sociology, anthropology, education, history, health, history of medicine, human rights, urban studies, criminal justice, Jewish studies, American studies, women's, gender, and sexuality studies, LGBTQ, Latino/a, Asian and African studies, as well as books about New York, New Jersey, and the region.

Rutgers also distributes books published by Bucknell University Press.

Showing 501-550 of 2,599 items.

Becoming Gods

Medical Training in Mexican Hospitals

Rutgers University Press

Becoming Gods is a vivid ethnography of how a cohort of doctors-in-training in the Mexican city of Puebla learn to become doctors. It illustrates the messy, complex, and nuanced nature of medical training, where trainees not only have to acquire a monumental number of skills but do so against a backdrop of strict hospital hierarchy and a crumbling national medical system that deeply shape who they are.

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At Ansha's

Life in the Spirit Mosque of a Healer in Mozambique

Rutgers University Press

At Ansha's takes the reader inside the spirit mosque of a female healer in Nampula, northern Mozambique. It is here that Ansha, a Makonde spirit healer, cures the resisting ailments of her patients, discloses pieces of her story of affliction and healing, and engages the borders of her world.
 

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Apocalypse Cinema

Rutgers University Press

Covering such films as MetropolisDr. StrangeloveContagion, and Avengers: Endgame, this book provides a lively overview of apocalypse cinema, including alien invasion movies, nuclear annihilation stories, and films where nature itself threatens humanity through climate change or deadly diseases.

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Precarity and Belonging

Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship

Rutgers University Press

Approaching mobility, precarity, and citizenship at once generates a critical exploration of the points of contact and friction and the potential politics of commonality between citizens and noncitizens. What does modern citizenship mean in a world of citizens, denizens, and noncitizens living under common conditions of labor and social precarity? Precarity and Belonging interrogates such binaries as citizen/noncitizen, and “legal”/“illegal” to explore the fluidity of the spectra of belonging.
 

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Precarity and Belonging

Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship

Rutgers University Press

Approaching mobility, precarity, and citizenship at once generates a critical exploration of the points of contact and friction and the potential politics of commonality between citizens and noncitizens. What does modern citizenship mean in a world of citizens, denizens, and noncitizens living under common conditions of labor and social precarity? Precarity and Belonging interrogates such binaries as citizen/noncitizen, and “legal”/“illegal” to explore the fluidity of the spectra of belonging.
 

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Martin Scorsese and the American Dream

Rutgers University Press

Exploring films as varied as Alice Doesn’t Live Here AnymoreTaxi DriverGoodfellasHugo, and The Wolf of Wall Street, this book is the first study of Martin Scorsese’s complex engagement with the American Dream—its charms, traps, and ambiguities.

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Mapping the Way from Teacher Preparation to edTPA® Completion

A Guide for Secondary Education Candidates

Rutgers University Press

This book is here to help teacher candidates not only survive the challenge of the edTPA®, but also thrive. Demystifying the language used in the performance assessment, it maps out precisely what steps aspiring secondary education teachers should take to ensure successful completion of the edTPA®
 

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Japan and American Children's Books

A Journey

By Sybille Jagusch; Foreword by Carla D. Hayden; Introduction by J. Thomas Rimer
Rutgers University Press

Drawing from the Library of Congress’s massive collection, this volume takes readers on a fascinating and informative journey through nearly 200 years of American children’s books and periodicals depicting life in Japan, from fanciful travelogues full of exotic stereotypes to serious works about wartime atrocities. Published by Rutgers University Press in association with the Library of Congress.

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Haunted Homes

Rutgers University Press

Looking at everything from classic movies like James Whale’s The Old Dark House to contemporary works like HereditaryThe Conjuring, and the Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House, Dahlia Schweitzer explores why haunted homes have become a prime stage for dramatizing anxieties about family, gender, race, and economic collapse.

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Haiti Fights Back

The Life and Legacy of Charlemagne Péralte

Rutgers University Press

Haiti Fights Back: The Life and Legacy of Charlemagne Péralte is the first US study of the politician and caco leader (guerrilla fighter) who fought against the US occupation of Haiti from 1915-1934. Alexis locates rare multilingual sources from both nations and documents Péralte’s political movement and citizens’ protests. The interdisciplinary work offers a new approach to studies of the US invasion period by documenting how Caribbean people fought back.

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Dying to Count

Post-Abortion Care and Global Reproductive Health Politics in Senegal

Rutgers University Press

Dying to Count explores how national and global population politics collide in Senegalese hospitals as health workers treat and document women who present with complications of abortion. Siri Suh’s ethnography illustrates political, economic, professional, and technological factors that jeopardize quality of and access to obstetric care in public hospitals despite national and global commitments to reproductive health.
 

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Dreams of Archives Unfolded

Absence and Caribbean Life Writing

Rutgers University Press

Dreams of Archives Unfolded: Absence and Caribbean Life Writing makes a significant contribution to studies of Caribbean literature by demonstrating that women’s autobiographical narratives published in the past twenty years are feminist epistemological projects that rework Caribbean studies’ longstanding commitment to creating counter-archives.

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Bollywood’s New Woman

Liberalization, Liberation, and Contested Bodies

Rutgers University Press

Bollywood’s New Woman examines the cinematic representations of the New Indian Woman in post-1990s Bollywood. The essays in this book explore the various dimensions and many avatars of this elusive and eternally transmuting figure that dominates post-liberalization popular Hindi cinema.

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Scarlet and Black, Volume Three

Making Black Lives Matter at Rutgers, 1945-2020

Rutgers University Press

The 250th anniversary of the founding of Rutgers University is a perfect moment for the Rutgers community to reconcile its past, and acknowledge its role in the enslavement and debasement of African Americans and the disfranchisement and elimination of Native American people and culture. 

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Scarlet and Black (3 volume set)

Rutgers University Press

The 250th anniversary of the founding of Rutgers University is a perfect moment for the Rutgers community to reconcile its past, and acknowledge its role in the enslavement and debasement of African Americans and the disfranchisement and elimination of Native American people and culture.

Scarlet and Black documents the history of Rutgers’s connection to slavery, which was neither casual nor accidental—nor unusual. Like most early American colleges, Rutgers depended on slaves to build its campuses and serve its students and faculty; it depended on the sale of black people to fund its very existence. 

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A COVID Charter, A Better World

Rutgers University Press

Using the examples of how the U.S., Britain, Mexico, and Colombia have responded to the COVID-19 crisis, Toby Miller investigates corporate, scientific, and governmental decision-making and their effects on disadvantaged local communities. He proposes a COVID charter calling for a new world, placing human lives above corporate profits.

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Folk Stories from the Hills of Puerto Rico / Cuentos folklóricos de las montañas de Puerto Rico

Edited by Rafael Ocasio
Rutgers University Press

This exciting new bilingual anthology gathers Puerto Rican folktales that were passed down orally for generations before being transcribed beginning in 1914 by the team of famous anthropologist Franz Boas. It includes stories about historical figures like pirate Roberto Cofresí, unique twists on “Snow White” and “Cinderella,” and beloved local characters like the kind cockroach Cucarachita Martina.
 

Esta nueva y emocionante antología bilingüe reúne cuentos populares puertorriqueños que se transmitieron oralmente durante generaciones antes de ser transcritos comenzando en 1914 por el equipo del famoso antropólogo Franz Boas. La colección incluye historias sobre personajes históricos como el pirata Roberto Cofresí, versiones criollas de “Blanca Nieves” y “Cenicienta” y otros queridos personajes locales como la amable cucaracha Cucarachita Martina.
 

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The Street

A Photographic Field Guide to American Inequality

Edited by Naa Oyo A. Kwate; By (photographer) Camilo José Vergara; Foreword by Darnell L Moore
Rutgers University Press

Using MacArthur fellow Camilo José Vergara’s intimate street photographs of Camden, New Jersey as reference points, the essays in this collection address everything from law enforcement to health care in order to analyze these images within the context of troubled histories and misguided policies that have exacerbated racial and economic inequalities.

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The Latinx Files

Race, Migration, and Space Aliens

Rutgers University Press

The Latinx Files: Race, Migration, and Space Aliens traces how Latinx science fiction writers are reclaiming the space alien from its xenophobic legacy in science fiction. It argues that the space alien is a vital Latinx figure preserving Latinx cultures by activating the myriad possible constructions of the space alien to represent race and migration.
 

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Playing with History

American Identities and Children’s Consumer Culture

Rutgers University Press

Examining cultural products geared towards teaching children American cultural identity, Playing With History highlights the changes and constancies in depictions of American identity since the advent of modern consumer society. The book examines political and ideological messages sold to children throughout the twentieth century through toys, dolls, books, and amusement parks.
 

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Pink and Blue

Gender, Culture, and the Health of Children

Rutgers University Press

In modern pediatric practice, gender matters. This volume seeks to understand the dialectical relationship between gender and the medical care of children by combining a historical perspective on gender and pediatrics with analyses of current debates and controversies in pediatric practice such as pediatric transgender medicine, HPV, neonatal intensive care, and more.

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Marriage, Gender and Refugee Migration

Spousal Relationships among Somali Muslims in the United Kingdom

Rutgers University Press

This ethical and poetical ethnography analyzes the upheavals to gender roles and marital relationships brought about by refugee migration to the UK. Unmoored from the socio-cultural norms that made them men and women, Somali migrants find "everything" to be "different, mixed up, upside down." The book finds that the most significant catalysts for challenging harmful gender practices are a combination of the welfare system and Islamic praxis.

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Life in a Cambodian Orphanage

A Childhood Journey for New Opportunities

Rutgers University Press

Combining detailed observations of children's daily life in a Cambodian orphanage with follow-up interviews of the same children after they have grown and left, this book shows how orphanages can be configured to meet children's developmental needs, providing evidence that they are not always bleak sites of deprivation and despair.

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Branding Brazil

Transforming Citizenship on Screen

Rutgers University Press

Branding Brazil examines a panorama of contemporary cultural productions including film, television, photography, and alternative media to explore the transformation of citizenship in Brazil. The book takes a multi-faceted approach, weaving media studies with politics and cinema studies to reveal that more than a marketing term or project emanating from the state, branding was a cultural phenomenon.

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Back to the Roots

Memory, Inequality, and Urban Agriculture

Rutgers University Press

Urban agriculture has become a critical domain for explorations of, and challenges to, the long standing and systemic inequalities that shape cities, neighborhoods, and the lives and life chances of their residents. Back to the Roots describes how urban farmers and gardeners reckon with the cultural meanings and material legacies of the past as they seek to create more just and equitable futures.
 

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American Hotel

The Waldorf-Astoria and the Making of a Century

Rutgers University Press

David Freeland explores how the Waldorf-Astoria hotel became an internationally recognized symbol of elegance and luxury while playing an essential role in New York’s rise as a world capital. Featuring such famous guests as Frank Sinatra, Martin Luther King, and Eleanor Roosevelt, the book examines how the hotel dealt with challenges like Prohibition, the Red Scare, and battles over social equality.

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All My Friends Live in My Computer

Trauma, Tactical Media, and Meaning

Rutgers University Press

All My Friends Live in my Computer combines personal stories, media studies, and interdisciplinary theories to examine case studies from unique segments of society. When people are traumatized, their worlds stop making sense, and this book explores how everyday people use social media to try and make a new world for themselves and others who are suffering.
 

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Securitizing Youth

Young People’s Roles in the Global Peace and Security Agenda

Edited by Marisa O. Ensor
Rutgers University Press

Securitizing Youth offers new insights on young people’s engagement in a wide range of contexts related to the peace and security field. It examines the challenges and opportunities faced by young women and men in their efforts to build more peaceful, inclusive, and environmentally secure societies.

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Securitizing Youth

Young People's Roles in the Global Peace and Security Agenda

Edited by Marisa O. Ensor
Rutgers University Press

Securitizing Youth offers new insights on young people’s engagement in a wide range of contexts related to the peace and security field. It examines the challenges and opportunities faced by young women and men in their efforts to build more peaceful, inclusive, and environmentally secure societies.

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The Guise of Exceptionalism

Unmasking the National Narratives of Haiti and the United States

Rutgers University Press

The Guise of Exceptionalism compares the historical origins of Haitian and American exceptionalisms. It also traces how exceptionalism as a narrative of uniqueness has shaped relations between the two countries, from their early days of independence through the contemporary period. As a social invention, it changes over time, but always within the parameters of its original principles.
 

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Not Your Mother's Mammy

The Black Domestic Worker in Transatlantic Women’s Media

Rutgers University Press

Not Your Mother’s Mammy examines how black artists, mostly women of the diaspora, many of them former domestics, reconstruct the black female subjectivities of domestics in black media. In doing so, they undermine and defamiliarize the reductive, one-dimensional images of black domestics as perpetual victims lacking voice and agency. In line with international movements like #MeToo and #timesup, the women in these stories demand to be heard.

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Not Your Mother's Mammy

The Black Domestic Worker in Transatlantic Women's Media

Rutgers University Press

Not Your Mother’s Mammy examines how black artists, mostly women of the diaspora, many of them former domestics, reconstruct the black female subjectivities of domestics in black media. In doing so, they undermine and defamiliarize the reductive, one-dimensional images of black domestics as perpetual victims lacking voice and agency. In line with international movements like #MeToo and #timesup, the women in these stories demand to be heard.

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Mixed-Race Superheroes

Rutgers University Press

Looking at such iconic heroes as Superman, Spider-Man, and The Hulk, alongside such lesser-studied characters as Valkyrie, Dr. Fate, and Steven Universe, the essays in this collection contend with the multitude of ways that mixed-race identity has been represented in superhero comics, films, television, and literature.

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Mixed-Race Superheroes

Rutgers University Press

Looking at such iconic heroes as Superman, Spider-Man, and The Hulk, alongside such lesser-studied characters as Valkyrie, Dr. Fate, and Steven Universe, the essays in this collection contend with the multitude of ways that mixed-race identity has been represented in superhero comics, films, television, and literature.

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From Residency to Retirement

Physicians' Careers over a Professional Lifetime

Rutgers University Press

 From Residency to Retirement tells the stories of twenty American doctors over the last half century, which saw a period of continuous, turbulent, and transformative changes to the U.S. health care system. The cohort’s experiences are reflective of the generation of physicians who came of age as Presidents Carter and Reagan began to focus on costs and benefits of health services.

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From Memory to History

Television Versions of the Twentieth Century

Rutgers University Press

Covering a range of beloved television series from M*A*S*H to Mad Men, this book explores how historical sitcoms and dramas have depicted earlier parts of the twentieth century, while still reflecting the concerns of their own era—including the Vietnam War, civil rights movements, changing gender roles, and technological advancements.

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Freedom’s Ring

Literatures of Liberation from Civil Rights to the Second Wave

Rutgers University Press

Freedom’s Ring examines the debate between “freedom” and “equality” in popular texts from the Black Power, anti-war/ counterculture, and women’s liberation movements of 1960s and 1970s. Its central finding is that although many struggled and died for it in the civil rights era, freedom (e.g., the vote, integrated bus rides, sex without consequences via the Pill) is ultimately free–costing officialdom little if anything to fully implement–while equality (with respect to jobs, salaries, education, housing, and health care) will forever be the much more expensive nut to crack.
 

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Disputing Discipline

Child Protection, Punishment, and Piety in Zanzibar Schools

Rutgers University Press

A visual and poetic exploration into the lives of Zanzibari children who negotiate the intersections of universalized and local children’s rights aspirations, Disputing Discipline shows how anti-corporal punishment programs in schools unintentionally compromise children’s well-being and asserts that children’s views and experiences can and should transform our understanding of child protection policy.

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Chasing the American Dream in China

Chinese Americans in the Ancestral Homeland

Rutgers University Press

Chasing the American Dream in China centers the stories of second-generation Chinese American professionals who “return” to their ancestral homeland to build careers. This book highlights complex issues of ethnic identity and belonging faced by Chinese Americans in both the United States and China as they position themselves as indispensable economic bridges between the world’s two greatest superpowers.

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Korean "Comfort Women"

Military Brothels, Brutality, and the Redress Movement

Rutgers University Press

Arguably the most brutal crime committed by the Japanese military during the Asia-Pacific war was the forced mobilization of 50,000 to 200,000 Asian women to military brothels to sexually serve Japanese soldiers. Korean “Comfort Women” explores Korean comfort women’s brutal experiences and their residual marriage, family, economic, and healthcare problems. It also examines the transnational redress movement, demonstrating that the Japanese government has tried to conceal the crime of sexual slavery by resolving the issue with money alone.  

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Learning to Love

Arranged Marriages and the British Indian Diaspora

Rutgers University Press

Learning to Love explores the everyday marriage narratives of the British-Indian diaspora. It unpacks the phenomenon of arranged marriages beyond its pejorative stereotypes by highlighting the diversity of interpersonal and emotional negotiations involved in their practice. Using in-depth ethnographic description, the book shows that far from being a homogeneous tradition, arranged marriages involve a variety of different matchmaking practices modified to suit modern diasporic identities.
 

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Toxic and Intoxicating Oil

Discovery, Resistance, and Justice in Aotearoa New Zealand

Rutgers University Press

When oil and gas exploration was expanding across Aotearoa, New Zealanders faced the typically distinct problems of oil spills, hydraulic fracturing, offshore exploration, climate fears, and disputes over unresolved Indigenous claims nearly simultaneously. Collectively, these grievances created the foundation for an organized civil society to construct and then magnify a comprehensive critical oil narrative--in dialogue, practice, and aspiration. Community advocates and socioecological activists mobilized for their health and well-being, for their neighborhoods and beaches, for Planet Earth and Planet Ocean, and for terrestrial and aquatic species and ecosystems. In this allied ethnography, quotes are used extensively to convey the tenor of some of the country’s most passionate and committed people. By analyzing the intersections of a social movement and the political economy of oil, Patricia Widener reveals a nuanced story of oil resistance and promotion at a time when many anti-drilling activists believed themselves to be on the front lines of the industry’s inevitable decline.
 

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The Divine Institution

White Evangelicalism's Politics of the Family

Rutgers University Press

The Divine Institution provides an ethnographic account of how a theology of the family came to dominate a white evangelical tradition in the post-civil rights movement United States, providing a theological corollary to Religious Right politics.

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Race and the Rhetoric of Resistance

Rutgers University Press

Continuing in the vein of his ever questioning the conventions of “race melodrama” through the lens of which so much American racial and cultural history and storytelling has been filtered, Ferguson’s final work conveys to the reader his sense of humor, warmth, and grace, while adding up to a serious, principled critique of much common scholarly and pedagogic practice. 
 

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Making the Right Choice

Narratives of Marriage in Sri Lanka

Rutgers University Press

Making the Right Choice is an intimate portrait of the politics of marriage and gender narrated through the life-histories of three generations of Sinhala-Buddhist families living in urban Sri Lanka. The book demonstrates that marriage is a privileged site to investigate questions about gendered selves, gendered agency, and modern subjectivities.
 

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Imagining Persecution

Why American Christians Believe There Is a Global War against Their Faith

Rutgers University Press

Many American Christians believe they belong to the most persecuted religious community in the world. This book provides a historical account of this way of imagining the world, evaluating the evidence used to support it, and reflecting upon its religious and political implications.
 

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Bodies Unbound

Gender-Specific Cancer and Biolegitimacy

Rutgers University Press

Bodies Unbound is a story about the relationship between bodies and gender. Drawing on the experiences of individuals whose bodies and gender identities don't match medical and social expectations, Piper Sledge explores how ideologies of gendered bodies shape medical care when medical professionals use their position of authority to dictate which combinations of bodies and genders are legitimate or not. 

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The Struggle of Non-Sovereign Caribbean Territories

Neoliberalism since the French Antillean Uprisings of 2009

Rutgers University Press

This essay collection examines the social upheaval that shook Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana, and Réunion in February and March of 2009, and the ways in which capital accumulation and centralization instantiated hierarchies of profit, capital accumulation, and economic exploitation in the wider non-sovereign Caribbean from Haiti to the Dutch Antilles to Puerto Rico.
 

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The Devil's Fruit

Farmworkers, Health, and Environmental Justice

Rutgers University Press

The Devil’s Fruit uses anthropology’s tool kit to examine farmworkers’ embodiment of toxic pesticides and social and workplace relationships in California’s agricultural industry. Rather than stopping at description and critique, Saxton explores how activist ethnographic methods and ethics align, conflict, and support ongoing struggles for farmworker health and environmental justice.

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Sex, Society, and the Making of Pornography

The Pornographic Object of Knowledge

Rutgers University Press

Pornographic films combine fantasy and real sex to create a unique genre of entertainment. This book explores how the making of pornographic films is a social process that draws on the fantasies, sexual scripts and sexual identities of performers, writers, directors, and editors to produce sexually exciting videos and movies.

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