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 351-400 of 2,599 items.

Authentically Jewish

Identity, Culture, and the Struggle for Recognition

Rutgers University Press

How do you know when someone or something is really, authentically Jewish?  This book argues that what is authentically Jewish is continually changing in response to historical and cultural developments, the shifting attributions of meaning that individuals make, and the negotiations that occur as different groups struggle for recognition.
 

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Unruly Souls

The Digital Activism of Muslim and Christian Feminists

Rutgers University Press

This book explores the intersectional feminist activism of young people within Islam and Evangelical Christianity. Deemed unruly souls due to their sexuality, gender, or race, these activists employ the creative tactics of digital media to seek justice and display their inherent value. The case studies demonstrate the overlaps between the hybrid identities of young Americans and the playful and interstitial aspects of digital media.
 

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Separate Paths

Lenapes and Colonists in West New Jersey

Rutgers University Press

Separate Paths: Lenapes and Colonists in West New Jersey is the first cross-cultural study of European colonization in the region south of the Falls of the Delaware River (now Trenton). In the 1670s, Quaker men and women sought to acquire all Lenape territory for their own use and to sell as real estate to new immigrants. Through epidemics that ravaged Lenape communities and the introduction of slavery to the colony, Quakers defied their prior experience of religious persecution and their principles of peaceful resolution of conflict and equality of everyone before God. Despite mutual commitment to peace by Lenapes, old settlers, and Friends, Quaker colonization had similar results to military conquests of Natives by English in Virginia and New England, and Dutch in the Hudson Valley and northern New Jersey.

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Mechanical Vibration

Theory and Application

Rutgers University Press

Mechanical Vibration: Analysis, Uncertainty, and Control presents the fundamental principles of mechanical vibration, including the theory of vibration and examples of the applications of these principles to practical engineering problems. Mechanical Vibration contains numerous new example problems with solutions to enable students to master the science of mechanical vibration.

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Jewish Lives under Communism

New Perspectives

Rutgers University Press

This volume provides new, groundbreaking views of Jewish life in the pro-Soviet bloc from the end of the Second World War until the collapse of Communism in late 1989 by recovering and analyzing the agency of Jews and their creativity in Communist Europe after the Holocaust. 

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Flooded

Development, Democracy, and Brazil’s Belo Monte Dam

Rutgers University Press

Flooded provides insights into the little-known effects of dam building through a close examination of Brazil’s Belo Monte hydroelectric facility, the fourth largest dam in the world. Klein tells the stories of dam-affected communities, such as fishermen and displaced urban residents, as well as their advocates, including activists, social movements, public defenders, and public prosecutors. This ground-level perspective shows how local democracy is at once strengthened and weakened by a rapid influx of government resources. In the midst of today’s climate crisis, Flooded showcases the challenges and opportunities of meeting increasing demands for energy in equitable ways.
 

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Fashionable Masculinities

Queers, Pimp Daddies, and Lumbersexuals

Rutgers University Press

Fashionable Masculinities explores the expression of masculinities through constructions of fashion, identity, style and appearance. Essays include musical pop sensation Harry Styles, rapper and producer “Puff Daddy” Sean Combs, lumbersexuals, spornosexuals, sexy daddies, and aging cool black daddies. This book interrogates and challenges the meaning of masculinities and the ways that they are experienced and lived. 

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Evidence of Things Not Seen

Fantastical Blackness in Genre Fictions

Rutgers University Press

Evidence of Things Not Seen is an interdisciplinary study of blackness in genre literature of the Americas. When mystery, romance, fantasy, mixed-genre, and science fiction writers center fantastical blackness, they make this expressive quality available to a broad audience that uses pop fictions’ imaginable vocabularies to reshape extra-literary realities. Ultimately, popular genres’ imaginable possibilities help us strategize ways that the made up can be made real.

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Contradictory Indianness

Indenture, Creolization, and Literary Imaginary

Rutgers University Press

As Contradictory Indianness endeavors to show, a postcolonial Caribbean aesthetics that has from its inception privileged inclusivity, interraciality, and resistance against Old World colonial orders requires taking into account Indo-Caribbean writers and their reimagining of Indianness in the region. This book’s unique contribution lies in an explicit privileging of Indo-Caribbean fiction as a creolizing literary imaginary to broaden its study beyond a narrow canon that has, inadvertently or not, enabled monolithic and unidimensional perceptions of Indian cultural identity and evolution in the Caribbean.

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Borders of Belief

Religious Nationalism and the Formation of Identity in Ireland and Turkey

Rutgers University Press

Why have modern nationalists built religious identity as the foundational signifier of nationality in an increasingly secular world? The cases of 20th century Ireland and Turkey reveal the answer: religious nationalism is not a knee-jerk reaction to secular modernization, but a tool that forges new and independent national identities.

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All for Beauty

Makeup and Hairdressing in Hollywood's Studio Era

Rutgers University Press

This book provides an industrial history that examines how and why makeup and hairdressing evolved as crafts in the studio era. Readers will never again watch Hollywood films without thinking about the roles of makeup and hairdressing in creating not just fictional characters but stars as emblems of an idealized and undeniably mesmerizing visual perfection.

 

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Abortion Care as Moral Work

Ethical Considerations of Maternal and Fetal Bodies

Edited by Johanna Schoen
Rutgers University Press

This anthology brings together the voices of abortion providers, counselors, clinic owners, neonatologists, bioethicists, and historians. Authors address the motivations that lead them to offer abortion care, discuss how anti-abortion regulations have made it increasingly difficult to offer feminist-inspired services, and ponder the ethical frameworks supporting abortion care and fetal research. 

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Janelle Monáe's Queer Afrofuturism

Defying Every Label

Rutgers University Press

This study of singer, actress, activist, and queer icon Janelle Monáe considers her as an intersectional figure who is actively reshaping discourses around race, gender, sexuality, and capitalism. Janelle Monáe’s Queer Afrofuturism is an exciting introduction to an audacious innovator whose work offers us fresh ways to talk about identity, desire, and power.

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A History of the Rutgers University Glee Club

Rutgers University Press

Commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Rutgers University Glee Club, this volume offers a comprehensive history, recounting the origins of the group’s most beloved traditions, while celebrating both the colorful, charismatic directors of the club and the dedicated, talented young men who have performed in it.

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Viral Frictions

Global Health and the Persistence of HIV Stigma in Kenya

Rutgers University Press

Viral Frictions explores how and why HIV-related stigma persists in the age of treatment. Based on a decade of fieldwork in a highway trading center in Kenya, Pfeiffer offers compelling stories of stigma as a lens for understanding broader social processes, the complexities of globalization and health, intersectionality, and their profound impact on the everyday social lives and relationships of people living through the ongoing HIV epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa.

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Uncanny Histories in Film and Media

Edited by Patrice Petro
Rutgers University Press

Uncanny Histories in Film and Media probes the uncanny as a mode of historical analysis. Whether writing about film movements, individual works, or the legacies of major or forgotten critics and theorists, the contributors challenge our inherited narratives to reveal a disturbance of what was once familiar in the histories of our field.
 

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Teenage Dreams

Girlhood Sexualities in the U.S. Culture Wars

Rutgers University Press

Teenage Dreams explores why girlhood sexual behaviors and identities became the focus of so much intense, divisive debate and discourse in the late-twentieth century and early twenty-first century US. In doing so, it reveals unexpected moral and political fluidity amongst culture wars actors, which challenge our understanding of this period of political turmoil as a whole.

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Redefining Multicultural Families in South Korea

Reflections and Future Directions

Rutgers University Press

Redefining Multicultural Families in South Korea: Reflections and Future Directions aims to reinvigorate contemporary discussions about Korean families that include immigrants by expanding the scope of what we consider to be multicultural families to include the families of undocumented migrant workers, divorced marriage immigrants, the families of Korean women with immigrant husbands, and by providing a nuanced look at their lives in Korea, not as newcomers but as first-generation immigrants.

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New Jersey Fan Club

Artists and Writers Celebrate the Garden State

Rutgers University Press

New Jersey Fan Club is an eclectic anthology featuring personal essays, interviews, photographs, and comics from a diverse group of writers and artists. An exploration of how the same locale can shape people in different ways, it will inspire readers to look at the Garden State with fresh eyes.

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New Jersey Fan Club

Artists and Writers Celebrate the Garden State

Rutgers University Press

New Jersey Fan Club is an eclectic anthology featuring personal essays, interviews, photographs, and comics from a diverse group of writers and artists. An exploration of how the same locale can shape people in different ways, it will inspire readers to look at the Garden State with fresh eyes.

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Importing Care, Faithful Service

Filipino and Indian American Nurses at a Veterans Hospital

Rutgers University Press

Drawing on rich ethnographic and survey data collected over a four-year period, Cherry’s study explores the role Catholicism plays in shaping the professional and community lives of foreign-born Filipino and Indian American nurses. Their stories provide unique insights into the often-unseen roles race, religion, and gender play in the daily lives of new immigrants employed in American healthcare. Seeing nursing as a religious calling, they care for their patients with a sense of divine purpose but must also confront the cultural tensions and disconnects between how they were raised and trained in another country and the legal separation of church and state. How they cope with and engage these tensions plays an important role in not only shaping how they see themselves as Catholic nurses, but their place in the new American story.
 

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Human Rights at Risk

Global Governance, American Power, and the Future of Dignity

Rutgers University Press

Human Rights at Risk brings together social scientists, legal scholars, and humanities scholars to analyze the policy challenges of human rights protection in the twenty-first century. The book focuses on international institutions, thematic blind spots in policy-making, and the role of the United States as a global and domestic actor in human rights protection.

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Human Rights at Risk

Global Governance, American Power, and the Future of Dignity

Rutgers University Press

Human Rights at Risk brings together social scientists, legal scholars, and humanities scholars to analyze the policy challenges of human rights protection in the twenty-first century. The book focuses on international institutions, thematic blind spots in policy-making, and the role of the United States as a global and domestic actor in human rights protection.

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Cultures of Resistance

Collective Action and Rationality in the Anti-Terror Age

Rutgers University Press

Cultures of Resistance brings new insight to a key question: do government efforts to repress social movements effectively repress dissent, or do they spur mobilization? Through analyses of activists’ experiences of repression and resistance, the book uncovers processes that shape how individuals understand the risks of participating in collective action. Reynolds-Stenson demonstrates how individual rationality is collectively constructed. 

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Citizens against Crime and Violence

Societal Responses in Mexico

Edited by Trevor Stack
Rutgers University Press

Citizens Against Crime and Violence considers societal responses to crime and violence in six contrasting localities of one of Mexico’s most affected regions, the state of Michoacán. The comparative ethnographic approach offers insights that are sensitive to local specifics but generalizable to other parts of the world affected by crime and violence.

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Branding Black Womanhood

Media Citizenship from Black Power to Black Girl Magic

Rutgers University Press

Branding Black Womanhood: Media Citizenship from Black Power to Black Girl Magic examines how corporate brands and media companies appropriated Black women's empowerment as a business enterprise. Beginning with the emergence of Essence magazine and continuing into the 2010s, Timeka N. Tounsel considers the affordances and limitations of media visibility and corporate attention.
 

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Between Brown and Black

Anti-Racist Activism in Brazil

Rutgers University Press

Afro-Brazilians are presented with a whole range of identity choices, from how to classify oneself to whether one votes for political candidates based on shared racial experiences. Between Black and Brown argues that Afro-Brazilian activists’ continued exploration of blackness confronts anti-blackness while complicating understandings of what it means to be black. This book raises complex questions about current black struggles in Brazil and beyond, including the black movements’ political initiatives and antiracist agenda.

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Activist Media

Documenting Movements and Networked Solidarity

Rutgers University Press

Drawing from his experiences as a documentary filmmaker with Black Lives Matter 5280 and Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 105 in Denver, Colorado, Gino Canella details how collaborative media projects can help activists mobilize supporters, amplify their campaigns for social justice, and foster solidarity among grassroots organizers.

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The Cancer Within

Reproduction, Cultural Transformation, and Health Care in Romania

Rutgers University Press

The Cancer Within examines cervical cancer in Romania as a point of entry into an anthropological reflection on contemporary health care. Fashioned by patriarchal relations, lived religion, and the historical trauma of pronatalism, Romanian women’s responses to reproductive medicine and cervical cancer prevention are complicated by neoliberal reforms to medical care.

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Stories That Bind

Political Economy and Culture in New India

Rutgers University Press

The book studies stories about India told through film, advertising, journalism, and popular non-fiction along with the stories narrated by political and corporate leaders to argue that Hindu nationalism and neoliberalism are conjoined in popular culture and that consent for this political economic project is crucially won in the domain of popular culture.

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Single Lives

Modern Women in Literature, Culture, and Film

Edited by Katherine Fama and Jorie Lagerwey; Afterword by Benjamin Kahan
Rutgers University Press

Inspired by the current public fascination with single women, Single Lives traces the relationship between modern and contemporary representations of single women. The original essays collected here analyze a broad range of texts that examine the ways films, cookbooks, archives, popular literature, and other British and American texts express norms, ideals, and challenges for single women and their relationship to dominant ideals of marriage and the family. This volume looks backwards to constellate existing scholarship, constituent fields, and unrecognized single voices and forward to consider new methods for interdisciplinary singles studies.

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New Deal Radio

The Educational Radio Project

Rutgers University Press

New Deal Radio examines the federal government's involvement in broadcasting during the New Deal period, looking at the U.S. Office of Education's Educational Radio Project. The book argues that this distinctive government commercial partnership amounted to a critical intervention in US broadcasting and an important chapter in the evolution of public radio in America.

 

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Janelle Monáe's Queer Afrofuturism

Defying Every Label

Rutgers University Press

This study of singer, actress, activist, and queer icon Janelle Monáe considers her as an intersectional figure who is actively reshaping discourses around race, gender, sexuality, and capitalism. Janelle Monáe’s Queer Afrofuturism is an exciting introduction to an audacious innovator whose work offers us fresh ways to talk about identity, desire, and power.

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High-Risk Feminism in Colombia

Women's Mobilization in Violent Contexts

Rutgers University Press

High-Risk Feminism in Colombia documents the experiences of four grassroots women’s organizations that united to demand gender justice during and in the aftermath of Colombia’s armed conflict. In doing so, the book illustrates a little-studied phenomenon: women whose experiences with violence catalyze them to mobilize and resist as feminists, even in the face of grave danger.

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Embodied Politics

Indigenous Migrant Activism, Cultural Competency, and Health Promotion in California

Rutgers University Press

Arguing for a structurally competent approach to migrant health, Embodied Politics shows how efforts to promote indigenous health may actually reinforce the same social and political economic forces, namely structural racism and neoliberalism, that are undermining the health of indigenous Oaxacans in Mexico and the United States.

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Embodied Economies

Diaspora and Transcultural Capital in Latinx Caribbean Fiction and Theater

Rutgers University Press

Embodied Economies compares works of Latinx Caribbean fiction and theater that explore the pitfalls and successes of economic upward mobility in diasporic communities. Each chapter compares two works in a counterpoint analysis that reveals the contradictions of using Latinx Caribbean culture to get ahead in the competitive fields of education, business, entertainment, and finance.

 

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Buyers Beware

Insurgency and Consumption in Caribbean Popular Culture

Rutgers University Press

Buyers Beware treats Caribbean pop cultural texts with the same critical attention as dominant mass cultural representations of the region to read them against the grain and consider how, and whether, their “pulp” preoccupation with contemporary fashion, music, sex, fast food, and television, is instructive for how race, class, gender, sexuality, and national politics are disseminated and consumed within the Caribbean.

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Cultivating Justice in the Garden State

My Life in the Colorful World of New Jersey Politics

Rutgers University Press

In this remarkable memoir, Raymond Lesniak reflects upon his life and career fighting for social justice in the Garden State. A must-read for anyone seeking to understand the inner workings of our political system, it offers a unique insider’s perspective on the past fifty years of New Jersey politics.

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The Holocaust & the Exile of Yiddish

A History of the Algemeyne Entsiklopedye

Rutgers University Press

This book tells the saga of the Yiddish-language general encyclopedia Algemeyne entsiklopedye (1932-1966) and the editors who continued to publish it even as they were sent into repeated exile and their world was utterly transformed by the Holocaust. It is not a story only about destruction and trauma, but also one of tenacity and continuity, as the encyclopedia’s compilers strove to preserve the heritage of Yiddish culture, to document its near-total extermination in the Holocaust, and to chart its path into the future.

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The Beats in Mexico

Rutgers University Press

The first book-length study of why the Beats were so fascinated by Mexico and how they represented its landscape, history, and mystical practices in their work, this volume examines such canonical figures as Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Lamantia, McClure, and Ferlinghetti, as well as lesser-known female Beat writers like Margaret Randall, Bonnie Bremser, and Joanne Kyger.

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Murder on the Mountain

Crime, Passion, and Punishment in Gilded Age New Jersey

Rutgers University Press

Charged with murdering her husband in 1879, Margaret Meierhofer became the last woman executed by the state of New Jersey. Murder on the Mountain considers all sides of this fascinating and mysterious true crime story, investigating how the case’s sensational details about domestic violence and female sexuality gripped the nation.

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Infected Empires

Decolonizing Zombies

Rutgers University Press

Infected Empires examines a central figure in contemporary apocalyptic film: the zombie. This creature reveals bloody truths about the human condition, the wounds of history, and methods of contending with them. Studying films from a transnational perspective, Infected Empires presents a vision of a global zombie that resists oppressive structures that racialize, marginalize, disable, and dispose of bodies.
 
 

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Global Health for All

Knowledge, Politics, and Practices

Rutgers University Press

Global Health for All is a deeply historical and ethnographically rich analysis of health at a global scale. It combines sixteen inquiries into actors, institutions, objects, and ideas at the centers and margins of global health, to give a uniquely collaborative account of health’s entanglement with development, science, and globalization. 

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Global Health for All

Knowledge, Politics, and Practices

Rutgers University Press

Global Health for All is a deeply historical and ethnographically rich analysis of health at a global scale. It combines sixteen inquiries into actors, institutions, objects, and ideas at the centers and margins of global health, to give a uniquely collaborative account of health’s entanglement with development, science, and globalization. 

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Equaliberty in the Dutch Caribbean

Ways of Being Non/Sovereign

Edited by Yvon van der Pijl and Francio Guadeloupe; Foreword by Linden F. Lewis; Epilogue by Anton Allahar
Rutgers University Press

Equaliberty in the Dutch Caribbean explores fundamental questions of equality and freedom on the various non-sovereign islands of the Dutch Caribbean. While this collection of essays recognizes the existence of nationalist independence movements, it challenges conventional assumptions about political non/sovereignty, opening a critical space to look at other forms of political articulation, autonomy, liberty, and a good life.

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Equaliberty in the Dutch Caribbean

Ways of Being Non/Sovereign

Edited by Yvon van der Pijl and Francio Guadeloupe; Foreword by Linden F. Lewis; Epilogue by Anton Allahar
Rutgers University Press

Equaliberty in the Dutch Caribbean explores fundamental questions of equality and freedom on the various non-sovereign islands of the Dutch Caribbean. While this collection of essays recognizes the existence of nationalist independence movements, it challenges conventional assumptions about political non/sovereignty, opening a critical space to look at other forms of political articulation, autonomy, liberty, and a good life.

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Childfree across the Disciplines

Academic and Activist Perspectives on Not Choosing Children

Rutgers University Press

Childfree across the Disciplines: Academic and Activist Perspectives on Not Choosing Children focuses on the relationship between childfreedom, social ideologies, and community activism. The authors ask (and frequently answer) the question: how do childfree people negotiate their subjectivity in a changing demographic, economic, media-saturated cultural landscape?
 

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Building Something Better

Environmental Crises and the Promise of Community Change

Rutgers University Press

Showing that it is possible to challenge social inequality and environmental degradation by refusing to continue business-as-usual, Building Something Better shares vivid case studies of small groups who are making a big impact by crafting alternatives to neoliberal capitalism. It offers both a call to action and a dose of hope in these troubled times.

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Here to Stay

Uncovering South Asian American History

Rutgers University Press

In Here to Stay, Geetika Rudra takes readers on a journey across the United States to unearth the little-known histories of South Asian Americans in the first half of the twentieth century. She shows how South Asians made a home for themselves in America, despite racist laws that only granted citizenship to European immigrants.

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War without Bodies

Framing Death from the Crimean to the Iraq War

Rutgers University Press

Thanks to the invention of photography and the telegraph descriptions and images of war have proliferated from the nineteenth century onward, yet wars continue to be fought. The way descriptions of war are framed blunts the impact of images of death and makes war an acceptable option by representing it as “war without bodies” therefore without casualties. Beginning with Crimean War, War Without Bodies traces the ways that death was framed in poetry, photography, video and video games up to and including the Iraq War.

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UBC Press is the Canadian agent for several international publishers. Visit our Publishers Represented page to learn more.