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.

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.

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.
 

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.

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.

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.

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.  

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.
 

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.