On War gathers together some of the finest writing on that troubling subject published in Raritan between 2003 and 2022. The editors, Jackson Lears and Karen Parker Lears, have selected work that typifies Raritan’s wide-ranging sensibility--focusing on a topic that is aesthetically rich, intellectually challenging, and morally disturbing. It is also all too timely.
 

The Twilight of Rome’s Papal Nobility is an intimate look at an ancient papal family who grew up accustomed to almost unimaginable wealth, power, and glamour. A tender elegy to a bygone era, this book offers a first-hand account of late nineteenth-century Italy’s social upheavals as the family’s vast private villa is divided up into public lands.

Taking over a century’s worth of yearbooks from his alma mater, Salinas High School, as a historical archive, acclaimed sociologist Michael A. Messner discovers a not-so-distant time when all the cheerleaders were boys and nearly equal attention was paid to boys’ and girls’ sports. In the process, he explores the changing meanings of high school athletics.
 

Say Her Name: Centering Black Feminism and Black Women in Sports offers an in-depth look into the lived experiences of Blackgirlwomen as athletes, activists, and everyday people through a Black feminist lens. With so much research on race centered on Black men and gender research focusing on white women, Say Her Name offers a necessary conversation that places Blackgirlwomen at the center of discussion.
 

Islamists in a Zionist Coalition explores a political drama that shocked Israel and the world in 2021: the decision of an Islamist party to join a Zionist coalition, and its elevation to the position of "king-maker" in Israeli politics. Based on analyses of hundreds of texts and exclusive interviews, it uncovers the religious and political origins of a development that will greatly impact Israeli society in years to come.
 

Films That Spill takes up a previously understudied moment in 1980s underground culture in New York City called Cinema of Transgression, offering both a microhistory of the intermingling art, music, performance, and film scenes of the time and a glimpse into their afterlives.
 

Based on analyses of literature and oral histories of children of survivors, At Home with the Holocaust reveals how the material conditions of survivor-family homes, along with household practices and belongings, rendered these homes as archives of trauma that in turn traumatized the children of Holocaust survivors.

Ronald C. Kramer applies theories from criminology to argue that possession of nuclear weapons is a criminal act and shows how a nuclear apocalypse might be averted, offering a pathway to the abolition of these devastating weapons. 

Caribbean Inhospitality juxtaposes the Caribbean’s reputation for being hospitable to foreigners with the alienation of the Caribbean citizen-subject from nations they call home. Reading literary, cinematic, and digital texts, Natalie Lauren Belisle demonstrates that this inhospitality is institutionalized through the aesthetic, reproducing itself in the laws that condition belonging and membership in the Caribbean nation-state. 

This volume brings together feminist reflections on the transnational lives of memorializations to colonial, imperial, militarized, and state violence. It asks what’s at stake in memorializing amidst and against ongoing harm and injustice produced by white supremacist global capitalist empire.

This volume brings together feminist reflections on the transnational lives of memorializations to colonial, imperial, militarized, and state violence. It asks what’s at stake in memorializing amidst and against ongoing harm and injustice produced by white supremacist global capitalist empire.

Labs of Our Own demonstrates the perils and possibilities that emerge from experiments in democratizing science. The book ultimately intervenes in stale debates for and against science by arguing against uncritical excitement for democratic science and instead for critical science literacy and feminist tinkering as third ways forward.

Dancing for Their Lives delves into the world of retired Chinese “dancing grannies” who seek fulfillment amid broad social transformation. Based on ethnographic research, it challenges conventional narratives of aging by portraying old age as a site of innovation. It examines how retirees navigate changing norms and offers insights on resilience and meaning in later life that resonate globally.

A recurrent and popular setting in American cinema, the dressing room has captured the imagination of audiences for over a century. In the only book-length study of the space, Desirée J. Garcia explores how dressing rooms are dynamic realms in which a diverse cast of performers are made and exposed.

This book provides a savvy investigation of the supervillains that appear in superhero comics. Exploring villainous archetypes and Otherness in relation to the notion of evil, the book investigates how supervillains uphold and solidify but also trouble hegemonic ideals expressed by the heroism of superheroes.
 

In Strength Through Diversity, Barry M. Goldenberg traces the inspiring, uncharted history of Harlem Prep, a unique multicultural institution that became an educational phenomenon in the iconic Black neighborhood of Harlem and nationwide. From 1967 to 1974, Harlem Prep sent to college many hundreds of students who had previously been labeled as “dropouts,” demonstrating how a multicultural educational program centered on diversity can provide a blueprint for schools today.

Rewriting Television suggests that it is time for a radical overhaul of television studies. It offers a new model for doing television (or film, or media) studies through the synthesis of production studies, screenwriting studies and “writing otherwise”. With a focus on form, story and voice, this book is an opportunity to imagine our work, and the work of others, differently.
 

The essays in this collection expand the definition of catastrophe to include not only events like pandemics, hurricanes, and wildfires but also slower-moving phenomena that have equally disastrous long-term consequences—like environmental degradation and structural racism. This book is a feminist intervention that challenges the binary between public and private, personal and political.

The essays in this collection expand the definition of catastrophe to include not only events like pandemics, hurricanes, and wildfires but also slower-moving phenomena that have equally disastrous long-term consequences—like environmental degradation and structural racism. This book is a feminist intervention that challenges the binary between public and private, personal and political.

Moving Blackness explores the centrality of circulation within the framework of western modernity and the racially structured regulations of mobility. Storytelling emerges as the primary mode through which blackness is conveyed: it serves as a means of circulating the lived experiences of being Black while also functioning as acts of resistance and solidarity performed by blackened individuals who were (once) colonized and enslaved.

In the years between the Soviet collapse and the Russo-Ukrainian war, Russia went from persecuting believers to jailing irreligionists, while Ukraine solidified religious pluralism and tolerance. The book richly documents and explains the development of this contrast while offering an original theoretical and methodological perspective on desecularization (the resurgence of religion’s societal role).

In this text, the Black Sporting Resistance Framework (BSRF) is introduced to examine how resistance actions in and through sport have contributed to the advancement of local and global racial justice efforts. Key concepts such as African (Black) diaspora, transnationalism, internationalism, sporting resistance typology, and sport activism typology are presented.

A critical and historical study of Ben Hecht’s forgotten controversial plays championing Jewish causes during the World War II era. Includes the full texts of four works - We Will Never Die (1943), A Jewish Fairy Tale (1944), A Flag is Born (1946), and The Terrorist (1947) - which are republished here for the first time along with production details and full performance histories.
 

Looking at the US, New Zealand, and Central America, this book considers how cultural politics has been deeply reworked in our contemporary media environment. The authors analyze how rampant technological convergence has allowed stories to spill across media platforms as well as geographical borders, and how those stories re-emerge as transmediated events.                            

The Future of Youth Violence Prevention: A Mixtape for Practice, Policy, and Research focuses on innovative approaches to youth violence prevention that utilize consistent principles found within existing best practices but are dynamic and adaptable across settings – and the socio-historical and cultural realities of those settings. 

Reclaiming Haiti's Futures traces the experiences of two generations of Haitian returned scholars who envisioned and sought to enact new worlds after crisis. An ethnography of the future, the book pursues concerns of home, belonging, and emplacement beyond coloniality’s fractures and displacements. These concerns ever more pressing amid overlapping crises that are displacing and enclosing the prospects of many, especially those living in post-colonial (outer) peripheries like Haiti.

This innovative visual ethnography examines diverse forms of self-reference and metareference that appear in Latin American graffiti art. Focusing on graffiti scenes from São Paulo, Brazil and Santiago in Chile, Chandra Morrison Ariyo shows how practitioners use metagraffiti features to influence public perceptions about this artform and its effect on the urban environment.

Imprisoned Minds tells the stories of men in prison that few people ever hear. Six gripping, first-person narratives of unimaginable childhood trauma and neglect set the men on a pathway for prison or death. We finally hear their stories because the author is in prison alongside them—incarcerated for life at the age of 21. 
 

Who makes films and television shows? How do those people make a living in Hollywood? Hollywood Unions tells the stories of the unions and guilds that have organized and negotiate on behalf of motion picture and television labor: the DGA, IATSE, SAG-AFTRA, and WGA.

Who makes films and television shows? How do those people make a living in Hollywood? Hollywood Unions tells the stories of the unions and guilds that have organized and negotiate on behalf of motion picture and television labor: the DGA, IATSE, SAG-AFTRA, and WGA.

Grieving Pregnancy compares contemporary American Catholic and Japanese Buddhist memorial practices focused on miscarriage, stillbirth, and abortion. Maureen L. Walsh demonstrates that while the memorial practices confront the same basic problem—that is, pregnancy loss—they conceive of the problem in different terms, and as a result, propose distinct responses to it.

A ghost story rich in mystery and life lessons, God's Waiting Room takes readers on a day-long tour of a tropical nursing home to hear stories of older white people and the younger Black nurses who care for them, showing how people formerly primed to be enemies find grace despite the odds.

 

This book features the voices of 50 primary caregivers of autistic and neurodivergent children who illuminate the process through which lay women become expert caregivers to provide the best care for their children. Expert caregiving captures an intensification of traditional family carework – meeting dependents’ financial, emotional, and physical needs – that transcends the walls of one’s private home and family and challenges the strict boundaries between many worlds: lay and professional, family and work, private and public, medical and social, and individual and society. 

Transformed States offers a timely history of the politics, ethics, medical applications and cultural representations of the biotechnological revolution, from the Human Genome Project to the Covid-19 pandemic. In exploring the entanglements of mental and physical health in an age of biotechnology, it views the post-Cold War 1990s as the horizon for understanding the intersection of technoscience and culture in the early twenty-first century.

Rutgers University has come a long way since it was granted a royal charter in 1766. It migrated from a parsonage in Somerville, to New Brunswick-sited The Sign of the Red Lion tavern, to stately Old Queens, expanding northward along College Avenue, and beyond. Replete with more than 500 campus images, Rutgers, Then and Now offers stunning pictorial and historical evidence of what it was then, side by side, with what it is today, a vital hub for research and beloved home for students.
 

Crisis leadership—which takes account of leading before, during, and after crisis—is an imperative for leaders at all levels. Often relegated as an afterthought in crisis scholarship and practice, the ability to navigate the post-crisis period can distinguish highly effective leaders and organizations. This book introduces a research-informed framework for this critical, and often neglected, phase of crisis leadership.

Syphilis, AIDS, and COVID disprove any belief that scientific discoveries have ended the period of acute epidemic diseases that once defined 19th century life and replaced them with chronic cardiovascular diseases and cancers. Today, we cope with a greater array of epidemics than those who lived during the 19th century, even though we have the biomedical means to control them. Our cumulative experience with epidemic diseases, together with our attempts to eliminate them, remains a continued component of our existence.

Making the Human grapples with the interactions between narrative, materiality, and Asian American racialization. Examining contemporary debates over the role of Asian Americans in affirmative action, media representation, police brutality, and public health discourses, Sugino argues media and cultural narratives about Asian Americans shape contemporary ideas about humanity, justice, family, and nation in ways that naturalize hierarchy.