Is sport good for kids? Child’s Play presents a nuanced examination of this question, considering not only the physical impacts of youth athletics, but its psychological and social ramifications as well. The eleven original scholarly essays in this collection provide a probing look into how sports—in community athletic leagues, in schools, and even on television—play a major role in how young people view themselves, shape their identities, and imagine their place in society.

Focusing largely on triathlon and “extreme” mountain biking, sociologist Stephen C. Poulson offers a fascinating exploration of the new lifestyle sports, shedding light on why people find them so compelling. Drawing on interviews with competitors, on his own experience as a participant, and other materials, Poulson looks at the commodification of the new sports, the types of people who decide to participate, those most often excluded, and whether or not participation in lifestyle sport should always be considered “good” for athletes. 

Designing Sound demonstrates how Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman, and other groundbreaking American directors of the 1970s possessed not only visionary eyes, but also keen ears that enabled them to take cinematic sound design in innovative directions. Offering detailed case studies of key films and filmmakers, Jay Beck explores how sound design was central to the era’s experimentation with new modes of cinematic storytelling and aesthetic sensibilities, from the lyricism of Terrence Malick to the gritty realism of Martin Scorsese.   

Based on almost a decade of research in the Kathmandu Valley, Planning Families in Nepal offers a compelling account of Hindu Nepali women as they face conflicting global and local ideals regarding family planning. By examining family life as it unfolds over time, Jan Brunson delivers a fresh perspective on discussions of contraception, son preference, the joint family, and the inability of the concept “planning” to accurately describe conception and reproduction in a patrilocal family system. 

Written in the midst of a moment when transgender people are enjoying unprecedented visibility, this interdisciplinary essay collection brings together leading experts in the burgeoning field of Trans Studies to ask tough questions about what gender and embodiment mean in the twenty-first century. Both theoretically sophisticated and deeply grounded in real-world concerns, Trans Studies bridges the gap between activism and academia by offering examples of cutting-edge activism, research, and pedagogy.  

Written in the midst of a moment when transgender people are enjoying unprecedented visibility, this interdisciplinary essay collection brings together leading experts in the burgeoning field of Trans Studies to ask tough questions about what gender and embodiment mean in the twenty-first century. Both theoretically sophisticated and deeply grounded in real-world concerns, Trans Studies bridges the gap between activism and academia by offering examples of cutting-edge activism, research, and pedagogy.  

In Invisible Asians, Kim Park Nelson analyzes the processes by which Korean American adoptees have been rendered racially invisible, and how that invisibility facilitates their treatment as exceptional subjects within the context of American race relations and in government policies, including immigration law. Park Nelson connects this invisibility to the ambiguous racial positioning of Asian Americans in American culture, and explores the implications of invisibility for Korean adoptees as they navigate race, culture, and nationality. 

In When Good Jobs Go Bad, Jeffrey Rothstein looks at the impact of globalization on workers in the North American auto industry, revealing that globalization has had a deleterious effect on even the most valued of blue-collar jobs. Rothstein shows how the consolidation of the Mexican and U.S.-Canadian auto industries, the expanding number of foreign automakers in North America, and the spread of lean production have all undermined organized labor and harmed workers.

Based on extensive research into the child welfare system in New York City, Catching a Case reveals that, in the face of draconian budget cuts and a political climate that blames the poor for their own poverty, child welfare practices have become punitive, focused on removing children from their families and on parental compliance with rules. Rather than provide needed help for family problems, case workers often hold parents to standards almost impossible for working-class and poor parents to meet.

Providing a picture of what ordinary life is like for urban dwellers surviving sectarian violence, The Insecure City captures the day-to-day experiences of Beirut's war-torn landscape. Kristin Monroe takes urban anthropology in a new and meaningful direction, telling the story of traffic in the Middle East, showing that when people move through Beirut they are experiencing the intersection of citizen and state, of the more and less privileged, and, in general, the city’s politically polarized geography.

Drawn from extensive interviews with paid gestational surrogates, women employed to carry children who are not genetically their own, Labor of Love reveals the challenges they face as they deal with complicated medical procedures, delicate work-family balances, and tricky social dynamics. The book demonstrates the extent to which advances in reproductive technology are affecting all Americans, changing how we think about maternity, family, and the labor involved in giving birth.   

From Shortbus to Shame and from Oldboy to Irreversible, film festival premieres regularly make international headlines for their shockingly graphic depictions of sex and violence. Extreme Cinema draws from interviews with film festival programmers, distributors, critics, and directors to demonstrate how these seemingly transgressive films actually operate within a strict set of codes and conventions, translating global notoriety into success within a competitive marketplace, and perpetuating a system that runs on provocation.

In this provocative new study, Jennifer Glaser examines how racial ventriloquism became a hallmark of late twentieth-century Jewish-American fiction, as Jewish writers asserted that their own ethnicity enabled them to speak for other minorities. Considering works by everyone from Cynthia Ozick to Woody Allen to Michael Chabon, she demonstrates how Jewish-American fiction can help us understand the larger anxieties about identity, authenticity, and authorial voice that emerged in the wake of the civil rights movement.

Of Forests and Fields tells the story of the Mexican guest laborers, Tejano migrants, and undocumented immigrants who worked to transform the Pacific Northwest into the agricultural powerhouse it is today. Employing an innovative approach that traces the intersections between Chicana/o labor and environmental history, Mario Sifuentez reveals both the struggles and the many accomplishments of these workers, offering valuable historical precedents for understanding the activism of immigrant and migrant laborers in our own era.  

Covering everything from Batman to Zorro’s Fighting Legion, Matinee Melodrama is the first scholarly study of the cinematic adventure serial as a distinct artform, one that uniquely encouraged audience participation and imaginative play. It suggests that the serial’s incoherent plotting and reliance on formula, far from being faults, should be understood as some of its most appealing attributes, helping lay the groundwork for today’s blockbuster action movies, interactive videogames, and active fan cultures. 

Laura Horak spent a decade scouring film archives worldwide, and what she discovered could revolutionize our understanding of gender roles in the early twentieth century. Girls Will Be Boys examines over 400 examples of women dressed as men in American films made between 1908 and 1934, revealing that Cross-Dressed women were once viewed as wholesome and used to lend respectability to the fledgling film industry. 

Laura Horak spent a decade scouring film archives worldwide, and what she discovered could revolutionize our understanding of gender roles in the early twentieth century. Girls Will Be Boys examines over 400 examples of women dressed as men in American films made between 1908 and 1934, revealing that Cross-Dressed women were once viewed as wholesome and used to lend respectability to the fledgling film industry. 

Renowned film scholar R. Barton Palmer explores the historical, ideological, economic, and technical developments that led Hollywood filmmakers of the late 1940s and 1950s to increasingly head outside the studio and capture footage of real places. Examining works ranging from Sunset Blvd. to The Searchers, Shot on Location discovers the massive influence that wartime newsreels had on the postwar Hollywood film, as the blurring of the formal boundaries between cinematic journalism and fiction lent a “reality effect” to otherwise implausible stories. 

In Santería, entrants into the priesthood undergo an extraordinary fifty-three-week initiation period. In A Year in White, sociologist C. Lynn Carr—who underwent this initiation herself—offers a wealth of insight into this remarkable year-long religious transformation. Carr draws on in-depth interviews, many online surveys, and nearly a decade of her own ethnographic fieldwork, shedding light not only on Santería, but on religion in general.