Checklist for Change
Making American Higher Education a Sustainable Enterprise
Hidden Chicano Cinema
Film Dramas in the Borderlands
This visual representation of New Mexico and its people is a fascinating study of how the region has been depicted in film from the dawn of early filmmaking and the silent era to today. Meléndez examines such films as Adventures in Kit Carson Land, The Rattlesnake, and Red Sky at Morning, among others, that have both educated and misinformed us about a state in our own midst that remains a “distant locale” to most white Americans.
Why Public Higher Education Should Be Free
How to Decrease Cost and Increase Quality at American Universities
Robert Samuels explains why universities cost so much and offers solutions as to how they can reduce their expenses by concentrating on their core mission of instruction and research. Not only can tuition be reduced, but public universities and colleges can be made free by allocating existing resources to provide quality undergraduate education and diminishing the amount of money spent in the areas of athletics, administration, and public research.
Mapping "Race"
Critical Approaches to Health Disparities Research
The essays in this unique book argue for the inclusion of race as a social construction in the design of large-scale data collection efforts and how scientists must utilize race in the context of specific research questions. This landmark collection concludes on a prescriptive note, providing an arsenal of multidisciplinary, conceptual, and methodological tools for studying race specifically within the context of health inequalities.
Mapping "Race"
Critical Approaches to Health Disparities Research
The essays in this unique book argue for the inclusion of race as a social construction in the design of large-scale data collection efforts and how scientists must utilize race in the context of specific research questions. This landmark collection concludes on a prescriptive note, providing an arsenal of multidisciplinary, conceptual, and methodological tools for studying race specifically within the context of health inequalities.
Killer Fat
Media, Medicine, and Morals in the American "Obesity Epidemic”
Killer Fatexamines how and why obesity emerged as a major public health concern and national obsession in recent years. Using primary sources and in-depth interviews, Boero enters the world of bariatric surgeries, Weight Watchers, and Overeaters Anonymous to show how common expectations of what bodies are supposed to look like help to determine what sorts of interventions and policies are considered urgent in containing this new kinds of disease.
Discipline and Indulgence
College Football, Media, and the American Way of Life during the Cold War
Discipline and Indulgence demonstrates how American popular culture during the early Cold War (1947–1964), especially college football, addressed the nation’s postwar affluence and consumerism and their effects on the population by integrating men into the economy of the Cold War as workers, warriors, and consumers. It assesses the period’s institutional linkage of sport, higher education, media and militarism and finds connections of contemporary sport media to today’s War on Terror.
Reel Vulnerability
Power, Pain, and Gender in Contemporary American Film and Television
Reel Vulnerability explores the way American popular culture thinks about vulnerability, arguing that our culture and our scholarship remain stubbornly invested in the myth of the helplessness of the female body. It examines the shifting constructions of vulnerability in the wake of the cultural upheavals of World War II, the Cold War, and 9/11, placing defenseless male bodies onscreen alongside representations of the female body in the military, in the interrogation room, and on the margins.
Jewish Families
Jonathan Boyarin explores a wide range of scholarship in Jewish studies to argue that Jewish family forms and ideologies have varied greatly throughout the times and places where Jewish families have found themselves. He considers a range of family configurations from biblical times to the twenty-first century, including strictly Orthodox communities and new forms of family, including same-sex parents, and suggests productive ways to think about possible futures for Jewish family forms.
Courting Justice
Ten New Jersey Cases That Shook the Nation
Ten cases decided between 1960 and 2011, including the Karen Ann Quinlan decision, the Baby M case, the Mount Laurel decision, Megan’s Law, and the series of decisions known as Abbott/Robinson that directed state funding of poor urban schools on par with suburban districts, shed light on landmark decisions and their impact on national and global events. Different experts cover each case, providing insight into the court’s approach and decision-making process.
New Jersey Politics and Government, 4th edition
The Suburbs Come of Age
This thoroughly updated fourth edition reflects the challenges New Jersey has overcome and those it continues to face. State politics and government have been almost entirely reshaped in recent decades, and those changes are analyzed in every chapter. It offers a comprehensive overview, covering New Jersey’s political history; campaigns and elections; interest groups; the constitution; the development of government institutions; relationships with neighboring states, the federal government, and its own municipalities and counties; tax and spending policies; and quality of life.
On-Demand Culture
Digital Delivery and the Future of Movies
On-Demand Culture is unique in its focus on the effects of digital technologies on movie distribution. It offers a compelling introduction to a world in which movies have become digital files and navigates through the complexities of digital delivery to show how new modes of access (online streaming services, digital downloads , DVD kiosks in grocery stores) are redefining how audiences obtain and consume motion picture entertainment and destabilizing the business of culture.
When Diversity Drops
Race, Religion, and Affirmative Action in Higher Education
Julie J. Park examines how losing racial diversity in a university affects the everyday lives of its students. She uses a student organization as a case study to show how reductions in racial diversity impact the ability of students to sustain multiethnic communities. The book contributes to our understanding of race and inequality in collegiate life and is a valuable resource for educators and researchers interested in the influence of racial politics on students’ lives.
The Phantom Holocaust
Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe
Focusing on work by both celebrated and unknown Soviet directors and screenwriters, this is the first book written about all Soviet narrative films dealing with the Holocaust from 1938 to 1991. In addition to studying the completed films, it analyzes the projects that were banned at various stages of production. Archival research and in-depth interviews are used to tell the stories of filmmakers who found authentic ways to represent the Holocaust in the face of official silencing.
Comrades in Health
U.S. Health Internationalists, Abroad and at Home
Ethnic Humor in Multiethnic America
David Gillota examines the ways in which contemporary comic works both reflect and participate in national conversations about race and ethnicity. Such well-known texts as Chappelle’s Show, South Park, and Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, as well as numerous stand-up comedy acts, children’s films, and situation comedies are analyzed to explore how various humorists respond to multiculturalism and the increasing diversity of the American population.
Domestic Negotiations
Gender, Nation, and Self-Fashioning in US Mexicana and Chicana Literature and Art
Domestic Negotiations explores how U.S. Mexicana and Chicana authors and artists across different historical periods and regions use domestic space to actively claim their own histories. Drawing from a range of archival sources and cultural productions, the book demonstrates how the very sites of domesticity are used to engage with the many political and recurring debates about race, gender, and immigration affecting the lives of Mexicanas and Chicanas from the early twentieth century to today.
Troubling Nationhood in U.S. Latina Literature
Explorations of Place and Belonging
This book examines the ways that recent U.S. Latina literature challenges popular definitions of nationhood and national identity. It explores the works of Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and Cuban American writers Denise Chavez, Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Esmeralda Santiago, and Himilce Novas to show how these texts argue for the legitimate belonging of Latino/as within U.S. borders and counter much of today’s anti-immigration rhetoric.
Do Babies Matter?
Gender and Family in the Ivory Tower
Do Babies Matter? is the first comprehensive examination of the relationship between family formation and the academic careers of men and women. The book draws on over a decade of research using unprecedented data resources, including the Survey of Doctorate Recipients, a nationally representative panel survey of PhDs in America, and multiple surveys of faculty and graduate students at the ten-campus University of California system.
Structural Intimacies
Sexual Stories in the Black AIDS Epidemic
Structural Intimacies brings together scholarship on the structural dimensions of the AIDS epidemic and the social construction of sexuality to address the continuing HIV epidemic in the Black population, It asserts that shifting forms of sexual stories, structural intimacies, are emerging and presents a compelling argument: in an era of deepening medicalization of HIV/AIDS, public health must move beyond individual-level interventions to community-level health equity frames and policy changes.