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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, University of Delaware Press, and Templeton Press.
Reel Kabbalah
Jewish Mysticism and Neo-Hasidism in Contemporary Cinema
Reel Kabbalah studies representations of esoteric Jewish conceptual traditions known as Kabbalah and Hasidism in five important fictional films from the first decade of the twenty-first century. The book considers how film both stands in continuity with those traditions and modifies them in the New Age, often mystical vein of what is known as neo-Kabbalah and neo-Hasidism.
Performing the News
Identity, Authority, and the Myth of Neutrality
Performing The News: Identity, Authority, & the Myth of Neutrality explores how journalists from historically marginalized groups have felt pressure to conform when performing for audiences and are increasingly challenging restrictive, supposedly neutral forms of self-presentation. Through in-depth interviews, this book suggests ways to make journalism more inclusive and representative of diverse audiences
Looking for America on the New Jersey Turnpike, Second Edition
This classic work reveals the fascinating history, iconography, and people behind the twelve-lane behemoth we call the New Jersey Turnpike. Now a special updated and expanded edition examines how the road has changed in the past thirty-five years yet still epitomizes America at its very best and very worst.
Laboring in the Shadow of Empire
Race, Gender, and Care Work in Portugal
Laboring in the Shadow of Empire: Race, Gender and Care Work in Portugal examines the everyday lives of an African descendant care service workforce that labors in an ostensibly “anti-racial” Europe and against the backdrop of the Portuguese colonial empire. While much of the literature on global care work has focused on Asian and Latine migrant care workers, there is comparatively less research that explicitly examines African care workers and their migration histories to Europe. Sociologist Celeste V. Curington focuses on Portugal—a European setting with comparatively liberal policies around family settlement and naturalization for migrants. In this setting, rapid urbanization in the late twentieth century, along with a national push to reconcile work and family, have shaped the growth of paid home care and cleaning service industries.
Isle of Rum
Havana Club, Cultural Mediation, and the Fight for Cuban Authenticity
Focusing on Havana Club rum as a case study, Isle of Rum examines the ways in which western cultural producers, working in collaboration with the Cuban state, have assumed responsibility for representing Cuba to the outside world. Christopher Chávez focuses specifically on the role of advertising practitioners, musicians, filmmakers, and visual artists, who stand to benefit economically by selling an image of Cuba to consumers who desperately crave authentic experiences that exist outside of the purview of the marketplace.
Gender Play
Boys and Girls in School
A detailed and perceptive ethnography told with compassion and humor, Gender Play immerses readers in children’s everyday lives to examine the social interactions that shape their gender identities. This new edition contains an introduction by Michael A. Messner and Raewyn Connell that highlights the book’s innovative approach, and an afterword by C.J. Pascoe on its lasting legacy.
Decentering Epistemologies and Challenging Privilege
Critical Care Ethics Perspectives
This book discusses the ways care ethics contributes to the decentering of dominant epistemologies and to the challenging of privilege, and considers how to decenter care ethics itself via an encounter with non-Western philosophical traditions and alternative epistemologies. Written by scholars from different countries, disciplines and intellectual traditions, the volume offers original care ethics contributions on epistemic injustice, privileged irresponsibility, ecofeminism, settler colonialism, social movements such as BLM, and on various racialized and gendered inequities tied to care work.
Decentering Epistemologies and Challenging Privilege
Critical Care Ethics Perspectives
This book discusses the ways care ethics contributes to the decentering of dominant epistemologies and to the challenging of privilege, and considers how to decenter care ethics itself via an encounter with non-Western philosophical traditions and alternative epistemologies. Written by scholars from different countries, disciplines and intellectual traditions, the volume offers original care ethics contributions on epistemic injustice, privileged irresponsibility, ecofeminism, settler colonialism, social movements such as BLM, and on various racialized and gendered inequities tied to care work.
Blessings Beyond the Binary
Transparent and the Queer Jewish Family
Blessings Beyond the Binary: Transparent and the Queer Jewish Family brings together leading scholars to analyze and offer commentary on the groundbreaking streaming series Transparent. The book explores the show’s depiction of Jewish life, religion, and history, as well as Transparent’s scandals, criticisms, and how it fits and diverges from today’s transgender and queer politics.
My Race Is My Gender
Portraits of Nonbinary People of Color
My Race is My Gender is the first anthology by nonbinary writers of color to include photography and visual portraits, centering their everyday experiences of negotiating intersectional identities. Bringing together Black, Indigenous, Latine, and Asian perspectives, its six contributors share their personal stories of working for racial justice and the recognition of queer gender identities.
Locker Room Talk
A Woman’s Struggle to Get Inside
Melissa Ludtke offers a compelling account of her courtroom quest to do what her male sportswriter colleagues took for granted: to talk with players in Major League Baseball’s locker rooms. She reveals how, as a 26-year-old woman, she took MLB Commissioner Bowie Kuhn to federal court—and won.
Alien Soil
Oral Histories of Great Migration Newark
Alien Soil: Oral Histories of Great Migration Newark looks at Newark, New Jersey’s once proposed Krueger-Scott African-American Cultural Center and the oral history collection generated to be a part of the Center. The narrators in this oral history collection recount their lives in Newark, painting pictures of everyday urbanity while also providing insight into 20th century Black urban life more generally.
The Georgia of the North
Black Women and the Civil Rights Movement in New Jersey
The Georgia of the North is a compelling narrative about the little-known struggles that African American women, and their community, faced when they arrived in the Garden State by way of the Great Migration to 1954 as they laid the foundations of the American civil rights movement in the North in the process.
Soviet-Born
The Afterlives of Migration in Jewish American Fiction
How does being Soviet-born inflect one’s grasp of Jewishness in North America? Reading across the many English-language works by Soviet-born writers, Soviet-Born: The Afterlives of Migration in Jewish American Fiction demonstrates how these diasporic authors recast such pivotal literary themes as Eastern Europe, the Holocaust, communism, gender and intimacy, and migrant solidarities.
Latin* Students in Engineering
An Intentional Focus on a Growing Population
Latin* Students in Engineering examines the state of Latin* engineering education at present as well as considerations for policy and practice regarding engineering education aimed at enhancing opportunity and better serving Latin* students. The essays in this volume first consider, theoretically and empirically, the experiences of Latin* students in engineering education and then expand beyond the student level to focus on institutional and social structures that challenge Latin* students' success and retention.