Reflections on the Pandemic: COVID and Social Crises in the Year Everything Changed is a collection of essays, poems, and artwork that captures the raw energy and emotion of 2020 from the perspective of the Rutgers University community. This book, through its rich and imaginative storytelling at the intersection of scholarly expertise and personal narrative brings readers into the hearts and minds of not just the Rutgers community, but the world.

Happy Days investigates how 1970s popular culture was obsessed with America’s past, but offered radically different interpretations of the same historical events and icons. Looking at representations of 1950s teenagers, the noir detective, America’s bicentennial, and neo-slave narratives, Benjamin Alpers examines how American history provoked both nostalgia and deep soul searching. 

As Premier of British Guiana, Forbes Burnham led the country to independence in 1966 and spent two decades as its head of state. This biography examines how he rose to power by combining nationalist rhetoric, socialist policies, and Pan-Africanist philosophies, leading to a rule that was frequently dictatorial and corrupt, yet also sometimes surprisingly progressive.  

Through their approximately $2.5 billion in donations each year to Israel, American Jews have profoundly impacted the direction of Israeli society. Checkbook Zionism uncovers how tensions over potential influence have been mediated and offers a new paradigm for evaluating philanthropic power sharing today.
 

Being Human: Political Modernity and Hospitality in Kurdistan-Iraq is a unique work of anthropological hospitality that draws on historical sources, eyewitness testimonies, perpetrator testimony, archival documents, trial records, artwork, novels, and poetry, to engage with one of political modernity’s acts of genocide in Iraq under the Iraqi Baʿth state.
 

Transpacific Cartographies examines how contemporary Chinese diasporic narratives address the existential loss of home for immigrant communities at a time of global precarity and amid rising Sino-US tensions. Melody Li argues that the characters in these stories create multilayered maps that transcend the territorial boundaries that make finding a home in foreign land a seemingly impossible task.

Between 1970 and 1985, lesbian, gay, and bisexual educators (LGB) formed communities and began advocating for a place of openness and safety for LGB people in America's schools. They fought for protection and representation in the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers in New York, Los Angeles and Northern California.

China and the Internet analyzes how Chinese activists, NGOs, and government offices have used the Internet to fight rural malnutrition, the digital divide, the COVID-19 pandemic, and other urgent problems affecting millions of people. It presents five theoretically-informed case studies of how new media have been used in interventions for development and social change, including how activists battled against COVID-19.

Between Care and Criminality examines Australian social welfare’s encounter with migration and marriage in an era of intensified border control. It offers an in-depth ethnographic account of how social welfare practitioners carry out a migrant-targeted social policy designed to prevent forced marriage in the aftermath of a 2013 law which criminalized the practice.

When Cowboys Come Home shows how World War II changed the ways men thought about their roles in American society. For three writers who served—James Jones, Stewart Stern, and Edward Field—the war taught that manhood didn’t have to be based on bravery and heroism, but could be defined by authenticity, sensitivity, and male camaraderie. Rebelling against the orthodoxies of their time, these veterans reimagined what roles a man could play and their work set the foundation for the revolutions of the sixties.
 

Watching While Black Rebooted: The Television and Digitality of Black Audiences examines what watching while Black means within an expanded U.S. televisual landscape. In this edition, media scholars return to television and digital spaces (those spaces relying on television structure) to think anew about what engages and captures Black audiences and users and why it matters.

Watching While Black Rebooted: The Television and Digitality of Black Audiences examines what watching while Black means within an expanded U.S. televisual landscape. In this edition, media scholars return to television and digital spaces (those spaces relying on television structure) to think anew about what engages and captures Black audiences and users and why it matters.