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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.
Showing 1,041-1,080 of 2,552 items.
Job Loss, Identity, and Mental Health
Rutgers University Press
Sociologist Dawn R. Norris uses in-depth interviews to offer insight into the experience of losing a job—what it means for daily life, how the unemployed feel about it, and the process they go through as they try to deal with job loss and their new identities as unemployed people. Job Loss, Identity, and Mental Health is filled with insight into the identity crises that unemployment can trigger, as well as strategies to help the unemployed maintain their mental strength.
Taking Chances
The Coast after Hurricane Sandy
Edited by Karen M. O'Neill and Daniel J. Van Abs
Rutgers University Press
Bringing together leading researchers—including biologists, urban planners, utilities experts, and climatologists, among others—Taking Chances illuminates the reactions to the dangers revealed by Hurricane Sandy. Focusing on New Jersey, New York, and other hard-hit areas, the contributors explore whether Sandy has indeed transformed our perceptions of coastal hazards, if we have made radically new plans in response to Sandy, and what we think should be done over the long run.
Taking Chances
The Coast after Hurricane Sandy
Edited by Karen M. O'Neill and Daniel J. Van Abs
Rutgers University Press
Bringing together leading researchers—including biologists, urban planners, utilities experts, and climatologists, among others—Taking Chances illuminates the reactions to the dangers revealed by Hurricane Sandy. Focusing on New Jersey, New York, and other hard-hit areas, the contributors explore whether Sandy has indeed transformed our perceptions of coastal hazards, if we have made radically new plans in response to Sandy, and what we think should be done over the long run.
Junctures in Women's Leadership: Social Movements
Edited by Mary K. Trigg and Alison R. Bernstein
Rutgers University Press
The case studies in Junctures in Women’s Leadership: Social Movements introduce readers to twelve women from across the globe who have spearheaded a wide array of social movements, from gender equality to environmental justice. Examining how these women made sacrifices, asked critical questions, challenged injustice, and exhibited the will to act in the face of harsh criticism, these case studies also provide a unique window into the ways that women leaders make decisions at moments of struggle and historical change.
Junctures in Women's Leadership: Social Movements
Edited by Mary K. Trigg and Alison R. Bernstein
Rutgers University Press
The case studies in Junctures in Women’s Leadership: Social Movements introduce readers to twelve women from across the globe who have spearheaded a wide array of social movements, from gender equality to environmental justice. Examining how these women made sacrifices, asked critical questions, challenged injustice, and exhibited the will to act in the face of harsh criticism, these case studies also provide a unique window into the ways that women leaders make decisions at moments of struggle and historical change.
Junctures in Women's Leadership: Business
Edited by Lisa Hetfield and Dana M. Britton
Rutgers University Press
Junctures in Women’s Leadership: Business, features a diverse array of women corporate executives and entrepreneurs, both past and present, including Martha Stewart, Alice Waters, and Madam C.J. Walker. Each of the twelve case studies in this volume includes a compelling and instructive story of how a prominent woman in business handled a critical juncture or crisis in her career, presenting leadership lessons that will benefit readers regardless of gender.
Junctures in Women's Leadership: Business
Edited by Lisa Hetfield and Dana M. Britton
Rutgers University Press
Junctures in Women’s Leadership: Business, features a diverse array of women corporate executives and entrepreneurs, both past and present, including Martha Stewart, Alice Waters, and Madam C.J. Walker. Each of the twelve case studies in this volume includes a compelling and instructive story of how a prominent woman in business handled a critical juncture or crisis in her career, presenting leadership lessons that will benefit readers regardless of gender.
The Brooklyn Experience
The Ultimate Guide to Neighborhoods & Noshes, Culture & the Cutting Edge
By Ellen Freudenheim; Foreword by Steve Hindy
Rutgers University Press
The Brooklyn Experience, Ellen Freudenheim’s fourth comprehensive Brooklyn book, is the insider’s guide to this fun destination. Offering photos, itineraries, and forty-one neighborhood profiles from Coney Island to Williamsburg, the book showcases Brooklyn’s remarkable culinary, cultural, and artistic renaissance. Interviews with sixty luminaries capture Brooklyn today: meteoric gentrification, celebrities, mafia trials, artisanal cocktails, and fabulous shopping. A celebration of the vibrant new and gritty old Brooklyn, The Brooklyn Experience lists 800 cultural venues, mom-and-pops, and eateries.
Privacy and the Past
Research, Law, Archives, Ethics
Rutgers University Press
In Privacy and the Past, medical historian Susan C. Lawrence explores the impact of research ethics and increasing privacy concerns on the study of history, offering insight into what historians should do when they research, write about, and name real people in their work. Engagingly written and powerfully argued, this book is an important first step in preventing privacy regulations from affecting the historical record and the ways that historians help us understand ourselves.
Feeding the Future
School Lunch Programs as Global Social Policy
Rutgers University Press
Today 368 million children receive school lunches in 151 countries, in programs supported by state and national governments. In Feeding the Future, Jennifer Geist Rutledge investigates how and why states have assumed responsibility for feeding children, chronicling the origins and spread of school lunch programs around the world, from the postwar period to the present.
Trafficked Children and Youth in the United States
Reimagining Survivors
Rutgers University Press
Drawing on interviews with 140 children from countries all over the globe, Elzbieta M. Gozdziak debunks the myths and uncovers the realities of trafficked children. Trafficked Children in the United States offers insight into how the children see themselves, contrasting their viewpoint with the institutional focus on vulnerability and pathology. Gozdziak concludes that the services provided by institutions are in effect a one-size-fits-all, trauma-based model, one that ignores the diversity of experience among trafficked children.
Moment of Action
Riddles of Cinematic Performance
Rutgers University Press
Moment of Action delves into the mysteries of screen performance, revealing both the acting techniques and the technical apparatuses that coalesce in an instant of cinematic alchemy to create movie gold. Considering a range of acting styles while examining films as varied as Bringing Up Baby, Psycho, The Red Shoes, Godzilla, and The Bourne Identity, Murray Pomerance takes us on an innovative exploration of the nexus at which the actor’s keen skills spark and kindle the audience’s receptive energies.
Transforming the Academy
Faculty Perspectives on Diversity and Pedagogy
Edited by Sarah Willie-LeBreton
Rutgers University Press
Transforming the Academy brings together faculty members from many different backgrounds—male and female, cisgender and queer, immigrant and native-born, white, black, multiracial, and other—to examine the state of diversity within the American university. Whether describing challenging power dynamics within their classrooms or recounting protests that occurred on their campuses, the book’s contributors offer bracingly honest inside accounts of both the conflicts and the learning experiences that can emerge from being a representative of diversity.
Transforming the Academy
Faculty Perspectives on Diversity and Pedagogy
Edited by Sarah Willie-LeBreton
Rutgers University Press
Transforming the Academy brings together faculty members from many different backgrounds—male and female, cisgender and queer, immigrant and native-born, white, black, multiracial, and other—to examine the state of diversity within the American university. Whether describing challenging power dynamics within their classrooms or recounting protests that occurred on their campuses, the book’s contributors offer bracingly honest inside accounts of both the conflicts and the learning experiences that can emerge from being a representative of diversity.
Iron Dads
Managing Family, Work, and Endurance Sport Identities
Rutgers University Press
An accomplished triathlete and social scientist, Diana Tracy Cohen offers much insight into the effects of endurance-sport training on family, parenting, and the sense of self. Based in part on in-depth interviews with forty-seven triathletes and three prominent men in the race industry, Iron Dads explores the sacrifices that are required—both at home and at work—to cross an iron-distance finish line.
Public Interests
Media Advocacy and Struggles over U.S. Television
Rutgers University Press
Public Interests fills in a key part of the history of American social reform movements, revealing the impressive battles fought by groups like the NAACP, NOW, and the conservative Parents Television Council to shape both the nation’s television programming and its broadcasting policies. Allison Perlman takes us behind the scenes of several key regulatory fights, in the process vividly illustrating the resilience, flexibility, and diversity of media activist campaigns from the 1950s onward.
Coming of Age in Jewish America
Bar and Bat Mitzvah Reinterpreted
Rutgers University Press
The Jewish practice of bar mitzvah dates back to the twelfth century. Yet, as this new study reveals, the ritual has changed dramatically over time and now serves as a sometimes shaky bridge between the values of contemporary American culture and Judaic tradition. Interviewing over 200 individuals involved in bar and bat mitzvah ceremonies, from family members to religious educators to rabbis, Patricia Keer Munro presents a candid portrait of the conflicts that often emerge and the negotiations that ensue.
Child's Play
Sport in Kids' Worlds
Rutgers University Press
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.
Why Would Anyone Do That?
Lifestyle Sport in the Twenty-First Century
Rutgers University Press
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
Audiovisual Aesthetics in 1970s American Cinema
By Jay Beck
Rutgers University Press
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.
Planning Families in Nepal
Global and Local Projects of Reproduction
By Jan Brunson
Rutgers University Press
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.
Trans Studies
The Challenge to Hetero/Homo Normativities
Edited by Yolanda Martinez-San Miguel and Sarah Tobias
Rutgers University Press
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.
Trans Studies
The Challenge to Hetero/Homo Normativities
Edited by Yolanda Martinez-San Miguel and Sarah Tobias
Rutgers University Press
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.
Invisible Asians
Korean American Adoptees, Asian American Experiences, and Racial Exceptionalism
Rutgers University Press
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.
When Good Jobs Go Bad
Globalization, De-unionization, and Declining Job Quality in the North American Auto Industry
Rutgers University Press
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.
Catching a Case
Inequality and Fear in New York City's Child Welfare System
By Tina Lee
Rutgers University Press
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.
The Insecure City
Space, Power, and Mobility in Beirut
Rutgers University Press
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.
Labor of Love
Gestational Surrogacy and the Work of Making Babies
Rutgers University Press
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.
Extreme Cinema
The Transgressive Rhetoric of Today's Art Film Culture
By Mattias Frey
Rutgers University Press
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.
Borrowed Voices
Writing and Racial Ventriloquism in the Jewish American Imagination
Rutgers University Press
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
Mexican Labor in the Pacific Northwest
Rutgers University Press
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.
Abstinence Cinema
Virginity and the Rhetoric of Sexual Purity in Contemporary Film
Rutgers University Press
Abstinence Cinema tracks the surprising sex-negative turn that Hollywood films have taken, associating premarital sex with shame and degradation, while romanticizing traditional nuclear families, courtship rituals, and gender roles. Locating these regressive sexual politics in everything from Twilight to Taken to Superbad, Casey Ryan Kelly examines how these films echo the rhetoric of the evangelical abstinence-only movement, then analyzes how they are particularly disempowering to young women, who are judged strictly on the basis of their sexuality.
Matinee Melodrama
Playing with Formula in the Sound Serial
Rutgers University Press
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.
Girls Will Be Boys
Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908-1934
By Laura Horak
Rutgers University Press
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.
Girls Will Be Boys
Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908-1934
By Laura Horak
Rutgers University Press
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.
Shot on Location
Postwar American Cinema and the Exploration of Real Place
Rutgers University Press
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.
A Year in White
Cultural Newcomers to Lukumi and Santería in the United States
By C. Lynn Carr
Rutgers University Press
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.
Superstorm Sandy
The Inevitable Destruction and Reconstruction of the Jersey Shore
Rutgers University Press
Why do people build in areas open to repeated natural disasters? Drawing on a variety of insights from environmental sociology, Superstorm Sandy offers a wide-ranging look at the Jersey Shore both before and after this disaster, examining the many factors—such as cultural attachment, tourism revenues, and governmental regulation—that combined to create a highly vulnerable coastal region and that fueled the demand to rebuild.
The Methamphetamine Industry in America
Transnational Cartels and Local Entrepreneurs
Rutgers University Press
The result of a study stretching from small-town America to Mexican cartels, and from law enforcement officers and drug treatment workers to local dealers and users, this book tells the story of how methamphetamine markets evolved in the United States—and thrived, despite vigorous legal and law enforcement challenges. Through the eyes and words of dealers, users, police officers, and treatment workers, the authors produce a complex picture of the social operation, organization, and meaning of the meth industry in America.
American Catholic Hospitals
A Century of Changing Markets and Missions
Rutgers University Press
In American Catholic Hospitals, Barbra Mann Wall chronicles changes in Catholic hospitals during the twentieth century. Wall explores the Church's struggle to safeguard its religious values. As hospital leaders reacted to increased political, economic, and societal secularization, they extended their religious principles in the areas of universal health care and adherence to the Ethical and Religious Values in Catholic Hospitals, leading to tensions between the Church, government, and society. Wall undertakes unprecedented analyses of the gendered politics of post-Second Vatican Council Catholic hospitals, as well as the effect of social movements on the practice of medicine.
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