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Making Choices, Making Do is a comparative study of Black and white working-class women's survival strategies during the Great Depression. Based on analysis of employment histories and Depression-era interviews of 1,340 women in Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and South Bend and letters from domestic workers, Lois Helmbold discovered that Black women lost work more rapidly and in greater proportions. The benefits that white women accrued because of structural racism meant they avoided the utter destitution that more commonly swallowed their Black peers. When let go from a job, a white woman was more successful in securing a less desirable job, while Black women, especially older Black women, were pushed out of the labor force entirely. Helmbold found that working-class women practiced the same strategies, but institutionalized racism in employment, housing, and relief assured that Black women worked harder, but fared worse. Making Choices, Making Do strives to fill the gap in the labor history of women, both Black and white. The book will challenge the limits of segregated histories and encourage more comparative analyses

From Donald Trump in the U.S. to Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, and Narendra Modi in India, right-wing populist leaders have taken power in many parts of the world. While each country's populist movement is distinct, they are united by several key features, including the presence of a boastful strongman leader and the scapegoating of vulnerable populations, especially immigrants, people of color, LGBTQ people, and women. The Perils of Populism shows how a feminist lens can help diagnose the factors behind the global rise of right-wing populism and teach us how to resist the threat it presents to democracy. Featuring interdisciplinary essays about politics in the United States, the Middle East, Europe, and India from a variety of acclaimed theorists and activists, the volume contributes to a rapidly expanding literature on gender and the far right. Together, these chapters offer a truly intersectional analysis of the problem, addressing everything from how populism has thrived in a "post-truth" era to the ways it appeals to working-class voters looking for an alternative to neoliberalism. Yet the authors also find reasons to be hopeful, as they showcase forms of grassroots feminist activism that challenge right-wing populism by advocating for racial and economic justice

Twenty years ago, Margaret Mulrooney's history of the community of Irish immigrant workers at the du Pont powder yards, Black Powder, White Lace, was published to wide acclaim. Now, as much of the materials Mulrooney used in her research are now electronically available to the public, and as debates about immigration continue to rage, a new edition of the book is being published to remind readers of the rich materials available on the du Pont workers, and of Mulrooney's powerful conclusions about immigrant communities in America. Explosives work was dangerous, but the du Ponts provided a host of benefits to their workers. As a result, the Irish remained loyal to their employers, convinced by their everyday experiences that their interests and the du Ponts' were one and the same. Employing a wide array of sources, Mulrooney turns away from the worksite and toward the domestic sphere, revealing that powder mill families asserted their distinctive ethno-religious heritage at the same time as they embraced what U.S. capitalism had to offer

Presents a unique view of social problems and conflicts over urban space from the cab of an ambulance.While we imagine ambulances as a site for critical care, the reality is far more complicated. Social problems, like homelessness, substance abuse, and the health consequences of poverty, are encountered every day by Emergency Medical Services (EMS) workers. Written from the lens of a sociologist who speaks with the fluency of a former Emergency Medical Technician (EMT), Medicine at the Margins delves deeply into the world of EMTs and paramedics in American cities, an understudied element of our health care system. Like the public hospital, the EMS system is a key but misunderstood part of our system of last resort. Medicine at the Margins presents a unique prism through which urban social problems, the health care system, and the struggling social safety net refract and intersect in largely unseen ways. Author Christopher Prener examines the forms of marginality that capture the reality of urban EMS work and showcases the unique view EMS providers have of American urban life. The rise of neighborhood stigma and the consequences it holds for patients who are assumed by providers to be malingering is critical for understanding not just the phenomenon of non- or sub-acute patient calls but also why they matter for all patients. This sense of marginality is a defining feature of the experience of EMS work and is a statement about the patient population whom urban EMS providers care for daily. Prener argues that the pre-hospital health care system needs to embrace its role in the social safety net and how EMSs' future is in community practice of paramedicine, a port of a broader mandate of pre-hospital health care. By leaning into this work, EMS providers are uniquely positioned to deliver on the promise of community medicine.At a time when we are considering how to rely less on policing, the EMS system is already tasked with treating many of the social problems we think would benefit from less involvement with law involvement. Medicine at the Margins underscores why the EMS system is so necessary and the ways in which it can be expanded

Trying to Make It is R. V. Gundur's journey from the US-Mexico border to America's heartland, from America's prisons to its streets, in search of the true story of the drug trade and the people who participate in it. The book begins with the Paso del Norte, the sister cities of Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, which have been in the public eye as calls for securing the border persist. From there, it moves on to Phoenix, which was infamously associated with the drug trade through a series of kidnappings. Finally, it goes on to Chicago, which has been a lightning rod of criticism for the gangs and violence within it. Gundur highlights the similarities and differences that exist in the American drug trade within the three sites and how they relate to current drug trade narratives in the US. At each stop, the reader is transported to the city's historical and contemporary contexts of the drug trade and introduced to the individuals who have lived it. Drug retailers, street and prison gang members, wholesalers, and the law enforcement personnel who try to stop them offer readers a comprehensive look at how various illicit enterprises work together to supply the drugs that American users demand. Most importantly, through a combination of macro and micro level vantage points, and comparative analysis of three key sites in illicit drug operations, the stories in Trying to Make It remind us that the people involved in the drug trade, for the most part, do not deserve vilification. Far from being a seemingly uniform, wide-spread threat or an unlimited array of bogeymen and women, they are ordinary people, living ordinary lives, just trying to make it

Urban landscapes are complex spaces of sociocultural diversity, characterized by narratives of both conviviality and conflict. As people with multiple ethnicities and nationalities find their common destinies in thriving globalizing cities, social cohesiveness becomes more precarious as different beliefs, practices, ambitions, values, and affiliations intersect in close proximity, producing social tensions. Tensions in Diversity presents a multi-method comparative study that draws on the experiences of 140 residents of native and immigrant origin, community organizers, and municipal officers in three culturally diverse neighbourhoods of varying income levels in Los Angeles County. Using cognitive mapping analysis combined with data from interviews, surveys, and participant observation, this book explores how exactly coexistence is socio-spatially experienced and negotiated in daily life. Tensions in Diversity identifies the planning and design considerations that enable intercultural learning in the public places within diverse cities. In doing so, this book foregrounds urban space as an active force in shaping coexistence and convivial public environments

How diversity initiatives end up marginalizing Arab Americans and US Muslims One of Donald Trump's first actions as President was to sign an executive order to limit Muslim immigration to the United States, a step toward the "complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States" he had campaigned on. This extraordinary act of Islamophobia provoked unprecedented opposition: Hollywood movies and mainstream television shows began to feature more Muslim characters in contexts other than terrorism; universities and private businesses included Muslims in their diversity initiatives; and the criminal justice system took hate crimes against Muslims more seriously. Yet Broken argues that, even amid this challenge to institutionalized Islamophobia, diversity initiatives fail on their promise by only focusing on crisis moments.Evelyn Alsultany argues that Muslims get included through "crisis diversity," where high-profile Islamophobic incidents are urgently responded to and then ignored until the next crisis. In the popular cultural arena of television, this means interrogating even those representations of Muslims that others have celebrated as refreshingly positive. What kind of message does it send, for example, when a growing number of "good Muslims" on TV seem to have arrived there, ironically, only after leaving the faith? In the realm of corporations, she critically examines the firing of high-profile individuals for anti-Muslim speech—a remedy that rebrands corporations as anti-racist while institutional racism remains intact. At universities, Muslim students get included in diversity, equity, and inclusion plans but that gets disrupted if they are involved in Palestinian rights activism. Finally, she turns to turns to hate crime laws revealing how they fail to address root causes. In each of these arenas, Alsultany finds an institutional pattern that defangs the promise of Muslim inclusion, deferring systemic change until and through the next "crisis."

A lyrical portrait of a young Irish woman reinventing herself at the turn of the twentieth century in AmericaEllen O'Hara was a young immigrant from Ireland at the end of the nineteenth century who, with courage and resilience, made a life for herself in New York while financially supporting those at home. Hereafter is her story, told by Vona Groarke, her descendant, in a beautiful blend of poetry, prose, and history. In July 1882, Ellen O'Hara stepped off a ship from the West of Ireland to begin a new life in New York. What she encountered was a world of casual racial prejudice that characterized her as ignorant, dirty, and feckless, the butt of many jokes. From the slim range of jobs available to her she, like, many of her kind, found a position as a domestic servant, working long hours and living in to save on rent and keep. After an unfortunate marriage, Ellen determined to win financial security on her own, and eventually opened a boarding house where her two children were able to rejoin her. Vona Groarke builds this story from historical fact, drawing from various archives for evidence of Ellen. However, she also considers why lives such as Ellen's seem to leave such a light trace in such records and fills in the gaps with memory and empathetic projection. Ellen—scrappy, skeptical, and straight-talking—is the heroine of Hereafter, whose resilience animates the story and whose voice shines through with vivid clarity. Hereafter is both a compelling account of an incredible figure and a reflection on how one woman's story can speak for more than one life

Firsthand accounts of migrants who settled in Britain offer new insights into empire, belonging, migration, and diasporaHomeward Bound shines a light on a neglected aspect of twentieth-century migration history. It compares two groups of migrants—Southern Irish Protestants and the British in India—who "returned" to Britain from Ireland and India after independence in 1922 and 1947. By looking across national boundaries, Niamh Dillon explores both individual and collective narratives of imperial identity in the late British Empire and the prompts for return. For both groups, the success of national independence movements in the first half of the twentieth century was cataclysmic and prompted a large-scale migration to Britain. Between 1911 and 1926, the number of Protestants in the Irish Free State dropped from approximately 313,000 to 208,000, and much of the British population left India. Although these numbers are significant, these two groups have largely been ignored by historians and have not been compared before. Though instability in the new political order and lack of livelihood were determining factors in the decision to migrate, Dillon argues that Southern Irish Protestants and the British community in India "returned" to Britain after independence principally because these former elites no longer had a clearly defined role in the new post-colonial era. Return migrants chose Britain because of continuing connections with it as "home," but often found their colonial experience was not valued in a country re-orienting itself to the post-war order. Through interviews with those who experienced these events first-hand and the recently opened files of the Irish Grants Committee at the National Archives in Britain, this book offers new insights into the history of migration and the affinity these migrants felt with Britain and with the empire

An up-close account of policing during the Ferguson protests, providing insights from both police officers and members of the communityPolicing Unrest presents the frontline experiences of police officers during the intense three weeks of protest, vigils, looting, violence, and large civil demonstrations in and around Ferguson, Missouri, following the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by a police officer. Looking closely at the lived experiences of police officers and community residents, Tammy Rinehart Kochel raises important questions about police-community relations and the role of police as peacekeepers in support of social justice.Drawing on interviews with dozens of police personnel who policed the protests, Kochel offers insight into their shared experiences and provides compelling personal accounts of how they performed their jobs during the protest. The book covers a range of topics such as police-community relationships and community policing principles; how factors such as police subculture and organizational culture stacked up against social identity during this crisis; the role of an officer's characteristics, especially an officer's race, play in an officer's self-legitimacy; and the implications for police recruitment and training. Kochel's unique access allowed her to provide a balanced perspective on police officers' cynicism and public protests against police that were rampant in the year following Ferguson against the need to restore police-community relations and police legitimacy through increased transparency, accountability, and procedural justice. Policing Unrest explains how the Ferguson protests ushered in an era of police reform and reveals what it is like being a police officer facing public unrest, particularly in the wake of widely publicized incidents of police brutality around the country

In Poverty and Wealth in East Africa Rhiannon Stephens offers a conceptual history of how people living in eastern Uganda have sustained and changed their ways of thinking about wealth and poverty over the past two thousand years. This history serves as a powerful reminder that colonialism and capitalism did not introduce economic thought to this region and demonstrates that even in contexts of relative material equality between households, people invested intellectual energy in creating new ways to talk about the poor and the rich. Stephens uses an interdisciplinary approach to write this history for societies without written records before the nineteenth century. She reconstructs the words people spoke in different eras using the methods of comparative historical linguistics, overlaid with evidence from archaeology, climate science, oral traditions, and ethnography. Demonstrating the dynamism of people's thinking about poverty and wealth in East Africa long before colonial conquest, Stephens challenges much of the received wisdom about the nature and existence of economic and social inequality in the region's deeper past

In Visitation, Jennifer DeClue shows how Black feminist avant-garde filmmakers draw from historical archives in order to visualize and reckon with violence suffered by Black women in the United States. DeClue argues that these filmmakers—including Kara Walker, Kara Lynch, Tourmaline, and Ja'Tovia Gary—create spaces of mourning and reckoning rather than voyeurism and pornotropy. Through their use of editing, performance, and cinematic experimentation, these filmmakers intervene in the production of Blackness and activate new ways of seeing Black women and telling their stories. Theorizing these films as a form of conjure work, DeClue shows how these filmmakers raise the specters of Black women from the past and invite them to reveal history from their point of view. In so doing, Black feminist avant-garde filmmakers channel spirits that haunt archives and create cinematic arenas for witnessing Black women battling for survival during pivotal and exceedingly violent moments in US history.Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient

In Uncanny Rest Alberto Moreiras offers a meditation on intellectual life under the suspension of time and conditions of isolation. Focusing on his personal day-to-day experiences of the "shelter-in-place" period during the first months of the coronavirus pandemic, Moreiras engages with the limits and possibilities of critical thought in the realm of the infrapolitical—the conditions of existence that exceed average understandings of politics and philosophy. In each dated entry he works through the process of formulating a life's worth of thought and writing while attempting to locate the nature of thought once the coordinates of everyday life have changed. Offering nothing less than a phenomenology of thinking, Moreiras shows how thought happens in and out of a life, at a certain crossroads where memories collide, where conversations with interlocutors both living and dead evolve and thinking during a suspended state becomes provisional and uncertain

In a time of accelerating sea level rise and increasingly intensifying storms, the world's sandy beaches and dunes have never been more crucial to protecting coastal environments. Yet, in order to meet the demands of large-scale construction projects, sand mining is stripping beaches and dunes, destroying environments, and exploiting labor in the process. The authors of Vanishing Sands track the devastating impact of legal and illegal sand mining over the past twenty years, ranging from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean to South America and the eastern United States. They show how sand mining has reached crisis levels: beach, dune, and river ecosystems are in danger of being lost forever, while organized crime groups use deadly force to protect their illegal mining operations. Calling for immediate and widespread resistance to sand mining, the authors demonstrate that its cessation is paramount for not only saving beaches, dunes, and associated environments but also lives and tourism economies everywhere

Long awaited after No Future, and making queer theory controversial again, Lee Edelman's Bad Education proposes a queerness without positive identity—a queerness understood as a figural name for the void, itself unnamable, around which the social order takes shape. Like Blackness, woman, incest, and sex, queerness, as Edelman explains it, designates the antagonism, the structuring negativity, preventing that order from achieving coherence. But when certain types of persons get read as literalizing queerness, the negation of their negativity can seem to resolve the social antagonism and totalize community. By translating the nothing of queerness into the something of "the queer," the order of meaning defends against the senselessness that undoes it, thus mirroring, Edelman argues, education's response to queerness: its sublimation of irony into the meaningfulness of a world. Putting queerness in relation to Lacan's "ab-sens" and in dialogue with feminist and Afropessimist thought, Edelman reads works by Shakespeare, Jacobs, Almodóvar, Lemmons, and Haneke, among others, to show why queer theory's engagement with queerness necessarily results in a bad education that is destined to teach us nothing