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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 151-200 of 2,557 items.
Ways of Belonging
Undocumented Youth in the Shadow of Illegality
Rutgers University Press
Ways of Belonging examines the experiences of undocumented young people who are excluded from K–12 education in Canada. Through rich ethnographic descriptions, this book vividly shows how ambivalence and invisibility shape both the lives of young people and institutional attitudes toward them.
The Truth That Never Hurts 25th anniversary edition
Writings on Race, Gender, and Freedom
Rutgers University Press
Barbara Smith has been doing groundbreaking work since the early 1970s, describing a Black feminism for Black women. This collection contains some of her major essays on Black women's literature, Black lesbian writing, on racism in the women's movement, Black-Jewish relations, and homophobia in the Black community. Her forays into these areas ignited dialogue about topics that few other writers were addressing at the time, and which, sadly, remain pertinent to this day. This 25th anniversary edition, in a beautiful new package, retains the urgency these essays had when they were first written.
The Sounds of Furious Living
Everyday Unorthodoxies in an Era of AIDS
Rutgers University Press
The Sounds of Furious Living seeks to understand the AIDS activist tradition, identifying the historical currents out of which it arose. Embracing a patient-centered, social historical lens, it traces historic shifts in popular understanding of health and perceptions of biomedicine through the 19th and 20th centuries to explain the lasting appeal of unorthodox health activism into the modern era. In asking how unorthodox health activism flourished during the 20th century’s last major pandemic, Kelly also seeks to inform our understanding of resistance to biomedical authority in the setting of the 21st century’s first major pandemic: COVID-19. As a deeply researched portrait of distrust and disenchantment, The Sounds of Furious Living helps explain the persistence of movements that challenge biomedicine’s authority well into a century marked by biomedical innovation, while simultaneously posing important questions regarding the meaning and metrics of patient empowerment in clinical practice.
The Round Dance
A Novel
Rutgers University Press
A tender, poetic coming-of-age tale drawn from author Carmine Abate’s childhood in the village of Carfizzi, The Round Dance transforms southern Italy into a magical realist wonderland that rivals Gabriel García Márquez’s Macondo. A multicultural masterpiece inspired by ancient Albanian oral traditions, publisher Mondadori named it among the one hundred greatest Italian novels of the twentieth century.
The Brodsky Center at Rutgers University
Three Decades, 1986-2017
Edited by Ferris Olin
Rutgers University Press
The Brodsky Center at Rutgers: Three Decades, 1986-2017, chronicles the history and artists involved with an internationally acclaimed print and papermaking studio at Rutgers University. Judith K. Brodsky conceived, founded, and directed the atelier, which, from its onset, provided state-of-the-arts technology and expertise for under-represented contemporary artists — women, Indigenous, and from diasporas of the African, Eastern European, Latin and Asian communities — to make innovative works on paper. These artistic creations presented new narratives to American and global visual arts from voices previously not heard or seen.
Playful Frames
Styles of Widescreen Cinema
By Steven Rybin
Rutgers University Press
Playful Frames: Styles of Widescreen Cinema studies the poetics of the auteur-driven widescreen image, offering nimble, expansive analyses of the work of four distinctive filmmakers – Jean Negulesco, Blake Edwards, Robert Altman, and John Carpenter – who creatively inhabited the nooks and crannies of widescreen moviemaking during the final decades of the twentieth century.
Home Girls, 40th Anniversary Edition
A Black Feminist Anthology
Edited by Barbara Smith
Rutgers University Press
Home Girls, the pioneering anthology of Black feminist thought, feaures writing by Black feminist and lesbian activists on topics both provocative and profound. Since its initial publication in 1983, it has become an essential text on Black women's lives and contains work by many of feminisms foremost thinkers. This edition features an updated list of contributor biographies and an all-new preface that provides Barbara Smith the opportunity to look back on forty years of the struggle, as well as the influence the work in this book has had on generations of feminists. The preface from the previous Rutgers edition remains, as well as all of the original pieces, set in a fresh new package.
Home Girls, 40th Anniversary Edition
A Black Feminist Anthology
Edited by Barbara Smith
Rutgers University Press
Home Girls, the pioneering anthology of Black feminist thought, feaures writing by Black feminist and lesbian activists on topics both provocative and profound. Since its initial publication in 1983, it has become an essential text on Black women's lives and contains work by many of feminisms foremost thinkers. This edition features an updated list of contributor biographies and an all-new preface that provides Barbara Smith the opportunity to look back on forty years of the struggle, as well as the influence the work in this book has had on generations of feminists. The preface from the previous Rutgers edition remains, as well as all of the original pieces, set in a fresh new package.
Bridge and Tunnel Boys
Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, and the Metropolitan Sound of the American Century
By Jim Cullen
Rutgers University Press
Exploring the surprising parallels between Long Islander Billy Joel and Asbury Park, NJ native Bruce Springsteen, cultural historian Jim Cullen places their music within a longer tradition of the New York metropolitan sound. By recombining classic influences in unique ways, each man created music that appealed to wide audiences in a rapidly changing America.
AntoloGaia
Queering the Seventies, A Radical Trans Memoir
By Porpora Marcasciano; Translated by Francesco Pascuzzi and Sandra Waters; Foreword by Sara Galli and Mohammad Javad Jamali
Rutgers University Press
AntoloGaia offers a vivid first-hand account of the rise of the gay liberation movement in Italy, revealing how it was intimately intertwined with other forms of left-wing activism. Porpora Marcasciano conveys both the heartbreak of living through an era of institutionalized homophobia and the queer joy of encountering Italy’s unique gay and trans communities.
An Age of Accountability
How Standardized Testing Came to Dominate American Schools and Compromise Education
By John L. Rury
Rutgers University Press
An Age of Accountability highlights the role of test-based accountability as a policy framework in American education. Even after very clear disappointments no other policy framework has emerged to challenge its hegemony, and many Americans continue to believe that accountability remains a vital necessity, even if educators and policy scholars disagree.
Staging a Comeback
Broadway, Hollywood, and the Disney Renaissance
Rutgers University Press
Drawing on original archival research and interviews, Peter C. Kunze offers a revisionist account of the Disney Renaissance that foregrounds the role of theatrically-trained talent in revitalizing Disney Animation. In so doing, he situates this impressive turnaround at the intersection of two dynamic entertainment industries with a long, underexamined relationships, Hollywood and Broadway.
Race and Police
The Origin of Our Peculiar Institutions
By Ben Brucato
Rutgers University Press
In the United States, race and police were founded along with a capitalist economy dependent on the enslavement of workers of African descent. Race and Police builds a critical theory of American policing by analyzing a heterodox history of policing, drawn from the historiography of slavery and slave patrols. Beginning by tracing the historical origins of the police mandate in British colonial America, the book shows that the peculiar institution of racialized chattel slavery originated along with a novel, binary conception of race. On one side, for the first time Europeans from various nationalities were united in a single racial category. Inclusion in this category was necessary for citizenship. On the other, Blacks were branded as slaves, cast as social enemies, and assumed to be threats to the social order.
Polish Jewish Culture Beyond the Capital
Centering the Periphery
Rutgers University Press
This book highlights the modernity of Polish Jewish culture through its literature, poetry, film, cabaret, theater, architecture, the visual arts, and music in urban centers large and small. The contributors expertly reassert the belonging of Jews in Polish lands and showcase the multivalent texture of Polish Jewish cultural production before World War II.
Policing Victimhood
Human Trafficking, Frontline Work, and the Carceral State
Rutgers University Press
Policing Victimhood analyzes semi-structured interviews with 54 service providers in the Midwestern US, a region that, though colloquially understood as “flyover country,” regularly positions itself as a leader in state-level anti-trafficking policies and collaborative networks. These frontline workers’ perceptions and narratives are informed by their interpersonal, day-to-day encounters with exploited or trafficked persons. Their insights underscore how anti-trafficking policies are put into practice and influenced by specific ideologies and stereotypes. Extending the reach of street-level bureaucracy theory to anti-trafficking initiatives, Corinne Schwarz demonstrates how frontline workers are uniquely positioned to perpetuate or radically counter punitive anti-trafficking efforts.
On the Turtle's Back
Stories the Lenape Told Their Grandchildren
Rutgers University Press
On the Turtle’s Back is the first collection of folklore from the Lenape people, New Jersey’s native inhabitants. Originally compiled by anthropologist M. R. Harrington over a century ago, but never published until now, it shares the tribe’s cherished tales about the world’s creation, epic heroes, and ordinary human foibles.
Migrants Who Care
West Africans Working and Building Lives in U.S. Health Care
Rutgers University Press
As the U.S. population ages, and as health care needs become more complex, demand for paid care workers in home and institutional settings has increased. Migrants Who Care draws attention to the reserve of immigrant labor that is called upon to meet this need, telling the little-known story of a group of English-speaking West African immigrants who have become central to the U.S. health and long-term care systems.
Metamorphosis
Who We Become after Facial Paralysis
Rutgers University Press
Imagine losing the ability to smile. After suffering permanent facial difference, Faye Linda Wachs finds a community of people reconstructing identity while coping with what she terms a social disability. By detailing personal accounts and interviews of those facing microaggressions and internal disruptions to communication, Metamorphosis explores the process of reconstructing the self.
Mainstreaming Gays
Critical Convergences of Queer Media, Fan Cultures, and Commercial Television
By Eve Ng
Rutgers University Press
Mainstreaming Gays examines a key transitional period linking the eras of legacy and streaming, when queer production and interaction was transformed by the emergence of digital media, the rising influence of fan cultures, and increasing interest in LGBTQ content. It is critical reading for those interested in media production, fandom, subcultures, and LGBTQ digital media.
Ideal Beauty
The Life and Times of Greta Garbo
Rutgers University Press
Ideal Beauty reveals the woman behind the Garbo mystique, a tough negotiator who used her newfound power in Hollywood to develop a distinctly new feminist screen persona. Examining how she was an icon who helped to define female beauty in the twentieth century, the book also considers Garbo’s spiritual and sexual exploration away from the camera’s glare.
Chinese Marriages in Transition
From Patriarchy to New Familism
By Xiaoling Shu and Jingjing Chen
Rutgers University Press
Chinese Marriages in Transition documents the nuanced and multidirectional nature of the transformations in Chinese marriage, gender roles, and family. Using complex and large-scale historical national data as well as comprehensive data from multiple countries, Xiaoling Shu and Jingjing Chen demonstrate that Chinese new familism consists of values both old and new.
The Prism of Human Rights
Seeking Justice amid Gender Violence in Rural Ecuador
Rutgers University Press
The Prism of Human Rights illustrates how women’s human rights campaigns have taken off in rural Ecuador. Drawing on two decades of research and activism, Friederic shows how the initial promises of legal empowerment often give way to self-blame, social isolation, and more extreme structural violence, and she demonstrates how one rural community is renegotiating beliefs about gender, the family, the meaning of violence, and even community development.
The Outcast
A Novel
Rutgers University Press
A tale of false accusations, social stigma, and adultery, The Outcast is an early masterwork from Nobel Prize–winning Italian author Luigi Pirandello. Combining elements of Zolaesque naturalism with emerging modernist aesthetics, the novel is notable for its deft use of irony and its resourceful and resilient heroine.
The Cyborg Caribbean
Techno-Dominance in Twenty-First-Century Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican Science Fiction
Rutgers University Press
The Cyborg Caribbean examines twenty-first-century Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican science fiction, showing how it negotiates legacies of techno-colonialism and techno-authoritarianism. It traces histories of four different technologies—electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), nuclear weapons, space exploration, and digital avatars—that have transformed corporality and humanity in the Caribbean.
Oh, Serafina!
A Fable of Ecology, Lunacy, and Love
Rutgers University Press
Newly translated into English, Giuseppe Berto’s 1973 novel Oh, Serafina! is a whimsical fable of ecology, lunacy, and love. One of the first environmentally-conscious works of Italian literature, it questions the destructive effects of industrial capitalism, the many forms spirituality might take, and the ways our society defines madness.
Maid for Television
Race, Class, Gender, and a Representational Economy
By L. S. Kim
Rutgers University Press
Maid for Television examines the racialized female domestic by tracing the maid’s representational and narrative function in American television. As domestic service has been a long-standing occupation for women of color, the figure of the maid in the employer’s home is a recurrent and patterned image, simultaneously enacting and revealing the nexus of race, class, and gender hierarchies in American culture.
Islam and Me
Narrating a Diaspora
Rutgers University Press
In Islam and Me, Shirin Ramzanali Fazel tells her story of being a Somali immigrant in Italy and shares the experiences of other Muslim women in southern Europe. She reveals the common prejudices they encounter and explores how Italy might reimagine its national culture and identity to become more diverse, inclusive, and anti-racist.
City of Men
Masculinities and Everyday Morality on Public Transport
Rutgers University Press
How do men experience gender in the city? Through descriptions of autorickshaw and taxi operators and their interactions with traffic police and commuters in Kolkata, India, this book highlights the gendered logics of cooperation and everyday morality through which masculinities take up space in cities.
Calling Family
Digital Technologies and the Making of Transnational Care Collectives
By Tanja Ahlin
Rutgers University Press
How do digital technologies shape how people care for each other and, through that, who they are? Calling Family explores how digital devices shape elder care at a distance and how it should be done in order to be considered good. Through Tanja Ahlin's ethnographic fieldwork among families of migrating nurses from Kerala, India, this book aspires to uncover the subtle workings of digital technologies beyond seeing them as tools of communication.
Black Women in Latin America and the Caribbean
Critical Research and Perspectives
Rutgers University Press
This volume collects intellectual work by and about Black women while shedding light on the socio-political conditions that shape their participation and leadership in political struggles for citizenship rights and resources. Additionally, this volume explores the role of the social sciences in documenting anti-Black violence and forging hemispheric struggles against that violence.
Asian American History
By Huping Ling
Rutgers University Press
A comprehensive survey, Asian American History places Asian immigration to America in international and domestic contexts, and explores the significant elements that define Asian America: imperialism and global capitalist expansion, labor and capital, race and ethnicity, immigration and exclusion, family and work, community and gender roles, assimilation and multiculturalism, panethnicity and identity, transnationalism and globalization, and new challenges and opportunities. It is an up-to-date and easily accessible resource for high school and college students, as well as anyone who is interested in Asian American history.
Stepping Away
Returning to the Faculty After Senior Academic Leadership
By Lisa Jasinski; Foreword by Leo M. Lambert
Rutgers University Press
Senior leadership transitions in higher education are inevitable. Given their ubiquity, those who work in colleges and universities share the responsibility to make these changing of the guard moments beneficial both for institutions and leaders. Moving beyond the well-worn cliché of "stepping down," Stepping Away identifies policies that institutions, administrators, chairs, and members of governing boards can enact as leaders assume a new place in the social architecture of their campus.
Murder Town, USA
Homicide, Structural Violence, and Activism in Wilmington
Rutgers University Press
Far too many poor Black communities struggle with gun violence and homicide. The result has been the unnatural contortion of Black families and the inter-generational perpetuation of social chaos and untimely death. Young people are repeatedly ripped away from life by violence, while many men are locked away in prisons. In neighborhoods like those of Wilmington, Delaware, residents routinely face the pressures of violence, death, and incarceration. Murder Town, USA is thus a timely ethnography with an innovative structure: the authors helped organize fifteen residents formerly involved with the streets and/or the criminal justice system to document the relationship between structural opportunity and experiences with violence in Wilmington's Eastside and Southbridge neighborhoods.
Defiant Bodies
Making Queer Community in the Anglophone Caribbean
Rutgers University Press
Defiant Bodies: Making Queer Community in the Anglophone extends the discourse on Caribbean sexuality, queerness, and trans experiences by focusing on several moments of community-making across the Anglophone Caribbean -- Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago -- including legal challenges against Caribbean laws, drag pageantry, kinship formations, and a co-opting of mainstream urban nightclubs and bars. These offer readers new ways to understand the creative and complicated ways that queer Caribbean people are responding to the dominant sexual politics in the region. They also reveal how queer people are envisioning transgressive ways of existing despite the various forms of violence that they face.
Bishops and Bodies
Reproductive Care in American Catholic Hospitals
By Lori Freedman; Foreword by Debra Stulberg
Rutgers University Press
Four out of the ten largest U.S. health care systems follow the policies of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops that forbid abortion, sterilization, and related treatments in their hospitals. Drawing on rich interviews with patients and providers, Bishops and Bodies shows how these opaque restrictions conflict with medical standards, producing unjust and unequal reproductive care.
Between Self and Community
Children’s Personhood in a Globalized South Korea
By Junehui Ahn
Rutgers University Press
Between Self and Community investigates the early childhood socialization process in a rapidly changing, globalizing South Korea. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in a South Korean preschool, it examines how both children and teachers interactively navigate, construct, and reconstruct their own multifaceted and sometimes conflicting models of “a good child” amid Korea’s shifting educational and social contexts.
Aspiring in Later Life
Movements across Time, Space, and Generations
Rutgers University Press
While aspirations are most often connected to younger people, this volume argues that people do not stop aspiring in older age. Aspiring in Later Life brings together rich ethnographic cases from different regions of the world, offering original insights into how aspirations are pursued over the course of life and in contexts of globalization and mobility.
This book is also freely available online as an open-access digital edition.
This book is also freely available online as an open-access digital edition.
Aloha Compadre
Latinxs in Hawai'i
Rutgers University Press
Aloha Compadre is the first study to examine the collective history and contemporary experiences of the Latinx population of Hawaiʻi. It reveals that contrary to popular discourse, Latinx migration to Hawaiʻi is not a recent event. From the early 1830s to the present, Latinx communities have been a part of the cultural landscape of Hawaiʻi prior to annexation, territorial status, and statehood.
Dead Funny
The Humor of American Horror
Rutgers University Press
Covering everything from the use of slapstick in Final Destination to the comedy of awkwardness in Get Out, Dead Funny locates humor as a key element in the American horror film. It explores how the genre uses physical comedy, parody, satire, and camp to comment on gender, sexuality, and racial politics.
Rockin' in the Ivory Tower
Rock Music on Campus in the Sixties
Rutgers University Press
Historian James Carter takes a close look at how the rock music of the 1960s played an integral role in the lives of American college students. He traces connections between rock fandom and the civil rights protests, free speech activism, radical ideas, lifestyle transformations, and anti-war movements that revolutionized universities.
Risk and Adaptation in a Cancer Cluster Town
By Laura Hart
Rutgers University Press
Risk and Adaptation in a Cancer Cluster Town examines the role of emotion and its relationship to community experiences of social belonging and inequality. Using a cancer cluster community in Northwest Ohio as a case study, Laura Hart advances an approach to risk that grapples with the complexities of community belonging in the wake of suspected industrial pollution. Her research points to a fear driven not only by economic anxiety, but also by a fear of losing security within the community—a sort of pride that is not only about status, but connectedness. Hart reveals the importance of this social form of risk—the desire for belonging and the risk of not belonging—ultimately arguing that this is consequential to how people make judgements and respond to issues. Within this context, affected families experience psychosocial and practical conflicts as they adapt to cancer as a way of life. Hart ultimately presents possibilities for the democratization of risk management and underscores the need for transformative approaches to environmental justice.
Race and Role
The Mixed-Race Asian Experience in American Drama
Rutgers University Press
Race and Role: The Mixed-Race Asian Experience in American Drama explores the shifting identities of multiracial Asian figures in theater, and through theater’s generative power, exposes the absurd tenacity with which society clings to a tenuous racial scaffolding.
Mary Climbs In
The Journeys of Bruce Springsteen's Women Fans
By Lorraine Mangione and Donna Luff
Rutgers University Press
Mammography Wars
Analyzing Attention in Cultural and Medical Disputes
Rutgers University Press
Mammography is a routine health screening performed 40 million times each year in the United States, yet it remains one of the most deeply contested topics in medicine. In Mammography Wars, sociologist Asia Friedman uses the sociology of attention to map the cognitive structure of the “mammography wars.”
Inside the Circle
Queer Culture and Activism in Northwest China
Rutgers University Press
Drawing on over a decade of fieldwork, Inside the Circle: Queer Culture and Activism in Northwest China explores how everyday queer Chinese people are courageously taking part in both local and global expressions of queer culture and activism while also striving to lead traditionally moral lives in a rapidly changing society.
Coastal Landscapes
South Jersey from the Air
By Kenneth W. Able; By (photographer) Kenneth W. Able
Rutgers University Press
Based on numerous aerial images from helicopter and drone flights between 2015 and 2021, this book provides extensive photographs and maps of the New Jersey coast, accompanied by expert analysis by marine scientist Kenneth Able describing each site’s natural features, ecology, history, and possible futures in an era of rising sea levels.
Coastal Landscapes
South Jersey from the Air
By Kenneth W. Able; By (photographer) Kenneth W. Able
Rutgers University Press
Based on numerous aerial images from helicopter and drone flights between 2015 and 2021, this book provides extensive photographs and maps of the New Jersey coast, accompanied by expert analysis by marine scientist Kenneth Able describing each site’s natural features, ecology, history, and possible futures in an era of rising sea levels.
Children of the Rainforest
Shaping the Future in Amazonia
Rutgers University Press
Children of the Rainforest explores the lives of Matses children growing up in a time of radical change in Amazonia. Using visual and participatory methods, the book explores ethnographically how children’s imaginations, play, and shifting desires are powerful catalysts of social change, which shape the future of their society and of Amazonia at large.
Children of the Rainforest
Shaping the Future in Amazonia
Rutgers University Press
Children of the Rainforest explores the lives of Matses children growing up in a time of radical change in Amazonia. Using visual and participatory methods, the book explores ethnographically how children’s imaginations, play, and shifting desires are powerful catalysts of social change, which shape the future of their society and of Amazonia at large.
Borderless Fashion Practice
Contemporary Fashion in the Metamodern Age
Rutgers University Press
Twenty-first century fashion practice has become increasingly borderless and diverse in the digital era, calling into question the very boundaries that define fashion in the Western cultural context. Borderless Fashion Practice engages the work of fashion designers whose work intersects with other creative disciplines such as art, technology, science, architecture, and graphic design.
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