This sweeping book details the extent to which the legal revolution emanating from the US has transformed legal hierarchies of power across the globe, while also analyzing the conjoined global histories of law and social change from the Middle Ages to today. It examines the global proliferation of large corporate law firms—a US invention—along with US legal education approaches geared toward those corporate law firms. This neoliberal-inspired revolution attacks complacent legal oligarchies in the name of America-inspired modernism. Drawing on the combined histories of the legal profession, imperial transformations, and the enduring and conservative role of cosmopolitan elites at the top of legal hierarchies, the book details case studies in India, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, and China to explain how interconnected legal histories are stories of both revolution and reproduction. Theoretically and methodologically ambitious, it offers a wholly new approach to studying interrelated fields across time and geographies.
“A highly original work that develops and merges different scholarly traditions into a unique analytic framework, illustrating how legal fields and fields of state power worldwide have been interwoven in their development from the Middle Ages until today.” OLE HAMMERSLEV, Professor of Sociology of Law, University of Southern Denmark
“Probably the most important work ever done on the global history of the legal profession and its role in constructing the state and capitalism since the Middle Ages. These authors have been honing their theoretical framework for decades and building up an unparalleled comparative knowledge of the global legal profession. This is their master work, the kind of comparative work that rarely comes along and that can be field-redefining.” CAROL JONES, Honorary Professor, University of Birmingham, School of Law
YVES DEZALAY is Emeritus Director of Research, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. BRYANT G. GARTH is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Irvine School of Law.
How do victim and perpetrator peoples generate conflicting knowledge about genocide? Using a sociology of knowledge approach, Joachim J. Savelsberg answers this question in the context of the Armenian genocide committed during the First World War. Focusing on Armenians and Turks, Savelsberg examines strategies of silencing, denial, and acknowledgment in everyday interactions, public rituals, law, and politics. He draws on interviews, ethnographic accounts, documents, and eyewitness testimony to illuminate the social processes that drive dueling versions of history. Ultimately, this study reveals the counterproductive consequences of denial in an age of human rights hegemony, demonstrating the implications for populist disinformation campaigns against overwhelming evidence.
“This pioneering book is critical for understanding the background to Turkish denial as the final stage of genocide. Savelsberg’s epistemic study is a warning against a revived shade of an Orwellian order, with its ‘alternative realities’ and ‘post-truths.’” CLAIRE MOURADIAN, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris
“Knowledge denial is a deadly phenomenon and an urgent problem. Through painstaking research, unrivaled expertise, and ethical commitment, Joachim J. Savelsberg illuminates how mass harm has been negated or acknowledged.” LOIS PRESSER, author of Inside Story: How Narratives Drive Mass Harm
“Savelsberg has done a brilliant job in this unique work that for the first time analyzes the Armenian genocide from the vantage point of knowledge construction. A must-read for all interested in collective violence, social movements, and sociology of knowledge.” FATMA MÜGE GÖÇEK, author of Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present, and Collective Violence against the Armenians, 1789–2009
JOACHIM J. SAVELSBERG is Professor of Sociology and Law and Arsham and Charlotte Ohanessian Chair, University of Minnesota. He is the author of Representing Mass Violence: Conflicting Responses to Human Rights Violations in Darfur.
Although wartime sexual violence against men occurs more frequently than is commonly assumed, its dynamics are remarkably underexplored, and male survivors’ experiences remain particularly overlooked. This reality is poignant in northern Uganda, where sexual violence against men during the early stages of the conflict was geographically widespread, yet now accounts of those incidents are not just silenced and neglected locally but also widely absent from analyses of the war. Based on rare empirical data, this book seeks to remedy this marginalization and to illuminate the seldom-heard voices of male sexual violence survivors in northern Uganda, bringing to light their experiences of gendered harms, agency, and justice.
“Schulz offers a nuanced frame for understanding the dynamic and varied lived experiences of male survivors. Essential reading for anyone who wants to better comprehend conflict-related sexual violence as well as political violence more generally.” MARIA ERIKSSON BAAZ, author of Sexual Violence as a Weapon of War? Perceptions, Prescriptions, Problems in the Congo and Beyond
“This extraordinary book opens new conceptual pathways in and beyond the field of transitional justice. A rich exploration of justice as a survivor-led praxis and a generous methodological offering for conducting ethical research.” ERIN BAINES, author of Buried in the Heart: Women, Complex Victimhood and the War in Northern Uganda
“In his ethnographically nuanced study, Schulz charts a more grounded approach to international justice. The Ugandan men who have survived wartime rape have a lot to teach us—about constructing non-oppressive masculinities, creating mutual support, and building gender-aware sustainable peace.” CYNTHIA ENLOE, author of The Big Push: Exposing and Challenging the Persistence of Patriarchy
PHILIPP SCHULZ is a Postdoctoral Researcher at University of Bremen’s Institute for Intercultural and International Studies.
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Want, disease, ignorance, squalor, and idleness: first recognized together in mid-nineteenth-century Europe, these are the focus of the Social Question. In 1942 William Beveridge called them the “giant evils” while diagnosing the crises produced by the emergence of industrial society. More recently, during the final quarter of the twentieth century, the global spread of neoliberal policies enlarged these crises so much that the Social Question has made a comeback.
This carefully curated volume maps the linked crises across regions and countries and identifies the renewed and intensified Social Question as a labor issue. It includes discussions of American exceptionalism, Chinese repression, Indian exclusion, South African colonialism, democratic transitions in Eastern Europe, and other phenomena. Evaluated here are the effects of capitalism, the impact of the scarcity of waged work, and the degree to which the dispossessed poor bear the brunt of the crisis. Both thorough and thoughtful, the book serves as collective effort to revive and reposition the Social Question, reconstructing its meaning and its politics in the world today.
“The global approach makes this book a highly innovative endeavor.” NICOLE MAYER-AHUJA, Director, Sociological Research Institute at the University of Göttingen
“Approaches a familiar debate on the social implications of globalization using a lens that is at once unique, suggestive, and innovative.” EDWARD WEBSTER, Professor Emeritus and Founder of the Society, Work and Development Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand
JAN BREMAN is Emeritus Professor at the University of Amsterdam and author of On Pauperism in Present and Past. KEVAN HARRIS is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of A Social Revolution: Politics and the Welfare State in Iran. CHING KWAN LEE is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of The Specter of Global China. MARCEL VAN DER LINDEN is Senior Fellow and former Director of Research at the International Institute of Social History and author of Workers of the World.
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In Forging the Ideal Educated Girl, Shenila Khoja-Moolji traces the figure of the ‘educated girl’ to examine the evolving politics of educational reform and development campaigns in colonial India and Pakistan. She challenges the prevailing common sense associated with calls for women’s and girls’ education and argues that such advocacy is not simply about access to education but, more crucially, concerned with producing ideal Muslim woman-/girl-subjects with specific relationships to the patriarchal family, paid work, Islam, and the nation-state. Thus, discourses on girls’/women’s education are sites for the construction of not only gender but also class relations, religion, and the nation.
“This ambitious and pathbreaking genealogical study of the circulation and political uses of the dense figure of the educated South Asian Muslim woman/girl is brilliantly executed and utterly timely. Khoja-Moolji has written an exemplary book destined to become a classic.” LILA ABU-LUGHOD, Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science, Columbia University
“A brilliant and unprecedented study . . . essential reading for anyone interested in the history of Muslims in South Asia and the gendered complexities of education.” JAMAL J. ELIAS, Walter H. Annenberg Professor in the Humanities, University of Pennsylvania
“Through careful sifting of archival material and interview data as well as analysis of important Urdu literary works, Khoja-Moolji highlights the historically, sociologically and politically contingent nature of discourses about women/girls education.” ALI S. ASANI, Professor of Indo-Muslim and Islamic Religion and Cultures, Harvard University
“A stunning genealogy of the Pakistani Muslim girl and her connections to educational, social, and national development from the colonial to the neoliberal state.” NANCY LESKO, Maxine Greene Professor, Teachers College, Columbia University
SHENILA KHOJA-MOOLJI is Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Bowdoin College.
In a time when conservative politicians challenge the irrefutability of scientific findings such as climate change, it is more important than ever to understand the conflict at the heart of the “religion vs. science” debates unfolding in the public sphere. In this groundbreaking work, John H. Evans reveals that, with a few limited exceptions, even the most conservative religious Americans accept science’s ability to make factual claims about the world. However, many religious people take issue with the morality implicitly promoted by some forms of science. Using clear and engaging scholarship, Evans upends the prevailing notion that there is a fundamental conflict over the way that scientists and religious people make claims about nature and argues that only by properly understanding moral conflict between contemporary religion and science will we be able to contribute to a more productive interaction between these two great institutions.
“John H. Evans successfully relocates religious concerns about science from the realm of knowledge to that of moral value. He is by far the most sophisticated of the sociologists.” RONALD L. NUMBERS, Hilldale Professor Emeritus of the History of Science and Medicine, University of Wisconsin–Madison
“This is just the kind of volume that academics, journalists, and policymakers who are concerned about the future of science need. The kind of synthetic fi eld-building work that Evans does is necessary in this burgeoning area.” ELAINE HOWARD ECKLUND, Herbert S. Autrey Chair in Social Sciences, Rice University
JOHN H. EVANS is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego.
Protect, Serve, and Deport exposes the on-the-ground workings of local immigration enforcement in Nashville, Tennessee. Between 2007 and 2012, Nashville's local jail participated in an immigration enforcement program called 287(g), which turned jail employees into immigration officers who identified over ten thousand removable immigrants for deportation. The vast majority of those identified for removal were not serious criminals but Latino residents arrested by local police for minor violations. Protect, Serve, and Deport explains how local politics, state laws, institutional policies, and police practices work together to deliver immigrants into an expanding federal deportation system, conveying powerful messages about race, citizenship, and belonging.
"Amada Armenta artfully weaves participants' justifications for their actions with her own scholarly analysis, finding that bureaucratic priorities, relevant laws, and local norms all help officers distance themselves from the frequently grave consequences of their work." DORIS MARIE PROVINE, Professor Emerita, School of Justice and Social Inquiry, Arizona State University
"This work evocatively shows how local police and jail employees have been drawn unwittingly into arresting and deporting hundreds of thousands of law-abiding immigrants and how this activity erodes trust in the police and fractures families and communities. This is painful but essential reading." CHARLES R. EPP, coauthor of Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship
"At a time when enforcement is expanding, this book is increasingly salient for understanding how enforcement is actually performed. It is essential, critical, urgent reading today." CECILIA MENJÍVAR, author of Enduring Violence: Ladina Women's Lives in Guatemala
AMADA ARMENTA is Assistant Professor of Urban Planning at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.
Cancer Intersections is an ethnographic analysis of the complex and paradoxical efforts to access neoliberal, market-based oncological treatments in Colombia, a country where all patients are legally guaranteed access to medical services, including high-cost oncology treatments. Drawing on years of fieldwork in the city of Cali, Camilo Sanz explores the deep entanglements between medical, legal, and policy practices that share a common goal of treating and curing cancer but are hindered by bureaucratic procedures, pernicious financial interests, and class politics. Cancer Intersections shows how the interplay of these hurdles dictates the rhythm at which patients access treatment and how even in resource-rich settings, patients suffer because of market imperatives that shape how cancer treatments unfold. Through careful and measured ethnography, Sanz unveils how a neoliberal universal health care regime delays access to care for those reliant on public assistance, which means that some patients will start expensive treatments only after they are unlikely to change the course of the disease.
Between 1919 and 1961, pioneering Chinese American actress Anna May Wong established an enduring legacy that encompassed cinema, theater, radio, and American television. Born in Los Angeles, yet with her US citizenship scrutinized due to the Chinese Exclusion Act, Wong—a defiant misfit—innovated nuanced performances to subvert the racism and sexism that beset her life and career. In this critical study of Wong’s cross-media and transnational career, Yiman Wang marshals extraordinary archival research and a multifocal approach to illuminate a lifelong labor of performance. Viewing Wong as a performer and worker, not just a star, To Be an Actress adopts a feminist decolonial perspective to speculatively meet her as an interlocutor while inviting a reconsideration of racialized, gendered, and migratory labor as the bedrock of the entertainment industries.
Feminist Cyberlaw reimagines the field of cyberlaw through a feminist lens. Essays crafted for this volume by emerging and established scholars and practitioners explore how gender, race, sexuality, disability, class, and the intersections of these identities affect cyberspace and the laws that govern it. This vibrant and visionary volume promises to build a movement of scholars whose work charts a near future where cyberlaw is informed by feminism.
Meg Leta Jones is the Provost's Distinguished Associate Professor in the Communication, Culture, and Technology program at Georgetown University. She is the author of Ctrl+Z: The Right to Be Forgotten and The Character of Consent: The History of Cookies and Future of Technology Policy.
Amanda Levendowski is Associate Professor of Law and Founding Director of the Intellectual Property and Information Policy Clinic at Georgetown University Law Center. She is also the founder of the Cyberspace and Technology (CAT) Lab.
Almost Futures looks to the people who pay the heaviest price for progress throughout war and capitalist globalization—particularly Vietnamese citizens and refugees—for glimpses of ways to exist at the end of our future's promise. In order to learn from the lives destroyed (and lived) amid our inheritance of modern humanism and its uses of time, Almost Futures asks us to recognize new spectrums of feeling: the poetic, in the grief of protesters dispossessed by land speculation; the allegorical, in assembly line workers' laughter and sorrow; the iterant and intimate, in the visual witnessing of revolutionary and state killing; the haunting, in refugee writing on the death of their nation; and the irreconcilable, in refugees' inhabitation of history.
One of the most hotly debated issues in contemporary Muslim ethics is the status of women in Islamic law. While Muslim conservatives argue that gender-differentiated legal rulings reflect complementary gender roles, Muslim feminists argue that Islamic law has subordinated women and is thus in need of reform. The shared assumption on both sides, however, is that gender fundamentally shapes an individual's legal status. Beyond the Binary explores an expansive cross section of topics in ninth- to twelfth-century Hanafi legal thought—from sexual crimes to consent to marriage—to show that early Muslim jurists imagined a world built not on a binary distinction between male and female but on multiple intersecting hierarchies of gender, age, enslavement, lineage, class, and other social roles. Saadia Yacoob offers a restorative reading of Islamic law, arguing that its intersectional and relational understanding of legal personhood offers a productive space for Muslim feminists to move beyond critique and instead to think with and through the Islamic legal tradition.
African cities are under construction. Beyond the urban redevelopment schemes and large-scale infrastructure projects reconfiguring central city skylines, the majority of urban residents are putting their resources into finding land and building homes on the city edges. As the first book-length analysis of Africa’s suburban middle-class, The Suburban Frontier examines how self-built housing on the urban periphery has become central to middle-class formation and urban transformation in contemporary Tanzania. Drawing on original qualitative and ethnographic field research in the city of Dar es Salaam, Claire Mercer writes a detailed exposition of how the "suburban frontier" has become the place where Africa’s middle classes are shaped. This book offers a new lens on the African middle classes, making significant contributions to the study of urban social change in Africa and urbanization in the Global South.
What happens after colonial industries have run their course—after the factory closes and the fields go fallow? Set in the cinchona plantations of India’s Darjeeling Hills, Quinine’s Remains chronicles the history and aftermaths of quinine. Harvested from cinchona bark, quinine was malaria’s only remedy until the twentieth-century advent of synthetic drugs, and it was vital to the British Empire. Today, the cinchona plantations—and the roughly fifty thousand people who call them home—remain. Their futures, however, are unclear. The Indian government has threatened to privatize or shut down this seemingly obsolete and crumbling industry, but the plantation community, led by strident trade unions, has successfully resisted. Overgrown cinchona fields and shuttered quinine factories may appear the stuff of postcolonial and postindustrial ruination, but quinine’s remains are not dead. Rather, they have become the site of urgent efforts to redefine land and life for the twenty-first century. Quinine's Remains offers a vivid historical and ethnographic portrait of what it means to forge life after empire.
In the late fifth century, a nameless girl was born at the edge of the Chinese empire. By the time of her death, she had transformed herself into Empress Dowager Ling, one of the most powerful politicians of her age and one of the first of many Buddhist women to wield incredible influence in dynastic East Asia. In this book, Stephanie Balkwill documents the Empress Dowager’s rise to power and life on the throne against the broader social world of imperial China under the rule of the Northern Wei dynasty, a foreign people from Inner Asia who built their capital deep in the Chinese heartland.
Building on largely untapped Buddhist materials, Balkwill shows that the life and rule of the Empress Dowager is a much larger story of the reinvention of religious, ethnic, and gender norms in a rapidly changing, multicultural society. The Women Who Ruled China recovers the voices of those left out of the mainstream historical record and, through the life of the Empress Dowager, paints a compelling portrait of medieval Chinese society reinventing itself under her leadership.
In recent decades, many members of the public have come to see processed food as a problem that needs to be solved by eating "real" food and reforming the food system. But for many food industry professionals, the problem is not processed food or the food system itself, but misperceptions and irrational fears caused by the public's lack of scientific understanding. In her highly original book, Charlotte Biltekoff explores the role that science and scientific authority play in food industry responses to consumer concerns about what we eat and how it is made. As Biltekoff documents, industry efforts to correct public misperceptions through science-based education have consistently misunderstood the public's concerns, which she argues are an expression of politics. This has entrenched "food scientism" in public discourse and seeded a form of antipolitics, with broad consequences. Real Food, Real Facts offers lessons that extend well beyond food choice and will appeal to readers interested in how everyday people come to accept or reject scientific authority in matters of personal health and well-being.
In the 1990s, India's mediascape saw the efflorescence of edgy soft-porn films in the Malayalam-speaking state of Kerala. In Rated A, Darshana Sreedhar Mini examines the local and transnational influences that shaped Malayalam soft-porn cinema—such as vernacular pulp fiction, illustrated erotic tales, and American exploitation cinema—and maps the genre's circulation among blue-collar workers of the Indian diaspora in the Middle East, where pirated versions circulate alongside low-budget Bangladeshi films and Pakistani mujra dance films as South Asian pornography. Through a mix of archival and ethnographic research, Mini also explores the soft-porn industry's utilization of gendered labor and trust-based arrangements, as well as how actresses and production personnel negotiate their social lives when marked by their involvement with a taboo form. By locating the tense negotiations between sexuality, import policy, and censorship in contemporary India, this study offers a model for understanding film genres outside of screen space, emphasizing that they constitute not just industrial formations but entire fields of social relations and gendered imaginaries.
For more than four decades, socially disadvantaged Israeli Mizrahim—descendants of Jews from Middle Eastern communities—have continuously supported right-wing political parties. Sociologists, NGOs, and left-wing politicians tend to view Mizrahim as acting against their own interests, but Nissim Mizrachi locates the problem within the limitations of the liberal grammar by which their behavior is read. In Beyond Suspicion, Mizrachi turns the direction of inquiry on itself, contrasting liberal grammar—which values autonomy, equality, and universal reason and morality—with the grammar of Mizrahi rootedness, in which the self is experienced through a web of relational commitments, temporal ties, and codes of collective identity. Recognizing rootedness as a fundamental need for belonging is necessary to understand both scholarly and political rifts in Israel and throughout the world.
Making Sense explores the experiential, ethical, and intellectual stakes of living in, and thinking with, worlds wherein language cannot be taken for granted. In Nepal, many deaf signers use Nepali Sign Language (NSL), a young, conventional signed language. The majority of deaf Nepalis, however, use what NSL signers call natural sign. Natural sign involves conventional and improvisatory signs, many of which recruit semiotic relations immanent in the social and material world. These features make conversation in natural sign both possible and precarious. Sense-making in natural sign depends on signers’ skillful use of resources and on addressees’ willingness to engage. Natural sign reveals the labor of sense-making that in more conventional language is carried by shared grammar. Ultimately, this highly original book shows that emergent language is an ethical endeavor, challenging readers to consider what it means, and what it takes, to understand and to be understood.
This book follows the production, transnational circulation, and reception of the highest grossing film in the history of Soviet exhibition, the 1971 Mexican romance "Yesenia." The film adaptation of a telenovela based on a wildly popular graphic novel set during the Second Franco-Mexican War became a surprise hit in the USSR, selling more than ninety million tickets in the first year of its Soviet release alone. Drawing on years of archival research, renowned film scholar Masha Salazkina takes "Yesenia"’s unprecedented popularity as an entry point into a wide-ranging exploration of the cultures of Mexico and the Soviet Union in the 1970s, and the ways in which popular culture circulated globally. Paying particular attention to the shifting landscape of sexual politics, Romancing Yesenia argues for the enduring importance and ideological ambiguities of melodramatic forms in global popular media.
For years the Catholic Church, Catholic Charities, and the Haitian Multi-Service Center in Boston have helped Haitian refugees and immigrants attain economic independence, health, security, and citizenship in the United States. In Life at the Center, Erica Caple James traces this aid work and discovers at its heart a fundamental paradox, arising from what she calls "corporate Catholicism": social assistance produces and reproduces structural inequalities between providers and recipients, which can deepen aid recipients' dependence and lead to resistance to organized benevolence. James documents how institutional financial deficits harmed clients and providers, yet also how modes of philanthropy that previously caused harm can be redeployed to repair damage and rebuild "charitable brands." The culmination of over a decade of advocacy and research on behalf of the Haitians of Boston, this groundbreaking work exposes how Catholic corporations strengthened—but also eroded—Haitians' civic power.