Compelling reads from Activism, Creativity and Identity to Money, Sexuality and Immigration the Social Sciences offers a well rounded group of titles to keep you engaged in a variety of research themes. This is for selective books written by UCI authors that have been published from 2017 to the present.
Anchor Babies and the Challenge of Birthright Citizenship by "Birthright citizenship has a deep and contentious history in the United States, one often hard to square in a country that prides itself on being 'a nation of immigrants.' Even as the question of citizenship for children of immigrants was seemingly settled by the Fourteenth Amendment, vitriolic debate has continued for well over a century, especially in relation to U.S. race relations. Most recently, a provocative and decidedly more offensive term than birthright citizenship has emerged: 'anchor babies.' [This book] explores the question of birthright citizenship, and of citizenship in the United States writ broadly, as [the author] counters the often hyperbolic claims surrounding these so-called anchor babies. [The author] considers how the term is used as a political dog whistle, how changes in the legal definition of citizenship have affected the children of immigrants over time, and, ultimately, how U.S.-born citizens still experience trauma if they live in families with undocumented immigrants. By examining this pejorative term in its political, historical, and social contexts, [the author] calls upon us to exorcise it from public discourse and work toward building a more inclusive nation."
Anxious Creativity: When Imagination Fails by Anxious Creativity: When Imagination Fails examines this conceptual mess, while focusing on how America’s current edginess dampens creativity in everyone. Written in an engaging and accessible style, Anxious Creativity draws on current ideas in the social sciences, economics, and the arts. Discussion centers on the knotty problem of reconciling the expressive potential in all people with the nation’s tendency to reward only a few.
The Auditory System at the Cocktail Party by Takes on the challenge faced by listeners in most everyday environments: how to hear out sounds of interest amid a cacophony of competing sounds. This book presents the mechanisms for bottom-up object formation and top-down object selection that the auditory system employs to meet that challenge.
Axis of hope: Iranian women's rights activism across borders by "Long-standing political tensions between Iran and the United States that intensified in the post-9/11 period and the Global War on Terror set the stage for women's rights activists both inside and outside Iran as they seek full legal equality under the Islamic Republic. Through discourse analysis and ethnographic research, Catherine Sameh demonstrates how despite limited success in overturning discriminatory laws under conservative and reform governments, women's rights activists have imprinted a gender equality perspective onto the state and society in defining modern Islamic democracy."
Beyond the Bifurcation of Nature by Environmental destruction, animal abuse, and widespread indifference toward plants and elemental systems demand that a human-centric view of the world be permanently dismantled. But once it is, what functional hierarchies take its place, if any? This volume brings Alfred North Whitehead’s process-relational worldview into conversation with deeper empirical perspectives on science and religion, with activist and de/constructive philosophies, with South Asian and indigenous traditions, and with art and ethical theory to ignite new nonviolent experiments in thought and action adequate for our current buzzing planetary multiplicity.
Black men, black feminism: Lucifer's nocture by A brief commentary on the necessity and the impossibility of black men’s participation in the development of black feminist theory and politics, Black Men, Black Feminism examines the basic assumptions that have guided―and misguided―black men’s efforts to take up black feminism.
Bordered Cities and Divided Societies by Bordered Cities and Divided Societies is a provocative, moving, and poetic encounter with the hearts and minds of individuals living in nine cities of conflict, violence, and healing—Jerusalem, Belfast, Johannesburg, Nicosia, Sarajevo, Mostar, Barcelona, Bilbao, and Beirut. Based on research spanning 25 years, including 360 interviews and over two and a half years of in-country field research, this innovative work employs a series of concise reflective narrative essays, grouped into four thematic sections, to provide a humanistic, “on-the-ground” understanding of divided cities, conflict, and peacemaking. Incorporating both scholarly analyses based on empirical research and introspective essays, Bollens digs underneath grand narratives of conflict to illuminate the complexities and paradoxes of living amid nationalistic political strife and the challenges of planning and policymaking in divided societies.
The Case Against Reality by Can we trust our senses to tell us the truth? Challenging leading scientific theories that claim that our senses report back objective reality, cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues that while we should take our perceptions seriously, we should not take them literally. How can it be possible that the world we see is not objective reality? And how can our senses be useful if they are not communicating the truth? Hoffman grapples with these questions and more over the course of this eye-opening work. Ever since Homo sapiens has walked the earth, natural selection has favored perception that hides the truth and guides us toward useful action, shaping our senses to keep us alive and reproducing. We observe a speeding car and do not walk in front of it; we see mold growing on bread and do not eat it. These impressions, though, are not objective reality. Just like a file icon on a desktop screen is a useful symbol rather than a genuine representation of what a computer file looks like, the objects we see every day are merely icons, allowing us to navigate the world safely and with ease. The real-world implications for this discovery are huge. From examining why fashion designers create clothes that give the illusion of a more "attractive" body shape to studying how companies use color to elicit specific emotions in consumers, and even dismantling the very notion that spacetime is objective reality, The Case Against Reality dares us to question everything we thought we knew about the world we see.
Creativity in Research by Creativity is at the heart of successful research, yet researchers are rarely taught how to manage their creative process, and modern academic life is not structured to optimize creativity.
The Ethics of War and Peace Revisited by How do we frame decisions to use-or not use-military force? Who should do the killing? Do we need new paradigms to guide the use of force? And what does "victory" mean in contemporary conflict? In many ways, these are timeless questions. But they should be asked again in light of changing circumstances in the twenty-first century. The post-Cold War, post-9/11 world is one of contested and fragmented sovereignty. Contested because the norm of territorial integrity has shed some of its absolute nature. Fragmented because some states do not control all of their territory and cannot defeat violent groups operating within their borders. Humanitarian intervention, preventive war, and just war are all framing mechanisms aimed at convincing domestic and international audiences to go to war (or not), as well as to decide who is justified in legally and ethically killing. The international group of scholars assembled for this book critically examine these frameworks to ask if they are flawed, and if so, how they can be improved. Finally, the volume contemplates what all the killing and dying is for if victory may prove, ultimately, to be elusive
Fearing the Black Body by "There is an obesity epidemic in this country and poor black women are particularly stigmatized as "diseased" and a burden on the public health care system. This is only the most recent incarnation of the fear of fat black women, which Sabrina Strings shows took root more than two hundred years ago."
Fruteros by "This book examines the social worlds of young Latino street vendors as they navigate the complexities of local and federal laws prohibiting both their presence and their work on street corners. Known as fruteros, they sell fruit salads out of pushcarts throughout Los Angeles and are part of the urban landscape."
Geopolitics, Supply Chains, and International Relations in East Asia by Global supply chains connect the world in unprecedented and intricate ways. Geopolitics, Supply Chains, and International Relations in East Asia dissects the sources and effects of contemporary disruptions of these networks. Despite their dramatic expansion as distinct, complex, and unique mechanisms of economic interdependence, the role of supply chains in broader patterns of interstate conflict and cooperation has been relatively neglected. This volume sheds light on whether a highly interdependent “Factory Asia” and Asia-Pacific can withstand geopolitical, geo-economic, and pandemic threats. This combustible mix, fueled by rising hyper-nationalism in the US and China, threatens to unleash sizable disruptions in the global geography of production and in the international relations of East Asia.
The Good Citizen by "There has been a growing chorus of political analysts with doomsday predictions of an American public that is uncivil, disengaged, and alienated. And it's only getting worse with a younger generation of Americans who do not see the value in voting. The good news is that the bad news is wrong. In this third edition of The Good Citizen, Russell Dalton uses current national public opinion surveys, including new evidence from 2018 Pew Center survey data, to show how Americans are changing their views on what good citizenship means. It's not about recreating the halcyon politics of a generation ago, but recognition that new patterns of citizenship call for new processes and new institutions that reflect the values of the contemporary American public. Trends in participation, tolerance, and policy priorities reflect a younger generation that is more engaged, more tolerant, and more supportive of social justice. The Good Citizen shows how a younger generation is creating new norms of citizenship that are leading to a renaissance of democratic participation. An important comparative chapter in the book showcases cross-national comparisons that further demonstrate the vitality of American democracy."
The Immigrant Rights Movement by "In the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election, liberal outcry over ethnonationalist views promoted a vision of America as a nation of immigrants. Given the pervasiveness of this rhetoric, it can be easy to overlook the fact that the immigrant rights movement began in the US relatively recently. This book tells the story of its grassroots origins, through its meteoric rise to the national stage. Starting in the 1990s, the immigrant rights movement slowly cohered over the demand for comprehensive federal reform of immigration policy. Activists called for a new framework of citizenship, arguing that immigrants deserved legal status based on their strong affiliation with American values. During the Obama administration, leaders were granted unprecedented political access and millions of dollars in support. The national spotlight, however, came with unforeseen consequences, including inequalities between factions and limits on what could be criticized and denounced. Such tradeoffs eventually shattered the united front and undermined the movement's ability to achieve protections for millions of undocumented immigrants. The Immigrant Rights Movement tells the story of a vibrant movement to change the meaning of national citizenship, that ultimately became enmeshed in the system that it sought to transform."
Intersectional Inequality by "For over twenty-five years, Charles C. Ragin has developed Qualitative Comparative Analysis and related set-analytic techniques as a means of bridging qualitative and quantitative methods of research. Now, with Peer C. Fiss, Ragin uses these impressive new tools to unravel the varied conditions affecting life chances."
Just War Thinkers by This volume offers a set of concise and accessible introductions to the seminal figures in the historical development of the just war tradition.
Madison's Sorrow by The story of America is the struggle between our liberal ideal and illiberal resistance. Donald Trump catalyzed a reactionary revolution by tapping into the dark, shadowy side of American democracy that embraces exclusion and inequality. Throughout American history these alarming impulses have come to the forefront of our culture--during the Civil War, the era of the Robber Barons, and the Civil Rights Movement--but have now come to fruition in the presidency of Donald Trump. Arguing that the contemporary Republican Party is waging a counterrevolution against the core beliefs of the nation, journalist and scholar Kevin C. O'Leary cracks open American history to reveal the essence of America's liberal heritage by critiquing the reactionary illiberal currents that periodically threaten American democracy. American politics is no longer an ongoing debate between liberals and conservatives because the new Republican Party embraces the feudal values of the Old World. While there are millions of conservatives in the population, the elected leadership of the GOP is deeply reactionary. Today's marriage of white-identity Southerners and their northern allies to moneyed libertarians is no run-of-the-mill political partnership. Instead, it is extraordinarily dangerous. Clearly, conservatives have lost their party. And without conservatives debating liberals in an intellectual, respectful manner to address the nation's problems, Madisonian democracy breaks down.
Mathematics Motivated by the Social and Behavioral Sciences by The mathematical challenges coming from the social and behavioral sciences differ significantly from typical applied mathematical concerns. “Change,” for instance, is ubiquitous, but without knowing the fundamental driving force, standard differential and iterative methods are not appropriate. Although differing forms of aggregation are widely used, a general mathematical assessment of potential pitfalls is missing. These realities provide opportunities to create new mathematical approaches.
The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread by Why should we care about having true beliefs? And why do demonstrably false beliefs persist and spread despite consequences for the people who hold them?
Modern Control Theory and the Limits of Criminal Justice by The book provides methodological assessments of research on the theory, contrasting the control theory perspective with other developmental perspectives in criminology. The role of opportunity, the relationship between self and social control theory, and the role of motivation are addressed.
Morphing Intelligence by A new approach that emphasizes the intertwined, networked relationships among the biological, the technological, and the symbolic.Malabou traces the modern metamorphoses of intelligence, seeking to understand how neurobiological and neurotechnological advances have transformed our view.
Multiple Marginality and Gangs by In Multiple Marginality and Gangs: Through a Prism Darkly, James Diego Vigil unravels the youth gang problem in America. Vigil uses a multidimensional approach that encompasses the place, status, and social control of urban street gangs and highlights associated subcultural and identity facets.
Nationalistic Conflict in the City by "Creating peace for a city's intimate enemies is harder than making war. This book is about the trajectories of urban conflict and peace in the politically polarized cities of Jerusalem and Belfast since 1994 - how sometimes there has been hopeful change while at other times debilitating stasis and regression. Based on extensive research, fieldwork, and interviews, Scott Bollens shows how seeking peace in these cities is shaped by the interaction of city-based actors and national elites, and that it is not just a political process, but a social and spatial one that takes place problematically over an extended period. He intertwines academic precision with ethnography and personal narrative to illuminate the complex political and emotional kaleidoscopes of these polarized cities. With hostility and competition among groups defined by ethnic, religious, and nationalistic identity on the increase across the world, this timely investigation contributes to our understanding of today's fractured cities and nations."
NATO's Lessons in Crisis by In crisis management operations, strategic errors can cost lives. Some international organizations (IOs) learn from these failures, whereas, others tend to repeat them. Given high rates of turnover and shorter job contracts, how do IOs such as NATO retain any knowledge about past errors? Institutional memory enhances prospects for reforms that can prevent future failures. The book provides an explanation for how and why IOs develop institutional memory in international crisis management. Evidence indicates that the design of an IO’s learning infrastructure (e.g. lessons learned offices and databases) can inadvertently disincentivize IO elites from using it to share knowledge about strategic errors. Under such conditions, IO elites - high-level civilian and military officials - view reporting to be risky. In response, they prefer to contribute to institutional memory through the creation and use of informal processes such as transnational interpersonal networks, private documentation and conversations during crisis management exercises. The result is an institutional memory that remains vulnerable to turnover since critical knowledge is highly dependent on a handful of individuals. The book draws on the author’s interviews and a survey experiment with 120 NATO elites, including assistant secretary generals, military representatives and ambassadors. Cases of NATO crisis management in Afghanistan, Libya and Ukraine serve to further illustrate the development of institutional memory. Findings challenge existing organizational learning scholarship by indicating that formal learning processes alone are insufficient to ensure learning occurs. The book also offers policymakers a set of recommendations for strengthening the learning capacity of IOs.
Of Love and Papers; how immigration policy affects romance and family by Explores how immigration policies are fundamentally reshaping Latino families; this book investigates how immigration status creeps into the most personal aspects of everyday life, intersecting with gender to constrain family formation.
Political Realignment by The process of electoral change is accelerating in contemporary democracies, and this book explains why. The emergence of Green parties in the 1980s and recent far right parties, Brexit and Trump's 2016 victory are parts of this overall process. 'Political Realignment' tracks the evolution of citizen and elite opinions on economic and cultural issues from the 1970s to the 2010s--and the impact of these changes on electoral politics and public policy. Citizen positions on these cleavages have realigned over time, producing a similar realignment in the structure of the party systems to represent these demands. Economic issues remain important, now joined by divisions on cultural issues as a backlash to modernization. Assembling an unprecedented time series of empirical evidence, this study explains the new forces of elector change in both Europe and the United States.
The pursuit of happiness : philosophical and psychological foundations of utility by Utilitarianism began as a movement for social reform that changed the world. To understand Utilitarianism, we must understand utility - how is it to be measured, and how aggregate utility of a group can be understood. The authors, a cognitive scientist and a philosopher, pursue these questions from Bentham to the present, examining psychophysics, positivism, measurement theory, meaningfulness, neuropsychology, representation theorems, and dynamics of formation of conventions.
The resistance : the dawn of the anti-Trump opposition movement by "Even before the 2016 presidential election took place, groups and individuals angry at Donald Trump, and frightened about what a Trump presidency could mean, were taking to the streets. After the election, and particularly after he inaugural, the protests continued. Over time, the Resistance was joined by a broad variety of groups and embraced an increasing diversity of tactics. In The Resistance, David S. Meyer and Sidney Tarrow have gathered together a cast of eminent scholars to tackle the emergence of a volatile and diverse movement directed against the Trump presidency. Collectively, the contributors examine the origins and concerns of different factions of this movement, and evaluate their prospects for surviving and exercising political influence. Through a range of analytical and methodological approaches, The Resistance offers both an overview of the broad scope of the emerging movement and sharp analyses of the campaign as it works through the numerous crises that the Trump era has introduced."
The Routledge Companion to Sexuality and Colonialism by Brings together comparative insights across European, Ottoman, Japanese, and US imperial contexts while spanning colonized spaces in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Indian Ocean, the Middle East, and East and Southeast Asia.
Stagnant Dreamers by This study shows how America's urban violence and social isolation in segregated contexts shape the integration process of young men. It explains why some young men get ahead, while others sink deeper into poverty.
Tokens of Power by War presents a curious paradox. Interstate war is arguably the most carefully planned endeavor by states, yet military history is filled with disasters and blunders of monumental proportions. These anomalies happen because most military history presumes that states are pursuing optimal strategies in a competitive environment. This book offers an alternative narrative in which the pillars of military planning - evaluations of power, strategy, and interests - are theorized as social constructions rather than simple material realities. States may be fighting wars primarily to gain or maintain power, yet in any given historical era such pursuits serve only to propel competition; they do not ensure military success in subsequent generations. Allowing states to embark on hapless military ventures is fraught with risks, while the rewards are few.
Translinguistics by "Translinguistics represents a powerful alternative to conventional paradigms of language such as bilingualism and code-switching, which assume the compartmentalization of different "languages" into fixed and arbitrary boundaries. Translinguistics more accurately reflects the fluid use of linguistic and semiotic resources in diverse communities. This ground-breaking volume showcases work from leading as well as emerging scholars in sociolinguistics and other language-oriented disciplines and collectively explores and aims to reconcile the distinction between "innovation" and "ordinariness" in translinguistics. Features of this book include: 18 chapters from 28 scholars, representing a range of academic disciplines and institutions from 11 countries around the world; research on understudied communities and geographic contexts including those of Latin America, South Asia, and Central Asia; several chapters devoted to the diversity of communication in digital contexts.
Virtue Hoarders by Author Catherine Liu shows how Professional Managerial Class (PMC) elite workers who labor in a world of performative identity and virtue signaling stand in the way of social justice and economic redistribution. Virtue Hoarders is an unapologetically polemical call to reject making a virtue out of taste and consumption habits.