This book looks at questions of intellectual property rights (IPR) -- historically, culturally, and politically -- and their relationship to law and the state. Arguing that the idea that intellectual property is another kind of property right (that is, that IP is a thing to be owned) exists in parallel with the idea that intellectual property is the consequence of a cultural process, Andrews di…
The Border and Its Bodies examines the impact of migration from Central America and México to the United States on the most basic social unit possible: the human body. It explores the terrible toll migration takes on the bodies of migrants—those who cross the border and those who die along the way—and discusses the treatment of those bodies after their remains are discovered in the desert.…
Urban anthropologist Kristin Monroe takes urban anthropology in a new and meaningful direction— the story of traffic in the Middle East, focusing on Beirut. As bombs reappeared recently following an impasse between competing political groups and their international backers, residents of the city were forced to contend with many forms of insecurity, forging their lives amid a contentious, ofte…
This work examines how death, suicide and violence shaped modern queer culture, arguing that negative experiences, as much as affirmative subculture formation, influenced the emergence of a collective sense of same-sex identity. Bauer looks for this history of violence in the work and reception of the influential sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935), and through Hirschfeld's work examines t…
The Cape Flats, a windswept, barren and sandy area which rings Cape Town, is home to more than a million people. Many live here in sprawling shack settlements. The post-apartheid state is attempting to eradicate such settlements by providing formal houses in planned residential estates. Raw Life, New Hope is a longitudinal study of the residents of one such shack settlement, The Park, who moved…
Somalis in the Twin Cities and Columbus seeks to understand the integration outcomes of refugees in the Midwest at local and state levels to show how communities struggle with political, social, and economic incorporation. While many immigration titles examine the Latino community, this book focuses on the black Muslim Somalis, providing an important understanding of the lives of this understud…
Violent Exceptions turns to the humanitarian figure of the child-in-peril in twenty-first-century political discourse to better understand how this figure is appropriated by political constituencies for purposes rarely to do with the needs of children at risk. Wendy S. Hesford shows how the figure of the child-in-peril is predicated on racial division, which, she argues, is central to both cons…
In contemporary Japan, as the Japanese population ages, the low birth rate shrinks the population, and decades of recession radically restructure labor markets' intimate relationships, norms, and ideals are concurrently shifting. This volume explores a broad range of intimate practices in Japan in the first decades of the 2000s to trace how social change is manifests through deeply personal cho…
Nation and Migration provides a way to understand recent migration events in Europe that have attracted the world’s attention. The emergence of the nations in the West promised homogenization, but instead the imagined national communities have everywhere become places of heterogeneity, and modern nation states have been haunted by the specter of minorities. This study analyses experiences rel…
In Diagnosing Desire: Biopolitics and Femininity into the Twenty-First Century, Alyson K. Spurgas examines the “new science of female sexuality” from a critical, sociological perspective, considering how today’s feminist-identified sex researchers study and manage women with low desire. Diagnosing Desire investigates experimental sex research that measures the disconnect between subjectiv…