Western analysts have long denigrated Islamic states as antagonistic, even antithetical, to the rule of law. Mark Fathi Massoud tells a different story: for nearly 150 years, the…
What is the relationship between Spirit Possession Rituals and Buddhism in mainland Southeast Asia? How has modernity transformed Spirit Possession cults in the 21st century and what has led…
Unlike many books that examine the how of making theater, Brian Kulick’s The Secret Life of Theater: On the Nature and Function of Theatrical Representation (Routledge, 2019) examines the why. Using Jorge Luis…
Women in Lagos, Nigeria, practice a spectacularly feminine form of black beauty. From cascading hair extensions to immaculate makeup to high heels, their style permeates both day-to-day life…
Disability is often described as a tragedy, a crisis, or an aberration, though 1 in 5 people worldwide have a disability. Why is this common human experience rendered…
Media of the Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt (Stanford UP, 2022) investigates the social life of an everyday technology—the cassette tape—to offer a multisensory history of modern Egypt.…
Çigdem Çidam, Associate Professor of Political Science at Union College, has a new book titled In the Street: Democratic Action, Theatricality, and Political Friendship (Oxford UP, 2021) that examines political…
Queer Carnival: Festivals and Mardi Gras in the South (NYU Press, 2022) reveals the importance of citywide celebrations like Mardi Gras and Fiesta for LGBTQIA+ communities in the US South.…
In Coconut Colonialism: Workers and the Globalization of Samoa (Harvard UP, 2022), Holger Droessler provides a novel history of the impact of globalization on Sāmoa and vice versa. Using a series of…
Black or Right: Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics (Utah State University Press, 2020) explores notions of Blackness in white institutional—particularly educational—spaces. In it, Louis M. Maraj theorizes how Black identity operates with/against…
Of the many differences between the West and the rest of the world the issue of religiosity is one of the most striking. In the West ever fewer…
Minoritarian Liberalism: A Travesti Life in a Brazilian Favela (University of Chicago Press, 2022) is a mesmerizing ethnography of the largest favela in Rio, where residents articulate their own politics…
China has one of the largest queer populations in the world, but what does it mean to be queer in a Confucian society in which kinship roles, ties,…
Edward Anthony Avery-Natale’s book Ethics, Politics, and Anarcho-Punk Identifications: Punk and Anarchy in Philadelphia (Lexington, 2016) explores the ways in which those who identify as punks and anarchists living in the…
In today’s episode of How To Be Wrong we welcome Dr. Khytie Brown, who is an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.…
A detailed exploration of parents’ fight for a safe environment for their kids, interrogating how race, class, and gender shape health advocacy The success of food allergy activism…
Argentina lies at the heart of the American hemisphere’s history of global migration booms of the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth century: by 1910, one of every three Argentine…
Trina Nileena Banerjee’s book Performing Silence: Women in the Group Theatre Movement in Bengal (Oxford UP, 2021) addresses the absence of a sustained and critical engagement with the gender politics…
Peer Schouten, of the Danish Institute for International Studies, has written a breathtaking book. Roadblock Politics: The Origins of Violence in Central Africa (Cambridge, 2022). Schouten mapped more than 1000…
Jazz in Socialist Hà Nội: Improvisations between Worlds (Routledge, 2022) examines the germination and growth of jazz under communist rule—perceived as the “music of the enemy” and “ideologically decadent”—in the…
In Militarized Global Apartheid, Catherine Besteman offers a sweeping theorization of the ways in which countries from the global north are reproducing South Africa’s apartheid system on a worldwide scale…
In Media Culture in Nomadic Communities (Amsterdam University Press, 2021), author Allison Hahn examines the ways that new communications technologies have changed how nomadic and mobile communities engage in political advocacy,…
A new generation of Afro-Brazilian media producers have emerged to challenge a mainstream that frequently excludes them. Reighan Gillam delves into the dynamic alternative media landscape developed by…
The Boston Harbor Islands have been called Boston’s “hidden shores.” While some are ragged rocks teeming with coastal wildlife, such as oystercatchers and harbor seals, others resemble manicured…