Social Sciences

This book tells the stories of young Black changemakers in Los Angeles. Black youth draw strength from their Black identities, families, communities, and civic organizations to challenge racial injustice and uplift Black communities. Their changemaking gives us hope for a better future without racism--

Each title in the Contemporary Debates series examines the veracity of controversial claims or beliefs surrounding a major political/cultural issue in the United States. The purpose of the series is to give readers a clear and unbiased understanding of current issues by informing them about falsehoods, half-truths, and misconceptions--and confirming the factual validity of other assertions--that have gained traction in America's political and cultural discourse. Ultimately, this series gives readers the tools for a fuller understanding of controversial issues, politics, and laws that occupy center stage in American life and politics.

How the drug war transformed American political culture. Since the 1950s, the American war on drugs has positioned white middle-class youth as sympathetic victims of illegal drug markets who need rehabilitation instead of incarceration whenever they break the law. The Suburban Crisis traces how politicians, the media, and grassroots political activists crusaded to protect white families from perceived threats while criminalizing and incarcerating urban minorities, and how a troubling legacy of racial injustice continues to inform the war on drugs today. In this incisive political history, Matthew Lassiter shows how the category of the white middle-class victim has been as central to the politics and culture of the drug war as racial stereotypes like the foreign trafficker, urban pusher, and predatory ghetto addict. He describes how the futile mission to safeguard and control white suburban youth shaped the enactment of the nation's first mandatory-minimum drug laws in the 1950s, and how soaring marijuana arrests of white Americans led to demands to refocus on real criminals in inner cities. The 1980s brought just say no moralizing in the white suburbs and militarized crackdowns in urban centers.The Suburban Crisis reveals how the escalating drug war merged punitive law enforcement and coercive public health into a discriminatory system for the social control of teenagers and young adults, and how liberal and conservative lawmakers alike pursued an agenda of racialized criminalization--

Traces the origins and evolution of online video platforms and how their algorithms now engineer human behavior, discussing present challenges and recommendations for reclaiming our online futures--

Suzette Mullen had been raised to play it safe--and she hated causing others pain. With college and law degrees, a kind and successful husband, two thriving adult sons, and an ocean-view vacation home, she lived a life many people would envy. But beneath the happy facade was a woman who watched her friends walk boldly through their lives and wondered what was holding her back from doing the same. Digging into her past, Suzette uncovered a deeply buried truth: she'd been in love with her best friend--a woman--for nearly two decades--and still was. Leaning into these unspeakable feelings would put Suzette's identity, relationships, and life of privilege at risk--but taking this leap might be her only chance to feel fully alive. As Suzette opened herself up to new possibilities, an unexpected visit to a new city helped her discover who she was meant to be. --

The Gender of Things is a highly interdisciplinary book that explores the power relationship between gender and the material culture of technoscience, addressing a seemingly straightforward question: How does a thing-such as a spacesuit, a humanoid robot, or a surgical instrument-become a gendered object? These 14 short essays cover an original selection of things: from cosmeceuticals to early motor scooters, from scrum boards to border walls, from robots to the human body and its parts. By historically examining how significance has been attached to specific things and how things were designed and produced, the essays reveal how the concept of gender has been embedded and finds expression in the material world of science and technology. With insights from science and technology studies, anthropology, the history of ergonomics, museum studies, the history of science, technology, and medicine but also the philosophy and sociology of technology and feminist new materialism, this collection reminds us that our material creations not only bear knowledge about our world. The Gender of Things will be of key interest to undergraduate and graduate students and research scholars of STS as well as Gender Studies--

In both local and international imaginations, Vancouver, Canada, is often celebrated as one of the world's most beautiful, cosmopolitan, and livable cities. Simultaneously, the city continues to be a ground zero for successive waves of public health emergency and intervention, including a recent and unprecedented drug overdose crisis driven by the proliferation of illicitly-manufactured fentanyl and related analogues in the local drug supply. In The Best Place: Addiction, Intervention, and Living and Dying Young in Vancouver, Danya Fast explores these politics of place from the perspectives of young people who use drugs. Those who are the subject of this book were in many ways relegated to the social, spatial, and economic margins of the city. Yet, they were also often at the very center of city life and state projects, including the project of protecting life in the context of the current overdose crisis--

An incisive and deeply candid account that explores autistic women in culture, myth, and society through the prism of the author's own diagnosis. Until the 1980s, autism was regarded as a condition found mostly in boys. Even in our time, autistic girls and women have largely remained invisible. When portrayed in popular culture, women on the spectrum often appear simply as copies of their male counterparts -- talented and socially awkward. Yet autistic women exist, and always have. They are varied in their interests and in their experiences. Autism may be relatively new as a term and a diagnosis, but not as a way of being and functioning in the world. It has always been part of the human condition. So who are these women, and what does it mean to see the world through their eyes? In The Autists, Clara Törnvall reclaims the language to describe autism and explores the autistic experience in arts and culture throughout history. From popular culture, films, and photography to literature, opera, and ballet, she dares to ask what it might mean to re-read these works through an autistic lens -- what we might discover if we allow perspectives beyond the neurotypical to take centre stage.

After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on most measures. Why? In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Haidt shows how the play-based childhood began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the phone-based childhood in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this great rewiring of childhood has interfered with children's social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies. Most important, Haidt issues a clear call to action. He diagnoses the collective action problems that trap us, and then proposes four simple rules that might set us free. He describes steps that parents, teachers, schools, tech companies, and governments can take to end the epidemic of mental illness and restore a more humane childhood. Haidt has spent his career speaking truth backed by data in the most difficult landscapes -- communities polarized by politics and religion, campuses battling culture wars, and now the public health emergency faced by Gen Z. We cannot afford to ignore his findings about protecting our children -- and ourselves -- from the psychological damage of a phone-based life. --

An intimate and one-of-a-kind look at the world of human smuggling in Latin America, by a MacArthur genius grant winner and anthropologist. Political instability, poverty, climate change, and the insatiable appetite for cheap labor all fuel clandestine movement across borders. As those borders harden, the demand for smugglers who aid migrants across them increases every year. Yet media and politicians have always characterized smugglers-or coyotes, or guides, as they are often known by the migrants who hire their services-using tired tropes and stereotypes, as boogie men and violent warlords. In an effort to better understand this essential yet extralegal billion dollar global industry, internationally recognized anthropologist and expert Jason De León embedded with a group of smugglers moving migrants across Mexico over the course of seven years. The result of this unprecedented access is SOLDIERS AND KINGS: the first ever in-depth, character-driven look at human smuggling. It is a heart-wrenching and intimate narrative that revolves around the life and death of one coyote, Chino, who falls in love and tries to leave smuggling behind. In a powerful, original voice, De León expertly chronicles the lives of low-level foot soldiers breaking into the smuggling game, and morally conflicted gang leaders who oversee rag-tag crews of guides and informants along the migrant trail. SOLDIERS AND KINGS is not only a ground-breaking up-close glimpse of a difficult-to-access world, it is a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction--