Featured Book: Experiencing the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict by visiting scholar, Yael Warshel

Yael Warshel’s book, Experiencing the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Children, Peace Communication and Socialization, published by Cambridge University Press, has been named a finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Awards for Current Events. The award (pictured in the attached) will be handed out at the upcoming Next Generation Indie Book Awards Ceremony in San Diego June 28, 2024.

Book Launch: The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives

This virtual book launch will celebrate the publication of The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives (2023), co-edited by Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi and Vinh Nguyen. This open-access Handbook presents a transnational and interdisciplinary study of refugee narratives, broadly defined. Interrogating who can be considered a refugee and what constitutes a narrative, the thirty-eight chapters included in this collection encompass a range of forcibly displaced subjects, a mix of geographical and historical contexts, and a variety of storytelling modalities. This book launch will feature presentations from eight of the volume's authors: Bishupal Limbu, Asha Varadharajan, Regina Marie Mills, Veronika Zablotsky. Himadri Chatterjee, Emily Hue, Hadji Bakara, and Erin Goheen Glanville.

March 16th, 2023 12:30pm - 1:45pm

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Featured book: Leisy J. Abrego, Duke University Press (with Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales).
The widely recognized “Dreamer narrative” celebrates the educational and economic achievements of undocumented youth to justify a path to citizenship. While a well-intentioned, strategic tactic to garner political support of undocumented youth, it has promoted the idea that access to citizenship and rights should be granted only to a select group of “deserving” immigrants. The contributors to We Are Not Dreamers—themselves currently or formerly undocumented—poignantly counter the Dreamer narrative by grappling with the nuances of undocumented life in this country. Theorizing those excluded from the Dreamer category—academically struggling students, transgender activists, and queer undocumented parents—the contributors call for an expansive articulation of immigrant rights and justice that recognizes the full humanity of undocumented immigrants while granting full and unconditional rights. Illuminating how various institutions reproduce and benefit from exclusionary narratives, this volume articulates the dangers of the Dreamer narrative and envisions a different way forward. More...

Featured book: Cecilia Menjívar, The Oxford Handbook of Migration Crises (with Marie Ruiz and Immanuel Ness).
The objective of The Oxford Handbook of Migration Crises is to deconstruct, question, and redefine through a critical lens what is commonly understood as "migration crises." The volume covers a wide range of historical, economic, social, political, and environmental conditions that generate migration crises around the globe. At the same time, it illuminates how the media and public officials play a major role in framing migratory flows as crises. The volume brings together an exceptional group of scholars from around the world to critically examine migration crises and to revisit the notion of crisis through the context in which permanent and non-permanent migration flows occur. More...

Featured book: Kelly Lytle Hernández's book, City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965
Los Angeles incarcerates more people than any other city in the United States, which imprisons more people than any other nation on Earth. This book explains how the City of Angels became the capital city of the world’s leading incarcerator. Marshaling more than two centuries of evidence, historian Kelly Lytle Hernández unmasks how histories of native elimination, immigrant exclusion, and black disappearance drove the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles. In this telling, which spans from the Spanish colonial era to the outbreak of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, Hernández documents the persistent historical bond between the racial fantasies of conquest, namely its settler colonial form, and the eliminatory capacities of incarceration. More...

Featured book: David Yoo's edited volume, The Oxford Handbook of Asian American History (with Eiichiro Azuma)
The Oxford Handbook of Asian American History offers the first comprehensive commentary on the state of the field, simultaneously assessing where Asian American studies came from and what the future holds. In this volume, thirty leading scholars offer original essays on a wide range of topics. The chapters trace Asian American history from the beginning of the migration flows toward the Pacific Islands and the American continent to Japanese American incarceration and Asian American participation in World War II, from the experience of exclusion, violence, and racism to the social and political activism of the late twentieth century. The authors explore many of the key aspects of the Asian American experience, including politics, economy, intellectual life, the arts, education, religion, labor, gender, family, urban development, and legal history. More...

Featured book: Cecilia Menjívar and Leisy Abrego's book, Immigrant Families (with Leah Schmalzbauer)
There is no quintessential immigrant experience, as immigrants and their families arrive with different levels of economic, social, and cultural resources, and must navigate various social structures that shape how they fare. Immigrant Families highlights the hierarchies and inequities between and within immigrant families created by key axes of inequality such as legal status, social class, gender, and generation. Drawing on ethnographic, demographic, and historical scholarship, the authors highlight the transnational context in which many contemporary immigrant families live, exploring how families navigate care, resources, expectations, and aspirations across borders. Ultimately, the book analyzes how dynamics at the individual, family, and community levels shape the life chances and wellbeing of immigrants and their families. More...

Featured book: Roger Waldinger's edited volume, A Century of Transnationalism: Immigrants and their Home Connections (with Nancy L. Green)
The burgeoning literature on immigrant transnationalism is one of the academic success stories of our times. Yet having reminded scholars that migrants, in leaving home for a new life abroad, inevitably tie place of origin and destination together, scholars of transnationalism have also insisted that today's cross-border connections are unprecedented. This collection of articles by sociologically minded historians and historically minded sociologists takes aim at that contention. Looking back over the past century and more, the book highlights both the long-term persistence and the continuing instability of home country connections. More...

Featured book: Ruben Hernandez-Leon's book, Skills of the "Unskilled": Work and Mobility among Mexican Migrants (with Jacqueline Hagan and Jean-Luc Demonsant)
Most labor and migration studies classify migrants with limited formal education or credentials as “unskilled.” Despite the value of migrants' work experiences and the substantial technical and interpersonal skills developed throughout their lives, the labor-market contributions of these migrants are often overlooked and their mobility pathways poorly understood. Skills of the “Unskilled” reports the findings of a five-year study that draws on research including interviews with 320 Mexican migrants and return migrants in North Carolina and Guanajuato, Mexico. The authors uncover these migrants’ lifelong human capital and identify mobility pathways associated with the acquisition and transfer of skills across the migratory circuit, including reskilling, occupational mobility, job jumping, and entrepreneurship. More...

Featured book: Lorrie Frasure-Yokley's book, Racial and Ethnic Politics in American Suburbs
Racial and Ethnic Politics in American Suburbs examines racial and ethnic politics outside traditional urban contexts and questions the standard theories we use to understand mobility and government responses to rapid demographic change and political demands. This study moves beyond traditional scholarship in urban politics, departing from the persistent treatment of racial dynamics in terms of a simple black-white binary. Combining an interdisciplinary, multi-method, and multiracial approach with a well-integrated analysis of multiple forms of data including focus groups, in-depth interviews, and census data, Racial and Ethnic Politics in American Suburbs explains how redistributive policies and programs are developed and implemented at the local level to assist immigrants, racial/ethnic minorities, and low-income groups - something that given earlier knowledge and theorizing should rarely happen. Lorrie Frasure-Yokley relies on the framework of suburban institutional interdependency (SII), which presents a new way of thinking systematically about local politics within the context of suburban political institutions in the United States today. More...

Featured book: Marjorie Faulstich Orellana's book, Immigrant Children in Transcultural Spaces: Language, Learning and Love
Immigrant Children in Transcultural Spaces speaks to critical social issues and debates about education, immigration, multilingualism and multiculturalism in an historical moment in which borders are being built up, torn down, debated and recreated, in both real and symbolic terms; raises questions about the values that drive educational practice and decision-making; and suggests alternatives to the status quo. At its heart, it is a book about how love can serve as a driving force to connect people with each other across all kinds of borders, and to motivate children to engage powerfully with learning and life. More...

Featured book: Carola Suarez-Orozco's edited volume, Transitions: The Development of Children of Immigrants (with Mona M. Abo-Zena and Amy K. Marks)
How are immigrant children like all other children, and how are they unique? What challenges as well as what opportunities do their circumstances present for their development? What characteristics are they likely to share because they have immigrant parents, and what characteristics are unique to specific groups of origin? How are children of first-generation immigrants different from those of second-generation immigrants? Transitions offers comprehensive coverage of the field’s best scholarship on the development of immigrant children, providing an overview of what the field needs to know—or at least systematically begin to ask—about the immigrant child and adolescent from a developmental perspective. More...

Featured book: Min Zhou's book, The Asian American Achievement Paradox (with Jennifer Lee)
Asian Americans are often stereotyped as the “model minority.” Their sizeable presence at elite universities and high household incomes have helped construct the narrative of Asian American “exceptionalism.” While many scholars and activists characterize this as a myth, pundits claim that Asian Americans’ educational attainment is the result of unique cultural values. In The Asian American Achievement Paradox, sociologists Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou offer a compelling account of the academic achievement of the children of Asian immigrants… While pundits ascribe Asian American success to the assumed superior traits intrinsic to Asian culture, Lee and Zhou show how historical, cultural, and institutional elements work together to confer advantages to specific populations. An insightful counter to notions of culture based on stereotypes, The Asian American Achievement Paradox offers a deft and nuanced understanding of how and why certain immigrant groups succeed. More...

Featured book: Roger Waldinger's book, The Cross-Border Connection: Immigrants, Emigrants, and Their Homelands
International migration presents the human face of globalization, with consequences that make headlines throughout the world. The Cross-Border Connection addresses a paradox at the core of this phenomenon: emigrants departing one society become immigrants in another, tying those two societies together in a variety of ways. In nontechnical language, Roger Waldinger explains how interconnections between place of origin and destination are built and maintained and why they eventually fall apart. …Although widely studied, cross-border connections remain misunderstood, both by scholars convinced that globalization is leading to a deterritorialized world of unbounded loyalties and flows, and by policy makers trying to turn migration into an engine of development. Not since Oscar Handlin’s classic The Uprooted has there been such a precisely argued, nuanced study of the immigrant experience. More...