Recent Books
Fragilities: Essays on the Politics, Ethics, and Aesthetics of Maintenance and Repair
Edited by Fernando Domínguez Rubio, Jérôme Denis, David Pontille
The MIT Press, 2025
At a time when it may be easy to fall into a defeatist melancholia, if not outright pessimism, fragility offers an opportunity for a different kind of world-making. In Fragilities, Fernando Domínguez Rubio, Jérôme Denis, and David Pontille argue that we need to pay attention to the moments when the bodies, things, and worlds we inhabit begin to crack and reveal their fragility; it is in these instabilities that we can gain precious access to alternative ways of being. The essays in this collection explore how the work of care, maintenance, and repair compose with, rather than struggle against, fragilities.
Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture by Andrew deWaard
UC Press, 2025
Sequels, reboots, franchises, and songs that remake old songs—does it feel like everything new in popular culture is just derivative of something old? Contrary to popular belief, the reason is not audiences or marketing, but Wall Street. In this book, Andrew deWaard shows how the financial sector is dismantling the creative capacity of cultural industries by upwardly redistributing wealth, consolidating corporate media, harming creative labor, and restricting our collective media culture. Moreover, financialization is transforming the very character of our mediascapes for branded transactions. Our media are increasingly shaped by the profit-extraction techniques of hedge funds, asset managers, venture capitalists, private equity firms, and derivatives traders. Illustrated with examples drawn from popular culture, Derivative Media offers readers the critical financial literacy necessary to understand the destructive financialization of film, television, and popular music—and provides a plan to reverse this dire threat to culture.
Bangtan Remixed: A Critical BTS Reader by Patty Ahn with Michelle Cho, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, Rani Neutill, Mimi Thi Nguyen, Yutian Wong
Duke University Press, 2024
Bangtan Remixed delves into the cultural impact of celebrated K-Pop boy band BTS, exploring their history, aesthetics, fan culture, and capitalist moment. The collection’s contributors—who include artists, scholars, journalists, activists, and fans—approach BTS through inventive and wide-ranging transnational perspectives. From tracing BTS’s hip hop genealogy to analyzing how the band’s mid-2020 album reflects the COVID-19 pandemic to demonstrating how Baroque art history influences BTS’s music videos, the contributors investigate BTS’s aesthetic heritage. They also explore the political and technological dimensions of BTS’s popularity with essays on K-Pop and BTS’s fan culture as frontiers of digital technology, the complex relationship between BTS and Blackness, the impact of anti-Asian racism on BTS’s fandom, and the challenges BTS poses to conservative norms of gender and sexuality. Bangtan Remixed shows how one band can inspire millions of fans and provide a broad range of insights into contemporary social and political life.
Business as Usual: How Sponsored Media Sold American Capitalism in the Twentieth Century by Caroline Jack
University of Chicago Press, 2024
Business as Usual reveals how American capitalism has been promoted in the most ephemeral of materials: public service announcements, pamphlets, educational films, and games—what Caroline Jack calls “sponsored economic education media.” These items, which were funded by corporations and trade groups who aimed to “sell America to Americans,” found their way into communities, classrooms, and workplaces, and onto the airwaves, where they promoted ideals of “free enterprise” under the cloaks of public service and civic education. They offered an idealized vision of US industrial development as a source of patriotic optimism, framed business management imperatives as economic principles, and conflated the privileges granted to corporations by the law with foundational political rights held by individuals. This rhetoric remains dominant—a harbinger of the power of disinformation that so besets us today. Jack reveals the funding, production, and distribution that together entrenched a particular vision of corporate responsibility—and, in the process, shut out other hierarchies of value and common care.
The Lamentations: A Requiem for Queer Suicide by Patrick Anderson
Fordham Univeristy Press, 2024
The Lamentations explores the struggles and resilience within the queer community, offering a unique blend of historical analysis and emotional tribute to those affected. Author Patrick Anderson examines the phenomenon of queer suicide across various art forms such as film, theatre, and literature, tracing its evolution from the twentieth century to today. Anderson brings to light the personal stories of individuals in the queer community who have ended their lives, compiling narratives from sources like newspaper articles, obituaries, and case studies. The book confronts the harsh realities of loneliness, shame, and oppression faced by many LGBTQ+ individuals, providing a poignant reflection on the societal challenges they face. The Lamentations is more than a meditation on death; it’s a narrative of survival, mourning, and healing. Sharing personal accounts, including the losses of loved ones and friends, Anderson highlights the importance of memory and storytelling in celebrating the vibrancy of queer life amidst the sorrow of loss. Accessible to a broad readership, the book transcends academic boundaries to address themes of love, loss, and the human spirit. It’s a compelling read for anyone interested in queer studies or anyone seeking to understand human experience through the lens of loss and legacy.
Window Shopping with Helen Keller: Architecture and Disability in Modern Culture by David Serlin
University of Chicago Press, 2025
Window Shopping with Helen Keller recovers a series of influential moments when architects and designers engaged the embodied experiences of people with disabilities. David Serlin reveals how people with sensory and physical impairments navigated urban spaces and helped to shape modern culture. Through four case studies—the lives of Joseph Merrick (aka “The Elephant Man”) and Helen Keller, the projects of the Works Progress Administration, and the design of the Illinois Regional Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped—Serlin offers a new history of modernity’s entanglements with disability.
Tourism Geopolitics: Assemblages of Infrastructure, Affect, and Imagination by Matilde Córdoba Azcárate (Editor) with Mary Mostafanezhad (Editor), Roger Norum (Editor)
University of Arizona Press, 2024
In Tourism Geopolitics, contributors show enacted processes such as labor migration, conservation, securitization, nation building, territorial disputes, ethnic cleansing, heritage revitalization, and global health crisis management, among others. These contended societal processes are deployed through tourism development initiatives that mobilize deeply uneven symbolic and material landscapes. The chapters reveal how a range of experiences are implicated in this process: museum visits, walking tours, architectonical evocations of the past, road construction, militarized island imaginations, gendered cultural texts, and official silences. Collectively, the chapters offer ethnographically rich illustrations from around the world that demonstrate the critical nature of tourism in formal geopolitical practices, as well as the geopolitical nature of everyday tourism encounters. This volume is a vital read for critical geographers, anthropologists, and political scientists, as well as scholars of tourism and cultural studies.
Redacted by Lilly Irani with Jesse Marx
Taller California, 2021
As involuntary art works, redacted documents visually state the limits between secrecy and public information. With a trenchant sense of irony, Marx and Irani analyze the many “styles” and “hands” of censorship, as revealed by a collection of public records from San Diego. Why are some public records requests denied? Why is some information revealed and other information redacted? What does public information mean for democracy, for trust in government and amongst ourselves? Redacted, a delightfully eclectic and playful combination of personal reflection, critical analysis, practical tips, and interviews, dives into the byzantine world of public records requests, a world of government redactors, lawyers, public officials, corporations, and citizens wrangling over the availability of information.
Shooting Cameras for Peace / Disparando Cámaras para la Paz by Alex Fattal
Youth, Photography, and the Colombian Armed Conflict / Juventud, Fotografía y el Conflicto Armado Colombiano
Harvard University Press, 2020
The book is the capstone of a nineteen year process, including the founding of a Colombian non-profit that gave marginalized youth in the far outskirts of Colombia the opportunity to take their own photographs and tell their own stories.
The report entitled, “Zooming to the Border for Human Rights: A fact-finding report on the ongoing violations of human rights at the U.S.-Mexico Border” draws from a series of public Zoom panels in consultation with community groups working on issues pertaining to migration, labor and the environment on both sides of the border and along its full east- west extension from the Gulf Coast the the Pacific Ocean. Originally conceived as a face-to-face fact-finding trip, rather than canceling the project, we switched to a virtual format during the height of the pandemic. The report, therefore, also documents the added impact of COVID-19 the already dire and dismal conditions at the border as well as the valiant efforts in these border communities to meet this additional challenges.
The document is disseminated among activists, journalists and policy makers. The report, as well recordings of the panel discussions, are both available on-line at:
http://www.tribunodelpueblo.org/zooming-to-the-border-for-human-rights/
Stuck with Tourism: Space, Power, and Labor in Contemporary Yucatan by Matilde Córdoba Azcárate
University of California Press, 2020
Tourism has become one of the most powerful forces organizing the predatory geographies of late capitalism. It creates entangled futures of exploitation and dependence, extracting resources and labor, and eclipsing other ways of doing, living, and imagining life. And yet, tourism also creates jobs, encourages infrastructure development, and in many places inspires the only possibility of hope and well-being. Stuck with Tourism explores the ambivalent nature of tourism by drawing on ethnographic evidence from the Mexican Yucatán Peninsula, a region voraciously transformed by tourism development over the past forty years. Contrasting labor and lived experiences at the beach resorts of Cancún, protected natural enclaves along the Gulf coast, historical buildings of the colonial past, and maquilas for souvenir production in the Maya heartland, this book explores the moral, political, ecological, and everyday dilemmas that emerge when, as Yucatán’s inhabitants put it, people get stuck in tourism’s grip.
2020 Book Prize, Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology
2020 Nelson Graburn Book Prize at the American Anthropological Association, Anthropology of Tourism Interest Group
Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum by Fernando Domínguez Rubio
University of Chicago Press, 2020
How do you keep the cracks in Starry Night from spreading? How do you prevent artworks made of hugs or candies from disappearing? How do you render a fading photograph eternal—or should you attempt it at all? These are some of the questions that conservators, curators, registrars, and exhibition designers dealing with contemporary art face on a daily basis. In Still Life, Fernando Domínguez Rubio delves into one of the most important museums of the world, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, to explore the day-to-day dilemmas that museum workers face when the immortal artworks that we see in the exhibition room reveal themselves to be slowly unfolding disasters.
Association for the Study of Arts of the Present: ASAP Book Prize
ASA Culture Section: Mary Douglas Prize
Science, Knowledge, and Technology section, American Sociological Association: Robert K. Merton Award (Honorable Mention)
The Routledge History of American Sexuality by David Serlin with Kevin P. Murphy, Jason Ruiz
Routledge, 2020
The Routledge History of American Sexuality brings together contributions from leading scholars in history and related fields to provide a far-reaching but concrete history of sexuality in the United States.
This interdisciplinary group of authors explores a wide variety of case studies and concepts to provide an innovative approach to the history of sexual practices and identities over several centuries. Each chapter interrogates a provocative word or concept to reflect on the complex ideas, debates, and differences of historical and cultural opinions surrounding it. Authors challenge readers to look beyond contemporary identity-based movements in order to excavate the deeper histories of how people have sought sexual pleasure, power, and freedom in the Americas.
Books Published Prior to 2019
Lilly Irani. Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India. (Princeton University Press, 2019).
Shawna Kidman. Comic Books Incorporated: How the Business of Comics Became the Business of Hollywood. (University of California Press, 2019).
Tanaka, Stefan. History without Chronology. (Lever Press, 2019).
Fattal, ALexander. Guerrilla Marketing: Counterinsurgency and Capitalism in Colombia. (University of Chicago Press, 2018).
Gary Fields. Enclosure: Palestinian Landscapes in a Historical Mirror (University of California Press, 2017).
Patrick Anderson. Autobiography of a Disease (Routledge, 2017).
Natalia Roudakova. Losing Pravada: Ethics and The Press in Post-Truth Russia (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
Christo Sims. Disruptive Fixation: School Reform and the Pitfalls of Techno-Idealism (Princeton University Press, 2017).
Chandra Mukerji. Modernity Reimagined: An Analytic Guide (Routledge, 2017).
John McMurria. Republic on the Wire: Cable Television, Pluralism, and the Politics of New Technologies, 1948-1984 (Rutgers University Press, 2017).
Dan Hallin and Charles L. Briggs. Making Health Public: How News Coverage Is Remaking Media, Medicine, and Contemporary Life (Routledge, 2016).
Carol Padden. Interaction of Morphology and Syntax in American Sign Language (London: Routledge Press, 2016).
David Serlin, Rachel Adams, and Benjamin Reiss, eds. Keywords for Disability Studies (New York University, 2015).
Robert Horwitz. America's Right: Anti-establishment Conservatism from Goldwater to the Tea Party (Polity, 2013).
Valerie Hartouni. Visualizing Atrocity: Arendt, Evil, and the Optics of Thoughtlessness (New York University, 2012).
Dan Hallin. Comparing Media Systems Beyond the Western World (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
Fernando Domínguez Rubio and Patrick Baert, eds. The politics of knowledge (London: Routledge, 2012).
Kelly Gates. Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance (New York University Press, 2011).
Boatema Boateng. That Copyright Thing Doesn't Work Here: Adinkra and Kente Cloth and Intellectual Property in Ghana (University of Minnesota, 2011).
Elana Zilberg. Space of Detention: The Making of a Transnational Gang Crisis between Los Angeles and San Salvador (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011).
Patrick Anderson. So Much Wasted: Hunger, Performance, and the Morbidity of Resistance (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010).
David Serlin, ed. Imagining Illness: Public Health and Visual Culture (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
Patrick Anderson and Jisha Menon, eds. Violence Performed: Local Roots and Global Routes of Conflict (Palgrave, 2009).
Daniel Hallin. Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2006).
Carol Padden and Tom Humphries. Inside Deaf Culture. Cambridge, (MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
John McMurria, Toby Miller, Nitin Govil, Richard Maxwell and Ting Wang. Global Hollywood 2, with Toby Miller, Nitin Govil, Richard Maxwell and Ting Wang (London: British Film Institute/University of California Press, 2004).
Gary Fields. Territories of Profit: Communications, Capitalist Development and the Innovative Enterprises of G.F. Swift and Dell Computer (Stanford University Press, 2004).
David Serlin. Replaceable You: Engineering the Body in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
Stefan Tanaka. New Times in Modern Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
Carol Padden and Tom Humphries. Learning American Sign Language (Second Edition. Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1992, 2004)
Brian Goldfarb. Visual Pedagogy: Media Cultures of Education in and Beyond the Classroom (Duke University Press, 2002).
David Serlin, Katherine Ott, and Stephen Mihm, eds. Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics (New York: New York University Press, 2002).
Olga Vásquez. La Clase Mágica: Imagining Optimal Possibilities in a Bilingual Community of Learners (New Jersey: Laurence Erlbaum Publishers, 2002).
Robert Horwitz. Communication and Democratic Reform in South Africa (Cambridge, 2001).
John McMurria, Toby Miller, Nitin Govil and Richard Maxwell. Global Hollywood (London: British Film Institute/University of California Press, 2001). Reprint, 2003.
Keith Pezzoli. Human Settlements and Planning for Ecological Sustainability: The Case of Mexico City. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000)
Daniel Hallin. We Keep America On Top of the World: Television Journalism and the Public Sphere (Routledge, 1994).
Olga Vásquez, Lucinda Pease-Alvarez, and Sheila Shannon. Pushing Boundaries: Language in a Mexicano Community (Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Valerie Hartouni. Cultural Conceptions: On Reproductive Technologies and the Remaking of Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
Stefan Tanaka. Japan's Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993).
Robert Horwitz. The Irony of Regulatory Reform: The Deregulation of American Telecommunications (Oxford, 1989).
Carol Padden and Tom Humphries. Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988)
Daniel Hallin. The "Uncensored War": The Media and Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 1986).