Better World Books

Solidarity Economics: The Comic

Chris Benner, Professor of Environmental Studies and Sociology

Co-author Manuel Pastor

In a world wracked by inequality, social divisions, and ecological destruction, can we build an alternative economy based on our mutual co-operation? This comic provides a short introduction and summary of key points of the Solidarity Economics book by Dr. Chris Benner and Dr. Manuel Pastor. In this book Chris Benner and Manuel Pastor invite us to imagine and create a new sort of solidarity economics – an approach grounded in our instincts for connection and community – and in so doing, actually build a more robust, sustainable, and equitable economy. Artwork by Golnoush Pak.

Tijeras Pueblo at the Crossroads: Archaeology, Cultural Heritage, and Public Education

Judith Habicht-Mauche, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology

Co-editor Sandra Arazi-Coambs

Tijeras Pueblo is a late precontact Ancestral Pueblo site, located just east of the modern city of Albuquerque, NM. This volume highlights diverse perspectives involved in understanding, interpreting, and preserving Tijeras Pueblo, including a summary of recent research on the site, the use of the site and its collections as a source for public education, a discussion of management challenges related to its location on a Forest Service administrative complex, and how interpretation and research have benefited from the continued collaboration with the descendant community of Isleta Pueblo.

Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean

Camilla Hawthorne, Associate Professor of Sociology

Contesting Race and Citizenship is an original study of Black politics and varieties of political mobilization in Italy. Camilla Hawthorne focuses on the ways Italians of African descent have become entangled with processes of redefining the legal, racial, cultural, and economic boundaries of Italy and by extension, of Europe itself. Hawthorne traces not only mobilizations for national citizenship but also the more capacious, transnational Black diasporic possibilities that emerge when activists confront the ethical and political limits of citizenship as a means for securing meaningful, lasting racial justice—possibilities that are based on shared critiques of the racial state and shared histories of racial capitalism and colonialism.

Trajectories in Environmental Politics

Sikina Jinnah, Professor of Environmental Studies

Co-editors Graeme Hayes, Sikina Jinnah, Prakash Kashwan, David Koniski, Sheilyn MacGregor, John M. Meyer, Anthony Zito

This book explores the dominant framings and paradigms of environmental politics, and the relationship between academic analysis and environmental politics. Discussing state violence, multispecies justice, epistemic injustice, the circular economy, NGOs, parties, green transition, and urban climate governance, they call above all for greater attention to intersectionality and interdisciplinarity, and for centering key insights about power relations and socio-economic inequalities into increasingly widespread, yet also often depoliticised, topics in the study of environmental politics.

Trees Are Shape Shifters How Cultivation, Climate Change, and Disaster Create Landscapes

Andrew Mathews, Professor of Anthropology

In Italy and around the Mediterranean, almost every stone, every tree, and every hillside show traces of human activities. Situating climate change within the context of the Anthropocene, Andrew Mathews investigates how people in Lucca, Italy, make sense of social and environmental change by caring for the morphologies of trees and landscapes. He analyzes how people encounter climate change, not by thinking and talking about climate, but by caring for the environments around them. The human-transformed landscapes of Italy are a harbinger of the experiences that all of us are likely to face, and addressing these disasters will call upon all of us to think about the human and natural histories of the landscapes we live in.

Archaeologies of Indigenous Presence

Tsim Schneider, Associate Professor of Anthropology

Co-editor Lee M. Panich

Challenging narratives of Indigenous cultural loss and disappearance that are still prevalent in the archaeological study of colonization, this book highlights collaborative research and efforts to center the enduring histories of Native peoples in North America through case studies from several regions across the continent. The contributors to this volume, including Indigenous scholars and Tribal resource managers, examine different ways that archaeologists can center long-term Indigenous presence in the practices of fieldwork, laboratory analysis, scholarly communication, and public interpretation.

Queer Theory and Psychology: Gender, Sexuality, and Transgender Identities.

Eileen Zubriggen, Professor of Psychology

Co-author Ella ben Hagai

The authors explore foundational ideas from queer thought and transgender theory including the instability of gender, variation in sexualities, intersectional theory, and trans writers’ rejection of the “born in the wrong body” narrative. These key ideas are juxtaposed with innovative empirical psychological research on the fluidity of gender, the proliferation of sexual identities, and transgender affirming medical and psychological care.

How Green Became Good: Urbanized Nature and the Making of Cities and Citizens

Hillary Angelo, Associate Professor of Sociology

Why are greening projects so widely taken up, and what good do they do? In How Green Became Good, Hillary Angelo uncovers the origins and meanings of appeals to urban nature. By tracing a century of greening projects in Germany’s Ruhr Valley, she reveals an enduring conviction that green space will transform us into ideal inhabitants of ideal cities, arguing that the creation of urban green space is more about how we imagine social life than about the good it imparts.

Solidarity Economics: Why Mutuality and Movements Matter

Chris Benner, Professor of Environmental Studies and Sociology

Co-author Manuel Pastor

In this book Chris Benner and Manuel Pastor invite us to imagine a new sort of solidarity economics – an approach grounded in our instincts for connection and community – and in so doing, actually build a more robust and sustainable economy. They argue that our current economy is already deeply dependent on mutuality, but that the inequality and fragmentation created by the status quo undermine this mutuality and with it our economic well-being. They outline the theoretical framing, policy agenda, and social movements that we need to revive solidarity and apply it to whole societies.

Poorly Understood: What America Gets Wrong about Poverty

Heather Bullock, Professor of Psychology

Co-authors Mark Robert Rank and Lawrence M. Eppard

Poorly Understood systematically addresses many of the most common myths about poverty, demonstrating that the realities of poverty are much different than the myths and in many ways more disturbing. The idealized image of American society is one of abundant opportunities, with hard work being rewarded by economic prosperity. But what if this picture is wrong? What if hard work does not necessarily lead to economic well-being? What if the reasons for poverty are largely beyond the control of individuals? And if all of the evidence necessary to disprove these myths has been readily available for years, why do they remain so stubbornly pervasive?

Why Food Matters: Critical Debates in Food Studies

Melissa Caldwell, Professor of Anthropology

What is food and why does it matter? By bringing together the most innovative, cutting-edge scholarship and debates in critical food studies, this volume considers what makes food so meaningful and powerful and sheds light on how questioning the very nature of food itself offers possibilities for reconsidering what we think we know about ourselves, other people, and the world around us.

The Handbook of Critical Literacies

Roberto Santiago de Roock, Assistant Professor of Education

Co-editors Jessica Zacher Pandya, Raúl Alberto Mora, Jennifer Helen Alford, Noah Asher Golden

Critical literacies are classically understood as ways to interrogate texts and contexts to address injustices and they are an essential literacy practice. Organized into thematic and regional sections, this handbook provides substantive definitions of critical literacies across fields and geographies, surveys of critical literacy work in over 23 countries and regions, and overviews of research, practice, and conceptual connections to established and emerging theoretical frameworks.

Sweetness in the Blood: Race, Risk, and Type 2 Diabetes

James Doucet-Battle, Assistant Professor of Sociology

In a rousing indictment of the idea that notions of biological race should drive scientific inquiry, Sweetness in the Blood provides an ethnographic picture of biotechnology’s framings of Type 2 diabetes risk and race. James Doucet-Battle offers an important critical examination of the assumptions behind the recruitment of African American and African-descent populations for Type 2 diabetes research.

The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders, and Citizenship

Camilla Hawthorne, Assistant Professor of Sociology

Co-editors Gabriele Proglio, Ida Danewid, P. Khalil Saucier, Giuseppe Grimaldi, Angelica Pesarini, Timothy Raeymaekers, Giulia Grechi, Vivian Gerrand

This edited volume aims to problematise and rethink the contemporary European migrant crisis in the Central Mediterranean through the lens of the Black Mediterranean. Bringing together scholars working in geography, political theory, sociology, and cultural studies, this volume takes the Black Mediterranean as a starting point for asking and answering a set of crucial questions about the racialized production of borders, bodies, and citizenship in contemporary Europe.

The Left Hand of Capital: Neoliberalism and the Left in Chile

Fernando Leiva, Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies

In The Left Hand of Capital, Fernando Ignacio Leiva provides a theoretically grounded analysis of the last thirty years of socioeconomic policies in Chile, beginning at the end of the Pinochet military regime in 1990. At a time when far-right movements seem to be growing in the Global South, Europe, and the United States, this book offers valuable insights into the predicament of social democracy and how, as in Chile and in the context of global neoliberalism, it can become the “left hand of capital.”

Shari’a, Inshallah: Finding God in Somali Legal Politics

Mark Fathi Massoud, Professor of Politics

Based on historical research, fieldwork, and interviews with lawyers, activists, and religious leaders, Shari’a, Inshallah documents nearly 150 years of historic attempts by the Somali people in East Africa to use shari’a to strengthen human rights and the rule of law — including attempts by contemporary women’s rights activists to push for gender equality by invoking shari’a. In a space where Western secular human rights interventions have failed, the book shows how future progress in human rights and the rule of law is possible under shari’a. 

Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship

Co-editors Catherine S. Ramírez, Sylvanna M. Falcón, Juan Poblete, Steven C. McKay & Felicity Amaya Schaeffer

Stemming from UCSC’s inaugural Andrew W. Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures and bringing together 23 contributors, _Precarity and Belonging_ looks at the institutions, practices, historical legacies, and discourses that have enabled, inhibited, or distorted social inclusion and civic and political participation. By highlighting commonalities between noncitizens and citizens, this volume sheds light on the nexus of precarity and mobility and strives to mitigate the divisiveness that threatens democracies in the twenty-first century.

Justice Is an Option: A Democratic Theory of Finance for the Twenty-First Century

Bob Meister, Professor of Political and Social Thought

Reckoning with historical injustice must address the effect of liquid financial markets in preserving and compounding pre-existing inequality. By retheorizing the financial bailouts of 2009, Justice Is an Option focuses directly on capital market liquidity as a potential chokepoint in future democratic struggles to reverse the cumulative inequalities arising from historical injustice while also harvesting their cumulative benefits. Historical justice is here conceived as an option (or contingent claim) on the appreciated value of past injustice; and democratic struggle is reimagined in today’s capitalism as the extraction of a high political premium (price) for supporting the ongoing liquidity of the investment vehicles in which the benefits of bad history have been thus far preserved and accumulated.

The Archaeology of Refuge and Recourse: Coast Miwok Resilience and Indigenous Hinterlands in Colonial California

Tsim Schneider, Assistant Professor of Anthropology

The Archaeology of Refuge and Recourse explores the dual practices of refuge and recourse among Indigenous peoples of California. From the eighteenth to the twentieth century, Indigenous Coast Miwok communities in California persisted throughout multiple waves of colonial intrusion. But to what ends?

The Senate: From White Supremacy to Government Gridlock

Daniel Wirls, Professor of Politics

This book examines the Senate in relation to our other institutions of government and the constitutional system as a whole, exposing the role of the “world’s greatest deliberative body” in undermining effective government and maintaining white supremacy in America.

Argentina in the Global Middle East

Lily Pearl Balloffet, Assistant Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies

Balloffet’s study connects modern Latin American and Middle Eastern history through shared links to global migration systems. Following the mobile lives of individuals with roots in the Levantine Middle East sheds light on the intersections of ethnicity, migrant–homeland ties, and international relations.

Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met: Border Making in Eighteenth-Century South America

Jeffrey Erbig, Assistant Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies

Drawing upon manuscripts from over two dozen archives in seven countries, Jeffrey Erbig traces on-the-ground interactions between Ibero-American colonists, Jesuit and Guaraní mission-dwellers, and autonomous Indigenous peoples as they responded to ever-changing notions of territorial possession.

Fields of Gold: Financing the Global Land Rush

Madeleine Fairbairn, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies

Madeleine Fairbairn looks at forces and players that have transformed farmland into a novel financial asset class, a practice that took hold after the 2008 financial crisis and continues today.

Civil Jury Trials Revolutionize Japan: Lessons from Experience of Civil Jury Trials in Okinawa

Hiroshi Fukurai, Professor of Legal Studies and Sociology

An examination of the civil jury trials that took place in Okinawa, involving corporate and government liabilities in relation to the colossal nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima in 2011. The introduction of civil jury trials may transform Japan’s legal landscape in the resolution of civil dispute cases.

Cities on the World Stage: The Politics of Global Urban Climate Governance

David Gordon, Assistant Professor of Politics

Cities are playing an ever more important role in the mitigation and adaption to climate change. This book examines the politics shaping whether, how and to what extent cities engage in global climate governance. Highlighting the constraints facing city networks and the potential pitfalls associated with a city-driven global response, this assessment of the transformative potential of cities will be of great interest to researchers, graduate students and policymakers in global environmental politics and policy.

Primer of Ecological Restoration

Karen Holl, Professor of Environmental Studies

A succinct introduction to the theory and practice of ecological restoration as a strategy to conserve biodiversity and ecosystems. The book introduces readers to the basics of restoration project planning, monitoring, and adaptive management.

Global Environmental Politics: Understanding the Governance of the Earth

Sikina Jinnah, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies

A comprehensive introduction to the key concepts, theories, methods, and debates in environmental politics. The authors’ analytical approach encourages students to critique a wide variety of political perspectives, equipping them with the necessary tools to develop their own arguments and opinions.

Greening Through Trade: How American Trade Policy Is Linked to Environmental Protection Abroad

Sikina Jinnah, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies

How the environmental provisions in US preferential trade agreements affect both the environmental policies of trading partners and the effectiveness of multilateral environmental agreements.

Strengthening Sustainability Programs and Curricula at the Undergraduate and Graduate Levels

Anne Kapuscinski, Professor of Environmental Studies & Coastal Science and Policy Program

Evidence-based core competencies for  interdisciplinary sustainability programs can provide suitable guidance for curricular and program development, research, policy, communication, and pedagogical approaches at academic institutions.

Resisting Redevelopment: Protest in Aspiring Global Cities

Eleonora Pasotti, Associate Professor of Politics

The politics of urban development is one of the most enduring, central themes of urban politics. In Resisting Redevelopment, Pasotti explores the forces that enable residents of ‘aspiring global cities,’ or economically competitive cities, to mobilize against gentrification and other forms of displacement, as well as what makes mobilizations successful. 

Assimilation: An Alternative History

Catherine S. Ramírez, Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies

Weaving together the legacies of US settler colonialism, slavery, and border control, Ramírez challenges the assumption that racialization and assimilation are separate and incompatible processes.

The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Political Theory

Megan Thomas, Associate Professor of Politics

The handbook demonstrates how mainstream political theory can and must be enriched through attention to genuinely global, rather than parochially Euro-American, contributions to political thinking.

Amplifying the Curriculum: Designing Quality Learning Opportunities for English Learners

George Bunch, Professor of Education

This practical resource will guide teachers through the coherent design of tasks, lessons, and units of study that invite English Lerners (and all students) to engage in productive, meaningful, and intellectually engaging activity.

Moral Foods: The Construction of Nutrition and Health in Modern Asia

Melissa L. Caldwell, Professor of Anthropology

Collectively, the chapters raise intriguing questions about how foods and the bodies that consume them have been valued politically economically, culturally, and morally, and about how those values originated and evolved.

Wilted: Pathogens, Chemicals, and the Fragile Future of the Strawberry Industry

Julie Guthman, Professor of Feminist Studies

The particular conditions of plants, soil, chemicals, climate, and laboring bodies that once made strawberry production so lucrative in the Golden State have now changed and become a set of related threats that jeopardize the future of the industry.

Environmental Politics for a Changing World: Power, Perspectives, and Practice

Ronnie Lipschutz, Emeritus Professor of Politics

Using framework of political economy and political ecology, the authors deconstruct current environmental problems to identify room causes and address those problems through mobilization of collective action and social power.

Rethinking Recess: Creating Safe and Inclusive Playtime for All Children in School

Rebecca London, Associate Professor of Sociology

Recess has been overlooked as an essential part of elementary school experience, with major implications for how well schools serve all students equitably and responsively.

The Psychology of Women under Patriarchy

Adriana Manago, Assistant Professor of Psychology

The contributors to this volume draw upon field research and in-depth qualitative data from different parts of the world to explore the reasons for women’s varied psychological responses to patriarchy.

Bending the Curve: Climate Change Solutions 

Adam Millard-Ball, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies

Using framework of political economy and political ecology, the authors deconstruct current environmental problems to identify room causes and address those problems through mobilization of collective action and social power.

Handbook on Critical Geographies of Migration

Katharyne Mitchell, Dean of the Division of Social Sciences

Border walls, shipwrecks in the Mediterranean, separated families at the border, island detention camps: migration is at the center of contemporary political and academic debates.

English Learners in STEM Subjects: Transforming Classrooms, Schools, and Lives

Judit Moschkovich, Professor of Education

The imperative that all students, including English learners (Els), achieve high academic standards and have opportunities to participate in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) learning has become even more urgent and complex given shifts in science and math standards.

Mapping Diaspora: African American Roots Tourism in Brazil

Patricia Pinho, Associate Professor of
Latin American & Latino Studies

Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic research as well as textual, visual, and archival sources, Pinho investigates African American roots tourism, a complex, poignant kind of travel that provides profound personal and collective meaning for those searching for black identity and heritage.

Fabricating Transnational Capitalism: A Collaborative Ethnography of Italian-Chinese Global Fashion

Lisa Rofel, Professor Emerita of Anthropology

Drawing on their respective linguistic and regional areas of expertise, Rofel and Yanagisako how different historical legacies of capital, labor, nation, and kinship are crucial in the formation of global capitalism.

The Kids Are in Charge: Activism and Power in Peru’s Movement of Working Children

Jessica Taft, Professor of Latin American & Latino Studies

Since 1976, the Peruvian movement of working children has fought to redefine age-based roles in society, including defending children’s right to work. Taft gives us an inside look at this groundbreaking, intergenerational social movement.