UC Press Blog

Hadar Aviram

June Morrison-Tom Gitchoff Founders Award
Western Society of Criminology

Hadar Aviram is Thomas Miller Professor of Law at the University of California Hastings College of the Law. She is the author of Cheap on Crime: Recession-Era Politics and the Transformation of American Punishment and a coeditor of The Legal Process and the Promise of Justice. She is a frequent media commentator and runs the California Correctional Crisis blog.

Yesterday’s Monsters
The Manson Family Cases and the Illusion of Parole

In 1969, the world was shocked by a series of murders committed by Charles Manson and his “family” of followers. Although the defendants were sentenced to death in 1971, their sentences were commuted to life with parole in 1972; since 1978, they have been regularly attending parole hearings. Today all of the living defendants remain behind bars.

Relying on nearly fifty years of parole hearing transcripts, as well as interviews and archival materials, Hadar Aviram invites readers into the opaque world of the California parole process—a realm of almost unfettered administrative discretion, prison programming inadequacies, high-pitched emotions, and political pressures. Yesterday’s Monsters offers a fresh longitudinal perspective on extreme punishment.

Cheap on Crime
Recession-Era Politics and the Transformation of American Punishment

After forty years of increasing prison construction and incarceration rates, winds of change are blowing through the American correctional system. The 2008 financial crisis demonstrated the unsustainability of the incarceration project, thereby empowering policy makers to reform punishment through fiscal prudence and austerity. In Cheap on Crime, Hadar Aviram draws on years of archival and journalistic research and builds on social history and economics literature to show the powerful impact of recession-era discourse on the death penalty, the war on drugs, incarceration practices, prison health care, and other aspects of the American correctional landscape.

Florence E. Babb

Honorable Mention 2020 Senior Book Prize
Association for Feminist Anthropology

Florence E. Babb is the Anthony Harrington Distinguished Professor in Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of The Tourism Encounter: Fashioning Latin American Nations and Histories.

Women’s Place in the Andes
Engaging Decolonial Feminist Anthropology

In Women’s Place in the Andes Florence E. Babb draws on four decades of anthropological research to reexamine the complex interworkings of gender, race, and indigeneity in Peru and beyond.  She deftly interweaves five new analytical chapters with six of her previously published works that exemplify currents in feminist anthropology and activism. Babb argues that decolonizing feminism and engaging more fully with interlocutors from the South will lead to a deeper understanding of the iconic Andean women who are subjects of both national pride and everyday scorn. This book’s novel approach goes on to set forth a collaborative methodology for rethinking gender and race in the Americas.

Milena Belloni

Honorable Mention Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Migration Studies Section Distinguished Book Award
International Studies Association

Milena Belloni is a sociologist at the University of Antwerp. Her doctoral research on Eritrean migration received the 2016 IMISCOE Award. Belloni has published in the Journal of Refugee Studies and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

The Big Gamble
The Migration of Eritreans to Europe

Tens of thousands of Eritreans make perilous voyages across Africa and the Mediterranean Sea every year. Why do they risk their lives to reach European countries where so many more hardships await them? By visiting family homes in Eritrea and living with refugees in camps and urban peripheries across Ethiopia, Sudan, and Italy, Milena Belloni untangles the reasons behind one of the most under-researched refugee populations today. Balancing encounters with refugees and their families, smugglers, and visa officers, The Big Gamble contributes to ongoing debates about blurred boundaries between forced and voluntary migration, the complications of transnational marriages, the social matrix of smuggling, and the role of family expectations, emotions, and values in migrants’ choices of destinations.

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org.

Lauren Duquette-Rury

Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Migration Studies Section Distinguished Book Award
International Studies Association

Lauren Duquette-Rury is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Wayne State University.

Exit and Voice
The Paradox of Cross-Border Politics in Mexico

Exit and Voice is a compelling account of how Mexican migrants with strong ties to their home communities impact the economic and political welfare of the communities they have left behind. In many decentralized democracies like Mexico, migrants have willingly stepped in to supply public goods when local or state government lack the resources or political will to improve the town. Though migrants’ cross-border investments often improve citizens’ access to essential public goods and create a more responsive local government, their work allows them to unintentionally exert political engagement and power, undermining the influence of those still living in their hometowns. In looking at the paradox of migrants who have left their home to make an impact on it, Exit and Voice sheds light on how migrant transnational engagement refashions the meaning of community, democratic governance, and practices of citizenship in the era of globalization.

Jessica Lynn Graham

Finalist Outstanding First Book Prize
Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora

Jessica Lynn Graham is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego.

Shifting the Meaning of Democracy
Race, Politics, and Culture in the United States and Brazil

This book offers a historical analysis of one of the most striking and dramatic transformations to take place in Brazil and the United States during the twentieth century—the redefinition of the concepts of nation and democracy in racial terms. The multilateral political debates that occurred between 1930 and 1945 pushed and pulled both states towards more racially inclusive political ideals and nationalisms. Both countries utilized cultural production to transmit these racial political messages. At times working collaboratively, Brazilian and U.S. officials deployed the concept of “racial democracy” as a national security strategy, one meant to suppress the existential threats perceived to be posed by World War II and by the political agendas of communists, fascists, and blacks. Consequently, official racial democracy was limited in its ability to address racial inequities in the United States and Brazil. Shifting the Meaning of Democracy helps to explain the historical roots of a contemporary phenomenon: the coexistence of widespread antiracist ideals with enduring racial inequality.

Nikki Jones

W.E.B. DuBois Award
Western Society of Criminology

Nikki Jones is Associate Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Between Good and Ghetto: African American Girls and Inner-City Violence. 

The Chosen Ones
Black Men and the Politics of Redemption

In The Chosen Ones, sociologist and feminist scholar Nikki Jones shares the compelling story of a group of Black men living in San Francisco’s historically Black neighborhood, the Fillmore. Against all odds, these men work to atone for past crimes by reaching out to other Black men, young and old, with the hope of guiding them toward a better life. Yet despite their genuine efforts, they struggle to find a new place in their old neighborhood. With a poignant yet hopeful voice, Jones illustrates how neighborhood politics, everyday interactions with the police, and conservative Black gender ideologies shape the men’s ability to make good and forgive themselves—and how the double-edged sword of community shapes the work of redemption.