UC Press is proud to publish award-winning authors and books across many disciplines. Below are several of our June 2023 award winners. Please join us in celebrating these scholars by sharing the news!
Janet Garcia-Hallet
2023 Ida B. Wells-Barnet Distinguished Book Award, Winner
ASA Section on Crime, Law, and Deviance
2023 William J. Goode Book Award, Finalist
ASA Section on Sociology of the Family
2023 Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award, Honorable Mention
ASA Section on Race, Gender, and Class
Janet Garcia-Hallett, an Afro-Latina mother and a product of Harlem, is Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of New Haven’s Henry C. Lee College of Criminal Justice and Forensic Sciences.
Invisible Mothers: Unseen Yet Hypervisible after Incarceration
Drawing on interviews conducted throughout New York City, Black feminist criminologist Janet Garcia-Hallett shares the traditionally silenced voices of formerly incarcerated mothers of color and exposes the difficult realities they face when reentering the community and navigating motherhood. Patriarchy, misogyny, and systemic racism marginalize and criminalize these mothers, pushing them into the grasp of penal control and forcing them to live in a state of disempowerment and hypersurveillance after imprisonment.
Darra Goldstein
2023 Mary W. Klinger Book Award, Winner
Society for Ethnobotany
Darra Goldstein is the Willcox B. and Harriet M. Adsit Professor of Russian, Emerita, at Williams College and founding editor of Gastronomica. She is author of six award-winning cookbooks, including Beyond the North Wind: Russia in Recipes and Lore.
The Kingdom of Rye: A Brief History of Russian Food
The Kingdom of Rye unearths the foods and flavors of the Russian land. Preeminent food studies scholar Darra Goldstein offers readers a concise, engaging, and gorgeously crafted story of Russian cuisine and culture. This story demonstrates how national identity is revealed through food—and how people know who they are by what they eat together. The Kingdom of Rye examines the Russians’ ingenuity in overcoming hunger, a difficult climate, and a history of political hardship while deciphering Russia’s social structures from within. This is a domestic history of Russian food that serves up a deeper history, demonstrating that the wooden spoon is mightier than the scepter.
Kenneth H. Kolb
2023 ASFS Book Award, Winner
Association for the Study of Food and Society
Kenneth H. Kolb is Professor of Sociology at Furman University. He is the author of Moral Wages: The Emotional Dilemmas of Victim Advocacy and Counseling.
Retail Inequality: Reframing the Food Desert Debate
Retail Inequality examines the failure of recent efforts to improve Americans’ diets by increasing access to healthy food. Based on exhaustive research, this book by Kenneth H. Kolb documents the struggles of two Black neighborhoods in Greenville, South Carolina. For decades, outsiders ignored residents’ complaints about the unsavory retail options on their side of town—until the well-intentioned but flawed “food desert” concept took hold in popular discourse. Soon after, new allies arrived to help, believing that grocery stores and healthier options were the key to better health. These efforts, however, did not change neighborhood residents’ food consumption practices. Retail Inequality explains why and also outlines the history of deindustrialization, urban public policy, and racism that are the cause of unequal access to food today. Kolb identifies retail inequality as the crucial concept to understanding today’s debates over gentrification and community development. As this book makes clear, the battle over food deserts was never about food—it was about equality.
John Lie
2023 ICAS Book Prize (Best Book in the Social Sciences), Longlist
International Convention of Asia Scholars
John Lie is C.K. Cho Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.
Japan, the Sustainable Society: The Artisanal Ethos, Ordinary Virtues, and Everyday Life in the Age of Limits
By the late twentieth century, Japan had gained worldwide attention as an economic powerhouse. Having miraculously risen from the ashes of World War II, it was seen by many as a country to be admired if not emulated. But by the early 1990s, that bubble burst in spectacular fashion. The Japanese economic miracle was over. In this book, John Lie argues that in many ways the Japan of today has the potential to be even more significant than it was four decades ago. As countries face the prospect of a world with decreasing economic growth and increasing environmental dangers, Japan offers a unique glimpse into what a viable future might look like—one in which people acknowledge the limits of the economy and environment while championing meaningful and sustainable ways of working and living. Beneath and beyond the rhetoric of growth, some Japanese are leading sustainable lives and creating a sustainable society. Though he does not prescribe a one-size-fits-all cure for the world, Lie makes the compelling case that contemporary Japanese society offers a possibility for how other nations might begin to valorize everyday life and cultivate ordinary virtues.
Ken MacLean
2023 ICAS Book Prize (Best Book in the Social Sciences), Longlist
International Convention of Asia Scholars
Ken MacLean is a Professor at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Clark University. He has more than two decades of experience researching state-sponsored violence, human rights violations, and conflict-induced displacement in Myanmar.
Crimes in Archival Form: Human Rights, Fact Production, and Myanmar
Crimes in Archival Form explores the many ways in which human rights “facts” are produced rather than found. Using Myanmar as his case study, Ken MacLean examines the fact-finding practices of a human rights group, two cross-border humanitarian agencies, an international law clinic, and a global NGO-led campaign. Foregrounding fact-finding, in critical yet constructive ways, prompts long overdue conversations about the possibilities and limits of human rights documentation as a mode of truth-seeking. Such conversations are particularly urgent in an era when the perpetrators of large-scale human rights violations exploit misinformation, weaponize disinformation, and employ outright falsehoods, including deepfakes, to undermine the credibility of those who document abuses and demand accountability in the court of public opinion and in courts of law. MacLean compels practitioners and scholars alike to be more transparent about how human rights “fact” production works, why it is important, and when its use should prompt concern.
Yu Tokunaga
2023 Shimizu Hiroshi Award, Winner
Japanese Association for American Studies
Yu Tokunaga is Associate Professor of History at the Graduate School of Global Environmental Studies with a joint appointment at the Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies, Kyoto University, Japan.
Transborder Los Angeles: An Unknown Transpacific History of Japanese-Mexican Relations
Focusing on Los Angeles farmland during the years between the Immigration Act of 1924 and the Japanese Internment in 1942, Transborder Los Angeles weaves together the narratives of Mexican and Japanese immigrants into a single transpacific history. In this book, Yu Tokunaga moves from international relations between Japan, Mexico, and the US to the Southern California farmland, where ethnic Japanese and Mexicans played a significant role in developing local agriculture, one of the major industries of LA County before World War II. Japanese, Mexicans, and white Americans developed a unique triracial hierarchy in farmland that generated both conflict and interethnic accommodation by bringing together local issues and international concerns beyond the Pacific Ocean and the US-Mexico border. Viewing these experiences in a single narrative form, Tokunaga breaks new ground, demonstrating the close relationships between the ban on Japanese immigration, Mexican farmworkers’ strikes, wartime Japanese removal, and the Bracero Program.
Anand A. Yang
2023 ICAS Book Prize (Best Book in the Social Humanities), Longlist
International Convention of Asia Scholars
Anand A. Yang is the Walker Family Endowed Professor in History at the University of Washington and the author of The Limited Raj and Bazaar India.
Empire of Convicts: Indian Penal Labor in Colonial Southeast Asia
Empire of Convicts focuses on male and female Indians incarcerated in Southeast Asia for criminal and political offenses committed in colonial South Asia. From the seventeenth century onward, penal transportation was a key strategy of British imperial rule, exemplified by deportations first to the Americas and later to Australia. Case studies from the insular prisons of Bengkulu, Penang, and Singapore illuminate another carceral regime in the Indian Ocean World that brought South Asia and Southeast Asia together through a global system of forced migration and coerced labor. A major contribution to histories of crime and punishment, prisons, law, labor, transportation, migration, colonialism, and the Indian Ocean World, Empire of Convicts narrates the experiences of Indian bandwars (convicts) and shows how they exercised agency in difficult situations, fashioning their own worlds and even becoming “their own warders.” Anand A. Yang brings long journeys across kala pani (black waters) to life in a deeply researched and engrossing account that moves fluidly between local and global contexts.
Musab Younis
2023 LMH Ling Outstanding First Book Prize, Honorable Mention
British International Studies Association
Musab Younis is Senior Lecturer in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London.
On the Scale of the World: The Formation of Black Anticolonial Thought
On the Scale of the World examines the reverberations of anticolonial ideas that spread across the Atlantic between the two world wars. From the 1920s to the 1940s, Black intellectuals in Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean established theories of colonialism and racism as structures that must be understood, and resisted, on a global scale. In this richly textured book, Musab Younis gathers the work of writers and poets, journalists and editors, historians and political theorists whose insights speak urgently to contemporary movements for liberation.