UC Press August Award Winners
Xóchitl Bada & Shannon Gleeson
Latin@/x Caucus Best Book Award 2024
APSA Latin@/x Caucus
Xóchitl Bada is Associate Professor in the Latin American and Latino Studies Program at the University of Illinois Chicago. She is author of Mexican Hometown Associations in Chicagoacán: From Local to Transnational Civic Engagement and coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Latin America, Accountability across Borders: Migrant Rights in North America and The Routledge History of Modern Latin American Migration.
Shannon Gleeson is Professor of Labor Relations, Law, and History at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University. She is author of Precarious Claims: The Promise and Failure of Workplace Protections in the United States and Conflicting Commitments: The Politics of Enforcing Immigrant Worker Rights in San Jose and Houston and coeditor of Building Citizenship from Below: Precarity, Migration, and Agency and The Nation and Its Peoples: Citizens, Denizens, Migrants.
Scaling Migrant Worker Rights: How Advocates Collaborate and Contest State Power
As international migration continues to rise, sending states play an integral part in "managing" their diasporas, in some cases even stepping in to protect their citizens' labor and human rights in receiving states. At the same time, meso-level institutions—including labor unions, worker centers, legal aid groups, and other immigrant advocates—are among the most visible actors holding governments of immigrant destinations accountable at the local level. The potential for a functional immigrant worker rights regime, therefore, advocates to imagine a portable, universal system of justice and human rights, while simultaneously leaning on the bureaucratic minutiae of local enforcement. Taking Mexico and the United States as entry points, Scaling Migrant Worker Rights analyzes how an array of organizations put tactical pressure on government bureaucracies to holistically defend migrant rights. The result is a nuanced, multilayered picture of the impediments to and potential realization of migrant worker rights.
Shannon Cram
Washington State Book Award for General Nonfiction/Biography Finalist 2024
Washington Center for the Book at the Seattle Public Library
Shannon Cram is Assistant Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell.
Unmaking the Bomb: Environmental Cleanup and the Politics of Impossibility
What does it mean to reckon with a contaminated world? In Unmaking the Bomb, Shannon Cram considers the complex social politics of this question and the regulatory infrastructures designed to answer it. Blending history, ethnography, and memoir, she investigates remediation efforts at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, a former weapons complex in Washington State. Home to the majority of the nation’s high-level nuclear waste and its largest environmental cleanup, Hanford is tasked with managing toxic materials that will long outlast the United States and its institutional capacities. Cram examines the embodied uncertainties and structural impossibilities integral to that endeavor. In particular, this lyrical book engages in a kind of narrative contamination, toggling back and forth between cleanup’s administrative frames and the stories that overspill them. It spends time with the statistical people that inhabit cleanup’s metrics and models and the nonstatistical people that live with their effects. And, in the process, it explores the uneven social relations that make toxicity a normative condition.
Matthew Frye Jacobson
Best New Book in African American History and Culture Finalist 2024
The Association for the Study of African Amerian Life and History
Author of seven books on race and US political culture, Matthew Frye Jacobson is Sterling Professor of American Studies and History at Yale University.
Dancing Down the Barricades
Davis was at once a pioneering, barrier-busting, anti–Jim Crow activist and someone who was widely associated with accommodationism and wannabe whiteness. Historian Matthew Frye Jacobson attends to both threads, analyzing how industry norms, productions, scripts, roles, and audience expectations and responses were all framed by race against the backdrop of a changing America. In the spirit of better understanding Davis's life and career, Dancing Down the Barricades examines the complexities of his constraints, freedoms, and choices for what they reveal about Black history and American political culture.
Matthew Morrison
MAAH Stone Book Award Shortlist 2024
Museum of African American History
Matthew D. Morrison, a native of Charlotte, North Carolina, is a musicologist, violinist, and Associate Professor in the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.
Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States
Blacksound explores the sonic history of blackface minstrelsy and the racial foundations of American musical culture from the early 1800s through the turn of the twentieth century. With this namesake book, Matthew D. Morrison develops the concept of "Blacksound" to uncover how the popular music industry and popular entertainment in general in the United States arose out of slavery and blackface.
Phaedra C. Pezzullo
Tarla Rai Peterson Book Award 2024
Environmental Communication Division (National Communication Division)
Phaedra C. Pezzullo is Associate Professor of Communication, Media Studies, Environmental Studies, and Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and author of multiple books, including Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Pollution, Travel, and Environmental Justice. She is a founding codirector of the Center for Creative Climate Communication and Behavior Change.
Beyond Straw Men: Plastic Pollution and Networked Cultures of Care
Addressing plastics can feel overwhelming. Guilt, shame, anger, hurt, fear, dismissiveness, and despair abound. Beyond Straw Men moves beyond “hot take” or straw man fallacies by illustrating how affective counterpublics mobilized around plastics reveal broader stories about environmental justice and social change. Inspired by on- and offline organizing in the Global South and the Global South of the North, Phaedra C. Pezzullo engages public controversies and policies through analysis of hashtag activism, campaign materials, and podcast interviews with headline-making advocates in Bangladesh, Kenya, the United States, and Vietnam. She argues that plastics have become an articulator of crisis and an entry point into the contested environmental politics of carbon-heavy masculinity, carceral policies, planetary fatalism, eco-ableism, greenwashing, marine life endangerment, pollution colonialism, and waste imperialism. Attuned to plastic attachments, Beyond Straw Men illustrates how everyday people resist unsustainable patterns of the plastics-industrial complex through imperfect but impactful networked cultures of care.