UC Press Blog

Today is the ten-year anniversary of Michael Brown’s death and a critical moment to reflect on the uprisings. While some view these contemporary revolts as solely driven by police aggression, our modern unrest narrative is more complex. Through interviews for my new book Slow and Sudden Violence, Ferguson and Baltimore community leaders identified police brutality as a cause of the uprisings, but they also voiced other significant frustrations.

By Stacy Torres, author of At Home in the City: Growing Old in Urban AmericaI never planned to study older adults. Old places that survived waves of gentrification initially fascinated me, as a lifelong New Yorker who had struggled to make ends meet and mourned the loss of beloved neighborho

Why has Silicon Valley become the model for addressing today's myriad social and ecological crises? With this book, Julie Guthman digs into the impoverished solutions for food and agriculture currently emerging from Silicon Valley, urging us to stop trying to fix our broken food system through finit

This post was originally published on DeSmog.By Ned Randolph, author of Muddy Thinking in the Mississippi River Delta: A Call for ReclamationI grew up in the shadow of the Mississippi River, whose mythology pressed upon my imagination. Its culture inspired iconic works and political move

Deep below the ground in Tucson, Arizona, lies an aquifer forever altered by the detritus of a postwar Superfund site. Disabled Ecologies tells the story of this contamination and its ripple effects through the largely Mexican American community living above. Drawing on her own complex relationship

Two decades ago, a group of Indonesian agricultural workers began occupying the agribusiness plantation near their homes. In the years since, members of this remarkable movement have reclaimed collective control of their land and cultivated diverse agricultural forests on it, repairing the damage do

Muddy Thinking in the Mississippi River Delta uses the story of mud to answer a deceptively simple question: How can a place uniquely vulnerable to sea level rise be one of the nation's most promiscuous producers and consumers of fossil fuels? Organized around New Orleans and South Louisiana as a ca

The IJURR Book Series has established itself as a cornerstone in the field of global urban studies, pushing the boundaries of critical, interdisciplinary, and theory-driven urban research across the globe. Entering a new phase with its partnership with UC Press starting in 2024, the IJURR Book Serie

In Seeding Empire, Aaron Eddens rewrites an enduring story about the past—and future—of global agriculture. Eddens connects today's efforts to cultivate a "Green Revolution in Africa" to a history of American projects that introduced capitalist agriculture across the Global South. Expansive in scope

By Shannon Cram, author of Unmaking the Bomb: Environmental Cleanup and the Politics of Impossibility"A powerfully researched and important look at the ravages of nuclear waste remediation."—​One of the Best Indie Books of 2023, Kirkus ReviewsI stumbled into this project in 2004, while w