Viola Castellano’s new book Set to See Us Fail looks at how on how inequalities are reproduced, measured, managed, and contested within the child welfare system of New York. Here she tells us what drew her to this complex issue and what her work has revealed.
Following an initial proposal for lasting solidarity in June of 2020, Berghahn Books committed to joining the global academic community and our publishing peers in challenging racism. Since then, we have fostered company-wide conversations on how best to contribute in perpetuity to that cause from the vantage point of our publishing program.
Through establishing a new collection titled Reading Against Racism: A Berghahn Collection, we have committed to increasing the visibility of and access to materials which contribute to ongoing conversations surrounding race and racism.
Here, a growing collection –– international in scope –– hosts contributions from our global community and is freely available as part of an expanded Digital Resources section to help further activity in vital areas of scholarship.
As we settle into a new academic year, we encourage you to use this as a teaching and learning resource, in or outside the classroom, or as a tool to continue your independent education.
Teachers, consider sharing this with your students. Students, consider this for your academic research. Individuals, consider adding this to your reading list or book club.
To coincide with the release of Reading Against Racism, our newest Salon B podcast episode features four interviews with writers included in the collection. This podcast episode thus serves as a friendly, informal introduction to the collection itself and a few of the individuals whose scholarly work has made this effort possible. Listen via the link below.
by Britta Waldschmidt-Nelson
The following excerpt was adapted from chapter 11 in the book Emotions in American History: An International Assessment edited by Jessica C. Gienow-Hecht, published in 2010.
The history of emotions provides important keys to understanding human behavior and can be of great assistance in explaining wider political, social, and economic trends in American history.1 This applies in particular to the history of African Americans, as racial conflicts in general and the black struggle for freedom and equality in particular repeatedly stirred public emotions in the United States to a degree hardly ever reached by other domestic issues. Thus, interracial relations have always been identified as an extremely emotionally charged aspect of American history, and in view of the new approaches to historical research proposed by the history of emotion, a closer examination of this phenomenon can offer significant additional insights into the close connection between emotions and politics. A broad and multifaceted cluster, such as the Civil Rights Movement or any other social protest movement, encompasses emotions on various levels and should therefore be analyzed from more than one perspective. Continue reading “Does Every Vote Count In America? Emotions, Elections, and the Quest for Black Political Empowerment”
The following is a guest blog post written by Sharon Lamb, co-author of the article Pride and Sexiness: Girls of Color Discuss Race, Body Image, and Sexualization, which appeared in Volume 8, Number 2 of the journal Girlhood Studies.
Way back when, my/our research group was interested in the issue of sexualization of girls and how girls conceived of it. We wanted to dive into the dilemma and critique of the APA Sexualization of Girls Task Force Report that suggested the co-authors, myself included, represented girls as dupes of the media, rather than shapers of it who make their own meaning from it. Typically, I have found, White middle class feminist students have been interested in the idea of sexualization although that may have been a result of my being a White middle class feminist (in their eyes, that is, — I wasn’t always middle class!). But that year, in the research group, a woman of color joined us and she was also doing a Practicum at a charter school (with 7th-12th grade students) that was quite diverse, more diverse that we at the time realized. She offered to make the connection for us and so we set about thinking through the questions we wanted to ask girls themselves about what is sexy and what is sexualization, and how race and ethnicity might intersect with their ideas.
Continue reading “New and Notable Titles from Berghahn Books & Journals”
This is the first in a series of posts dedicated to celebrating the 40th volume of our journal Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques.
The latest issue of the journal is devoted to the special topic of “War, Occupation, and Empire in France and Germany.” This post is the transcript of an electronic interview between the issue’s Guest Editor, Jean Elisabeth Pedersen, and one of the six contributors, W. Brian Newsome.
Pedersen: What drew you to the study of Maxence Van der Meersch and his novel Invasion 14?
Newsome: Several years ago, I was conducting research on the Young Christian Workers and its adult offshoots. Specifically, I was interested in the theology of the Mystical Body of Christ and the ways in which chaplains and lay leaders in Catholic Action groups absorbed and acted upon principles associated this theological concept. My research led to “The Mystical Body of Christ: A Vector of Engagement for French Catholic Action, 1926-1949,” an article that appeared in Politics in Theology, part of Transaction Publishers’ series Religion and Public Life, ed. Gabriel Ricci 38 (June 2012): 147-172.
Continue reading “Discovering Van der Meersch: Themes of Race and Empire”