Bookshelf: Social Sciences Division

Fundamentals of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience

Silvia A. Bunge
Heather Bortfeld
2024

An exciting introduction to the scientific interface between biological studies of the brain and behavioural studies of human development. The authors trace the field from its roots in developmental psychology and neuroscience, and highlight some of the most persuasive research findings before anticipating future directions the field may take. They begin with a brief orientation of the brain, along with genetics and epigenetics, and then summarise brain development and plasticity. Later chapters detail the neurodevelopmental basis of a wide variety of human competencies, including...

The Black Geographic

Jovan Scott Lewis
2023

The contributors to The Black Geographic explore the theoretical innovations of Black Geographies scholarship and how it approaches Blackness as historically and spatially situated. In studies that span from Oakland to the Alabama Black Belt to Senegal to Brazil, the contributors draw on ethnography, archival records, digital humanities, literary criticism, and art to show how understanding the spatial dimensions of Black life contributes to a broader understanding of race and space. They examine key sites of inquiry: Black spatial imaginaries, resistance to racial...

Untraceable

Aya de León
2023

With gripping results, this companion novel to Undercover Latina returns to the high-stakes world of the Factory—an international organization of spies protecting people of color.

Fifteen-year-old Amani Kendall’s biggest problem is being the only plus-size Black girl at a white private school—until her house burns down and her family is unexpectedly on the run. Suddenly, she’s reeling from the news that her formerly boring mom is being pursued by an ex-boyfriend turned stalker, and her scientist dad has gone MIA. At the same time, she has
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The Future of Nuclear Waste: What Art and Archaeology Can Tell Us about Securing the World's Most Hazardous Material

Rosemary Joyce
2020

How can sites of waste disposal be marked to prevent contamination in the future? The United States government addressed this challenge in planning for nuclear waste repositories. Consulting with experts in imagining future scenarios, in language and communication, and in anthropology, the Department of Energy sought to develop plans that would satisfy demands from the Environmental Protection Agency for a marker system that would be effective long into the future. Expert consultants proposed two very different designs: one based on archaeological sites recognized as cultural...

The Feeling of History Islam, Romanticism, and Andalusia

Charles Hirschkind
2020

In today’s world, the lines between Europe and the Middle East, between Christian Europeans and Muslim immigrants in their midst, seem to be hardening. Alarmist editorials compare the arrival of Muslim refugees with the “Muslim conquest of 711,” warning that Europe will be called on to defend its borders. Violence and paranoia are alive and well in Fortress Europe.

Against this xenophobic tendency, The Feeling of History examines the idea of Andalucismo—a modern tradition founded on the principle that contemporary Andalusia is connected in vitally important ways...

Unburied Lives The Historical Archaeology of Buffalo Soldiers at Fort Davis, Texas, 1869–1875

Laurie A. Wilkie
2021

According to the accounts of two white officers, on the evening of November 20, 1872, Corporal Daniel Talliafero, of the segregated Black 9th cavalry, was shot to death by an officer's wife while attempting to break into her sleeping apartment at the military post of Fort Davis, Texas. Historians writing about Black soldiers serving in the West have long accepted the account without question, retelling the story of Daniel Talliafero, the thwarted "rapist."

In Unburied Lives Wilkie takes a different approach, demonstrating how we can "listen" to stories found in things...

Unlearning Rethinking Poetics, Pandemics, and the Politics of Knowledge

Charles L. Briggs
2021

A provocative theoretical synthesis by renowned folklorist and anthropologist Charles L. Briggs, Unlearning questions intellectual foundations and charts new paths forward. Briggs argues, through an expansive look back at his own influential works as well as critical readings of the field, that scholars can disrupt existing social and discourse theories across disciplines when they collaborate with theorists whose insights are not constrained by the bounds of scholarship.

Eschewing narrow Eurocentric modes of explanation and research foci, Briggs brings together...

The Spectacular Generic Pharmaceuticals and the Simipolitical in Mexico

Cori Hayden
2022

In The Spectacular Generic, Cori Hayden examines how generic drugs have transformed public health politics and everyday experiences of pharmaceutical consumption in Latin America. Focusing on the Mexican pharmacy chain Farmacias Similares and its proprietor, Víctor González Torres, Hayden shows how generics have become potent commodities in a postpatent world. In the early 2000s, González Torres, a.k.a. “Dr. Simi,” capitalized on the creation of new markets for generic medicines, selling cheaper copies of leading-brand drugs across Latin America. But Dr. Simi has not simply competed...

Engineering Vulnerability In Pursuit of Climate Adaptation

Sarah E. Vaughn
2022

In Engineering Vulnerability Sarah E. Vaughn examines climate adaptation against the backdrop of ongoing processes of settler colonialism and the global climate change initiatives that seek to intervene in the lives of the world’s most vulnerable. Her case study is Guyana in the aftermath of the 2005 catastrophic flooding that ravaged the country’s Atlantic coastal plain. The country’s ensuing engineering projects reveal the contingencies of climate adaptation and the capacity of flooding to shape Guyanese expectations about racial (in)equality. Analyzing the coproduction of race and...

Untimely Sacrifices Work and Death in Finland

Daena Aki Funahashi
2023

Untimely Sacrifices questions why individuals may give their time and energy to the collective against their own self-interest. Turning to Finland where public health officials named occupational burnout as a "new hazard" of the new economy, Daena Funahashi asks: What moves people to work to the point of pathological stress?

Contrary to health experts who highlight the importance of self-management and energetic conservation, Funahashi questions the very economic premise of cognitive psychology that one could "economize" one's energy and thus save oneself. By pitting anthropological...