Preserving the Past, Building the Future

This week in North Philly Notes, we highlight Preserving the Vanishing City author Stephanie Ryberg-Webster’s upcoming panels and appearance at the Urban Affairs Association conference.

Stephanie Ryberg-Webster will be at Temple University Press’ booth in the exhibit hall at the 2024 Urban Affairs Association annual conference on Friday, April 26 from 10:00 to 11:00AM to talk with attendees about her new book, Preserving the Vanishing City: Historic Preservation amid Urban Decline in Cleveland, Ohio.

The book chronicles the rise of the historic preservation sector in Cleveland during the 1970s and 1980s and is set against the backdrop of the city’s escalating decline. Historic preservation grew in popularity in the mid-20^th century as demolition stemming from urban renewal and highway building increasingly threatened older and historic buildings across the nation’s central cities. In the Industrial Midwest, forces of deindustrialization compounded the population and economic contractions spurred by an exodus of residents to suburban areas. In cities like Cleveland, a city with an oversupplied built environment combined with concentrated poverty and reduced municipal coffers, historic preservationists confronted unique challenges.

Preserving the Vanishing City tells a highly local story to convey the history of historic preservation within the context of decline. The book chronicles the rise of Cleveland’s local preservation movement, which had seeds in growing awareness about architectural heritage in the 1950s and 1960s. Ultimately, Cleveland created the Ohio’s first local preservation commission, the Cleveland Landmarks Commission, in 1971. As preservationists navigated how to establish a preservation ethos in the city, they confronted local policies that heavily prioritized demolition, local skepticism that the city had much of anything of historic value, and a lack of resources that made their work a constant uphill battle. In response, they adopted an entrepreneurial approach that relied on cultivating advocates who had a deep passion for the city’s history and future, establishing local partnerships, engaging with national networks, and finding creative sources of funding.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Cleveland’s preservationists tackled an array of preservation challenges, with varying degrees of success. They were deeply passionate about the city’s industrial heritage, which included unique infrastructure and machinery, the preservation of which often remains in question today. They engaged in physical planning and urban design to transform the city’s downtown Warehouse District, while simultaneously working to change state and local zoning and building codes to support, rather than ban, creative adaptive reuse. Preservationists worked in neighborhoods across the city and neighborhood preservation was often led by resident activists and neighborhood organizations. At the same time, Cleveland’s preservationists, like many of their peers around the nation, struggled to engage with the city’s Black residents and lacked the tools and ability to navigate the city’s changing racial landscape. This was particularly evident in the Buckeye neighborhood, once the nation’s largest Hungarian enclave, which underwent rapid racial change from the 1960s through the 1980s and is now a predominantly Black neighborhood. Preserving the Vanishing City also dives into the landscape of residential rehabilitation by stepping outside of traditional preservation to explore if and how other public and nonprofit initiatives support the retention and rehabilitation of Cleveland’s vast residential landscape.

You can also find Stephanie in two sessions on Thursday, April 25. At 1:00 pm in the Booth room (on the 5th floor), she will present “Redlining, Revitalization, and Preservation Practice: Uncovering Connections in Cleveland and St. Louis,” co-authored with Dr. Kelly Kinahan (Florida State University). Following this, at 3:00 pm, Stephanie is part of a colloquy session on Democratic Practice, Organizational Resilience, and Equity in Urban Arts Ecosystems, where she will be talking about a new project that looks at how arts and cultural districts around the nation support diversity, equity, and inclusion in their organizations and neighborhoods also in the Booth room.

Stephanie Ryberg-Webster is a Professor of Urban Affairs and the Associate Director of the Maxine Goodman Levin School of Urban Affairs in the Levin College of Public Affairs and Education at Cleveland State University. Her research focuses on urban historic preservation and its intersections with neighborhoods, community development, equity, and revitalization. Her work places a particular emphasis on preservation within the context of urban decline and legacy cities, such as Cleveland. She earned a PhD in City & Regional Planning from the University of Pennsylvania, a Master’s in Historic Preservation from the University of Maryland, and a Bachelor’s in Urban Planning from the University of Cincinnati. She can be reached at s.ryberg@csuohio.edu.

Presenting Temple University Press’ Spring 2024 Catalog

This week in North Philly Notes, we present Temple University Press’ Spring 2024 catalog.

Below are our forthcoming books, arranged alphabetically by title. You can also view the catalog online here.

Adoption Memoirs: Inside Stories, by Marianne Novy

Bringing together birthmothers’, adoptees’, and adoptive parents’ portrayals of their experiences in memoirs

Beyond Left, Right, and Center: The Politics of Gender and Ethnicity in Contemporary Germany, by Christina Xydias

Debunks our assumptions about ideology and women’s representation in democracies

Black History in the Philadelphia Landscape: Deep Roots, Continuing Legacy, by Amy Jane Cohen

Philadelphia’s Black history as seen through historical markers, monuments, murals, and more

Carceral Entanglements: Gendered Public Memories of Japanese American World War II Incarceration, by Wendi Yamashita

Critiques how Japanese American public memorializations unintentionally participate in maintaining and justifying a neoliberal racial order

Crossing Great Divides: City and Country in Environmental and Political Disorder, by John D. Fairfield

Forging a path forward toward modes of production and ways of life, less dependent on despoliation and manic consumption, that will be genuinely sustaining

Crossing the Border to India: Youth, Migration, and Masculinities in Nepal, by Jeevan R. Sharma

How the changing political economy of rural Nepal informs the desire and agency of young male migrants who seek work in cities

Death Penalty in Decline?: The Fight against Capital Punishment in the Decades since Furman v. Georgia, Edited by Austin Sarat

Examines how the politics of capital punishment have changed in America since 1972 and the current prospects for abolition

Democracy’s Hidden Heroes: Fitting Policy to People and Place, by David C. Campbell

Turning deeply rooted governance dilemmas into practical policy results

Disability, the Environment, and Colonialism, Edited by Tatiana Konrad

Explores discourses related to gender, race, imperialism, and climate across the colonial era

Displacing Kinship: The Intimacies of Intergenerational Trauma in Vietnamese American Cultural Production, by Linh Thủy Nguyễn

How American children of Vietnamese refugees connect and express their experiences of racialization using the tropes of family, war, and grief

Faith and Community: How Engagement Strengthens Members, Places of Worship, and Society, by Rebecca A. Glazier

Showing how community engagement can build stronger congregations and improve democracy

Female Body Image and Beauty Politics in Contemporary Indian Literature and Culture, Edited by Srirupa Chatterjee and Shweta Rao Garg

Initiates a much-neglected and much-needed discussion of the politics of Indian women’s body image and self-identity

From South Central to Southside: Gang Transnationalism, Masculinity, and Disorganized Violence in Belize City, by Adam Baird

How longstanding socio-economic vulnerability in Belize City created fertile grounds for embedding deported Bloods and Crips from Los Angeles

The Improviser’s Classroom: Pedagogies for Cocreative Worldmaking, Edited by Daniel Fischlin and Mark Lomanno

Exploring improvisation as a fundamental practice for teaching and learning

Play to Submission: Gaming Capitalism in a Tech Firm, by Tongyu Wu

A critical exploration into the gamification in modern workplaces as a means of control

Only the Paper You Need

This week in North Philly Notes, Beth Kephart, author of My Life in Paper, writes about our relationship with paper.

A sheet of paper is a promise or a dare, a letter, a list, a story, a smudge, a treasure or the evidence that finally proves the crime. It signifies (or can signify) the death of a forest, the corruption of water and air, a coming heap in the trashcan or the dumpsite.

Each office worker consumes, on average, 10,000 sheets of paper a year, claim some who have dared to quantify the situation. And with paper accounting for more than a quarter of the total waste in landfills, TheWorldCounts, an organization that uses live trackers to help the rest of us understand the magnitude of global challenges, presents this fact for our imagination: “With all the paper we waste each year, we can build a 12 foot high wall of paper from New York to California!”

Paper, ubiquitous paper, isn’t even a human invention. Give the patent rights to the paper wasps and yellow jackets who, millions of years ago, heeded some inborn directive and began to saturate chewed-up wood with their own saliva and convert the fibrous material into their thin, architecturally brilliant nests. It would be a long time before anonymous humans would leave traces of the stuff in Central Asia and even longer before Cai Lun, a Chinese official employed by the Eastern Han Court in 105 CE, acquired fame for his understanding that you could beat the heck out of cellulose fibers, set the loose organic material to float in a watery vat, and, using a screen of some sort, dip into the suspension before leaving the material to dry and flatten in a variety of ways. It was in this way that old clothes, for example, became new paper, and that paper, in time, became new clothes.

The technology of paper spread. Various cultures had their paper making secrets, but the mechanics were essentially the same—pound, suspend, dip, dry, let those hydrogen bonds do their thing. In the United States, William Rittenhouse made an early claim as key colonial papermaker when, in 1687, he purchased a 20-acre wedge of land along an active tributary of Philadelphia’s Wissahickon Creek, and constructed, with help, the first paper mill of British North America. Families who had worn their old night clothes or shirts to ruin were paid, by the mill, for their rags. A class of rag pickers emerged.

Paper offered proof of the power of recycling. It also offered proof of Nature’s profound versatility. Consider Dr. Jacob Christian Schaeffer (1718-1790), a German mycologist who, among many other things, made the making of paper one of his lifelong obsessions. Experimenting with cabbage stalks, moss, grapevines, nettles, cat-tails, thistles, mallow, corn husks, potatoes, old roof shingles, reeds, beans, St. John’s wort, aloe, clematis, sawdust, burdock, and asbestos, among other organic materials, Schaeffer ultimately created a six-volume book to showcase his methods and samples. The fibers, always, were the thing—wherever they could be found.

After the Hollander beater was invented by the Dutch in 1860, hand beating gave way to machines. Demand, already on the rise, grew—outpacing, sometimes overwhelmingly, supply. Though the Frenchman Nicholas Louis Robert had invented the first paper-making machine in 1799, it wasn’t until the 19th century that papermaking became an industrial force. All those trees. All that water. All those chemicals. All that stink in the air above the factories.

Recycling was—and remains—the answer, or at least an answer to our paper needs. Recycle your paper and you are saving the trees, contributing to lower levels of air and water pollution, reducing the need for chlorine. Being a wise steward of paper helps, too—printing on both sides, widening your margins, writing smaller numbers, maybe, memorizing your grocery-store lists.

But there is also, I have learned in recent years, this: Grab a vat. Acquire or build a deckle and mold. Save your ratty T-shirts or buy actual couch sheets. Hunt about your yard or in your refrigerator or other places where plucking flowers is not the work of thieves for some delicious fibrous stuff (lawn clippings, cattails, dandelions, arugula, wheat straw, the inner flesh of mulberry trees, say). Save your journal scraps, old drafts, last year’s reports, yesterday’s printed news, your abandoned holiday gift list, the books you no longer wish to read. Make, in other words, your very own paper, which perhaps you’ll lace with blanched flower petals, or perhaps you’ll size with okra juice so that you might write, on it, a story.

Stand in the breeze pulping and vatting and dipping and drying, and this is what you’ll see: Every sheet of paper is a miracle of sorts. Use it well. Recycle honorably. Imagine yourself as a paper wasp, making only the paper you need.

Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of some forty books, a memoir teacher, and a book artist. Find her online at bethkephartbooks.com and bind-arts.com.

Announcing Temple University Press’ Fall 2023 catalog

This week in North Philly Notes, we present the titles featured in our Fall 2023 catalog.

My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera, by Beth Kephart
A memoirist’s guide to the role paper plays in our construction of ourselves

In Reunion: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Communication of Family, by Sara Docan-Morgan

Details how transnational Korean adoptees who have reunited with their birth families navigate identity, family, and belonging

Sons of Chinatown: A Memoir Rooted in China and America, by William Gee Wong

An immigrant father-American son story that illustrates that immigration works despite systemic racism and American exceptionalism

Intimate Strangers: Shin Issei Women and Contemporary Japanese American Community, 1980-2020, by Tritia Toyota

Exploring how Japanese women migrants (shin Issei) are making place/space for themselves among generations of Americans of Japanese ancestry

Taking Stock of Homicide: Trends, Emerging Themes, and Research Challenges, edited by Karen F. Parker, Richard Stansfield, and Ashley M. Mancik

Setting the standard for how to study homicide

Work, Fight, or Play Ball: How Bethlehem Steel Helped Baseball’s Stars Avoid World War I, by William Ecenbarger

The fascinating story of top athletes like Babe Ruth dodging military service by playing ball for shipyards and steel mill teams

Digging in the City of Brotherly Love: Stories from Philadelphia Archaeology, Second Edition, by Rebecca Yamin

New archaeological finds in Philadelphia and state-of-the-art analyses bring more of the city’s unknown past and its people to life

The Barnes Then and Now: Dialogues on Education, Installation, and Social Justice, edited by Martha Lucy Distributed by Temple University Press for the Barnes Foundation

As the Barnes enters its second century, how does it honor its founder’s vision while responding to the complexities of contemporary life and museum practice?

Words like Water: Queer Mobilization and Social Change in China, by Caterina Fugazzola

Examining grassroots strategies the LGBT movement in China used to achieve social change without protest

Yes Gawd!: How Faith Shapes LGBT Identity and Politics in the United States, by Royal G. Cravens III

A comprehensive study of LGBT religious experiences in the United States that provides important lessons for American democracy and civil society

The Fantasy Economy: Neoliberalism, Inequality, and the Education Reform Movement, by Neil Kraus

Showing how the contemporary education reform movement is a political campaign created to advance the free markets of neoliberalism

Preparing Students to Engage in Equitable Community Partnerships: A Handbook, by Elizabeth A. Tryon, Haley C. Madden, and Cory Sprinkel

A comprehensive handbook for community-engagement professionals to navigate the art of preparing students for humble, respectful, and equitable community partnerships

All Play and No Work: American Work Ideals and the Comic Plays of the Federal Theatre Project, by Paul Gagliardi

How comic plays of the Federal Theatre Project challenged work norms promoted by the federal government during the Great Depression

Building a Social Contract: Modern Workers’ Houses in Early Twentieth-Century Detroit, by Michael McCulloch

Shows that power is negotiated through housing development, which spatializes race and class relations and is central to workers’ security

Inspired Citizens: How Our Political Role Models Shape American Politics, by Jennie Sweet-Cushman

Do Americans have political role models and, if so, what impact do they have on political behavior and attitudes?

The Perversity of Gratitude: An Apartheid Education, by Grant Farred

How a disenfranchised apartheid education prompted thinking

A Critical Synergy: Race, Decoloniality, and World Crises, by Ali Meghji

Shows how decolonial theory and critical race theory can complement each other, applying them in combination to the world’s greatest social challenges

Modern Migrations, Black Interrogations: Revisioning Migrants and Mobilities through the Critique of Antiblackness, edited by Philip Kretsedemas and Jamella N. Gow

Using Black Studies theory to examine the contemporary meanings of migration

Why Clean Air AND Good Jobs

This week in North Philly Notes, Todd E. Vachon, author of Clean Air and Good Jobs, writes about the double whammy of climate change and income inequality.

In 1989, at the age of 13, I learned two valuable lessons. The first was the importance of unions for building and supporting the middle class, and the second was that burning fossil fuels was warming the planet and would one day have serious consequences for life on Earth. The first was learned through personal experience, the second in a classroom.  

At the time, my family owned a small business—a general store and gas station—in a small town in Eastern Connecticut. Due to market forces, including the rise of corporate chain stores, my parent’s business was struggling. By 1989 we were facing bankruptcy. Fortuitously, there was a rising demand for skilled construction workers at the time. Through his friend network in the volunteer fire department, my father was able to join the local carpenter’s union and immediately began working in the industry—including at several local power plants. Within a year of his becoming a union carpenter, our family experienced a transition from being working poor to being middle class. We had health insurance, I got glasses and braces, and my dad built our family home—the home I now bring my children to visit as he enjoys his retirement thanks to the union pension. 

Around the same time that we were experiencing that economic hardship in the late 1980s, NASA climate scientist James Hansen explained to Congress, and the world, that the heat-trapping gases emitted by the burning of fossil fuels were pushing global temperatures higher. Hansen’s remarks marked the official opening of “the age of climate change.” The following school year I learned about “The Greenhouse Effect” in science class and my mind was opened to the possibility that human activity was changing the planet, and not in a good way. In the 34 years since Hansen’s testimony, the scientific community has affirmed that climate change is a serious cause for concern. Extreme weather events, including hurricanes, wildfires, floods, and droughts have become more frequent, more intense, and longer in duration. Yet, annual greenhouse gas emissions continue to grow and are 44% higher in 2022 than they were in 1989. 

During the same period, private sector unionization in the United States declined from 14% of workers in 1989 to just 6% in 2022. As a result, income inequality has soared as much as greenhouse gas emissions, with the top 1% now taking home 16% of all income while the middle class share of income has declined from 62% to 43% in the past four decades. Major causes of union decline include outsourcing of manufacturing, eroding employment in highly unionized industries, and rabid anti-unionism on the part of employers taking advantage of weak labor law protections for workers. Today, many of the remaining good private sector union jobs are in the energy sector—especially fossil fuels—while many of the new renewable energy and green economy jobs are not unionized and attempts to do so face an uphill battle against hostile employers. This has led many blue-collar unionized workers in the U.S. to adopt a “jobs vs the environment” perspective, fighting to save good jobs in fossil fuel-related industries by resisting measures to decarbonize the economy that threaten to replace the existing good jobs with new lower wage jobs that offer few benefits.  

As the son of a union carpenter and a former carpenter myself, but also the father of three young children growing up in a steadily warming world, I struggled with this dilemma: How can we ensure our kids, and their generation can afford to make a living with good jobs and benefits, like my father did, and also have a planet that will support that living? Grappling with this question led to my spending 10 years participating in the nascent labor-climate movement as an activist and a researcher. It is those experiences and the findings from that research that make up Clean Air and Good Jobs. 

One thing I learned doing this work is that the zero-sum mindset of having to choose between good jobs or having a livable climate is rooted in the deeply ingrained ideology of neoliberalism—the dominant governing philosophy of our time. At the core of neoliberalism is the belief that unregulated free markets create the best outcomes for all and that there should be little to no role for government in the economy. The narrative that addressing climate change must inevitably lead to a further decline in good jobs does not consider the vast array of public policy instruments which could be used to ensure that a green economy is also an equitable economy. It instead only benefits those that would profit from the exploitation of both workers and the environment. Overcoming this barrier, I contend, will require a powerful alliance of labor and communities working together, demanding clean air and good jobs.

Clean Air and Good Jobs documents the efforts of some of the organizations and activists that are working to build such a movement to ensure a fair and just transition away from fossil fuels and toward a more sustainable and equitable future. This, I believe, is the struggle of our time, and the whole of future humanity is counting on us to do the right thing.  

Honoring Kate Nichols

This week in North Philly Notes, we celebrate and congratulate Kate Nichols, who has just retired from the Press.

Kate Nichols has been a freelance designer Temple University Press for more than three decades. She has been the Press’ full-time Art Manager for the past twelve years, overseeing the production and design of all books, including jackets, covers, and interiors. On the day of Kate’s retirement last week, we chatted with her about some of her favorite interior and cover designs.

In Defense of Public Lands: The Case against Privatizing and Transfer, by Steven Davis.

The author had a genuine interest in the design and structure of the book. The photograph on the cover and those in the book were his own, and very expressive of the message. Above all, the subject matter—keeping public parks open to the public—is close to my heart.

Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans an the End of Slavery, by Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer

My interior design was inspired by the jacket design done by Faceout studio which included an old daguerreotype, with a fading patterned wallpaper background. The book tells the story of Emancipation through photographs, and the combination of a delicate ornamentation juxtaposed with historic, poignant and tragic images made sense to me.

The Audacity of Hoop: Basketball and the Age of Obama, by Alexander Wolff

Faceout also did the cover for this book. I was reluctant to take on the interior at the time because of my workload, but our director pushed me to do it, and I am so glad I did. I like the design challenge, but more than that, I loved seeing all of Pete Souza’s candid photos of President Obama and his joy at playing basketball!

A Refugee’s American Dream: From the Killing Fields of Cambodia to the U.S. Secret Service, by Leth Oun with Joe Samuel Starnes

Memoirs are probably my favorite genre to design. I like focusing on typography, the experience of a person’s story, their personal photographs, and the wonder of a book. The authors provided me with a cover concept by Melanie Franz from their original proposal which I happily adapted when creating the final jacket. 

Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies

My interest in Kalfouis less about the actual design. It is a project where I have tremendous respect for its “mission.” The journal includes peer-reviewed scholarship, and non-peer reviewed material, which falls into the section “Ideas, Art, and Activism.” This section features a wide range of entries from articles to poetry, visual arts, and photography.   

Honoring Ann-Marie Anderson

This week in North Philly Notes, we pay tribute to Marketing Director Ann-Marie Anderson, who is retiring from Temple University Press at the end of the month.

Temple University Press Marketing Director Ann-Marie Anderson, is retiring January 31, after a decades-long career at the Press..

Ann-Marie has been an inspiring member of the press during her tenure. She championed many of the Press’s best-selling and beloved titles. Her efforts promoting Deborah Willis’s books—The Black Female Body (coauthored with Carla Williams), the NAACP Award-winning Envisioning Emancipation (coauthored with Barbara Krauthamer), as well as Black Venus 2010—were labors of love and among her favorite and proudest achievements. (She has long wanted The Black Female Body to come back in print and could supplement her retirement by selling her copy of the book, which fetches $450 on Amazon).

She also enthusiastically supported Tasting Freedom, Daniel Biddle and Murray Dubin’s book about Octavius Catto, and attended the 2017 unveiling of the Catto statue, Philadelphia’s first statue of an African American.

Despite being from New York, Ann-Marie was particularly excited to promote Philadelphia-based books. From Larry Kane’s memoir, to three Mural Arts titles; from Forklore,the Press’s first cookbook, to  P Is for Philadelphia, the Press’s first children’s book, she appreciated the history, art, and culture of her adopted city. Ann-Marie spearheaded the development and publication of Color Me…. Cherry & White, the Press’s first coloring book, which featured images from Temple University, an institution that, despite thinking she would spend only a few years at, proved hard to leave.  

Like any committed marketing director, Ann-Marie loved books that sold in huge quantities, which meant anything written by Ray Didinger. She also once sold 10,000 copies of AFSCME’s Philadelphia Story to a local union, which may have been her single largest sale.

Ann-Marie enjoyed working with all Press authors, ranging from Molefi Kete Asante on his landmark books The Afrocentric Idea and African Intellectual Heritage (coedited with Abu S. Abarry), to Judge James P. Gray and his book Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What Can We Do About It. She delayed her retirement because of the numerous interesting books she was keen to read and market, most notably the forthcoming The Collected Short Stories of Bharati Mukherjee.

Other career highlights included campaigns for Harilyn Rousso’s Don’t Call Me Inspirational, Lori Peek’s Behind the Backlash, Patricia Hill Collins’s From Black Power to Hip Hop and On Intellectual Activism, as well as the American Literatures Initiatives series, which included titles such as This Is All I Choose to Tell, by Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, and Unbought and Unbossed, by Trimiko Melancon.

Ann-Marie’s passion for books and strong connections with book buyers, bookstores, and area organizations helped her effectively promote titles such as The Great Gardens of Philadelphia; two books on the Philadelphia institution that is The Mummers; two Philadelphia Orchestra titles; Monument Lab, on Philadelphia’s public art installation; a book on Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square, as well as books about the Electric Factory, Philadelphia: Finding the Hidden City, and a book on weather, coauthored by a Franklin Institute scientist and a local TV weatherman, among many others.

Ann-Marie also met many heroes and legends during her career, from Olympic gold medalist Tommie Smith, coauthor of Silent Gesture, to Lindy hoppers Norma Miller (coauthor of Swingin’ at the Savoy) and Frankie Manning (coauthor of his eponymous memoir). A music aficionado, one of her absolute favorite projects was Jimmy Heath’s memoir, I Walked with Giants, and her experiences with Heath at signings or performances in New York and Philadelphia are among her most cherished memories.

Temple University Press staff members can say they Walked with a Giant working alongside Ann-Marie, who leaves big shoes to fill. We wish her well on her future endeavors, which include, cooking, singing (not signing, as a colleague might mistype), and amassing and reading her vast collection of African American literature.

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Announcing Temple University Press’ Spring 2023 catalog

This week in North Philly Notes, we showcase our titles forthcoming this Spring.

All-American Massacre: The Tragic Role of American Culture and Society in Mass Shootings, edited by Eric Madfis and Adam Lankford, looks beyond guns and mental illness to the deeper causes of mass shootings.

Brothers: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Race, by Nico Slate, is a White historian’s heartbreaking quest to make sense of the death of his mixed-race older brother.

Clean Air and Good Jobs: U.S. Labor and the Struggle for Climate Justice, by Todd E. Vachon, examines the growing participation by labor activists, leaders, and unions in the fight to address climate change, jobs, and justice.

The Collected Short Stories of Bharati Mukherjee, edited by Ruth Maxey, collects all 35 of Bharati Mukherjee’s sophisticated short stories—some never before published—in one volume.

The Compassionate Court?: Support, Surveillance, and Survival in Prostitution Diversion Programs, by Corey S. Shdaimah, Chrysanthi S. Leon, and Shelly A. Wiechelt, shines a light on women who surveil and are surveilled in U.S. prostitution diversion programs within punishing economic, social, and carceral systems.

Disability Services in Higher Education: An Insider’s Guide, by Kirsten T. Behling, Eileen H. Bellemore, Lisa B. Bibeau, Andrew S. Cioffi, and Bridget A. McNamee, provides a blueprint for disability service providers on how institutions can and must support students with disabilities.

Gender and Violence against Political Actors, edited by Elin Bjarnegård and Pär Zetterberg, is an interdisciplinary, global examination of political violence through a gendered lens.

The History of Temple University Japan: An Experiment in International Education, by Richard Joslyn and Bruce Stronach, shows how Temple University successfully established an innovative international branch campus in Japan that endured against the odds.

The Impact of College Diversity: Struggles and Successes at Age 30, by Elizabeth Aries, reveals the benefits of learning from peer diversity during college and the effect that has on graduates’ lives.

Jewish Self-Determination beyond Zionism: Lessons from Hannah Arendt and Other Pariahs, by Jonathan Graubart, presents a compelling diagnosis of the long-reigning pathologies and practices of Zionism and a prescription for reforming Jewish self-determination.

The Many Geographies of Urban Renewal: New Perspectives on the Housing Act of 1949, edited by Douglas R. Appler, reveals crucial yet previously unexplored facets of the American federal urban renewal program.

“Mr. Taxpayer versus Mr. Tax Spender”: Taxpayers’ Associations, Pocketbook Politics, and the Law during the Great Depression, by Linda Upham-Bornstein, traces the history and lasting impact of the taxpayers’ association movement of the 1930s.

The NFL Off-Camera: An A–Z Guide to the League’s Most Memorable Players and Personalities, by Bob Angelo, provides insider stories of gridiron grit, heroism, and tragedy—as well as egos run amok.

One Last Read: The Collected Works of the World’s Slowest Sportswriter, by Ray Didinger, new in paperback, features essays from Philadelphia’s most beloved sportswriter—and a new afterword.

Philadelphia, Corrupt and Consenting: A City’s Struggle against an Epithet, by Brett H. Mandel, shows how corruption in Philadelphia harms the city, why it endures, and what can be done to move toward a better future.

Political Black Girl Magic: The Elections and Governance of Black Female Mayors, edited by Sharon D. Wright Austin, examines the crucial role that Black women have carried out in the cities they govern.

Preserving the Vanishing City: Historic Preservation amid Urban Decline in Cleveland, Ohio, by Stephanie Ryberg-Webster, exploring historic preservation in Cleveland, Ohio during the 1970s and early 1980s, when the city’s urban decline escalated.

Regional Governance and the Politics of Housing in the San Francisco Bay Area, by Paul G. Lewis and Nicholas J. Marantz, provides a cautionary lesson about the dangers of fragmented local authority and the need for an empowered regional institution to address housing crises.

Solidarity & Care: Domestic Worker Activism in New York City, by Alana Lee Glaser, shows how intersectional labor organizing and solidarity can effectively protect workers in the domestic work sector and other industries.

Talk about Sex: How Sex Ed Battles Helped Ignite the Right, by Janice M. Irvine, is a 20th Anniversary edition of the classic book that shows how the American right wing used sex education to build a political movement and regulate sexuality by controlling sexual speech.

Undoing Suicidism: A Trans, Queer, Crip Approach to Rethinking (Assisted) Suicide, by Alexandre Baril, proposes a radical reconceptualization of suicide and assisted suicide by theorizing suicidism—the oppression of suicidal people.

Temple University Press’s Annual Holiday Give and Get

This week in North Philly Notes, the staff at Temple University Press close out 2022 by suggesting the Temple University Press books they would give along with some non-Temple University Press titles they hope to receive and read this holiday season. 

Mary Rose Muccie, Director

Give: For better or worse, athletes are looked up to and can serve as role models, especially for young people.  David Steele’s It Was Always a Choice: Picking Up the Baton of Athlete Activism provides examples of and inspiration for today’s athletes and those who admire them to stand up against political, social, and racial injustice and is a book I’d give to several people on my list. 

Get: Years ago, I assigned freelance indexers to and edited indexes for medical and nursing reference and textbooks. Indexing software was just taking off and it was both an exciting and challenging time to be an indexer.  Our conversations as they wrote detailed indexes gave me a window into how to analyze content and think like a reader to create a map of a book.  It’s truly a craft, one that Dennis Duncan pays homage to in Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure From Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age. I hope to get it and travel back to those days. 

Karen Baker, Associate Director, Financial Manager

Give: I would give The Mouse Who Played Football by Brian Westbrook Sr. and Lesley Van Arsdall to my grandson, because you are never too young to start reading!

Get: I would like to receive Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah, because I really like his comedy and I think his back-story would be interesting.

Aaron Javsicas, Editor-in-Chief

Give: Beethoven in Beijing: Stories from the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Historic Journey to China, by Jennifer Lin. I’ve never published a book quite like this. It offers a unique blend of oral history, photography, and reportage to tell a fascinating story at the intersection of culture and international relations, a global tale yet also one of particular relevance to Philadelphians. It’s an elegant, beautifully designed, and highly giftable book. 

Get: One Day: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America, by Gene Weingarten. Generally I don’t go for gimmicks, and yes, this concept — ask strangers to choose a random day from a hat, and then write about it — could certainly be described as a gimmick. But it sounds like Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Gene Weingarten really made it work. The day is Sunday, December 28, 1986. Let’s see… I was probably baking a cake in my new Easy-Bake oven. Will have to check the index to see if that event made it in. 

Shaun Vigil, Editor

Give: The opportunity to publish memoir is a particular joy of my list, and this year I had the pleasure of working with George Uba on his provocative, poetic, and deeply moving Water Thicker Than Blood: A Memoir of a Post-Internment Childhood. Uba’s is a rare book that simultaneously offers vital scholarship and an emotionally resonant narrative. I’ll certainly be sharing it with others this season and many others into the future. 

Get: In keeping with the memoir theme, I’m looking forward to reading through Margo Price’s Maybe We’ll Make It: A Memoir while taking some time away from my desk this holiday. Musicians’ memoirs are a particular interest of mine, and Price has been a mainstay on my turntable since I came across her first album. The fact that it is published by a fellow university press makes it all the more exciting!

Ryan Mulligan, Editor

Give: Passing for Perfect, by erin Khuê Ninh. Have you seen that book trailer? 

Get: Trust, by Hernan Diaz- Give me a book where the “great men” view of history is only one of several unreliable perspectives and I can bounce them off each other and I’m intrigued

Will Forrest, Rights and Contracts Coordinator/Editorial Assistant

Give: Richard III’s Bodies from Medieval England to Modernity. This is a fascinating look at Shakespeare’s classic play through the lens of disability studies and how perceptions of Richard’s disability have changed over the centuries. My favorite part of the book is the extensive research into historical productions of the play, looking at how actors over the years have interpreted the character and reimagined it for themselves.

Get: I would love to get Four of the Three Musketeers: The Marx Brothers on Stage by Robert Bader. This book looks at the history of the Marx Brothers’s time on the vaudeville circuit, before they made any of their classic movies. I love old American theatre history and I love the Marx Brothers, so this book is right up my alley!

Ann-Marie Anderson, Marketing Director

I would give a copy of The Real Philadelphia Book by Jazz Bridge to every musician friend to experience “all that jazz” from the more than 200 compositions by Philadelphia musicians.

Continuing on my theme of amassing not just cookbooks with recipes, I hope to get Ghetto Gastro Presents Black Power Kitchen, which has been described by Publishers Weekly as one of the Top 10 Cooking & Food Books for Fall 2022.

Irene Imperio, Advertising and Promotions Manager

Give: Exploring Philly Nature, a fun book for getting outside no matter the season, love the tips to engage children onsite and references for the curious investigators. 

Get: The Murder of Mr. Wickham as I love a Jane Austen/mystery combo!

Kate Nichols, Art Manager

Give: Monument Lab: Creative Speculations for Philadelphia, edited by Paul M. Farber and Ken Lum. Published in 2019, Monument Lab is the product of a “prescient” and massive undertaking, which examines Philadelphia’s existing and future public monuments. The book includes written contributions from scholars and artists, as well as photographs, documents, and a range of proposals from the city’s citizens. Temple Univerity Press is now beginning work on a companion edition that will address sites across the United States.

Get: Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards. The book makes the case that anyone can learn basic drawing—it is not about talent. With illustrations and side quotes throughout, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain serves as a guide to learning/practicing drawing, and advocates its importance in visual perception and experiencing the world around us.

Ashley Petrucci, Senior Production Editor

Give: My Soul’s Been Psychedelicized, by Larry Magid and Robert Huber. I’ve been a bit on a music kick lately and also have friends who’d be interested in seeing some of the stunning photographs/posters from old Electric Factory shows.

Get: I’m just collecting Free Library of Philadelphia loans on my iPad to read over break, including The Two Towers, The Return of the King, Little Women, The Brothers Karamazov, Frankenstein, and Sapiens. I’m also finishing up The Feminine Mystique. It’s a bit of a daunting list for 10 days, but I’m ready!

Faith Ryan, Production Assistant

Give: The Health of the Commonwealth, by James Higgins, because I think it offers a very useful historical perspective on surviving epidemics in Pennsylvania. It’s a slim volume, but it covers a lot of ground and is chock-full of fascinating details (I especially liked all the information about women’s medical colleges in the 1800s).

Get: Ian Urbina’s The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier. It’s been recommended to me by multiple family members, and despite my interest, I just haven’t gotten around to picking up a copy since it came out in 2019. But if it fell into my lap on Christmas morning, I know I’d spend all break tearing through it.

Alicia Pucci, Scholarly Communications Associate

Give: I’m giving my one friend (and fellow Tyler School of Art alum) Color Me…Cherry & White as the perfect Temple memento. 

Get: The Winterthur Garden Guide, by Linda Eirhart. Plants make me happy and I’m always on the look-out for garden ideas and design inspiration. So, even though I currently live in a second-floor apartment where my only access to the outside is a small balcony, one can dream and live vicariously through the colorful pages of this book.

Gary Kramer, Publicity Manager

Give: I’m giving my spouse (the politico in the family) a copy of Reforming Philadelphia, 1682-2022, because it provides a short but comprehensive history of the city we love.

Get: Life As It Is, by Nelson Rodrigues. I just heard about this author, who is famous in Brazil but practically unknown in the U.S. This is a collection of his stories, and I am a huge fan of short stories and Latin American literature, so all my Venn Diagrams overlap! 

Jenny Pierce, Head of Research, Education and Outreach Services at Temple University’s Health Sciences Libraries at just loves to give and give and give.

One friend who loves trivia is getting Real Philly History, Real Fast.  His partner is getting Beethoven in Beijing because he likes the orchestra and travel.

A little girl I know is getting A is for Art Museum and my nephew, who comes from an Eagles mad family, is getting The Mouse Who Played Football.

And I am giving Exploring Philly Nature to a family I know with two small kids who love the outdoors.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS AND BEST WISHES (AND BOOKS) FOR 2023!

Examining care injustices

This week in North Philly Notes, Akemi Nishida, author of Just Care, writes about care as an analytical framework to understand the contemporary United States

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we were forced to recognize what was at the stake in the political debates on public healthcare programs such as Medicaid, the overstretched nature of the care labor force, and our own vulnerabilities. We also witnessed continuous fights for social justice including Black Lives Matter and Asian Americans against hate crimes, as well as the development of mutual aid networks to survive together.

Just Care suggests care as a lens to understand these phenomena—and incorporates care as not only an object of study but also an analytical framework. The book examines care injustices where people—whether they are situated as care workers, care receivers, or both—deteriorate under the name of care, when care is used as a mechanism to enhance the political economy and neglect the well-being of those situated as care workers and care receivers. It also addresses care justice, or just care, which occurs when people feel cared for affirmatively and when care is used as a foundation for more-just world building.

Just Care is based on research conducted at the request of disability communities to reveal how the public care services they receive are increasingly becoming money-centered, while they demand these services to be human-centered. Also, as a disabled person, my own experiences of receiving and providing care informed my work.

Just Care considers the experiences of care workers and care receivers under the Medicaid long-term care programs, queer disabled people who participate in community-based care collectives to interdependently support each other, and disabled and sick people of color who engage in bed activism to fight for social change from their bedspaces. By being in conversation with and witnessing care routines, the multiplicity of care became particularly noticeable—it is turned into a mechanism of social oppression and control while simultaneously being a tool with which marginalized communities activate, engage in, and sustain social justice fights.

Here are some key points from the book:

• When scholars and activists work to dismantle injustices surrounding care activities, they often approach them by looking into solely the labor exploitation care workers experience or the lack of adequate care recipients endure. Instead, Just Care engages in relational analysis to think through how these circumstances are intertwined and mutually witnessed and experienced, as care workers and receivers spend the majority of their daily lives side by side.
• An example of relational analysis is my tracing of the parallels between the histories of welfare programs for single mothers and families in need, (neo)colonialism and labor migration, and public healthcare programs like Medicaid, from the perspectives of critical race, transnational feminist, and disability studies.
• This analysis shows that in addition to differences in degrees and kinds of care people individually need, intersecting oppressions including racism, neocolonialism, patriarchy, and ableism shape who is currently pressured to take up caring responsibilities and how their own care needs or disabling conditions are quickly neglected. Such oppressions also make us think of disabled people exclusively as recipients of care and rarely acknowledge their caring contributions to society, let alone how the public healthcare services they receive are rarely adequate and can function to surveil them.
• Care services for disabled people are primarily planned by centering financial benefits for the care industrial complex and budget suppressions for governments and are not based on disabled people’s needs and preferences.
• This focus on financial benefits means that well-being of care workers and care recipients become secondary concerns. This leads them to experience mutual debilitation, rather than the presumed idea that one group thrives on the back of the other.
• Some care workers and care recipients under such debilitating public healthcare services develop interdependent relationships to help one another, in the middle of care-based oppression they experience, by transgressing the strict roles given to them.
• Disabled people have started care collectives to practice interdependence and based on their insistence that everyone needs care and can provide care. Engaging in interdependence in the middle of a society that values individualist independence is destined to be full of challenges. One challenge they faced is material (to physically meet all the care needs emerging within the group), and another is affective (to make sure conflicts within the group will not affect quality of care).
• Disabled and sick people engage in social change from their bedspaces, or “bed activism.” Bed activism entails critiquing of intersecting oppressions that manifest in bedspaces and offering visions for a more just world by centering the wisdom of sick and disabled people that emerges from their bedspaces.
• Bed activism can happen actively, for example, when bed dwellers engage in social change by writing a blog post. It also happens in inactive moments, for example, when they rest in their beds while going through depression, pain, or fatigue. Even those moments inform bed activists about their relationships with their bodies and minds or the social conditions that restrict them to their beds.

We all need care and are capable of caring for others in various ways. When we start from this foundational understanding, how can we each engage in just care or more-just world making through care? Just Care points the way to answering this question.