Can we abolish the death penalty?

This week in North Philly Notes, Austin Sarat, editor of Death Penalty in Decline?, considers how attitudes about capital punishment have changed over the decades since Furman v. Georgia.

I have been studying America’s death penalty for almost 50 years. When I started doing so it seemed almost unimaginable that this country could, or would, ever give up its apparent love affair with capital punishment. In 1972, the United States Supreme Court brought a temporary halt to capital punishment in Furman v. Georgia. Four years later, however, the Court approved new procedures for deciding on death sentences and upheld the constitutionality of the death penalty. And by the 1990s, fueled by a “tough on crime” political climate, the number of death sentences and executions steadily climbed.

I have been inspired in my work on capital punishment by what Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote in Furman. He believed people supported the death penalty because they did not know very much about it. Marshall argued that the more people knew about the death penalty, the less they would like it. He thought that scholars could play an important role in the work of educating the public about the grim realities of state-sponsored killing.

So I had my charge. Write about the workings of the death penalty system. Inform my fellow citizens about what the government does when it puts people to death.

I have written many books and scholarly articles about America’s death penalty. Recently, I added to my repertoire a series of op eds and commentaries designed to make my scholarship accessible to a public audience. I have not been alone in this work. Many distinguished scholars have lent their voices to the conversation about capital punishment. Lawyers, activists, and politicians have done the crucial work of mobilizing opposition to state killing.

They have alerted us to the fallibility of, and flaws in, the death penalty system. Sixty-three percent of the American public now believe that an innocent person has been executed in the past five years, and confronting the sheer fact of miscarriages of justice has led many Americans to reconsider their views about the death penalty. The fear of executing the innocent, the continuing specter of racial discrimination in the death penalty system, and the difficulties encountered with lethal injection executions have led to the perception that the death penalty system is broken from start to finish.

As a result, what was unimaginable 50 years ago is today very much on the horizon of possibility, namely that the United States may soon find a way to live without the death penalty. Indeed, it is fair to say that we are in the midst of a national reconsideration of capital punishment and on the road to its abolition. Signs of progress in the fight against capital punishment are everywhere.

Since 2007, more states have abolished the death penalty than at any other 17-year period in American history. As the Death Penalty Information Center noted in its 2022 annual report, “public support for capital punishment and jury verdicts for death remained near fifty-year lows. Defying conventional political wisdom, nearly every measure of change—from new death sentences imposed and executions conducted to public opinion polls and election results—pointed to the continuing durability of the more than 20-year sustained decline of the death penalty in the United States.”

The Death Penalty in Decline? looks back over the last half-century and offers an analysis of the enduring significance of Furman. It takes up the facts of the present moment in the hope of offering a portrait of where we are on the road to abolition. It continues the work that Justice Marshall inspired.  

A Hopefully Realistic Take on the Future of Democracy

This week in North Philly Notes, David Campbell, author of Democracy’s Hidden Heroes, writes about the cultures of the bureaucratic and communal worlds.

It’s a little intimidating to have your book published on the same day that Taylor Swift’s new album drops. Even if everyone reading this blog rushes out to buy my book, Democracy’s Hidden Heroes, it will be hard to keep up in the sales competition!

But Taylor and I share something in common. We both use small, everyday stories to tell a larger story worth hearing. While the particular stories can stand on their own, it is their accumulation that packs a narrative punch.

My stories were gathered over three decades and draw on over 2,000 interviews with local bureaucrats, nonprofit directors, and other community leaders. I use their highly particular accounts of daily hassles to tell a larger story about democratic governance—what it requires, why it is so routinely difficult, but also why it often works better than we might expect. In this story, the bureaucrats we have been taught are narrow-minded rule followers often turn out to be the creative agents rescuing policy from implementation roadblocks. They don’t always succeed, but their efforts are worthy of our attention.

Democracy’s Hidden Heroes is a hopefully realistic book that counters the current pessimism about the future of democracy. Much of that pessimism stems from our division into two warring tribes. But instead of a left-right distinction let us imagine that the names of the two tribes are bureaucracy and community.

The culture of the bureaucratic world is captured in terms like standardization, specialization, formality, and uniform treatment. Its language is primarily metric—things exist to be counted, measured, and controlled.

The culture of the communal world is captured in terms like craftsmanship, social networks, local knowledge, and informal agreements. In this world communication is infused with stories. Nuance and discretion are always necessary because we are dealing with individual human beings and unique local circumstances.

Now imagine that these two worlds routinely meet and often collide, often in grants designed on high and implemented locally. Democracy’s Hidden Heroes is about the governance spaces where these collisions happen and the people who work in those spaces. These “heroes” live with a foot in both the bureaucratic world and the communal world and the burden of their work is to reconcile those worlds, however difficult that reconciliation may be. This burdened work is the secret sauce without which public policy will fail, not matter how well-intended or well-funded.

The protagonists in my story—government and foundation funders, on the one hand, and participants in networks of benevolent community care, on the other—share the common goal of improving the health and well-being of children, families, and communities. They are partners in a quest to produce tangible results, driven by their own civic motivations and increasingly by accountability demands imposed by others. The funders have the resources and some types of expertise that the community partners need. Network participants have local knowledge without which the funders’ initiatives cannot be adapted successfully to place and personal circumstance. If they could find a way to bring their capacities together, we could reasonably expect better policy and programmatic outcomes and with them a badly needed uptick in public trust in government.

By paying attention to the way the hidden heroes reconcile these two worlds—their way of embracing contraries—we can learn profound lessons that inform our politics, policy processes, and democratic culture. We learn how to become conversant in two distinct languages of public life and how to balance the alternative forms of knowledge on which bureaucracy and community networks rely. We learn to emphasize crossover roles: experts as community members; community members as experts. We learn to put more stake in learning from experience and less on pre-set strategies. We learn how to treat rules as starting points for negotiation. We learn to evaluate short-term programs not in isolation but in light of the dynamics of the community networks in which they are embedded and long-term trajectories of community change. These are the sorts of strategies and approaches needed to navigate difference democratically.  

The hidden heroes know that the voice of the people has no efficacy if there are not resources and staffing and expertise to turn that voice into programs and policies that work. They also know that the policy wonks and bureaucratic experts will always be wielding blunt instruments, such that the work of fitting policy to people and place will always be critical to achieving the results we want.

And here’s the good news: we already have a huge cadre of mid-level bureaucrats and nonprofit directors who have extraordinary experience in finding a way to marry the best of bureaucracy with the best of community voice. Hopefully, Democracy’s Hidden Heroes will play a role in introducing their collective wisdom to a broader audience of academics, students, and practitioners. 

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

Temple University Press’ Annual Holiday Give and Get

This week in North Philly Notes, the staff at Temple University Press close out 2023 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. 

Will Forrest, Rights and Contracts Coordinator/Editorial Assistant
Give: I’m giving Beth Kephart’s magnificent My Life in Paper to my mother, who has had her eye on this book since she got a copy of our Fall catalog. This is a very special book, exploring the everyday paper items that populate our lives with grace and lucidity. It’s the kind of book that I look at and can’t believe that I worked on. It’s a book I would recommend even if it wasn’t from Temple.

Get: I already have too many books I need to work my way through, so I’m not asking for any more. My reading list includes Isaac Butler’s The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act, which traces the history of acting technique from Stanislavsky through to the Group Theatre and Lee Strasberg and Brando. I have always found acting books to be hard to parse, so I’m looking forward to this book giving clarity to an often obfuscated (perhaps intentionally so) world.

Shaun Vigil, Editor
Give: The Press has published so many volumes this year that warrant a place on holiday lists that it’s nearly impossible to choose just one. That said, The Collected Short Stories of Bharati Mukherjee will certainly be among those I’m gifting this year. Bringing Mukherjee’s complete short fiction under one cover for the first time, this work is sure to offer something new to readers for many years to come.

Get: This year our fellow university press colleagues at the University of New Mexico released The Official Cookbook of the Chile Pepper Institute. The breadth of recipes and chiles represented from across the world will make this an essential in my kitchen, especially in helping to keep me warm during these cold winter months.

Aaron Javsicas, Editor-in-Chief
Give: Digging in the City of Brotherly Love: Stories from Philadelphia Archaeology, Second Edition, by Rebecca Yamin. Wherever you go in Philadelphia, there’s a good chance history is sleeping beneath your feet. Rebecca Yamin wakes it up and dusts it off, revealing the remarkable stories behind once-buried bones, bowls, and privy pits. This second edition is beautifully designed with several new chapters and new color illustrations.

Get: Biography of a Phantom: A Robert Johnson Blues Odyssey, by Mack McCormick. Who doesn’t want to better understand Robert Johnson? I’m curious about this book for that reason, but also because of the questions it raises around storytelling and an author’s responsibility to both the living and the dead. The publisher’s pitch reminds me a little of tales like Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse in which storytellers may be consumed by the same forces they’re exploring in their work. 

Stephen Bassett Gluckman, Graduate Editorial Assistant

Give: Kimberly Kattari’s Psychobilly: Subcultural Survival would be a perfect gift for more than a few people in my circle of friends and family. Kattari’s study is not only a dive into the world of Psychobilly, it’s a fascinating journey into the roots and conditions that shaped this vibrant subculture. It promises to be a thoughtful and intriguing present, one that enlightens as much as it entertains. 

Get: I’m intrigued by Esther Yi’s debut novel Y/N from what I’ve heard about it. With a plot working through the concept of “fanfiction,” Yi’s novel seems to be a unique tragicomic meditation on fandom and the way we center our lives in our globalized and wired world. I hope Yi’s novel proves to be both an absurd yet nuanced reflection on identity, human connection, and their limitations in contemporary culture.

Irene Imperio, Advertising and Promotions Manager

Give: Forklore: Recipes and Tales from an American Bistro, by Ellen Yin.  Celebrate cooking at home with Ellen Yin, winner of the 2023 James Beard Award for Outstanding Restaurateur. Great for aspiring chefs and home cooks in your life!

Get: Hoping for this holiday cozy mystery to wind down the year – Blackmail and Bibingka (A Tita Rosie’s Kitchen Mystery) by Mia P. Manansala 

Faith Ryan, Production Assistant
Give: I would give Intimate Strangers: Shin Issei Women and Contemporary Japanese American Community, 1980-2020, by Tritia Toyota. I find immigrant stories endlessly fascinating, and this book studies a group of people—young Japanese women—who aren’t commonly showcased in such stories about the United States. Spanning forty years, right up to the modern day, this book offers so much to learn about our society past and present.

Get: I would love to receive Blood and Guts: A History of Surgery by Richard Hollingham. I’ve always been interested in history in general, and I find medical history to be an especially dramatic way to connect with the past. Exploring so many centuries of trial-and-error medical care is both a harrowing and rewarding way to trace just how far we’ve come as a civilization.

Ashley Petrucci, Senior Production Editor

Give: I would give Building a Social Contract, by Michael McCulloch, because I think people I know would be interested in the point of comparison between housing situations in the early twentieth century vs. today.

Get: I need to build up my cooking repertoire, but in a whimsical way, so I’d like to get something like The Redwall Cookbook, since that was a series I enjoyed as a kid.

Ryan Mulligan, Editor

Give: Bob Angelo’s The NFL Off-Camera. Angelo spent a career humanizing the people behind the NFL jerseys and helmets through his work at NFL Films. In his book, he reveals even more about what those players were like when the cameras were off. 

Get: Colson Whitehead’s The Harlem Shuffle. Whitehead’s understated prose and alluring characters combined deftly with his insight into the antebellum context of Underground Railroad. I’m eager to see him tackle the 1960s.

Alicia Pucci, Scholarly Communications Associate

Give: The Battles of Germantown, by David W. Young. One of the many history buffs in my life would greatly enjoy learning about Philly’s historic Germantown and hearing Young’s powerful take on public history.

Get: Baking Yesteryear, by B. Dylan Hollis, would be a great addition to my kitchen’s bookshelf. I love seeing recipes from antique cookbooks. Plus, who wouldn’t want to try new things like a chocolate potato cake from 1910?

Karen Baker,  Associate Director, Financial Manager
Give: I would give Color Me…Cherry & White: A Temple University Coloring Book to my grandson, because he is starting to color, and what better to color in than a Temple University inspired coloring book.

Get: I would like to receive I Can’t Make This Up: Life Lessons by Kevin Hart, because I find him really funny, and he’s a Philly guy, so that makes it even better. 

Mary Rose Muccie, Director
Give: Over Thanksgiving, and a week before Henry Kissinger’s death, my nephew and I had a scarily prescient conversation about the U.S. bombing of  Cambodia. When talking about the Khmer Rouge, I described the Press book, A Refugee’s American Dream: From the Killing Fields of Cambodia to the U.S. Secret Service, by Leth Oun and Joe Samuel Starnes. I’ll follow up on that conversation by giving him the book. 

Get: I want to make time to read a book I already have: The Nix, by Nathan Hill. I bought it after the great New York Times and NPR reviews, and then many more, but have been daunted by its size ever since.  This will be the year I tackle it! 

Gary Kramer, Publicity Manager and Interim Sales Manager
Give: A friend of mine is a history buff so I’m getting him a copy of Real Philly History, Real Fast. I had a chance this year to see author Jim Murphy present his book and he was amazing. I sold out of copies. I’d hoped to see him lead a tour but it rained the day we planned. But hey, that’s a resolution for 2024!
Get: While I am not a history buff, I read about two “history” books in the New York Times that intrigued me. Aaron and I were both fascinated by Among Friends: An Illustrated Oral History of American Book Publishing and Bookselling in the 20th Century, so if anyone wants to spend the $200.00 to send us a copy, I’d share it with him when I’m done. The other title was the more affordable novel, The Sleeping Soldier, by Aster Glenn Gray, about a union soldier who “wakes up” and befriends a college student in the 1960s.

University Press Week Blog Tour: #SPEAKUP

It’s University Press Week and the Blog Tour is back! This year’s theme is #SPEAKUP. Today’s theme is What Does It Mean to #SPEAKUP at your Press? 

Today’s entries shine a spotlight on new or backlist projects that exemplify the ways the SpeakUP theme intersects with a Press’ mission, practices, acquisitions/marketing/production strategies, etc.

Click on links to Presses to read their entries.
(Note: Some Press have not provided links or descriptions of content as of time of publication)

Yale University Press

University of Notre Dame Press
Greg Bourke, author of Gay, Catholic, and American, writes about choosing to publish his book with University of Notre Dame Press.

Columbia University Press
In this interview, Howard University’s Dr. Amy Yeboah Quarkume and Columbia University’s Dr. Frank Guridy #SpeakUP about The Black Lives in the Diaspora series and its mission to uplift voices of Black scholars and authors who have often been marginalized by providing a platform for their research and perspectives.

Leuven University Press
Guest post by a press Acquisitions Editor.

University of Nebraska Press
Guest post, by UNP Director.

University of Chicago Press
Interview with Laura Mamor, author of Sexualing Cancer, a book that SpeaksUP about the intersections of politics, gender, and public health

McGill-Queen’s University Press
#SpeakUP Reading list

University of Amsterdam Press

Purdue University Press
Purdue University Press has a long history of publishig in Jewish, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies.

Harvard Education Press
Executive director Jess Fiorillo writes about HEP’s mission and our books that that “speak up” against problems in education

Bristol University Press
Alison Shaw on BUPs history and mission.

Duke University Press
Curated reading lists with free content.

University Press of Kentucky
Frank X Walker, the first African American writer to be named Kentucky Poet Laureate, is an artist, writer, and educator who has published eleven collections of poetry. A founding member of the Affrilachian Poets, Walker speaks to the importance of books by the University Press of Kentucky.

Johns Hopkins University Press

The University of the West Indies Press
Empowering our authors as Dara Wilkenson Bobb is with her marketing strategy for Gods of Bruising.

Cornell University Press

SUNY Press
#SpeakUP Reading List

University of Manitoba Press
Highlighting ways our recent titles have spoken up.

NYU Press
Author Jeffrey S. Gurock explains how sports hero Marty Glickman spoke out against anti-semitism.

The problem with prostitution problem solving

This week in North Philly Notes, Corey Shdaimah, Chrysanthi Leon and Shelly Wiechelt, coauthors of The Compassionate Court?, provide their observations about studying prostitution diversion programs. (Part 2 of 2)

For many years we have been studying court-affiliated prostitution diversion programs (PDPs) at various stages of their inception and implementation. As Corey’ previous blog suggests, we find ourselves caught between the critical reflection of our academic training and deep empathy for all of the stakeholders. What is often missing from policy debates is an accurate portrayal of workday conditions of under-resourced agencies that struggle to provide the assistance or the efforts to survive in a city that lacks much of a social safety net. By the same token, a lot of joy, humor, and love is also missing from these debates. Criminal legal system actors and women arrested for street-based sex work are a savvy, thoughtful bunch and they often help each other with advice and material resources.

One of the main reasons we wanted to write The Compassionate Court? was to provide the broader public with a picture of the complicated reality that we see when we spend time in courtrooms, probation offices, people’s homes, and treatment programs. A book provides an opportunity to share the three-dimensional understanding that we have championed, and one goal of our book is to provide what Nancy Fraser referred to as “everyday world policy analysis,” a walk through policy as it would happen on the ground in real time. It also allowed us to provide fuller stories for some of our study participants. In addition to formal observations and interviews, our conversations and embeddedness in a variety of locations creates a familiarity that often feels truncated by the traditional article format built from decontextualized fragments. Each chapter in The Compassionate Court? contains an expanded vignette drawing on multiple interviews and interactions with a different participant, which we hope provides our readers with some of the familiarity that we have developed with the interviews. We imagine that, as Project Dawn Court participant “Amy” suggested, knowing a person’s story will open readers’ minds.

Many of our readers will be empathetic toward the women who participate in Project Dawn Court and the Specialized Prostitution Diversion Program. We imagine that readers may be less empathetic toward professional stakeholders, especially given the critiques that we have shared (often quoting these very same professional stakeholders!). We hope that our extended vignettes and weaving of perspectives will allow our readers to recognize the binds faced by these professionals, most of whom are women—just like the overwhelming majority of people arrested for sex work. That they act from a place of urgency and love does not negate problematic saviorism that some grapple with. But to view them only through such a critical lens obscures the larger capitalistic patriarchal narrative that too often serves up the street-level service providers for critique. We should also be asking who benefits from the entrenched inequality and privileging of criminal legal spaces as the last-stop safety net. It is no wonder that PDP participants’ say the primary positive aspect of PDPs is that they are treated like human beings. This low bar for a positive rating shows how people arrested for sex work, especially those who use drugs, are treated. We ask the question, does this need be the case? What would happen if all systems treated people like human beings? We doubt that PDPs would be as welcome in the criminal legal system landscape by participants or by professional stakeholders and welcome readers to let us know what you think.

Visiting Project Dawn Court

This week in North Philly Notes, Corey Shdaimah, coauthor of The Compassionate Court?, with Chrysanthi Leon and Shelly Wiechelt, provides observations from her research on prostitution diversion programs. (Part one of two entries).

In December 2021 I visited Project Dawn Court (PDC). It was the first time I had seen anyone in person since the start of the COVID pandemic. Fresh in my mind were the interviews I had been conducting with program participants and other stakeholders, many of whom were no longer engaged with Dawn Court, and who hold wildly divergent assessments of whether PDC is good or bad, and in what ways. I was struck by how good it felt for me to be in this space, and the warmth that is there. There was a genuine feeling of camaraderie among many of the women in the program and care emanating from the program staff. As someone who sat on the benches with program participants monthly for three years, and in subsequent visits, this was familiar, and I was eager (COVID-caution to the winds) to share hugs. There was also a sense of sadness and nostalgia that something is ending. This court meeting was also a farewell party for the retiring judge and a longtime therapist who is leaving for new career options. The program is small, with participants who have been in Project Dawn for years. The “spigot” has literally been turned off by self-proclaimed progressive District Attorney Larry Krasner, who will not bring charges for prostitution against those who sell sex, and who is the target of dismay and anger. Although there may have been folks in the room who think this is good, none shared this publicly. Program graduates and participants and the professional stakeholders were vehemently opposed and broke into diatribes in conversation and in their prepared farewell messages in open court. Most saw this as abandonment: The concerns of women who need help will once again go unheeded. They viewed Larry Krasner and his progressive vision as part of a larger, ongoing “discourse of disposal” (Lowman, 2000).

This narrative of abandonment shows both how important Prostitution Diversion Programs (PDPs) are, and how they are also doomed to failure. This group of program participants and most program stakeholders—nearly all women—have created a space where (some of them) find a semblance of common ground. Even those who most decried the program, and women who were removed from the program, made meaningful personal connections. They found mutual hope, concrete assistance, and in some cases friendship. But few of the women were left better off. There are still insufficient resources for assistance that would help people who would prefer not to sell sex on the streets of Philadelphia or Baltimore to leave this option behind. There are also insufficient resources to help most of those who have stopped selling sex, either by choice or by mandate, to thrive. I was upset with myself for being nostalgic, and upset by how easily I could be lulled by the familiarity, warmth, and kindness of individual women to blunt and suspend my own critical stance. What does this say about the mutual eagerness to make connections among people whom I imagine do not usually connect—across class, race, and stigma? Is that the real purpose of this court? To make everyone here feel just a little bit better about an overall lack of empathy and isolation? And where is the line between a prurient curiosity and a desire for connection, especially in this space where sex and suffering are the main topics of conversation? What are the systems that place these women, myself included, into this space of longing and desire? How are visions of mothering and other forms of women’s work implicated in this peculiar blend of maternalistic rescue that focuses on nurturing while tasked with a mission of preparation for the world? This role largely involves making sure that those in our charge are ready—ostensibly for their own safety but also for the “good” of a larger society—to conform to normative conceptions of how, where, and with whom, women can present and use their bodies and their sexuality. Is one of the reasons that we cannot imagine large large-scale change somehow built on this fear of abandoning and being abandoned?

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

Exploring the influences and causes of mass shootings in the United States

This week in North Philly Notes, Eric Madfis and Adam Lankford, coeditors of All-American Massacre, attempt to diagnose America’s mass shooting problem.

“What kind of society is this?” These were the last words screamed by a 64-year-old man before he began a shooting rampage at the 1979 Battle of the Flowers parade in San Antonio, Texas. He killed two women and wounded more than 50 people, including six police officers. 

The mission of our book, All-American Massacre, is to answer precisely this question: What kind of society is the United States, and what elements of contemporary American life contribute to our having the greatest number and highest share of public mass shootings around the globe? We asked scholars across a range of disciplines to answer this question. They took on this challenge to explore how gender, racism, media, politics, education, gun culture, firearm access, and mental health influence the causes of mass shootings in the United States. With a specific focus upon exploring how American culture, institutions, and social structures influence the circumstances, frequency, and severity of mass shootings in the United States, this book helps to clarify the unique nature and salience of mass shootings in contemporary American life. 

Sometimes a problem is so obvious that people can see it for themselves, without consulting experts. For instance, most Alaskans are probably aware that their state gets more snow than California. Sophisticated methods are not required to recognize the difference. America’s mass shooting problem is similar. Many people have recognized that something terrible has been happening in the United States, and that this particular type of tragedy does not seem to occur in other countries nearly as often. More and more data in recent years have demonstrated that America has far more mass shootings than anywhere else on the planet—one recent study found that we have approximately three times as many mass shootings as all other developed countries, combined.

All-American Massacre uncovers what America’s mass shooting problem tells us about the American social body and our country’s underlying ailments. The experts gathered in this book trace this prominent symptom back to its insidious causes, both fringe and mainstream.

Mass shootings have become more frequent and more deadly since the turn of the 21^st century.  Research on mass murder, and public mass shootings in particular, has also increased exponentially during this time. However, little research specifically investigates why it is that the United States experiences such a large proportion of these devastating events. Most prior books have examined mass shootings in the United States with only passing consideration of the American context—as if these incidents could have occurred anywhere on the globe. Very little research has studied why these violent phenomena are so much more common in the United States and examined American culture, institutions, and social structures as interlocking sources of explanation. This is lamentable, as the American causes of mass shootings are multi-faceted but vitally necessary to understand in order to prevent future attacks. 

In this volume, contributors advance a variety of social and cultural explanations for the prevalence and overrepresentation of mass shootings in the United States. To that end, chapters explore: 1) American masculinity and gender norms as a way to better understand why so very many mass killers are male, 2) America’s history and legacy of white supremacy and how this contributes to hate-motivated mass shootings, 3) the role of American mass and social media in motivating mass killers and copycats, 4) the influence of American politics around firearm policy and the resultant impact upon the prevalence of mass shootings, 5) the role of American education in school mass shootings, and 6) the manner in which mental health and firearms policy contribute to America’s disproportionate mass shooting problem. 

We named the book All-American Massacre to reflect that nowhere else in the world has a mass shooting problem quite like America’s, and that these massacres may be better understood through the lens of American culture, institutions, and social structures. Shortly after choosing this title, we discovered that this is also the title of an unreleased horror film meant as a spin-off of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise. As scholars who frequently think, write, research, and talk publicly about mass shootings, watching the rising number of incidents and deaths in recent years has indeed felt, at times, like being in a horror film. It is both our sincere hope and empirically informed view that more can be done to combat this threat. The United States is not inherently or inevitably predisposed to having more than our share of mass shooters. There is still reason for hope about reversing these trends. As concerned citizens and scholars, we are passionate about saving our nation from experiencing more of these terrible tragedies. Our country needs far more clarity, shared understanding, and desire to make progress on the issues covered in this volume. Otherwise, it will be a long time before we end this traumatizing cycle of horror and death.

What Is Solidarity?

This week in North Philly Notes, Alana Lee Glaser, author of Solidarity & Care, writes about how her days as a labor activist informed her new book.

What is solidarity? What do we—as members of a society—owe one another? How might we effectively uphold and institutionalize our mutual obligations? These questions have animated my own activism and scholarship since I was an undergraduate student turned labor activist two decades ago. More recently, these same questions motivated me to write a book for undergraduate students that I hope might inspire them to solidarity action themselves.

During my first year as an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I, along with ten or so other students, staged a sit-in in the Chancellor’s historic South Building office on UNC’s central campus to protest the sweatshop labor behind the manufacture of the university’s licensed apparel. Months earlier, on a lark, I had attended a small meeting of anti-sweatshop activists. Over the course of those few months, I had what I now recognize as a full-scale world-view revolution. I entered college with an esteem for volunteerism and letter-writing campaigns (both of which I continue to endorse) and before my first year ended, I was a self-proclaimed labor activist and student radical.  To contextualize, let me add that this all occurred in 1998, before historical hindsight would allow me to place my consciousness within broader anti-neoliberal globalization movements that united “Teamsters and turtles” in Seattle and countless others in global mass demonstrations against the anti-labor, free-trade policies of the World Trade Organization, IMF, and World Bank. Virtually all my subsequent endeavors have built upon the foundational experiences of student-labor solidarity that took place throughout my undergraduate career, leading me to Domestic Workers United, the organization of immigrant women domestic worker activists that is the subject of my book, Solidarity & Care.

Solidarity & Care addresses these questions of solidarity, mutual aide, and activism through an accessible ethnographic description of Domestic Workers United’s decade-long fight to establish workplace protections in New York and the ramifications of this legislation in the ten years since it passed. Historically, U.S. labor laws have excluded care work performed in the home—housekeeping, childcare, and elder care—from labor law protections, leaving the women who work in this highly personalized, low-wage sector vulnerable to wage theft, harassment, abrupt termination, and abuse. In summer 2010, New York State passed the Domestic Worker Bill of Rights, the nation’s first-ever legislation granting formal protections to in-home workers.

Solidarity & Care chronicles the laboring lives and activist endeavors of immigrant women care workers across New York’s five boroughs, as they manage the implications of the new law in their workplaces, transnational communities, and political organizations. The introduction of the Domestic Worker Bill of Rights hasn’t attenuated many of the issues with which childcare providers, housecleaners, and home health aides contend on a regular basis—frequent termination, employer inconsideration, long hours, dismally low pay, mistreatment, and lack of control over their own labor. Solidarity & Care describes how care work positions exemplify increasing worker insecurity across industries—wrought by neoliberal economic policy and employer efforts to reduce wages and eliminate worker benefits through overseas outsourcing where possible and through casualization, deskilling, and fragmentation here in the United States. In this way, the book invites undergraduate students, many already working in low waged labor sectors themselves, to contextualize their own labor and to consider their experiences and interests in common with domestic workers.

By foregrounding the activist successes and setbacks of primarily Caribbean, Latina, and African women care workers, Solidarity & Care showcases how intersectional labor organizing and solidarity can effectively protect workers in this and other industries. It centers the voices and experiences of immigrant women workers through their oral histories, vibrant accounts of their roles in protest actions, and their own analyses of the overlapping oppressions they face as women of color, immigrants, and low-wage workers in New York City. Just as I was drawn to understand the historic and political circumstances during which I protested sweatshops by “sitting-in” as a an undergraduate, my hope is that Solidarity & Care will be an approachable invitation to undergraduates, and even the broader public, to reflect on their own political-economic position and to stand in solidarity with immigrant women workers, like the members of Domestic Workers United, and workers across the U.S. labor movement.