In the days before Google and the blogosphere, Americans still valued interaction with media and preserving historical events that mattered to them, despite their lack of virtual tools to deal with the nascent age of information. So with the tenacity and ingenuity so typical of 19th century American spirit, a new method of recording and interacting with media came to the fore: scrap booking. This woefully neglected trend in American popular culture touched the lives of everyone from Abraham Lincoln to Susan B. Anthony, from emancipated slaves to confederate soldiers.
Throughout the ages, women have had to fight to maintain control of their sexuality and fertility, regardless of the specific era or culture. Whether it is the use of special herbs to reduce fertility or sea sponges serving as diaphragms, women have been incessantly innovative in their approach to fertility and pregnancy.
The IHR Transdisciplinary Humanities Book Award is presented for a non-fiction work that exemplifies transdisciplinary, socially engaged humanities-based scholarship. This year’s award goes to Martijn Konings for his work "The Emotional Logic of Capitalism: What Progressives Have Missed." Konings, a political economist, moves beyond traditional Marxist critiques of capitalism by employing humanistic scholarship, drawing on the works of theorists such as Bruno Latour, Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault and Judith Butler.
"Ingenious Citizenship: Recrafting Democracy for Social Change" by Charles T. Lee focuses on the daily experiences and actions of marginalized people such as migrant domestic workers, prostitutes and transgendered people as central in the rethinking of mainstream models of social change.
With the railroad's arrival in the late nineteenth century, immigrants of all colors rushed to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, transforming the region into a booming international hub of economic and human activity. Following the stream of Mexican, Chinese and African American migration, Julian Lim presents a fresh study of the multiracial intersections of the borderlands, where diverse peoples crossed multiple boundaries in search of new economic opportunities and social relations.
"Beautiful Wasteland: The Rise of Detroit as America's Postindustrial Frontier" reveals the contemporary story of Detroit’s rebirth as an upcycled version of the American Dream, which has long imagined access to work, home and upward mobility as race-neutral projects.
Disciplinary, spatial, ideological, virtual—the boundaries we imagine, construct, and confront are multiple and multi-faceted. Boundaries exclude and include; borders connect and separate. Borders and boundaries are created by states and communities, by institutions and individuals; they shift and change over time. What functions do borders and boundaries serve? Who makes and guards them? Who confronts and crosses them? Who do they serve and who do they limit?
As long as there have been cities, they have existed in complex relationship to the countryside; bound together in networks of trade and migration, politics and warfare, they have also been pitted against each other. From Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s condemnation of cities as centers of female-led corruption to Karl Marx’s dismissal of the idiocy of rural life, city and countryside have been strategically defined with and against each other and have worked as complex signifiers in myriad social, cultural and political debates.
What is health and what is disease? What institutions generate or impede health? Who has access to the healthiest environments and what makes those environments healthy? How do communities construct, maintain or discipline health in individual bodies? These are questions that have been central to scholarship in the health humanities as well as other disciplines.
Money--what it is, how it works, who has it and who doesn’t--has concerned thinkers and researchers both inside and outside academia, and across a wide range of disciplines. It surrounds us and is a fundamental aspect of modern human life, shaping transactions and interactions and powering networks of ideas, material objects, and myriad cultures and subcultures.