This book captures the Indian state's difficult dialogue with divorce, mediated largely through religion. By mapping the trajectories of marriage and divorce laws of Hindu, Muslim, and Christian communities in post-colonial India, it explores the dynamic interplay between law, religion, family, minority rights and gender in Indian politics. It demonstrates that the binary frameworks of the private-public divide, individuals versus group rights, and universal rights versus legal pluralism collapse before the peculiarities of religious personal law. Historicizing the legislative and judicial response to decades of public debates and activism on the question of personal law, it suggests that the sustained negotiations over family life within and across the legal landscape provoked a unique and deeply contextual evolution of both, secularism and religion in India's constitutional order. Personal law, therefore, played a key role in defining the place of religion and determining the content of secularism in India's democracy.

所有的知識都只是時代的產物，並非永恆不變的
本書帶你理解新時代的知識轉變及對你我的影響，
新知識來臨，你是否已準備好面對挑戰了呢？
什麼是當代新知識？它是怎麼發現、怎麼建構的？
每個人所具備的知識都受到當代時空環境的影響，並且由於人生經歷不同，每個人對於同樣的知識也會有不同理解，並進一步創造或發現可以面對時代問題的新知識。
再現對當代的想像？東埔社布農族獨創排球新規則告訴你！
在東埔社人創造的排球新規則中，第一局發球方同時發兩個球，只有兩個球都贏時才算得分，雙方各贏一球不算得分。第二局雙方各發一球，同樣是兩球都贏時才算得分，否則不算得分。這兩局都贏就算贏，只有平手戰到第三局時，才恢復平常大家所熟悉的規則來決勝負。
新規則的創造是用來再現他們對於當代的想像。他們常說，以前只要努力工作就能成功，就如同過去打排球只打一個球，只要專心打這個球便可。但當代則完全不同，一個人必須同時注意許多事情而無法專心，就像同時玩兩個排球一樣。
在文學作品、日劇啟發下，試圖找尋有效再現當代的觀念與解釋方式
◆大江健三郎在《燃燒的綠樹》中，描繪既沒有教義、又沒有儀式、只有個人的修煉及諸教合一、以及一旦擴大就沒落等當代新興宗教的新現象，讓人重新思考如何有效處理當代的「宗教」問題。
◆村上龍的《希望之國》中，日本國中生在北海道創立「國中之國」，使人意識到民族國家已經過時、不再是理所當然的存在，因它是會破產的。
◆日劇「電車男」反映了網路不僅是新自由主義化的前提，更提示我們當代的人群結合方式早已超越了過去社會科學所強調的血緣、地緣，乃至於志願性團體等原則。
◆「我們的教科書」中被霸凌的國中女生，創造出過去的我、當下的我、未來的我三個自我，來解決被同學視為不存在的透明人而導致自殺的問題，呈現當代多重自我的普遍化趨勢。
本書中，作者嘗試以自身生命經驗的體悟為基礎、以種種日常為啟發，提示我們現在與過去如何的不同，期盼人們也能從生活中體會新時代的痕跡。先感知才能有突破，才能思考如何創造「新知識」來面對新時代的挑戰，以及解答未來我們將何去何從？本書試圖提供您一個探索及思考的方向。
好評推薦（按姓氏筆畫排）
丁仁傑　中央研究院民族學研究所研究員
王甫昌　中央研究院社會學研究所研究員
李丁讚　國立清華大學社會學研究所教授
林開世　國立臺灣大學人類學博物館館長
陳文德　中央研究院民族學研究所兼任副研究員
黃冠閔　中央研究院中國文哲研究所研究員
張正衡　國立臺灣大學人類學系副教授
張隆志　國立臺灣歷史博物館館長
蔡怡佳　輔仁大學宗教學系教授
鄭瑋寧　中央研究院民族學研究所副研究員

從「摩尼教」的變種（包括各種「雜糅假說」），到反映社會排斥「異己」的「汙名化標籤」（白蓮教並無「自我認同」的實體），儘管內涵矛盾，這些觀點卻都是目前學界關於白蓮教的主流學說。民間史料的欠缺，推動本書轉換視角，從逐村的社會歷史調查入手，發掘、搶救瀕臨永久毀滅的民間文書，開拓白蓮教的「地方化」研究。本書從地方視角出發，對官書檔案、道內寶卷、民間傳說、鄉土小戲等不同性質史料，層層剝筍，縱向剖析，努力突破傳統宗教史、社會史與制度史的藩籬，是一部顛覆性的學術著作。

An intimate, deeply moving investigation of an underreported phenomenon—the rising number of unclaimed dead in America today—and what it says about the state of our society
For centuries, people who died destitute or alone were buried in potters’ fields—a Dickensian end that even the most hard-pressed families tried to avoid. Today, more and more relatives are abandoning their dead, leaving it to local governments to dispose of the bodies. Up to 150,000 Americans now go unclaimed each year. Who are they? Why are they being forgotten? And what is the meaning of life if your death doesn’t matter to others?
In this extraordinary work of narrative nonfiction, eight years in the making, sociologists Pamela Prickett and Stefan Timmermans uncover a hidden social world. They follow four individuals in Los Angeles, tracing the twisting, poignant paths that put each at risk of going unclaimed, and introducing us to the scene investigators, notification officers, and crematorium workers who care for them when no one else will.
The Unclaimed lays bare the difficult truth that anyone can be abandoned. It forces us to confront a variety of social ills, from the fracturing of families and the loneliness of cities to the toll of rising inequality. But it is also filled with unexpected moments of tenderness. In Boyle Heights, a Mexican American neighborhood not far from the glitter of Hollywood, hundreds of strangers come together each year to mourn the deaths of people they never knew. These ceremonies, springing up across the country, reaffirm our shared humanity and help mend our frayed social fabric.
Beautifully crafted and profoundly empathetic, The Unclaimed urges us to expand our circle of caring—in death and in life.

The Dating Divide is the first comprehensive look at “digital-sexual racism,” a distinct form of racism that is mediated and amplified through the impersonal and anonymous context of online dating. Drawing on large-scale behavioral data from a mainstream dating website, extensive archival research, and more than seventy-five in-depth interviews with daters of diverse racial backgrounds and sexual identities, Curington, Lundquist, and Lin illustrate how the seemingly open space of the internet interacts with the loss of social inhibition in cyberspace contexts, fostering openly expressed forms of sexual racism that are rarely in face-to-face encounters. The Dating Divide is a fascinating look at how a contemporary conflux of individualization, consumerism, and the proliferation of digital technologies have given rise to a unique form of gendered racism in the era of swiping right—or left.
The internet can be an equalizer, a seemingly level playing field, but the digital world also acts as an extension of and platform for the insidious prejudices and divisive impulses that affect social politics in the “real” world. Shedding light on how every click, swipe, or message can be linked to the history of racism and courtship in the United States, this compelling study uses data to show the racial biases at play in digital dating spaces.

This book examines and evaluates various private initiatives to enforce fair labor standards within global supply chains. Using unique data (internal audit reports, and access to more than 120 supply chain factories and 700 interviews in 14 countries) from several major global brands, including NIKE, HP, and the International Labor Organization's Factory Improvement Programme in Vietnam, this book examines both the promise and the limitations of different approaches to actually improve working conditions, wages, and working hours for the millions of workers employed in today's global supply chains. Through a careful, empirically grounded analysis of these programs, this book illustrates the mix of private and public regulation needed to address these complex issues in a global economy.

A look at the benefits and consequences of the rise of community-based organizations in urban development

Who makes decisions that shape the housing, policies, and social programs in urban neighborhoods? Who, in other words, governs? Constructing Community offers a rich ethnographic portrait of the individuals who implement community development projects in the Fairmount Corridor, one of Boston’s poorest areas. Jeremy Levine uncovers a network of nonprofits and philanthropic foundations making governance decisions alongside public officials—a public-private structure that has implications for democratic representation and neighborhood inequality.

Levine spent four years following key players in Boston’s community development field. While state senators and city councilors are often the public face of new projects, and residents seem empowered through opportunities to participate in public meetings, Levine found a shadow government of nonprofit leaders and philanthropic funders, nonelected neighborhood representatives with their own particular objectives, working behind the scenes. Tying this system together were political performances of “community”—government and nonprofit leaders, all claiming to value the community. Levine provocatively argues that there is no such thing as a singular community voice, meaning any claim of community representation is, by definition, illusory. He shows how community development is as much about constructing the idea of community as it is about the construction of physical buildings in poor neighborhoods.

Constructing Community demonstrates how the nonprofit sector has become integral to urban policymaking, and the tensions and trade-offs that emerge when private nonprofits take on the work of public service provision.

Workers in cultural industries often say that the best part of their job is the opportunity for creativity. At the same time, profit-minded managers at both traditional firms and digital platforms exhort workers to "be creative." Even as cultural fields hold out the prospect of meaningful employment, they are marked by heightened economic precarity. What does it mean to be creative under contemporary capitalism? And how does the ideology of creativity explain workers' commitment to precarious jobs? Michael L. Siciliano draws on nearly two years of ethnographic research as a participant-observer in a Los Angeles music studio and a multichannel YouTube network to explore the contradictions of creative work. He details how such workplaces feature engaging, dynamic processes that enlist workers in organizational projects and secure their affective investment in ideas of creativity and innovation. Siciliano argues that performing creative labor entails a profound ambivalence: workers experience excitement and aesthetic engagement alongside precarity and alienation. Through close comparative analysis, he presents a theory of creative labor that accounts for the roles of embodiment, power, alienation, and technology in the contemporary workplace. Combining vivid ethnographic detail and keen sociological insight, Creative Control explains why "cool" jobs help us understand how workers can participate in their own exploitation.

In the mid-1990s, experts predicted that India would face the world's biggest AIDS epidemic by 2000. Though a crisis at this scale never fully materialized, global public health institutions, donors, and the Indian state initiated a massive effort to prevent it. HIV prevention programs channeled billions of dollars toward those groups designated as at-risk—sex workers and men who have sex with men. At Risk captures this unique moment in which these criminalized and marginalized groups reinvented their "at-risk" categorization and became central players in the crisis response. The AIDS crisis created a contradictory, conditional, and temporary opening for sex-worker and LGBTIQ activists to renegotiate citizenship and to make demands on the state.
Working across India and Kenya, Gowri Vijayakumar provides a fine-grained account of the political struggles at the heart of the Indian AIDS response. These range from everyday articulations of sexual identity in activist organizations in Bangalore to new approaches to HIV prevention in Nairobi, where prevention strategies first introduced in India are adapted and circulate, as in the global AIDS field more broadly. Vijayakumar illuminates how the politics of gender, sexuality, and nationalism shape global crisis response. In so doing, she considers the precarious potential for social change in and after a crisis.

"This book addresses the question of whether, and if so how, religion benefits American democracy. Scholarly views about the answer are divided, as is public opinion. Some hold that religion is beneficial where democracy is concerned; others view it as detrimental; and still others take the middle view that there is "good religion" and "bad religion", and that it all depends on kind is winning. As Robert Wuthnow argues in this new book, these ways of thinking about this topic paint with too broad a brush. Religion as we know it in the United States is vastly diverse, and it is this diversity that has mattered, and still matters. It has mattered not in the abstract, but concretely in the give and take that has mobilized faith communities to engage energetically in the pressing issues of the day -- an engagement that has often involved contesting the influence of other faith communities. Wuthnow's argument is that the deep diversity of religion in American has had, by & large, salutary political consequences. People of faith care about what happens in the country and are keen to mobilize to express their convictions and advocate for policy outcomes in line with their views. The diversity of religious groups in the U.S. contributes to democracy by reducing the chances of any one view becoming preeminent and by bringing innovative ideas to bear on public debate. The book shows empirically what diverse religious groups have done over the past century in advocating for particular democratic values. Individual chapters are case studies that explore important instances in which religious groups advocated against tyranny and on behalf of freedom of conscience; for freedom of assembly; in favor of human dignity; for citizenship rights in the case of immigrants; and for an amelioration of the wealth gap. Plenty of books have been written over the last few decades on religion and politics in the U.S. that have been salvos in the long-running American culture wars. Such books have often decried the involvement of religion in American politics, called for a firmer separation of church and state on the grounds that democracy is better when religion retreats, and criticized the Religious Right in particular. This book, by contrast, offers a more nuanced account of what diverse religious groups have done in the U.S. over the past century in advocating for particular democratic values"--

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth disproportionately make up the U.S. youth homelessness population. In Coming Out to the Streets, Brandon Andrew Robinson examines their lives.
Based on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in central Texas, Coming Out to the Streets maps the LGBTQ youth’s lives prior to experiencing homelessness – within their families, schools, and other institutions – and while the youth live on the streets, deal with police, and navigate shelters and services for people experiencing homelessness. Through this documentation, Robinson shows how poverty and racial inequality shape how LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness negotiate their gender and sexuality. Robinson contends that solutions to addressing LGBTQ youth homelessness need to move beyond blaming families for rejecting their child. By highlighting youth’s voices, Robinson calls for queer and trans liberation through systemic change.

Exposing ethical dilemmas of neuroscientific research on violence, this book warns against a dystopian future in which behavior is narrowly defined in relation to our biological makeup. Biological explanations for violence have existed for centuries, as has criticism of this kind of deterministic science, haunted by a long history of horrific abuse. Yet, this program has endured because of, and not despite, its notorious legacy. Today's scientists are well beyond the nature versus nurture debate. Instead, they contend that scientific progress has led to a nature and nurture, biological and social, stance that allows it to avoid the pitfalls of the past. In Conviction Oliver Rollins cautions against this optimism, arguing that the way these categories are imagined belies a dangerous continuity between past and present. The late 1980s ushered in a wave of techno-scientific advancements in the genetic and brain sciences. Rollins focuses on an often-ignored strand of research, the neuroscience of violence, which he argues became a key player in the larger conversation about the biological origins of criminal, violent behavior. Using powerful technologies, neuroscientists have rationalized an idea of the violent brain—or a brain that bears the marks of predisposition toward "dangerousness." Drawing on extensive analysis of neurobiological research, interviews with neuroscientists, and participant observation, Rollins finds that this construct of the brain is ill-equipped to deal with the complexities and contradictions of the social world, much less the ethical implications of informing treatment based on such simplified definitions. Rollins warns of the potentially devastating effects of a science that promises to "predict" criminals before the crime is committed, in a world that already understands violence largely through a politic of inequality.

编辑推荐：
☆法国新锐人类学家娜斯塔西娅·马丁的成名作，出版后即在法国引起轰动，连获索梅尔奖、生命之光奖、皮埃尔·马克·奥兰奖等多项殊荣，被翻译成德、西、葡、俄、意、荷等各国文字，通行近三十个版本，还被改编成不同版本的舞台剧在美国、巴西、法国等地上演，撼动全球读者与观众 。
☆著名翻译家袁筱一倾情翻译并撰写译后记，复旦大学中文系教授张新颖、《重走》作者杨潇、文化人类学者袁长庚等诚挚推荐。
☆一场人与熊的相互启蒙，一次艰苦卓绝的内向探索。我们仿佛与作者共同经历了这段重创后的重建之路，感受到我们所处的日常世界中看不见的暴力与野蛮，也发现原来还有其他与世界相处的方式。
内容简介：
年轻的法国人类学者娜斯塔西娅·马丁长期和北极圈内的原住民共同生活。2015年秋天，她在翻越堪察加火山的途中遭遇了一头熊，被咬去了半边颌骨。她奇迹般幸存了下来，而她生命中的危机才真正开始：辗转俄法多家医院，被绑在床上，切开气管，脸上植入金属板，反复经历手术、插管、感染，遭受秘密警察的盘问和猎奇者的围观……这一切几乎将她摧毁。
破碎中的娜斯塔西娅回想起，堪察加的埃文人中有一个词叫“米耶德卡”（“半人半熊”），在这场相遇之前，她也曾被当地人称为“玛杜卡”（“女-熊”）。为了重新理解这一事件，她在零下40摄氏度的气候中穿越800公里的森林，重返埃文人的部落，和他们共同生活。在这段日子里她重建自我，也探索与世界相处的其他方式，直到再次出发……
评价推荐：
我们仿佛与娜斯塔西娅共同经历了创痛、恐惧、绝望，直到走出漫长黑暗的隧道，豁然开朗。也让我们发现看似“正常”的社会生活里的“异常”、“文明”世界里的“野蛮”。
——张新颖 复旦大学中文系教授
作者的叙事功力非常了得。这是一部从死亡边缘重生的回忆录，也是一次对自我与他者、对文明与自然的再认识。
——杨潇 作家、记者
法国人类学家娜斯塔西娅在勘察加半岛进行田野调查的过程中被熊袭击。独闯异乡的智识之旅因为两种截然不同的生命力量的碰撞而变成惨烈的意外事故。遇袭事件之后，人类学家沉重的肉身被迫在人类世界的医疗景观内部漂流。与角落里会窜出恐怖强力的自然相比，文明内部幽暗的脆弱和荒诞似乎更让人难过，也正是在疗愈的过程当中，娜斯塔西娅确认了野兽的启示：对于游走在边缘地带的人类学者而言，肉身上的创痛提醒她不要忘记，这个世界上永远存在着另外一种逻辑。本书不是拟人化地把野兽纳入人类社会的伦理系统，而是以身体和生命的脆弱性为代价，对世界的开放性保持存在论意义上的忠诚。
——袁长庚 云南大学社会学系副教授
马丁始终令自己的文字处于试图言说不可言说者，而又不落入任何既定象征体系的“不舒适地带”。正是在这种“不舒适地带”中，读者会像灵光乍现一般感受到任何民族志中都很难感受到的对于原住民的深刻理解与共情，感受到我们所处的看似正常的世界的异常之处、不合情理之处、野蛮之处。
——谢晶 复旦大学哲学院副教授
这是一本关于恐怖、痛苦、忍耐和自我蜕变的令人着迷、震撼心灵的书，其感知的强度和风格的独创性可与 J. A. 贝克的经典作品《游隼》相媲美。在这里，娜斯塔西娅·马丁将我们带到了人类最遥远的极限。
——New York Review Books
马丁的叙事，具有个人散文的骨架和散文诗的升华感……在仍然被掩盖和分离的事物中猎取美。其结果是令人激动和着迷的，因为她一次又一次地冲击着每个人认知的极限：什么是自我？什么是“他人”？…… 如果一只熊能突然撕下你的部分头颅，你到底有多珍贵或神圣？
——The New Yorker
这是一本令人震惊的蜕变之书，是人类学和文学的混合体，它既记录了一次内部旅行，又邀请读者以另一种方式看待世界。
——L’Humanité
美妙得可怕……对万物有灵论——人类和动物之间的界限——的一次迷人的、雄心勃勃的探索。这本书既展现了坍塌，也代表了重建。
——The Guardian
马丁执着地回想着她的暴力遭遇，努力从中寻找意义。本书是一个惊心动魄的生存故事，让人联想到阿尔托和米肖，在深渊的边缘徘徊。
——Le Monde des Livres
这部作品横跨脏体和大脑两个层面。既是一部关于遭遇野兽并改变人生的动人回忆录，也是关于边界和边缘性、关于在自我与他者的互动中吸收他者的一部分，以及人类学作为理解这一切的方法的局限性的探索……令人兴奋，引人入胜，极具可读性。
——4 Columns

Recent research on inequality and poverty has shown that those born into low-income families, especially African Americans, still have difficulty entering the middle class, in part because of the disadvantages they experience living in more dangerous neighborhoods, going to inferior public schools, and persistent racial inequality. Coming of Age in the Other America shows that despite overwhelming odds, some disadvantaged urban youth do achieve upward mobility. Drawing from ten years of fieldwork with parents and children who resided in Baltimore public housing, sociologists Stefanie DeLuca, Susan Clampet-Lundquist, and Kathryn Edin highlight the remarkable resiliency of some of the youth who hailed from the nation’s poorest neighborhoods and show how the right public policies might help break the cycle of disadvantage. Coming of Age in the Other America illuminates the profound effects of neighborhoods on impoverished families. The authors conducted in-depth interviews and fieldwork with 150 young adults, and found that those who had been able to move to better neighborhoods—either as part of the Moving to Opportunity program or by other means—achieved much higher rates of high school completion and college enrollment than their parents. About half the youth surveyed reported being motivated by an “identity project”—or a strong passion such as music, art, or a dream job—to finish school and build a career. Yet the authors also found troubling evidence that some of the most promising young adults often fell short of their goals and remained mired in poverty. Factors such as neighborhood violence and family trauma put these youth on expedited paths to adulthood, forcing them to shorten or end their schooling and find jobs much earlier than their middle-class counterparts. Weak labor markets and subpar postsecondary educational institutions, including exploitative for-profit trade schools and under-funded community colleges, saddle some young adults with debt and trap them in low-wage jobs. A third of the youth surveyed—particularly those who had not developed identity projects—were neither employed nor in school. To address these barriers to success, the authors recommend initiatives that help transform poor neighborhoods and provide institutional support for the identity projects that motivate youth to stay in school. They propose increased regulation of for-profit schools and increased college resources for low-income high school students. Coming of Age in the Other America presents a sensitive, nuanced account of how a generation of ambitious but underprivileged young Baltimoreans has struggled to succeed. It both challenges long-held myths about inner-city youth and shows how the process of “social reproduction”—where children end up stuck in the same place as their parents—is far from inevitable.

We like to think of ourselves as possessing an essential self, a core identity that is who we really are, regardless of where we live, work, or play. But places actually make us much more than we might think, argues Japonica Brown-Saracino in this novel ethnographic study of lesbian, bisexual, and queer individuals in four small cities across the United States.

Taking us into communities in Ithaca, New York; San Luis Obispo, California; Greenfield, Massachusetts; and Portland, Maine; Brown-Saracino shows how LBQ migrants craft a unique sense of self that corresponds to their new homes. How Places Make Us demonstrates that sexual identities are responsive to city ecology. Despite the fact that the LBQ residents share many demographic and cultural traits, their approaches to sexual identity politics and to ties with other LBQ individuals and heterosexual residents vary markedly by where they live. Subtly distinct local ecologies shape what it feels like to be a sexual minority, including the degree to which one feels accepted, how many other LBQ individuals one encounters in daily life, and how often a city declares its embrace of difference. In short, city ecology shapes how one “does” LBQ in a specific place. Ultimately, Brown-Saracino shows that there isn’t one general way of approaching sexual identity because humans are not only social but fundamentally local creatures. Even in a globalized world, the most personal of questions—who am I?—is in fact answered collectively by the city in which we live.

The Second Edition of Symbols, Selves, and Social Reality introduces students to the symbolic interactionist perspective in sociology. This book differs from other texts on interactionism in several important respects. First, it offers a stronger empirical focus, linking discussions of the central ideas and premises of symbolic interactionism to pertinent research, including ethnographic studies conducted by each of the authors. Second, the book emphasizes topics that are inherently interesting to students, such as the dynamics of self-development, impression management, identity transformation, gender play, rumor transmission, and collective action. Third, it includes an analysis of the changing nature and experience of selfhood in contemporary society. Fourth, the authors provide a useful set of pedagogical tools at the end of each chapter, including a summary of key points and concepts, a glossary of key terms, a list of suggested readings, and questions for reflection and discussion. Finally, Symbols, Selves, and Social Reality offers a discussion of the personal relevance of symbolic interactionism, its salience for social policy, its broadening theoretical scope, and its relationship to new and increasingly prominent perspectives emerging within sociology. The new edition covers an even broader range of ideas and topics than the First Edition. It also features several updated sections and boxed inserts. These address such topics as: * The impact of postmodernity on students' experiences of self.
* The dynamics of mass panics.
* Status passages experienced by students.
* Ethnomethodology and the construction of reality.
* The necessity of language.
* Internet technologies and their effects on interaction.
* New methods of ethnographic analysis.
* The dramatic elements of social movements.
* The value and future of interactionism.

What is the relationship between evangelical Christianity and democracy in America? In Good News for Common Goods, sociologist Wes Markofski explores how multicultural evangelicals across the United States are addressing race, poverty, inequality, politics, and religious and cultural difference in America's increasingly plural and polarized public arena. Based on extensive original research on multicultural evangelicals active in faith-based community organizing, community development, political advocacy, and public service organizations across the country-including over 90 in-depth interviews with racially diverse evangelical and non-evangelical activists, community leaders, and neighborhood residents-Markofski shows how the varieties of public religion practiced by evangelical Christians are not always bad news for non-evangelicals, people of color, and those advancing ethical democracy in the United States.

Markofski argues that multicultural evangelicals can and do work with others across race, class, religious, and political lines to achieve common good solutions to public problems, and that they can do so without abandoning their own distinctive convictions and identities or demanding that others do so. Just as ethical democracy calls for a more reflexive evangelicalism, it also calls for a more reflexive secularism and progressivism.

Financial experts have become ubiquitous on television, radio, and social media. They provide investment advice, interpret market movements, and explain the implications of political events, wielding a great deal of power and influence through their media presence. How do these experts acquire their authority, and what makes displays of financial expertise persuasive to their audiences?

Alex Preda provides an ethnographic exploration of how financial expertise is performed and produced in the media, analyzing its features and how audiences react to it. He examines how analysts, anchors, and producers collaborate in manufacturing financial talk that circulates around the world. Preda emphasizes the significance of talk—as opposed to the written word—in finance, as the fabric of many transactions and a means of capturing capital. Analysts and media figures understand financial talk as requiring a skill set distinct from conducting research or representing facts. Preda demonstrates that analysts and media professionals deploy expertise when they engage with audiences in ways that make it difficult to contest the claims conveyed in their talk.

The Spectacle of Expertise is based on close observations of TV and radio studios in Hong Kong, a global financial center and a crucial gateway to China, including interviews with audience members and financial analysts who appear as regular guests. It offers new and global perspectives on the relationship between financial expertise and the media, the making of public-expert talk, and how expertise is used to legitimize financialization.

Where do lessons of “stranger danger” and safety come from—and do they apply differently for women? A gender-fear paradox shows that although women are less likely to be victims of most crimes (sexual assault aside), their fear of crime is greater. Moreover, girls and women—especially White women—are taught to fear the wrong things and given impossible tools to prevent victimization. In Teaching Fear, Nicole Rader zooms in on the social learning process, tracing the ways that families, schools, and the media have become obsessed with crime myths, especially regarding girls and women. Based on in-depth research and family studies, Rader reveals the dubious and dangerous origins of many of the most prominent safety guidelines that teach young girls to be more afraid of crime. These guidelines carry over to adulthood, influencing women’s behaviors and the way they order their worlds, with dangerous consequences. As women teach their learned behavior and conditioned fear to others, gendered crime myths are recirculated from generation to generation, making them a staple in our society. Teaching Fear includes suggestions for taking precautionary measures and crime prevention strategies. Rader also provides guidance for instilling safety values and demonstrating how we can “teach fear better” to break this cycle and truly create greater security.

This fascinating book takes readers inside the world of faith-based progressive community organizing, one of the largest and most effective social justice movements in the United States. Drawing on rich ethnographic observation and in-depth interviews, Jack Delehanty shows how organizers use religion to build power for change. As Delehanty convincingly demonstrates, religion is more than beliefs, doctrines, and rituals; within activist communities, it also fuels a process of personal reflection and relationship building that transforms people's understandings of themselves, those around them, and the political system.

Relational practices like one-on-one conversation and public storytelling take on new significance in faith-based community organizations. Delehanty reveals how progressive organizers use such relational practices to help people see common ground across lines of race, class, and religious sect. From this common ground, organizers work to develop and deploy shared ideas of moral citizenship that emphasize common dignity, equity, and prosperity and nurture the sense that public action is the only way one can live out religious faith.