Free time, one of life’s most precious things, often feels unfulfilling. But why? And how did leisure activities transition from strolling in the park for hours to “doomscrolling” on social media for thirty minutes? Today, despite the promise of modern industrialization, many people experience both a scarcity of free time and a disappointment in it. Free Time: The History of an Elusive Ideal (NYU Press, 2024) by Dr. Gary Cross offers a broad historical explanation of why our affluent society does not afford more time away from work and why that time is often unsatisfying. Dr. Cross e ..read more

In Seeking a Future for the Past: Space, Power, and Heritage in a Chinese City (U Michigan Press, 2024), Philipp Demgenski examines the complexities and changing sociopolitical dynamics of urban renewal in contemporary China. Drawing on ten years of ethnographic fieldwork in the northeastern Chinese city of Qingdao, the book tells the story of the slow, fragmented, and contentious transformation of Dabaodao - an area in the city’s former colonial center - from a place of common homes occupied by the urban poor into a showcase of architectural heritage and site for tourism and consump ..read more

Fieldnotes in the Critical Study of Religion: Revisiting Classical Theorists (Bloomsbury, 2023) introduces students to the so-called classics of the field from the 19th and 20th centuries, whilst challenging readers to apply a critical lens. Instead of representing scholars and their works as virtually timeless, each contributor provides sufficient background on the classic work in question so that readers not only understand its novelty and place in its own time, but are able to arrive at a critical understanding of whether its approach to studying religion continues to be useful to ..read more

As the U.S. population ages and as health care needs become more complex, demand for paid care workers in home and institutional settings has increased. This book draws attention to the reserve of immigrant labour that is called on to meet this need.  Migrants Who Care: West Africans Working and Building Lives in U.S. Health Care (Rutgers University Press, 2023) by Dr. Fumilayo Showers tells the little-known story of a group of English-speaking West African immigrants who have become central to the U.S. health and long-term care systems. With high human capital and middle-class pre-m ..read more

Ahmed M. Abozaid’s Undesired Revolution: The Arab Uprising in Egypt--A Three Level Analysis (Brill, 2023) introduces new non-Western perspectives on the Arab Uprisings, decentering and decolonizing International Relations, and Middle Eastern Studies. Drawing on over ten years of fieldwork, ethnography, over 250 interviews, and empirical research, it is one of the first books to evaluate the position of International Relations theorists towards studying the Arab Uprisings. It relies on local IR scholarship from the region, which is rarely considered. It provides a critical accoun ..read more

The Promise of Piety: Islam and the Politics of Moral Order in Pakistan (Cornell University Press, 2024) by Arsalan Khan is an incisive ethnographic study of Pakistan’s Tablighi movement. This piety movement attracts Pakistani Muslim men across class, caste, and social contexts and as such Khan is particularly attuned and reflexive as he navigates the boundaries of this community.  Khan theorizes the various modalities of relationality that mark this movement from its sonic and ritual dimensions, especially as it relates to dawat or p ..read more

Recognition Politics: Indigenous Rights and Ethnic Conflict in the Andes (Cambridge University Press, 2023) by Dr. Lorenza B. Fontana is a pioneering work that explores a new wave of widely overlooked conflicts that have emerged across the Andean region, coinciding with the implementation of internationally acclaimed indigenous rights. Why are groups that have peacefully cohabited for decades suddenly engaging in hostile and, at times, violent behaviours? What is the link between these conflicts and changes in collective self-identification, claim-making, and rent-seeking dynamics? And ho ..read more

Bruce O'Neill's Underground: Dreams and Degradations in Bucharest (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024) gets to the bottom of the twenty-first-century city, literally. Underground moves beneath Romania’s capital, Bucharest, to examine how the demands of global accumulation have extended urban life not just upward into higher skylines, and outward to ever more distant peripheries, but also downward beneath city sidewalks. Underground details how developers and municipal officials have invested tremendous sums of money to gentrify and expand Bucharest’s constellation of subterranean Metro ..read more

Over three years have passed since a military coup of February 2021 in Myanmar precipitated a popular uprising that has since transformed into a revolutionary situation. While researchers and writers have cobbled together edited books trying to come to terms with all that has happened and how we might interpret it in relation to Myanmar’s recent past, Elliott Prasse Freeman’s Rights Refused: Grassroots Activism and State Violence in Myanmar (Stanford University Press, 2023) is the first authoritative monographic study of the transitional 2010s and early revolutionary 2020s. Free ..read more

American guns have entangled the lives of people on both sides of the US-Mexico border in a vicious circle of violence. After treating wounded migrants and refugees seeking safety in the United States, anthropologist Ieva Jusionyte boldly embarked on a journey in the opposite direction—following the guns from dealers in Arizona and Texas to crime scenes in Mexico. An expert work of narrative nonfiction, Exit Wounds: How America's Guns Fuel Violence across the Border (University of California Press, 2024) provides a rare, intimate look into the world of firearms trafficking ..read more