"Crime Gone Viral"

New from NYU Press: Crime Gone Viral: Eyewitnessing in a Digital Age by Karen G. Weiss.

About the book, from the publisher:

Highlights crime eyewitnesses who use digital technologies to record, share, and watch crime online

In the digital age, crime and efforts to control crime have been transformed by the ability of ordinary citizens to “witness” crime remotely and intervene through smartphones and computer screens. Crime Gone Viral shines a spotlight on the digital witnesses who record, share and watch crime online to elucidate how their responses impact crime outcomes. With the ability to see crime for themselves and digitally intervene from afar, digital witnesses play outsized roles in social control as both capable guardians who help, and as incapable guardians who make matters worse. Digital witnesses also play important roles as storytellers who inform and shape public perceptions about crime and criminal justice.

By placing crime witnesses front and center, Weiss provides a bold and critical framework that challenges existing criminological research that assumes third parties deter crime by virtue of their presence and problematizes traditional ways of thinking about third party social control. Drawing from original survey data and providing examples of real-life criminal cases from both traditional news media and social media to illustrate and analyze digital responses to crime, Weiss identifies three digital witness types: Samaritans, Voyeurs, and Vigilantes. Together, these witness types form the basis of a theoretical framework meant to provide a more nuanced understanding of third-party participation in social control and punishment in the digital age. Ultimately, Crime Gone Viral provides a necessary and comprehensive understanding of crime in the 21st century aimed at developing a theoretical, empirical, and practical understanding of what it means to witness crime in a digital age.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Unruly Fertility"

New from Stanford University Press: Unruly Fertility: Race, Development, and Decolonial Reproductive Politics by T.D. Harper-Shipman.

About the book, from the publisher:

As sexual and reproductive repression increases around the world, engaging with reproductive politics has become acutely urgent. This reproductive repression exists alongside pervasive economic precarity, untenable costs of living, and pressing demands for higher labor productivity. What feels like the emergence of a novel reproductive and economic dystopia, however, is a long-lasting reality for poor Black women globally. Comparing Senegal and North Carolina, T.D. Harper-Shipman shows how states and markets turn to poor Black women's fertility to assuage economic and social crises that would otherwise expose the failings of modern political economy. Moving through formative moments that draw reproductive health, gender, race, and labor into closer proximity―from the transatlantic slave trade through to the present―Harper-Shipman argues that reproductive health policies are instruments for national and international elites to regulate resource distribution and recreate future stores of differentiated labor across time and space.

Unruly Fertility attends to the innovative and unconventional forms of resistance that poor Black women use to decouple their productive and reproductive labor from state efforts to manage their fertility. These discreet forms of resistance establish new possibilities that scaffold decolonial reproductive politics. Harper-Shipman compels us to view reproductive politics as an enduring battle over which bodies deserve the fruits of modernity, and which bodies get perpetually marked as the vehicles for carrying all of humanity forward.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Subversion and Seduction"

New from Oxford University Press: Subversion and Seduction: China's Economic Statecraft by Audrye Wong.

About the book, from the publisher:

China has consistently sought to wield economic clout in its quest for global geopolitical influence. Yet, as the book shows in convincing detail, this use of economic statecraft has seen varying degrees of effectiveness, with results less successful than commonly assumed.

Subversion and Seduction examines the reasons why economic statecraft only works some of the time, showing that outcomes depend on both the inducement strategy and the target country's political setting. Audrye Wong folds China's numerous economic inducements into two strategic categories--"subversive carrots" and "legitimate seduction"--and then examines how public accountability mechanisms in recipient countries can facilitate or impede the effectiveness of such inducements. Drawing on detailed case studies, extensive field research, and a survey experiment, she diagnoses China's setbacks in gaining geoeconomic influence, but also highlights its successes in achieving short-term transactional goals and driving wedges between and within countries. Her analysis emphasizes the important role recipient countries can play in shaping and constraining China's influence. By developing a theory of China's economic statecraft, the book sheds light on how and when China can use its economic might to reshape US-China relations and the international system as a whole.

Visit Audrye Wong's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Order of Business"

New from Columbia University Press: Monstrous Conceptions: A History of Race, Disability, and Reproductive Medicine in the United States by Miriam Rich.

About the book, from the publisher:

In the nineteenth century, American medical practitioners helped craft a new science of monsters. The term “monstrous birth” had long been applied to newborns with congenital conditions such as anencephaly. When practitioners redefined “monstrosity” in scientific terms, they claimed to be stripping away its fraught connotations. Instead, recast as a biological phenomenon, the monster gained new social and cultural salience. Monstrosity gave form to pervasive ideas about the meaning of racial difference, the fragility of racial order, and the peril of racial degeneration.

Miriam Rich explores the history of monstrosity as a modern scientific category, tracing the practices that transformed newborn bodies into medical specimens across the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. Monstrous Conceptions vividly examines experiences of pregnancy, birth, and postpartum care; the preparation and display of anatomical specimens; and the production and circulation of scientific knowledge. It shows how diverse laywomen and their families engaged with medical meaning making even as predominantly white, male practitioners increasingly sought to assert authority over reproduction. Rich also reveals how the nineteenth-century category of biological monstrosity helped lay the groundwork for the American eugenics movement―and contributed to ideas about deviant and defective bodies that still haunt us today. Shedding new light on intertwined historical conceptions of race, sex, and disability, Monstrous Conceptions illuminates how medical science produced enduring notions of human difference.

Visit Miriam Rich's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Post-Liberal Peace"

New from Cornell University Press: A Post-Liberal Peace: How Emergent Powers Are Reshaping Global Conflict Management by Monalisa Adhikari.

About the book, from the publisher:

In A Post-Liberal Peace, Monalisa Adhikari shows how rising powers like India and China are reshaping global peace governance. Over recent decades, both countries have deepened engagement with institutions built on liberal principles, including those related to peacebuilding. Their growing role raises critical questions about how their approaches diverge from liberal models and their impact on the domestic politics of conflict-affected states.

Focusing on India and China's involvement in peace processes in Nepal and Myanmar, Adhikari demonstrates that these powers advance distinctive, state-centered programs that privilege regional stakeholders, stability, development, and pragmatism. Operating under conditions of "negotiated coexistence" with liberal peacebuilders, their initiatives neither fully align with nor openly contest existing actors, limiting cooperation while avoiding confrontation. This pluralized form of international engagement enables domestic elites to resist external pressures, producing hybrid peace orders that incorporate some liberal elements yet remain largely at the status quo―and often illiberal.

Rich with archival and interview evidence, A Post-Liberal Peace sheds light on alternative forms of peacebuilding and their on-the-ground effects in an increasingly multipolar world.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Wanting Children"

New from the University of Chicago Press: Wanting Children: Family-Planning Policies and the Engineering of America’s Population by Leonard M. Lopoo.

About the book, from the publisher:

On the eugenic origins of US reproductive laws—and the surprising policy changes needed to remedy it.

The US government spends hundreds of millions of dollars every year to promote and facilitate contraception. Whereas other wealthy countries support broader fertility interventions under the banner of “family planning,” the United States remains committed only to helping Americans—and especially poorer Americans—plan not to have a family.

In an unflinching treatise on one of the century’s defining social issues, Leonard M. Lopoo shows how the US’s asymmetric reproductive approach is a vestige of the country’s earlier sins: America’s first reproductive policies were authored by some of the twentieth century’s most prominent eugenicists, a group whose primary goal was birth prevention among lower economic classes and racial minorities. These origins have consequently created a contradictory position for the country today, in which contraception for the lowest-income Americans is subsidized, while many upper-class Americans employ technologies to have children with preferable traits.

Lopoo recasts this personal and politicized topic in elegant, stark terms. If the United States is to legislate reproduction, the only defensible approach is equity: helping people who want children to have children. Wanting Children posits a new and elevating criterion for how we think about fertility in the twenty-first century.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Organizational Invention in Renaissance Florence"

New from Oxford University Press: Organizational Invention in Renaissance Florence by John F. Padgett.

About the book, from the publisher:

The Renaissance in Florence was not only a time of extraordinary artistic and philosophical creativity; it also marked a pivotal moment in the invention of new organizational forms that reshaped the city's economic, political, and social life. In Organizational Invention in Renaissance Florence, John F. Padgett distills and synthesizes thirty years of research into how Florentine institutions and social networks developed and transformed over two centuries. Drawing on an unparalleled historical dataset encompassing more than 100,000 individuals, Padgett maps the intricate web of relationships that connected Florence's families, businesses, and political actors between 1300 and 1500.

The book centers on three major arenas of organizational change. First, Padgett traces the evolution of business structures, particularly within the banking sector, focusing on the development of the diversified partnership-system form of business organization. Second, he examines the shifts to Florentine kinship networks, Florentine kinship networks, outlining the formation of patrilineage and its diffusion from upper classes to middle classes. Finally, he charts the shifting terrain of political networks and the transformation of oligarchic elites.

Across all three domains, Padgett demonstrates that organizational change did not occur in isolation. Instead, developments in one arena continually spilled over into others through the dense, cross-cutting social networks that underpinned Florentine society. Elites were rarely confined to a single role: they were merchants, bankers, politicians, and civic leaders simultaneously, moving fluidly among spheres as circumstances shifted. This multivalent identity, he argues, was central to Florence's adaptability and resilience. Organizational Invention in Renaissance Florence ultimately offers a fresh interpretation of the Renaissance, revealing how social networks emerged, transformed, and generated new forms of collective life during a period of intense social, political, and cultural change.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Invested"

New from Stanford University Press: Invested: Trust and Ignorance in a Middle-Class Fraud by Camilo Arturo Leslie.

About the book, from the publisher:

A riveting and revealing new account of the precarity of the middle class today

To be middle class today connotes a certain prudence when it comes to financial decision-making – steadily building one's nest egg rather than carelessly spending. Constantly enjoined to put their savings to work in shrewd investments, these subjects must constantly guard their class status. In Invested Camilo Leslie contends that these pressures require middle-class adults to engage professionals, experts, brokers, and organizations for help in financializing their futures. These pivotal relationships that comprise the middle class experience cannot be grasped without an account of trust, and, in this case, its betrayal.

Leslie takes the case of the Stanford Financial Group (SFG) – the second largest Ponzi scheme on record – to explore the vulnerability built into middle classness. The Stanford fraud stands out for its twenty-three-year length, its complex structure, and its geographic breadth, ensnaring victims across the Americas, including this book's focal populations: investors in Venezuela and the United States. Victims of the scheme were invariably members of the middle class, with sufficient investable funds to participate. The book's comparative approach reveals how middle classness is made and manifested differently in distinct settings. Tracing SFG's arc in Venezuela and the U.S. reveals the weight of local political and institutional contexts on middle-class subjects' propensity to trust.

Drawing on interviews with investors, ex-employees of SFG, and a range of professionals with ties to the case, Leslie tells a compelling, often poignant story of an unwieldy category. To be middle-class, he shows, is to occupy not just a material location but a moral and epistemic one in which class members are obliged to trust from a place of ignorance.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Reading Matters"

New from NYU Press: Reading Matters: A History for the Digital Age by Joel Halldorf.

About the book, from the publisher:

Traces earlier revolutions in the history of reading to orient our shift to the digital age

Considered one of the greatest inventions of human civilization, writing has served as a pathway to culture and education through history. The digital revolution has ushered in a dramatic transformation, leading to growing concern over the effects and possible detriments of algorithms, information overload, and fake news. In Reading Matters, Joel Halldorf makes the case that in order to navigate the upheavals of the digital age, we must understand prior technical revolutions and the transformations they engendered. He shows how our ways of reading are inseparable from the media we use, and that the decline of deep, attentive reading may be the most serious consequence of our move from page to screen.

Originally published in Swedish in 2023, this newly revised volume presents a sweeping history of transformations in reading and writing, tracing precedents in the invention of writing, the shift from clay tablets to papyrus and from scrolls to codices, the advent of printing, and the development of industrial printing. It explores how each new format of writing has encouraged new ways to think, relate, and organize the world. Essentially, it is not only what we read that is important, but how we read.

Moving through key historical events including the rise of Christianity, the scientific revolution, and the development of democracy, Halldorf explores how changes in the physical book reflected major cultural and historical shifts of the time. By tracing how new media forms have impacted human attention, authority, and community, the volume equips readers to better understand our own digital habits today. Detailing the riveting cultural history of reading technologies, book revolutions, and cultural upheavals, Reading Matters showcases the massive power of reading, writing, and books in helping us understand who we are.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Hidden History of Conspiracy Theory"

New from Princeton University Press: The Hidden History of Conspiracy Theory by Andrew McKenzie-McHarg.

About the book, from the publisher:

Tracing the genealogy of conspiracy theory, from Machiavelli through the “paranoid style” to QAnon

Truthers, birthers, flat-Earthers, the deep state, crisis actors, chemtrails, the Epstein files, Pizzagate, the Plandemic—it seems as though there’s a conspiracy theory for every situation. But what exactly is a conspiracy theory? And why is the term used to describe beliefs that are so very unlike theories (at least in the scientific sense of the word)? In this erudite and original book, Andrew McKenzie-McHarg answers these questions not by formulating a definition but by tracing a genealogy. He uncovers two crucial strands of contemporary conspiracy theorizing on the threshold of modernity: on the one hand, political analysis as realized by Niccolò Machiavelli in such works as The Prince and, on the other, apocalyptic prophecy as channeled by the charismatic preacher Girolamo Savonarola.

The French Revolution, the antisemitic hoax known as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and the Nuremberg Trials number among the subsequent episodes that progressively entangled these strands before finally knotting them into the twentieth-century concept of conspiracy theory. Alternative labels were also offered, most strikingly by the historian Richard Hofstadter, whose engagement with American right-wing politics in the 1950s and 1960s inspired his notion of the paranoid style. As McKenzie-McHarg shows, Hofstadter’s coinage, with its psychological bent, contributed to personalizing our understanding of conspiracy theory, thus yielding a specific type of person that, for better or worse, has become all too familiar to us today: the conspiracy theorist.

Proceeding from The Prince through The Protocols to the paranoid style and then beyond to QAnon, The Hidden History of Conspiracy Theory sheds new light on a complex and troubling phenomenon.

--Marshal Zeringue