Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2020 -

This collection's 10 essays explore the history of social scientific data collection in the Caribbean, challenging researchers to reflect critically on the colonial legacies inherent in modern research methodologies. Qualitative inquiry in the Caribbean is typically conducted within Eurocentric frameworks bound by Western academic thought. The essays seek to deconstruct these Western-oriented academic research designs and promote "indigenous methodologies" that decolonize Caribbean research, empower Caribbean scholars, and produce work that speaks to the needs of Caribbean peoples. Contributing authors embrace and outline qualitative approaches that celebrate key anti-colonial themes of struggle and resistance. These proposed methods also encourage researchers to engage in self-reflexive scholarship that integrates the voices and sociopolitical interests of local participants into research design. In her opening essay Stewart (Univ. of the West Indies, Jamaica) highlights how deeply Western academic language, pedagogy, and perspectives are ingrained in social scientific methodologies, and reveals that the practice of decolonizing research is ongoing. Later, Anne Pajard critically assesses how local concepts of physical and imagined space can confront Eurocentric notions of modernity and decolonize Caribbean heritage. This theoretically sophisticated volume is a must read for Caribbean scholars.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readership levels.

In 44 essays, academic activist Huerta (California State Polytechnic Univ., Pomona) describes, honors, and narrates the economic challenges, discrimination, and racism faced by Mexican immigrants and their US-born children. Throughout the text he shares personal and familial experiences, paying homage to his hardworking immigrant parents. He elaborates on aspects of his parents' lives in their native Michoacan, Mexico; his family's migration to Tijuana, where he lived as a child; and their subsequent move to Los Angeles. Poignantly depicting the details of his life growing up in the projects, he recounts a middle school field trip to another district where he encountered well-to-do people and received a less-than-welcoming reception. Two articles by Juan Gomez-Quinones also stand out; one a call to challenge anti-Mexicanism, the other providing insight into the case of Ruben Salazar. Chapters highlight the effects of systemic inequality, racism, and exclusion, focusing especially on the plight of DACA recipients, day laborers, deportees, and the working poor. At the same time, Huerta captures the resilience of immigrant communities, emphasizing peoples' perseverance, solidarity, and love of family. Including fabulous art work, this accessible and engaging book is a must read.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readership levels.

This bold, provocative, and very timely book from Speed (Univ. of California, Los Angeles) focuses on the experiences of indigenous women from Honduras, Guatemala, and southern Mexico who annually undertake the long, dangerous trek to the US border and beyond, fleeing poverty, violence, and repression. Speed talked with women who had been incarcerated in immigration detention facilities along the US border to learn and share their stories. As the author explains, the experiences of indigenous women migrants are more difficult and dangerous, from start to finish, than that of other migrants. Speed uses the stories she gathered to construct a broader and more intriguing argument about the structures of violence in which the boundaries between state and criminal are blurred. Within this framework criminal gangs in Honduras and Guatemala, corrupt officials and drug cartels in Mexico, and immigration authorities in the US all play their part in exploiting the special vulnerabilities of the indigenous women migrants under discussion. This book serves as an excellent entree into any thoughtful study of the contemporary mess of US immigration policy and the experience of Central American immigrants to this country.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readership levels.

Van Roekel (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands) grounds this volume in a full body of interdisciplinary research, showcasing her rich ethnographic fieldwork. The analytical framework employed--phenomenological anthropology--is timely in its application, reminding the reader that not everyone can escape the immediacy of their experiences, which can be felt even decades later. As a participant observer, van Roekel intentionally immerses herself in her own conflicted feelings about violence and justice within the context of the close relationships that developed with her research participants, who recount experiences of forced disappearances, torture, and survival under Argentina's brutal military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983. Transcending a simple right-versus-wrong dichotomy, the author writes an engaging narrative that invites the reader to embrace the complex subtleties of violence and morality, and of truth and reconciliation, in post-conflict Argentina, and by extension in the world at large. Phenomenal Justice is invaluable for students of anthropology and sociology who are approaching their first extensive fieldwork experience.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and graduate students.

Traveling with Sugar is divided into four cronicas, a term devised to reflect the chronic nature of diabetes within the context of "slow-moving storytelling" that depicts the daily sufferings of those afflicted with this condition. Entwining personal vignettes of those who "travel with sugar," an expression used in some Belizean communities to depict the hardships caused by the metabolic disorder, anthropologist Moran-Thomas (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) examines the multifaceted metaphorical and physiological manifestations of this global epidemic and its deleterious impacts at the individual, local, and national levels. Drawing from a vast body of scholarship at the intersections of fields such as global health, disability studies, Belizean and Garifuna cultural histories, and postcolonial studies, Moran-Thomas examines topics such as the impact of crippling costs of essentials like syringes and insulin, impediments in health policy, and the personal, psychological, and social trauma caused by amputation. This well-researched ethnography is an excellent addition to existing scholarship in that it offers fresh perspectives on the global history of sweetness and power and the ways in which this relationship continues to shape human health.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.