Mignon R. Moore brings to light the family life of a group that has been largely invisible--gay women of color--in a book that questions longstanding ideas about racial identity, family formation, and routes to motherhood for lesbians. Drawing from three years of interview, survey, and participant observation study of more than 100 women, Invisible Families explores the ways that race and class have influenced how these women understand their sexual orientation, find partners, and form families. Invisible Families asks how people with multiple stigmatized identities imagine and construct an individual and collective sense of self.

In this comprehensive comparative study, Jorge Duany explores how migrants to the United States from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico maintain multiple ties to their countries of origin.

Chronicling these diasporas from the end of World War II to the present, Duany argues that each sending country's relationship to the United States shapes the transnational experience for each migrant group, from legal status and migratory patterns to work activities and the connections migrants retain with their home countries. Blending extensive ethnographic, archival, and survey research, Duany proposes that contemporary migration challenges the traditional concept of the nation-state. Increasing numbers of immigrants and their descendants lead what Duany calls "bifocal" lives, bridging two or more states, markets, languages, and cultures throughout their lives. Even as nations attempt to draw their boundaries more clearly, the ceaseless movement of transnational migrants, Duany argues, requires the rethinking of conventional equations between birthplace and residence, identity and citizenship, borders and boundaries.

It's no secret that fun is important to American college students, but it is unusual for scholars to pay attention to how undergraduates represent and reflect on their partying. Linguist and anthropologist Chaise LaDousa explores the visual manifestations of collegiate fun in a Midwestern college town where house signs on off-campus student residences are a focal point of college culture. With names like Boot 'N Rally, The Plantation, and Crib of the Rib, house signs reproduce consequential categories of gender, sexuality, race, and faith in a medium students say is benign. Through his analysis of house signs and what students say about them, LaDousa introduces the reader to key concepts and approaches in cultural analysis.

American newspapers have faced competition from new media for over ninety years. In the 1920s, broadcast radio was the threatening upstart. At the time, newspaper publishers of all sizes turned threat into opportunity by establishing their own stations. Many, such as the Chicago Tribune's WGN, are still in operation. By 1940 newspapers owned 30 percent of America's radio stations. This new type of enterprise, the multimedia corporation, troubled those who feared its power to control the flow of news and information. In Sound Business, historian Michael Stamm traces how these corporations and their critics reshaped the ways that Americans received the news.

Stamm is attuned to a neglected aspect of US media history: the role newspaper owners played in communications from the dawn of radio to the rise of television. Drawing on a wide array of primary sources, he recounts the controversies surrounding joint newspaper and radio operations. These companies capitalized on synergies between print and broadcast production. As their advertising revenue grew, so did concern over their concentrated influence. Federal policymakers, especially during the New Deal, responded to widespread concerns about the consequences of media consolidation by seeking to limit and even ban cross ownership. The debates between corporations, policymakers, and critics over how to regulate these new kinds of media businesses ultimately structured the channels of information distribution in the United States and determined who would control the institutions undergirding American society and politics.

Sound Business is a timely examination of the connections between media ownership, content, and distribution, one that both expands our understanding of mid-twentieth-century America and offers lessons for the digital age.

"A fascinating, finely researched reconsideration of the newspaper industry's response to the advent of radio. Stamm has made a major contribution to mass media history."--James L. Baughman, author of Same Time, Same Station: Creating American Television, 1948-1961

A unique and useful guide to the skills necessary for on-camera journalism and public relations. With a foreword by NBC's Lester Holt, the book includes profiles of notable multimedia journalists, including CNN's Jessica Yellin, NBC's Brian Williams, NPR's Corey Flintoff, CNNMoney's Poppy Harlow as well as numerous local journalists and public relations practitioners. Includes storytelling across multiple platforms, such as broadcast, print, and online video. Addresses key ethical issues of global multimedia communication.

In a world of finite resources, expanding populations and widening structural inequalities, the ownership of things is increasingly contested. Not only are the commons being rapidly enclosed and privatized, but the very idea of what can be owned is expanding, generating conflicts over the ownership of resources, ideas, culture, people, and even parts of people. Understanding processes of ownership and appropriation is not only central to anthropological theorizing but also has major practical applications, for policy, legislative development and conflict resolution.

Ownership and Appropriation significantly extends anthropology's long-term concern with property by focusing on everyday notions and acts of owning and appropriating. The chapters document the relationship between ownership, subjectivities, and personhood; they demonstrate the critical consequences of materiality and immateriality on what is owned; and they examine the social relations of property. By approaching ownership as social communication and negotiation, the text points to a more dynamic and processual understanding of property, ownership, and appropriation.

The most significant French sociologist since Durkheim, Pierre Bourdieu's influence on intellectual life shows no sign of abating. He was a prolific and consequential scholar whose impact can be measured by the Social Science Citation Index and International surveys of academics. Conceptualizations, such as habitus and field, his heuristic treatment of cultural, economic, political, social, and symbolic capital to analyze the uses of power, and his insistence upon melding the usually separated micro and macro levels of societal theorizing are now embedded in the basic vocabulary of sociology and anthropology. Whether or not in accord with his outlook, serious scholars are obliged to test themselves against his challenges. This collection offers insight into central features of Bourdieu's sociology as well as examples of original research inspired by Bourdieu's work.

For hundreds of years, Black Rock, New Mexico, located on the Zuni Indian Reservation, has had multiple meanings for its inhabitants--both Indians and non-Indians alike. By providing a historical background for this place and in particular describing the dramatic changes that took place there during the 20th century, Dodge deftly weaves a story of how the Zunis and the community of Black Rock have reflected transformations to this unique cultural landscape.

The modernist era was marked by a continual breaching of distinctions regarding what is or is not art, and the breakdown of the hierarchies that had traditionally demarcated them. Today, the arts are characterized by an unprecedented openness to new possibilities, a shifting of established genres, a melding of unlikely forms, and far greater inclusiveness. How then, without an art world establishment with formal authority over outcomes, do we determine what constitutes art and judge different artistic works? Outsider Art explores the historical roots of this post-modern condition and analyzes how artistic recognition is attained. Sociologists, art historians, policy makers, and artists themselves analyze cases from the visual and performing arts, taking as their starting point the "classic" outsiders--asylum inmates, "naive artists," and African "primitives"--and turning to other "outsider" group members, from prison inmates to tango artists, to reveal aspects, stages and strategies of artistic transformation.

At a time when a pile of bricks is displayed in a museum, when music is composed for performance under water, and when the boundaries between popular and fine art are fluid, conventional understandings of art are strained in describing what art is, what it includes or excludes, whether and how it should be evaluated, and what importance should be assigned the arts in society.

In this book, Vera Zolberg examines diverse theoretical approaches to the study of the arts. Ranging over humanistic and social scientific views representing scholarly traditions, American and European, she develops a sociological approach that evaluates the institutional, economic, and political influences on the creation of art, while affirming the importance of the question of artistic quality.