Faculty Bookshelf
Please enjoy this list of some of the latest publications from our prolific faculty.
Vital topics include the uprisings following the death of George Floyd, the real-world impact of social science research, the future of digital media and the political economy, and more.
New in 2025
| Title & Authors | Description |
|---|---|
Freedom Train: Black Politics and the Story of Interracial Labor Solidarity Cedric De Leon (University of California Press) | Drawing on the minutes, correspondence, and speeches of Black labor activists and organizations from 1917 to 1968, de Leon reveals that Black people have been the most ardent and consistent proponents of racial inclusion, leadership representation, and programs linking economic and racial justice. He also demonstrates how conflict and consensus among Black labor groups fueled the fight for solidarity, as different factions split and consolidated to form successive and sometimes competing Black labor organizations. Freedom Train centers the contributions of Black people to the multiracial unions we have today and demonstrates that internal conflict can be a source of strategic innovation and social movement success. |
Decolonial Reconstellations Dynamics of Deep Time and Deep Place, Volume One Dissolving Master Narratives, Volume Two Reconceiving Identities in Political Economy, Volume Three Mwangi wa Gĩthĩnji, Laura Doyle, Simon Gikandi (Routledge) | Collaboratively conceived, the volumes are founded on the observation that we cannot fully uproot the epistemological-material violence of coercive systems nor fully (re)imagine more ethical visions of planetary community, without shared attention to the deeper histories of place and peoples that shape the present. Accordingly, the volumes gather social scientists and humanists, Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, and intersectional and materialist thinkers who reconceptualize longue-durée history and its afterlives. They engage in the dual project to dismantle eurocentric, colonial, androcentric frameworks and to make visible the legacies of care and creative world-making that have sustained human communities. Uncovering pasts that are as complex and dynamic as the present, the contributors brilliantly transform notions of temporality, relationality, polity, conjuncture, resistance and experimentation within histories of struggle and alliance. They richly decolonize political imaginaries. The co-editors’ introductions articulate fresh frameworks of “deep place” and “deep time” freed from eurocentric modernity paradigms, indicating pathways toward decolonial collaboration and institutional change. |
- Anthropology
- Communication
- Economics
- Journalism
- Labor Studies
- Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning
- Political Science/Legal Studies
- Public Policy
- Social Thought and Political Economy
- Sociology
Have a new addition to this list? Email mworoner [at] umass [dot] edu (Morgan Woroner) with the details!