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“This content is not available in your country.” Media consumers around the world regularly run into this reminder of geography’s imprint on digital culture. Despite utopian hopes of a borderless digital society in an era of globalization, DVDs, video games, and streaming platforms include digital rights management mechanisms like region codes and IP address detection systems that block media access within certain territories. Although propped up by national and transnational intellectual property regulation, these technologies of “regional lockout” are designed primarily to keep the entertainment industries’ global markets distinct. Beyond this, they frustrate consumers around the world and place certain territories on a hierarchy of global media access. Drawing on extensive research of media-industry strategies, consumer and retailer practices, and media regulation, Locked Out explores regional lockout in DVDs, console video games, and streaming video and music platforms. The book argues that regional lockout has shaped global media culture over the past few decades in three interrelated ways: as technological regulation, media distribution, and geocultural discrimination. As a form of digital rights management, regional lockout builds in limitations on the affordances of digital software and hardware. As distribution, it seeks to ensure that digital technologies accommodate media industries’ traditional segmentation of markets. Finally, as a cultural system, regional lockout shapes and reflects long-standing global hierarchies of power and discrimination.

Catholic Social Activism asks a number of questions regarding Catholic faith and politics: How have American laypeople responded to contentious political moments, including times of war, severe economic trouble, human rights abuses, environmental degradation, and encounters with refugees fleeing these problems? How have they interpreted official church documents and translated them into progressive action for immigrant rights and women’s rights? And how have their movements influenced religious leaders and Catholic Social Teachings? Drawing upon in-depth interviews with activists, archival documents, and secondary resources, the book captures the lived religious experiences of progressive American Catholic activists. It explores how their faith has led them to innovative and sometimes controversial engagement in various movements, including the Catholic Worker, the United Farm Workers, peace movements, Catholic feminism, the Central America solidarity movement, the Sanctuary movement, and the environmental movement. The book argues that these activists have shaped the landscape of American Catholicism and pressured the Catholic hierarchy from below, often prompting them to take a stand and articulate the theological bases for social justice. In compelling prose, the book uncovers the progressive and sometimes radical history of American Catholics, whose stories have for too long remained on the margins of public awareness.

Reorganizing Government seeks to transform how policymakers and scholars understand relationships between government institutions, and offers a pioneering model for constructing and assessing government authority. Regulation is frequently less successful than it could be. This is at least partly because the relationships among regulatory institutions are poorly understood and regulatory structures are routinely poorly designed. The book advances a framework for assessing how governmental authority may be structured along three dimensions-centralization, overlap, and coordination-and demonstrates how differentiating among these dimensions and among particular governmental functions (e.g., standard setting, enforcement) better illuminates the tradeoffs of organizational alternatives. It illustrates these neglected dimensional and functional aspects of interjurisdictional relations through six in-depth explorations involving securities and banking regulation, food safety, environmental protection, and terrorism prevention. In each case study, the authors explore how differentiating among dimensions, and among particular governmental functions, better illuminates the advantages and disadvantages of available structural options. (Re)Organizing Government thus offers a way for officials and scholars to evaluate both adopted and contemplated allocations of authority and to structure intergovernmental authority more effectively. It uses the lens of climate change, an emerging and vital global policy challenge, to illustrate the practical value of applying the book's novel analytical framework to future reorganization efforts. The book concludes by proposing an "adaptive governance" infrastructure that provides a way for policymakers to embed the creation, evaluation, and adjustment of the organization of regulatory institutions into the democratic process itself.

The Little Old Lady Killer focuses on the female serial killer Juana Barraza Samperio, a Mexican lucha libre wrestler who, disguised as a government nurse, strangled sixteen elderly women in Mexico City. The search for the Mataviejitas (the killer of old women) was the first ever undertaken for a serial killer in Mexico. Following international profiling norms for serial killers, the police were initially looking for an ordinary-looking man, but after witness accounts described the Mataviejitas as wearing a wig and makeup, police changed their focus and began to search for a “travesti.” The book undertakes an analysis of the classed, gendered, and sexed transitions described in police reports and media accounts in relation to international criminological discourses and Mexican popular culture. On January 26, 2006, Juana Barraza was arrested as she fled the home of an elderly woman who had just been strangled with a stethoscope. Two years later, Barraza was convicted and sentenced to 759 years and 17 days; she remains in Santa Martha Acatitla to this day. I argue that La Dama del Silencio, Barraza’s masked wrestling identity, more than the woman herself became figured in official and popular discourse as the serial killer, La Mataviejitas. This displacement of personas reinforces national imaginaries of masculinity, femininity, and criminality. The national imaginaries of what constitutes a criminal female or male, in turn, determine crucial notions of mexicanidad within the country’s pigmentocratic culture, who counts as a victim, and how a criminal is constructed.

Democracy aid has grown considerably since the end of the Cold War. In the late 1980s, less than US$1 billion a year went to democracy assistance; by 2015, the estimated total was more than $10 billion. Despite this overwhelming commitment to spreading democracy abroad, the results have been mixed, and in some cases, this aid has in fact undermined the longer-term prospects for democratic development. What factors account for these different outcomes? Why are democracy promotion efforts far more successful in some cases as opposed to others? Promoting Democracy answers these questions while also providing an often overlooked perspective - the perspective of those most directly affected by the impact of this assistance. By examining two primary conflicttopeace transition cases- the Palestinian territories and El Salvador- and drawing from over 150 interviews with grassroots activists, political leaders, heads of NGOs, and directors of donor agencies, Manal A. Jamal investigates how democracy assistance shaped the re-constitution of political and civic life. She examines these developments at a more macro, general level in terms of democratic outcomes and then at the level of civil society by tracing transformations in one social movement sector--the women’s sector--in each case. She argues that ultimately the pervading political settlements determined the different outcomes, and that democracy assistance mediated these processes. The book then expands the temporal and geographic aperture of the study by examining developments in the Palestinian territories following Ḥamas’ 2006 election victory, and then by investigating the impact of political settlements and the mediating role of democracy assistance in Iraq and South Africa during the start of their political transitions. Jamal challenges more simple accounts that rely on NGO professionalization to explain civil society outcomes and illustrates how pervading political settlements that govern political relations in these contexts ultimately determined the different outcomes. By providing a systematic analysis of how democracy assistance impacts civil society and broader democratic outcomes, she provides new ways of understanding the relationship between foreign aid and domestic political contexts and resolves key debates about the limits of democracy promotion in non-inclusive political contexts.

It is a common observation that dominant US secular culture retains the stamp of seventeenth-century Protestantism. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the veneration of monogamous coupledom, an ideal that has been entrenched rather than challenged by the recent extension of marriage rights to LGBTQ couples. But what if this narrative of “history and tradition” turns out to suppress the queerness of its own foundational texts? Queer Faith reassesses key texts of the prehistory of monogamy—from Paul to Luther, Petrarch to Shakespeare—to show that writing assumed to promote fidelity in fact articulates the affordances of promiscuity, both in its sexual sense and in its larger designation of all that is impure and disorderly. At the same time, this book resists casting promiscuity as the ethical, queer alternative to monogamy, tracing instead how ideals of sexual liberation are themselves attached to nascent racial and economic hierarchies. Because discourses of erotic fidelity and freedom are also discourses on racial and sexual positionality, excavating the long and complex historical entanglement of concepts of faith, race, and secular love is urgent to contemporary debates about normativity, agency, and subjectivity. Queer Faith puts Christian theology and Renaissance lyric poetry in dialogue with contemporary theory and politics. Deliberately unfaithful to disciplinary norms and national boundaries, this book assembles new conceptual frameworks at the juncture of secular and religious thought, political and aesthetic form. It thereby enlarges the contexts, objects, and authorized genealogies of queer theory and scholarship.

Racial Immanence is about how and why artists use the body in contemporary Chicanx cultural production. The book explores disease, disability, abjection, and sense experience in Chicanx visual, verbal, and performing arts from the late 1980s to the early 1990s in order to ask whether it is possible to think of race as something other than a human quality. This attention to the body is a way to push back against two distinct modes of identity politics: first, the desire for art to perform or embody an idealized abstraction of oppositional ethnicity; and second, the neoliberal commodification of identity in the service of better managing difference and dissent. While these two modes seem mutually exclusive, the resistance the artists in Racial Immanence exert toward both suggests a core similarity. By contrast, the cultural objects examined in the book assert human bodies as processes, as agents of change in the world rather than as objects to be known and managed. Within Chicanx cultural production the author locates an articulation of bodily philosophies that challenge the subject/object dualism leading to a global politics of dominance and submission. Instead, she argues, Chicanx cultural production fosters networks of connection that deepen human attachment to the material world, a phenomenon the author terms “racial immanence” that creates the possibility of progressive social change.

This book argues that unique rural cultural dynamics shape women’s experiences of incarceration and release from prison in the remote, predominantly white communities that many Americans still think of as “the Western frontier.” Together, these dynamics comprise an architecture of gendered violence, a theoretical lens applicable to women’s experiences of prison throughout the United States in its focus on how the synchronous operations of addiction and compromised mental health, poverty, fraught relationships, and felony-related discrimination undergird women’s lives. The architecture of gendered violence that comprises the primary pathway to incarceration among the Wyoming women in this study reflects the way the suite of concerns facing currently and formerly incarcerated women throughout the United States manifests in a remote rural context far from the coastal metropolises that dominate the production of criminal justice discourse and scholarship.

In Political Legitimacy, a distinguished interdisciplinary group of scholars in political science, law, and philosophy examine one of the most challenging and important concepts in contemporary politics: legitimacy. The twelve essays in this volume, the latest installment in the NOMOS series, take up fundamental philosophical questions about the appropriate scope and domain of legitimacy and the justified exercise of political power, as well as empirical questions about the structure of citizens’ beliefs about compliance and justice. The essays also speak to urgent concerns for contemporary politics, including whether “animus” should matter for the legitimacy of political decisions and the range of institutions (international institutions, labor unions, and so forth) for which legitimacy is relevant. The volume is in three parts. The first third addresses basic questions of the legitimacy of the state and its regime, drawing on competing traditions in the history of political thought (Kant, Hobbes, and Aristotle). The second takes up the reasons according to which institutional authority may be exercised. The final part turns to the empirical study of legitimacy and compliance, and to the relationship between what the authors describe as moral or normative accounts of legitimacy and sociological or descriptive legitimacy.

This book is a nontechnical, accessible, scholarly volume about criminal trajectories within a developmental context. The book provides a comprehensive overview of criminal trajectories as a concept and methodology. It addresses the complexities, controversies, findings, and applications from the rich criminal trajectory literature. It synthesizes material from the current literature in a range of fields, including developmental psychology, developmental and life-course criminology, quantitative methods, and crime prevention, to illustrate the theoretical, empirical, and practical utility of considering the heterogeneity underlying offender populations (i.e., of criminal trajectories) in the conceptualization, response to, and prevention of crime. Each chapter ends with suggested supplemental readings.