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High-profile killings by police in Ferguson, Cleveland, Baltimore, New York City, Louisville, Minneapolis, and elsewhere have sparked protests and exposed deep discontent over police practices, especially in communities of color. Investigations of US police departments came to a number of troubling findings—patterns of excessive force, enforcement activities aimed at generating revenue from low-income residents, and persistent racial disparities. These findings cast doubt on the legitimacy of policing in its current form and raise pressing questions about its proper role in a democratic society. The Ethics of Policing offers a wide-ranging analysis of the current ethical challenges facing police and the institutions that oversee them. In particular, its chapters address competing understandings of the role of police, concerns about police use of force, racial bias in police practices, the legacy of policing’s past, and how new technology is transforming policing. Given the complexity of these challenges, making progress on them requires insights from various perspectives. With that goal in mind, this volume takes an interdisciplinary approach that features leading experts in Black studies, criminology, history, law, philosophy, political science, and sociology.

Bringing together prominent early contributions from this emergent perspective, the volume traces the origins, theory, and method of ghost criminology. From the powers of exorcism and erasure marshalled by state agents, street-level struggles over memorialization and memory, to the lingering violence of crime scenes and the ghostly traces of outlaw artists, Ghost Criminology is a volume attuned to that which is well-theorized in other disciplines—the spectral, hauntological, apparitional. Each of the writers assembled here shares, as Mark Fisher (2017) put it, a fascination for the outside, “that which lies beyond standard perception, cognition and experience.”  Assembling an arsenal of cutting-edge social and cultural theory, the volume tangles with some of criminology’s most stubborn revenants—the politics of criminalization, the commodification of crime and violence, the haunting power of the image, as well as the unheard and disregarded cries of the dead.

From the childfree and childless who nurture their dogs and cats similarly to a child to the grandparents who support them to children who view their animals as siblings and empty nesters who think of themselves as caretakers, it is clear that family structure—and who is part of that—has increasingly diversified in the United States since the 1970s. This book explores the ways in which family has changed to include companion animals as bona fide members with distinctly human identities. Using identity theory and the second demographic transition as a foundation, the author uses mixed methods to analyze thirty-five original in-depth interviews and over one hundred hours of fieldwork to show how the modern multispecies family has moved from thinking of companion animals as family entertainment to embracing them as genuine family members with needs and desires to be considered alongside other, human members of the family. The author also shows that the multispecies family has transcended from micro-level perceptions of kinship to macro-level, cultural shifts that acknowledge it as a legitimate family form. Content analysis of print advertisements reveals how the $72 billion pet-product industry has reproduced and reinforced the multispecies family as one with distinct needs, challenges, and relationships. The book underscores the necessity for mainstream family scholarship to take up the multispecies family as a new, nontraditional family type that has evolved in the same historical context as single-parent families, grandparent families, and cohabitation while encouraging identity theory to move beyond anthropocentric paradigms.

Alzheimer’s is ubiquitous. Stories of the heart-wrenching drudgery of care giving, escalating incidence rates, and the new path to a cure just around the corner are everywhere. Yet we rarely see or hear from anyone actually living with AD. The negative portrayals, apocalyptic projections, and promise of cures in the mass media and medical outlets are grossly inaccurate. But they are also an assault on the identities of those with Alzheimer’s. Drawing on an 18-month ethnography observing cognitive evaluations and post-diagnosis interviews with nearly 100 forgetful individuals, this book aims to chip away at this pervasive and persistent destructive trend by revealing what life with memory loss is really like. While diagnosed seniors are ultimately socialized into medicalized interpretations of their forgetfulness, most participants achieve a graceful balance between accepting the medical label and resisting the social stigma that accompanies it. In contrast to what we are led to believe, people with early AD actively and deliberately navigate their lives. Interviews with specialty clinicians and staff from the Alzheimer’s Association reveal that a biomedical ethos generates tensions that constrain the roles older forgetful people can play within these settings. Clinicians and Association staff perpetuate “myths” about “self-loss,” “impending cures,” and the economic and emotional “burden” even if they do not personally believe them. Living with AD ultimately requires managing stigma and presumptions of incompetence in addition to the associated symptoms. Unfortunately, we, the well-meaning public, and not their dementia become the major barrier to a happy life for those affected.

To greater and lesser degrees, we rely on our memories to give us an accurate portrayal of the past. The potential consequences of failing to live up to this ideal are minimal in many circumstances but can become critical in others, such as remembering a crime that one has witnessed. How can we discriminate between memories that are an accurate reflection of a prior experience and those that are not? This book attempts to answer this question by considering basic behavioral and neuroscientific research on perception and memory and its relevance for understanding how errors might occur when remembering complex events such as those experienced by eyewitnesses. The book is organized around six key questions: (1) How do we perceive and remember faces? (2) How do differences in basic executive processes (e.g., working memory) place limits on what we remember? (3) How do we monitor and control our memories (metacognition)? (4) How do we distinguish between false and genuine memories in ourselves and others (personal and interpersonal source monitoring)? (5) How does emotional arousal and stress affect what we remember? and (6) How does the act of remembering change what we can later recall? Each chapter discusses how basic research in a given area, highlighting factors influencing the accuracy of memory and how this understanding relates to applied research on eyewitness testimony. Finally, this book explores the implications of this synthesis for helping real-world eyewitnesses.