Author Events
Wednesday, 25 August 2010, 6:00 – 7:30 PM
University Press Books and the University of Minnesota Press invite you to join
Teresa Gowan
Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders: Homeless in San Francisco
When American homelessness reemerged during the 1980s, it initially provoked a sense of national crisis. An initial rush for emergency provision gradually gave way to a fierce debate, pitching advocates who emphasised structural causes against ultimately more powerful voices insisting on either the deep pathology or the criminality of the homeless. With the development of vast patchwork of pathologizing shelters and thousands of “quality-of-life” police campaigns, these debates have come to profoundly shape how homeless people live, and how they understand their lives. Even in San Francisco, the most liberal city in America, sympathy and tolerance gradually gave way to the authoritarian medicalisation already dominant in the rest of the country.
In Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders, Teresa Gowan draws on five years of fieldwork to show some of the diverse ways that men on the street in San Francisco struggled for survival, autonomy and self-respect. Spending weeks at a time among homeless men; working side-by-side with them as they collected cans, bottles, and scrap metal; helping them set up camp; watching and listening as they panhandled and hawked newspapers; and accompanying them into soup kitchens, jails, welfare offices, and shelters, Gowan immersed herself in their routines, personal stories, and their perspectives on life on the streets. Leading us from the homeless drug dealers and thieves of the Tenderloin to the more solidaristic concentration of “new hobos” in remote and relatively peaceful Dogpatch, Gowan’s vivid and intimate ethnography shows the men’s ambivalent relationship with the local “homelessness industry,” and their restless efforts to mitigate the dependence, degradation and anomie of life on the street, to find more bearable ways of being homeless.
Teresa Gowan is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota.
Wednesday, 8 September 2010, 5:30 – 7:00 PM
University Press Books and Cambridge University Press invite you to join
Susan Holloway
Women and Family in Contemporary Japan
Japanese women have often been singled out for their strong commitment to the role of housewife and mother. But they are now postponing marriage and bearing fewer children, and Japan has become one of the least fertile and fastest aging countries in the world. Why are so many Japanese women opting out of family life? To answer this question, the author draws on in-depth interviews and extensive survey data to examine Japanese mothers’ perspectives and experiences of marriage, parenting, and family life. The goal is to understand how, as introspective, self-aware individuals, these women interpret and respond to the barriers and opportunities afforded within the structural and ideological contexts of contemporary Japan. The findings suggest a need for changes in the structure of the workplace and the education system to provide women with the opportunity to find a fulfilling balance of work and family life.
Susan Holloway is professor in the Graduate School of Education at UC Berkeley. She is the author of Contested Childhood: Diversity and Change in Japanese Preschools, and co-author of Through My Own Eyes: Single Mothers and the Cultures of Poverty.
Thursday, 9 September 2010, 5:30 – 7:00 PM
University Press Books and the University of Chicago Press invite you to join
Karin Sanders
Bodies in the Bog and the Archaeological Imagination
in conversation with Mark Sandberg
Known for his red hair, day-old stubble, and uncannily preserved two-thousand-year-old physique, Tollund Man—a mummified body discovered in 1950s Denmark—was an instant archaeological sensation. But he was not the first of his kind: recent history has resurrected from northern Europe’s bogs several men, women, and children who were deposited there as sacrifices in the early Iron Age and kept startlingly intact by the chemical properties of peat. In this remarkable account of their modern afterlives, Karin Sanders argues that the discovery of bog bodies began an extraordinary—and ongoing—cultural journey.
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Sanders shows, these eerily preserved remains came alive in art and science as material metaphors for such concepts as trauma, nostalgia, and identity. Sigmund Freud, Joseph Beuys, Serge Vandercam, Seamus Heaney, and other major figures have used them to reconsider fundamental philosophical, literary, aesthetic, and scientific concerns. Exploring this intellectual spectrum, Sanders contends that the power of bog bodies to provoke such a wide range of responses is rooted in their unique status as both archeological artifacts and human beings. They emerge as corporeal time capsules that transcend archaeology to challenge our assumptions about what we can know about the past. By restoring them to the roster of cultural phenomena that force us to confront our ethical and aesthetic boundaries, Bodies in the Bog excavates anew the question of what it means to be human.
Karin Sanders is professor of Scandinavian at the University of California, Berkeley.
Mark Sandberg is professor of Scandinavian and Film Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Living Pictures, Missing Persons: Mannequins, Museums and Modernity.
Tuesday, 14 September 2010, 6:00 – 7:30 PM
University Press Books and Cambridge University Press invite you to join
Colleen Cotter
News Talk: Investigating the Language of Journalism
in conversation with Louis Freedberg
Written by a former news reporter and editor, News Talk gives us an insider’s view of the media, showing how journalists select and construct their news stories. Colleen Cotter goes behind the scenes, revealing how language is configured by news staff into the stories we read and hear. Tracing news stories from start to finish, she shows how the reporting traditions of journalists and editors – and the constraints of news writing protocols – shape (and may distort) stories prepared with the most determined effort to be fair and accurate. Using insights from linguistics and journalism on both sides of the Atlantic, News Talk is a remarkable picture of journalistic working practices. It will interest those involved in linguistics, journalism, media and communication, and anyone who wants to understand how the news media shape our language and our view of the world.
Colleen Cotter, a Berkeley linguistics Ph.D., is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at Queen Mary, University of London. She was a reporter, editor and journalism educator in Northern California.
Louis Freedberg, a Berkeley anthropology Ph.D., is an adviser and senior reporter at California Watch, a non-profit journalism organization which he co-founded. He worked in Washington and the Bay Area for the San Francisco Chronicle.
Wednesday, 15 September 2010, 5:30 – 7:00 PM
University Press Books and Blackwell Publishing invite you to join
Laura Nader
The Energy Reader
The Energy Reader examines the quandary of meeting future energy needs, bringing a critical and practical approach to this complex global challenge and its potentially dire implications. It evaluates the social and cultural components of the energy problem in addition to the technological issues, and differentiates long-term perspectives from short term fixes, presenting readers with a truly holistic approach to energy.
In this insightful book a wide range of experts address the overall energy problem, the politics of energy, the protection of future generations, the avoidance of dangerous waste products, efficiency, resilience, and democratic relevance. These cross-disciplinary critical perspectives are presented by respected social scientists, physicists, economists, business experts, engineers, journalists, historians, and entrepreneurs. They illuminate the key historical trends in energy development and demonstrate new and sometimes controversial solutions—they tell us what can and will work with respect to current and future energy policies. The Energy Reader offers thought-provoking insights into the global energy strategies necessary for humanity’s future.
Laura Nader is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences. Nader’s books include Naked Science: Anthropological Inquiry into Boundaries, Power and Knowledge (1996), The Life of the Law (2002), and, with Ugo Mattei, Plunder–When the Rule of Law is Illegal (Blackwell, 2008). Her films To Make the Balance and a later PBS film Little Injustices are widely disseminated.
Tuesday, 21 September 2010, 5:30 – 7:00 PM
Carlos Manuel Salomon
Pio Pico: The Last Governor of Mexican California
Two-time governor of Alta California and prominent businessman after the U.S. annexation, Pío de Jesus Pico was a politically savvy Californio who thrived in both the Mexican and the American periods. This is the first biography of Pico, whose life vibrantly illustrates the opportunities and risks faced by Mexican Americans in those transitional years.
Carlos Manuel Salomon breathes life into the story of Pico, who—despite his mestizo-black heritage—became one of the wealthiest men in California thanks to real estate holdings and who was the last major Californio political figure with economic clout. Salomon traces Pico’s complicated political rise during the Mexican era, leading a revolt against the governor in 1831 that swept him into that office. During his second governorship in 1845 Pico fought in vain to save California from the invading forces of the United States.
Pico faced complex legal and financial problems under the American regime. Salomon argues that it was Pico’s legal struggles with political rivals and land-hungry swindlers that ultimately resulted in the loss of Pico’s entire fortune. Yet as the most litigious Californio of his time, he consistently demonstrated his refusal to become a victim.
Pico is an important transitional figure whose name still resonates in many Southern California locales. His story offers a new view of California history that anticipates a new perspective on the multicultural fabric of the state.
Carlos Manuel Salomon is Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies and Director of the Latin American Studies Program at California State University, East Bay.