Books by Faculty
Recent Books
Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Since 1980, the number of people in U.S. prisons has increased more than 450%. Despite a crime rate that has been falling steadily for decades, California has led the way in this explosion, with what a state analyst called "the biggest prison building project in the history of the world." Golden Gulag provides the first detailed explanation for that buildup by looking at how political and economic forces from the global to the local conjoined to produce the prison boom.
In an informed and impassioned account, Ruth Wilson Gilmore examines this issue through statewide, rural, and urban perspectives to explain how the expansion developed from surpluses of finance capital, labor, land, and state capacity. Detailed crises that hit California's economy with particular ferocity, she argues that defeats of radical struggles, weakening of labor, and shifting patterns of capital investment have been key conditions for prison growth. The results--a vast and expensive prison system, a huge number of incarcerated young people of color, and the increase in punitive justice such as the "three strikes" law--pose profound and troubling questions for the future of California, the United States, and the world. Golden Gulag provides a rich context for this complex dilemma, and at the same time challenges many cherished assumptions about who benefits and who suffers from the state's commitment to prison expansion.
Ecological Consequences of Artificial Night Lighting
Island Press
Catherine Rich and Travis Longcore
One of the less obvious effects of population growth is that a vastly increased proportion of the Earth is now illuminated at night, with increasingly powerful lights. This book provides the first reference on the profound effects that these lights have on plants, animals, and whole ecosystems. The best-known research on this topic has focused on birds and sea turtles, but artificial lighting also affects other species in ways that are less well-known: foraging behavior of amphibians is altered, lights affect the dispersal patterns of young cougars, and fireflies may be inhibited from finding mates. Because of the tremendous prevalence of night lights, and because of the intricate (and often poorly understood) interactions of different life forms, these impacts are far-reaching, affecting not only survival of various species, but also influencing adaptations and evolution.
These are important issues for people who are researching and working to protect biodiversity. To date, research on the impacts of artificial light has been isolated within taxonomic specialties, with no synthesis of overall effects of the loss of natural darkness on ecological communities. This volume helps to remedy the information need.
University of California Press
Laura Pulido
Laura Pulido traces the roots of third world radicalism in Southern California during the 1960s and 1970s in this accessible, wonderfully illustrated comparative study. Focusing on the Black Panther Party, El Centro de Acción Social y Autónomo (CASA), and East Wind, a Japanese American collective, she explores how these African American, Chicana/o, and Japanese American groups sought to realize their ideas about race and class, gender relations, and multiracial alliances. Based on thorough research as well as extensive interviews, Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left explores the differences and similarities between these organizations, the strengths and weaknesses of the third world left as a whole, and the ways that differential racialization led to distinct forms of radical politics.
Seductions of Place: Geographical Perspectives on Globalization and Touristed Landscapes
Routledge
Carolyn Cartier and Alan A. Lew (Eds)
Seductions of Place assesses travel and tourism as simultaneously cultural and economic processes, through ideas about place, seduction and the formation of landscapes. This approach emerges from the new significance of tourism as the largest industry in the world economy and from increased international mobility. The book's broad approach will garner interest from social scientists and humanists alike, who are interested in contemporary debates about place studies, mobility, and the located realities of globalization.
Up Against the Sprawl: Public Policy and the Making of Southern California
University of Minnesota Press
Jennifer Wolch, Manuel Pastor Jr., and Peter Dreier (Eds)
Up Against the Sprawl:Public Policy and the Making of Southern California , co-edited by Jennifer Wolch (Geography) and her colleagues Manuel Pastor Jr. (UC Santa Cruz), and Peter Dreier (Occidental College) has been published by the University of Minnesota Press. The volume, which opens with a foreword by Michael Dear (Geography), focuses on managing urban growth and change in Los Angeles. The sprawling evolution of the city and its infamous problems -- traffic, pollution, growing inequality -- are usually attributed to a Wild West version of capitalism, a triumph of the unregulated free market over comprehensive urban planning. However, Los Angeles has been shaped by a wide range of public policies and programs. Up against the Sprawl shows how governmental policies and public agencies have influenced the region ’s growth in terms of infrastructure, transportation, housing, immigration, fiscal policy, and the environment.
The book also considers how innovative policies for greater social, economic, and environmental justice could contribute to an alternative future for the city. Contributors include Center for Sustainable Cities Fellows Carol Armstrong and Elizabeth Gearin, and USC faculty Gen Giuliano, Juliet Musso, William Fulton, John Wilson and Laura Pulido. Other contributors include Carolyn Aldana, Gary Dymski, Steven Erie, Gregory Freeman, Pascale Joassart-Marcelli, Enrico A.Marcelli, Myra A. Marks, Stephanie Pincetl, and Christine M. Ryan.
To order a copy, contact: University of Minnesota Press
Chinese Diaspora
Rowman & Littlefield
Laurence J.C. Ma and Carolyn Cartier (Eds)
In the first book to explore the Chinese diaspora from geographical perspectives, leading scholars in the field consider the profound importance of meanings of place and the spatial processes of mobility and settlement for the Chinese overseas. They trace the Chinese diaspora everywhere it has become a significant force, from Southeast Asia to Oceania, North America, Latin America, and Europe. Providing an important historical perspective, the contributors analyze the sharp differences between sojourning Chinese prior to the 1960s and the transnational Chinese of the current era, especially in terms of spatial distribution, mobility, economic status, occupational structure, and identity formation.
Postborder City
Routledge
Michael Dear and Gustavo Leclerc (Eds)
The vast metropolis stretching from Los Angeles in the north to Tijuana and Mexicali in the south heralds a new form - the post border city. Comprised of both Baja California (Mexico) and Alta California (Southern California), "Bajalta California" is not a milieu of constantly shifting and intersecting geographies, economies, and cultures. While cross-border exchange has existed for well over a century, in recent years the accelarating currents of cultural and economic globalization have hastened the emergence of this transnational megalopolis. Postborder City is an interdisciplinary investigation of the hybrid culture on both sides of the increasingly fluid U.S.-Mexico border, spanning the disciplines of art, film studies, art history, urban planning, geography, and Latina/o and American studies.
The Postmodern Urban Condition
Blackwell
Michael Dear
This book will change the way we understand cities. It provides readers with not only an introduction to cities and urbanism in the postmodern world but also overturns many common assumptions about urban structure. Dear's analysis combines concepts of postmodernism, space and the urban to trace the genesis of a postmodern urban condition. He provides an understanding of the intellectual, moral, and political consequences of postmodernism and an evaluation of the role of space, and place in contemporary social theory and philosophy.
Globalizing South China
Blackwell
Carolyn Cartier
Globalizing South China provides readers with an invaluable evalution of "greater China," the Chinese diaspora, regional identity formation, the gendered conditions of the regional economy, nature-society relations, the world city formation. The book concludes by anticipating the futures of Hong Kong and Shanghai and relations between China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore in the wider Asian region.
From Chicago to L.A.
Sage
Michael J. Dear
From Chicago to L.A. critically examines some of the major precepts of the "Los Angeles School." Designed specifically for both students and professionals, this text critically examines the foundations and potential of a putative Los Angeles school. Clearly written, this volume begins the task of defining an alternative agenda for urban studies and examines the case of shifting the focus of urban studies from Chicago to Los Angeles.
Terrain Analysis: Principles and Applications
Wiley
John Wilson and John C. Gallant (Eds)
Leading experts detail how GIS and related technologies, such as GPS and remote sensing, are now being used, with the aid of computer modeling, in terrain analysis.
California Landscapes: Los Angeles, Big Sur, San Francisco, and Death Valley
Rutgers University Press
Martin S. Kenzer, Douglas J. Sherman, Robert A. Rundstrom, and Bernard O. Bauer
The authors comment on everything that's likely to catch your attention, from the lay of the land to the taste of the food, from la Brea Tar Pits to Mono Lake, from banana orchards to the giant redwoods, from surfing beaches to snow-covered mountains, from old Spanish missions to the newest immigrants' restaurants.
Malign Neglect: Homelessness in an American City
Jossey-Bass
Jennifer Wolch and Michael Dear
Tells the truth about homelessness in America - how we have chosen to ignore it, how our elected officials prefer to to think about it, how homelessness had become so widespread, and why many of us could become its next victim. It also spells out what professionals and citizens alike can do to make a difference.
Animal Geographies: Place, Politics, and Identity in the Nature-Culture Borderlands
Verso
Jennifer Wolch and Jody Emel
Explores the diverse ways in which animals shape the formation of human identity. From questions of identity and subjectivity, it moves to a consideration of the places where people and animals confront the realities of coexistence on an everyday basis. Animal Geographies compels a profound rethinking of the nature of human-animal relations and offers a series of proposals for reconstituting this relationship on an ecologically and ethically progressive basis.
Transforming California: A Political History of Land Use and Development
University of California Press
Stephanie Pincetl
Argues that the transformation of nature in order to enhance economic development lies at the heart of much of the state's recent history...describes the evolution of the state's institutions of government as they apply to land use and development, and it shows how land use decisions affect people's quality of life and their daily interactions with each other and with their environment.
Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest
University of Arizona Press
Laura Pulido
Spotlights another front in the ongoing wars over environmental issues, a front being fought by Chicano communities in the American Southwest. The book concentrates on struggles surrounding the 1965-1971 pesticide campaign of the United Farm Workers and a grazing conflict involving Hispanic cooperatives and mainstream environmentalists in northern Mexico.
EthniCity: Geographic Perspectives on Ethnic Change in Modern Cities
Rowman & Littlefield
Curtis C. Roseman, Hans Dieter Laux, and Gunter Thieme
Focuses on geographical processes and concomitant socioeconomic and political issues associates with ethnic diversity in a variety of urban areas in eleven countries.
Urban Latino Cultures: La Vida Latina en L.A.
Sage Publications
Gustavo Leclerc, Raul Villa, and Michael Dear
A multidimensional study of place and identity in Los Angeles...records the voices and visions of poets, cartoonists, photographers, architects, geographers, designers, playwrights, musicians, and filmmakers as they testify to the vida latina in Los Angeles.