SANCHA DOXILLY MEDWINTER

With Ecologies of Inequity, Sancha Doxilly Medwinter tells the story of how the racially and ethnically diverse, immigrant, and urban poor disaster survivors lose ground to their White, middleclass-to-affluent and Black middle-class homeowner neighbors during official disaster response. Medwinter presents analyses from 120 conversational and expert interviews with disaster responders and survivors in New York City, beginning as early as twelve days after the November 2012 landfall of Superstorm Sandy. The settings are Carnarsie, Brooklyn, and the Rockaway peninsula, which experienced six to eight feet of flooding.

The color- and class-blind assumptions of disaster responders and the labyrinthine process of obtaining a FEMA grant combine to exclude and increase the psychological burden of urban poor disaster survivors. Similarly, the locational decisions and volunteer service perimeters uncritically replicate the segregation logics of urban spaces. Part of this story explains how the chronically poor repeatedly get displaced by the machinery of official disaster response. One reason is the introduction of a race- and class-blind disaster “logic of response” that caters to the needs of the newly created class of “disaster victims,” while displacing the “logic of service,” which typically attempts to address the needs of the chronically poor.

Sancha Doxilly Medwinter is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

August 2023

198 pages

History / United States/ State & Local / Middle Atlantic / Social Science / Disasters & Disaster Relief / Social Classes / Ethnic Studies / African American Studies

Rights: World

October 2023

256 pages

Social Science / Human Geography / Agriculture & Food / History / Latin America / Central America / Political Science / World / Caribbean & Latin American

Rights: World x Spanish

The Coup and the Palm Trees Agrarian Conflict and Political Power in Honduras ANDRÉS LEÓN ARAYA

The Coup under the Palm Trees interrogates the Honduran present, through an exploration of the country’s spatiotemporal trajectory of agrarian change since the mid-twentieth century. It tells the double history of how the Aguán region went from a set of “empty” lands to the centerpiece of the country’s agrarian reform in the 1980s and a central site for the palm oil industry and drug trade, while militarized process of state formation between the military coups of 1963 and 2009 took place. Rather than a case of failed democratic transition, the book shows how the current Honduran crisis—exemplified by massive outmigration towards the United States, blatant narco-state links and the 2009 coup—is better understood within longer historical processes in which violence, exclusion, and dispossession became the central organizational principles of the state.

We the Young Fighters

Pop Culture, Terror, and War in Sierra Leone

MARC SOMMERS

October 2023

488 pages

Social Science / Popular Culture / Ethnic Studies / African Studies / Children's Studies / History / Military / Wars & Conflicts (Other) / Africa / General / Music / General

Rights: World

We the Young Fighters is at once a history of a nation, a story of a war, and the saga of downtrodden young people and three pop culture superstars. The extraordinary narrative begins centuries ago, with the capture mainly of men by European slavers and the emergence of slave wives across the land that would become Sierra Leone. Soon after it became a colony, British overlords discovered diamonds and empowered Paramount Chiefs to help dig them up. Once in power, President Siaka Stevens took this setup and ran with it, creating a personal diamond empire, keeping the government feeble, managing a brutal state security force, and allowing exclusion and inequality to skyrocket. Accessibly written and thoroughly researched, We the Young Fighters describes how Tupac, Rambo, and, especially, Marley wove their way into the conflict fabric of Sierra Leone, from the pre-war landscape dominated by chiefs, politicians, and emasculated youth; across a war featuring terror, drugs, diamonds, young soldiers, and citizen resilience; and into a post-war era spotlighting the quiet endurance of young people. The book ends by extracting lessons from Sierra Leone that promise to improve current approaches to governance, youth alienation, and terror groups globally.

Marc Sommers is an internationally recognized youth expert with research experience in over twenty war-affected countries. He has provided analysis and technical advice to policy institutes, donor and United Nations agencies, and NGOs. He also is the author of seven previous books, including Stuck: Rwandan Youth and the Struggle for Adulthood (Georgia), which received an Honorable Mention for the African Studies Association’s Bethwell A. Ogot Book Prize, Islands of Education: Schooling, Civil War, and the Southern Sudanese (1983–2004), and Fear in Bongoland: Burundi Refugees in Urban Tanzania, which received the Margaret Mead Award.