Books published by Rutgers University Press

The recent recession is one result of how local planning laws and practices have stifled competition, discouraged innovation, and artificially pushed up prices in America's most economically vibrant regions. Claude Gruen unravels the story behind how these unintended consequences have resulted from the evolution of local zoning, growth controls, and laws intended to increase housing affordability.

Assesses the state of women's healthcare today by analysing popular media representations - television, print newspapers, websites, advertisements, blogs, and memoirs - in order to understand the ways in which breast cancer, postpartum depression, and cervical cancer are discussed in American public life.

When non-Orthodox Jews become frum (religious), they encounter much more than dietary laws and Sabbath prohibitions. They find themselves in the midst of a whole new culture, involving matchmakers, homemade gefilte fish, and Yiddish-influenced grammar. This explains how these newcomers learn Orthodox language and culture through their interactions with community veterans and other newcomers.

Explores how a major change in the nature and forms of working-class power affected novels about U.S. industrial workers in the first half of the twentieth century.

Explores the issues that arise from a mother's confinement and provides first-person accounts of the experiences of children with moms behind bars. The author offers a perspective that recognises differences over the long course of a family's interaction with the criminal justice system and presents an unparalleled view into the children's lives both before and after their mothers are imprisoned.

Examines how US health care reform will impact safety net programs that serve low-income and uninsured patients. With contributions from leading health care scholars, it is the first comprehensive assessment of the safety net following enactment of national health care reform.

Beyond Health, Beyond Choice is a multidisciplinary collection of essays written by thirty-seven contributors that examines the role of feminist theory in the promotion of breastfeeding by public health authorities. Essays are arranged thematically and consider breastfeeding in relation to health care; work and family; embodiment (specifically breastfeeding in public); economic and ethnic factors; guilt; violence; and commercialization.

Nadia Bozak's innovative fusion of film studies and environmental studies leads her to make provocative connections between the disappearance of material resources and the emergence of digital media--with examples ranging from early cinema to Dziga Vertov's prescient eye, from Chris Marker's analog experiments to the digital work of Agn s Varda, James Benning, and Zacharias Kunuk.

Covering topics such as: foetal rights, in vitro fertilization, prenatal diagnosis, and surrogacy, this text argues that a social policy for dealing with mothers and motherhood is needed, and that such a policy should be consistent with feminist policy and feminist theory.

Explores two interrelated issues: U.S. citizenship and the Mexican migrants' position in the United States. Through an extensive and multifaceted collection of interviews, ethnographic fieldwork, ethno-historical research, and public policy analysis, Plascencia probes the ways in which citizenship discourses are understood and taken up by individuals.

In this provocative book, Jennifer Glaser examines how racial ventriloquism became a hallmark of Jewish-American fiction, as Jewish writers asserted that their own ethnicity enabled them to speak for other minorities. She offers a nuanced analysis of the technique, judiciously assessing both its limitations and its potential benefits.

Fifteen years after the end of a protracted civil war, Beirut broke out in violence once again, forcing residents to contend with many forms of insecurity, amid an often violent landscape. Providing a picture of what ordinary life is like for urban dwellers surviving sectarian violence, this volume captures the day-to-day experiences of citizens of Beirut moving through a war-torn landscape.

The first ethnographic study of gestational surrogacy in the US, Labor of Love examines the conflicted attitudes that emerge when the ostensibly priceless act of bringing a child into the world becomes a paid occupation. Heather Jacobson interviews surrogate mothers, their family members, the intended parents, and the various professionals who work to facilitate the process.

Integrates legal, regulatory, industrial, and political histories to chronicle the dramatic transformation within the media between 1980 and 1996. This expands the conventional models and boundaries of media history. A fundamental part of its argument is that media industries have been intertwined for decades and, as such, cannot be considered separately.

Patients as Policy Actors offers groundbreaking accounts of one of the health field's most important developments of the last fifty years--the rise of more consciously patient-centered care and policymaking. The authors in this volume illustrate, from multiple disciplinary perspectives, the unexpected ways that patients can matter as both agents and objects of health care policy yet nonetheless too often remain silent, silenced, misrepresented, or ignored.

In Popular Trauma Culture, Anne Rothe argues that American Holocaust discourse has a particular plot structureaEURO"characterized by a melodramatic conflict between good and evil and embodied in the core characters of victim/survivor and perpetratoraEURO"and that it provides the paradigm for representing personal experiences of pain and suffering in the mass media.

At the Heart of Work and Family presents original research on work and family by scholars who engage and build on the conceptual framework developed by well-known sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild. The common thread in these essays covering the gender division of housework, childcare networks, families in the global economy, and children of consumers is the incorporation of emotion, feelings, and meaning into the study of working families. These examinations connect micro-level interaction to larger social and economic forces and illustrate the continued relevance of linking economic relations to emotional ones for understanding contemporary work-family life.

Provides a rigorous analysis of the legacies of war in a community racked by political violence. It explores political processes in one of El Salvador's former war zones - a region known for its peasant revolutionary participation - to offer a searing portrait of the entangled aftermaths of confrontation and displacement, aftermaths that have produced continued deception and marginalization.

Provides a rigorous analysis of the legacies of war in a community racked by political violence. It explores political processes in one of El Salvador's former war zones aEURO" a region known for its peasant revolutionary participation aEURO" to offer a searing portrait of the entangled aftermaths of confrontation and displacement, aftermaths that have produced continued deception and marginalization.