Please find below a sampling of some book titles that you may find helpful for your assignment.
American Homelessness by Mary Ellen Hombs; Mildred Vasan (Editor)With 50 percent new material, this third edition breaks this complex topic into key elements, examining the roots of the problem, programs that address it, current research, and public perceptions of homelessness.
• Documents include European legislation on homelessness, the International Bill of Rights, and the Istanbul Declaration on Human Settlements
• Includes a directory of organizations, associations, and government agencies―national, federal, and international
Call Number: HV4505 .H647 2001
ISBN: 1576072479
Publication Date: 2001-07-23
Bunk by Kevin YoungAward-winning poet and critic Kevin Young traces the history of the hoax as a peculiarly American phenomenon--the legacy of P.T. Barnum's 'humbug' culminating with the currency of Donald J. Trump's 'fake news'. Disturbingly, Young finds that fakery is woven from stereotype and suspicion, with race being the most insidious American hoax of all. He chronicles how Barnum came to fame by displaying figures like Joice Heth, a black woman whom he pretended was the 161-year-old nursemaid to George Washington, and 'What Is It?', an African American man Barnum professed was a newly discovered missing link in evolution. Bunk then turns to the hoaxing of history and the ways that forgers, plagiarists, and journalistic fakers invent backstories and falsehoods to sell us lies about themselves and about the world in our own time, from pretend Native Americans like Nasdijj to the deadly imposture of Clark Rockefeller, from the made-up memoirs of James Frey to the identity theft of Rachel Dolezal. This brilliant and timely work asks what it means to live in a post-factual world of 'truthiness' where everything is up for interpretation and everyone is subject to a pervasive cynicism that damages our ideas of reality, fact, and art.
Call Number: BJ1421 .Y68 2017
ISBN: 9781555977917
Publication Date: 2017-11-14
Dreams and Nightmares by Marjorie S. Zatz; Nancy RodriguezDreams and Nightmares takes a critical look at the challenges and dilemmas of immigration policy and practice in the absence of comprehensive immigration reform. The experiences of children and youth provide a prism through which the interwoven dynamics and consequences of immigration policy become apparent. Using a unique sociolegal perspective, authors Zatz and Rodriguez examine the mechanisms by which immigration policies and practices mitigate or exacerbate harm to vulnerable youth. They pay particular attention to prosecutorial discretion, assessing its potential and limitations for resolving issues involving parental detention and deportation, unaccompanied minors, and Dreamers who came to the United States as young children. The book demonstrates how these policies and practices offer a means of prioritizing immigration enforcement in ways that alleviate harm to children, and why they remain controversial and vulnerable to political challenges.
Call Number: Electronic book
ISBN: 9780520958890
Publication Date: 2015-05-01
Lives in Limbo by Roberto G. Gonzales; Jose Antonio Vargas (Foreword by)Over two million of the nation's eleven million undocumented immigrants have lived in the United States since childhood. Due to a broken immigration system, they grow up to uncertain futures. In Lives in Limbo, Roberto G. Gonzales introduces us to two groups: the college-goers, like Ricardo, whose good grades and strong network of community support propelled him into higher education, only to land in a factory job a few years after graduation, and the early-exiters, like Gabriel, who failed to make meaningful connections in high school and started navigating dead-end jobs, immigration checkpoints, and a world narrowly circumscribed by legal limitations. This ethnography asks why highly educated undocumented youth ultimately share similar work and life outcomes with their less-educated peers, even as higher education is touted as the path to integration and success in America. Gonzales bookends his study with discussions of how the prospect of immigration reform, especially the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, could impact the lives of these young Americans.
Total Confinement by Lorna A. RhodesIn this rare firsthand account, Lorna Rhodes takes us into a hidden world that lies at the heart of the maximum security prison. Focusing on the'supermaximums'—and the mental health units that complement them—Rhodes conveys the internal contradictions of a system mandated to both punish and treat. Her often harrowing, sometimes poignant, exploration of maximum security confinement includes vivid testimony from prisoners and prison workers, describes routines and practices inside prison walls, and takes a hard look at the prison industry. More than an exposé, Total Confinement is a theoretically sophisticated meditation on what incarceration tells us about who we are as a society. Rhodes tackles difficult questions about the extreme conditions of confinement, the treatment of the mentally ill in prisons, and an ever-advancing technology of isolation and surveillance. Using her superb interview skills and powers of observation, she documents how prisoners, workers, and administrators all struggle to retain dignity and a sense of self within maximum security institutions. In settings that place in question the very humanity of those who live and work in them, Rhodes discovers complex interactions—from the violent to the tender—among prisoners and staff. Total Confinement offers an indispensable close-up of the implications of our dependence on prisons to solve long-standing problems of crime and injustice in the United States.
Call Number: Electronic book
ISBN: 9780520240766
Publication Date: 2004-02-26
Transforming Citizenships by Isaac WestTransforming Citizenships engages the performativity of citizenship as it relates to transgender individuals and advocacy groups. Instead of reading the law as a set of self-executing discourses, Isaac West takes up transgender rights claims as performative productions of complex legal subjectivities capable of queering accepted understandings of genders, sexualities, and the normative forces of the law. Drawing on an expansive archive, from the correspondence of a transwoman arrested for using a public bathroom in Los Angeles in 1954 to contemporary lobbying efforts of national transgender advocacy organizations, West advances a rethinking of law as capacious rhetorics of citizenship, justice, equality, and freedom. When approached from this perspective, citizenship can be recuperated from its status as the bad object of queer politics to better understand how legal discourses open up sites for identification across identity categories and enable political activities that escape the analytics of heteronormativity and homonationalism.