THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Monograph Enhancement Publications
The Political Lives Of Saints: Christian-Muslim Mediation In Egypt
Angie Heo, Assistant Professor of the Anthropology and Sociology of Religion, Divinity School
The Political Lives of Saints: Christian-Muslim Mediation in Egypt" is a nuanced ethnographic study by Angie Heo, drawing on over a decade of extensive fieldwork from 2005 onward. Heo's unique perspective captures pivotal moments, including the final years of the Mubarak regime, the Tahrir protests in 2011, and subsequent political shifts with the election of an Islamist government and a military coup.
The book focuses on the central role of saints and martyrdom in Egypt's Christian minority, exploring their impact on sensory mediations and political contestations. Heo delves into the significance of saints' images, visuals, and imaginings, illustrating resonance not only within the Coptic Orthodox Christian community but also among Muslims. Challenging the notion of the impending extinction of Coptic Orthodoxy in the Arab Muslim world, Heo asserts its fundamental role in minoritarian regulation and authoritarian rule.
Examining the transfer of holy presence from saints to images, pilgrims, and believers, Heo explores the intersections of holiness and politics. She refutes sensationalized narratives of persecution and Islamophobia, providing a comprehensive exploration of Egypt's Copts as symbols of collateral damage amidst sectarian strife. "The Political Lives of Saints" offers a profound understanding of the complexities surrounding Egypt's Coptic Christians, unraveling the impact of revered figures on social relations, revolutionary sacrifice, and the presentation of sectarian challenges to national security.
The Political Lives of Saints: Christian-Muslim Mediation in Egypt was published by the University of California Press in November 2018.
The Global British Empire Ca. 1650 - 1784
Steven Pincus, Thomas E. Donnelly Professor of British History and the College
At its greatest extent the British Empire was the largest empire in history, comprised of North America, Australia, most of South Asia, and much of Africa. The imprint of the Empire is still felt, long after decolonization. English is the international lingua franca, British parliamentary institutions are deeply imbedded in the governments of former colonies, and English common law principles infuse numerous law codes worldwide. This book, based on research in a wide range of European, North American, and West Indian archives, insists that the British imperial state was just as institutional strong if structurally distinct, from its rivals. Throughout the empire Britons debated and fought over the kind of imperial state they wanted. Some wanted to focus on a political economy that privileged colonial production over one that emphasized colonial consumption; some wanted an empire that favored England, while others thought the empire should be organized as a confederation; some thought chattel slavery was essential to the prosperity of the empire while others decried cattle slavery as economically and morally deleterious; some thought the empire should protect and promote the development of indigenous peoples, while others thought indigenous peoples were a barrier to imperial development.
In The Global British Empire, Steven Pincus insists that accounts of the colonies that focus on the binary relationship between a particular colony or set of colonies and Britain will necessarily misunderstand that relationship. The British Empire can only be understood as a global phenomenon. It is essential to think the empire whole. Manuscript in Progress.
Sensory futures: Deafness and Cochlear Implants infrastructures in India
Michele Friedner, Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Comparative Human Development
Amid a surge in biotechnical interventions and disability rights activism, deaf people desire to create habitable worlds and grapple with their futures, navigating the structural, political, and social possibilities biotechnological and social “cures” offer. Cochlear implants, provided by both states and growing private markets around the globe, are tracked from development to domestication, with a case study of unequal distribution in India. Professor Friedner explores inequalities and sensory hierarchies embedded in the latest medical technologies and global biotechnical markets. Rejecting sensory hierarchies that privilege audition, she advocates for multisensory, multimodal, and multipersonal approaches to relating to the world.
Sensory Futures: Deafness and Cochlear Implants Infrastructures in India was published in English by University of Minnesota Press in June 2022
Synthetic Markets
Karin Knorr Cetina, Otto Borchert Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology and Anthropology
Few concepts today are as widely used as that of a market, few accorded more importance, and few slip away more easily when looked at closely. Financial markets in particular have a stunning presence in our world. They are dramatized in public discourse in which their ups and downs are endlessly reported and storied. And they dramatize our lives, having become the measure of well-being in countries in which individuals depend on them for pensions and income, and governments and corporations for growth and investments. Much as producer markets epitomized a rising industrial era, driving Adam Smith to high flying and Karl Marx to damming treatises, so financial markets today epitomize a postindustrial age—popular beliefs and academic theories alike appear captivated by their machinations. And yet when we search for a market concept that captures markets from the inside, we will not readily find it in the social sciences.
Economists tend to see in the market a mechanism for the allocation of goods and services, for supply and demand adjustment, for price discovery. They have expanded their model assumptions in many important directions. They may ask, on a micro-analytic level, how specific trading mechanisms affect price formation, or on a semi-micro-analytic level which types of problems are better solved by market contracting and which by intra-firm production. They often ask how economizing is best accomplished—they ask functional questions, for example how transaction costs can be minimized. The bulk of the finance literature consists of painfully fine-grained studies designed with an eye to the management of financial variables. What these studies generally abstract away from is the behavioral system of a market.
A Field Guide To White Supremacy
Kathleen Belew, Associate Professor, Department of History, Northwestern.
"A Field Guide to White Supremacy" transcends temporal boundaries and specific incidents, providing a comprehensive examination aimed at fostering a deeper understanding and active opposition to white supremacy in America.
Previous academic research on violent acts of white supremacy in the USA has frequently remained confined to disparate subfields, failing to bridge the gap between current events and historical contexts such as legal histories, nativist insurgencies, or centuries of misogynistic, anti-Black, anti-Latino, anti-Asian, and xenophobic violence. However, recent hateful actions are not only connected to the past through common perpetrators but also by the extensive network of systems, histories, ideologies, and personal beliefs collectively constituting white supremacy in the United States.
Exploring topics such as immigration, antisemitism, gendered violence, lynching, and organized domestic terrorism, the book reveals shared elements in white supremacist actions across various scales, from individual incidents to broader policy and legal frameworks.
In collaboration with a group of dedicated researchers and writers, "A Field Guide to White Supremacy" establishes crucial connections between present and past violence. It is an urgent resource for journalists, activists, policymakers, and citizens, unveiling common threads in white supremacist actions, ranging from hate crimes and mass attacks to policy and law.
A Field Guide to White Supremacy was published by the University of California Press in November 2021. This book was the #1 new release in Emigration and Immigration Law on Amazon and was co-edited by Ramón Gutiérrez, the Preston and Sterling Morton Distinguished Service Professor of History and the director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture at the University of Chicago.
The Patchwork City: Urban Fragmentation and Populism in Manila
Marco Garrido, Associate Professor, Director of Undergraduate Studies of Sociology
The Patchwork City explores the role of spatial changes in transforming the nature of class relationships in Manila. Marco Garrido argues that, during the 1980s, new urban planning practices and widening social inequality combined to segregate lower-class slum residents from middle-class enclave residents, heightening class consciousness in the city. The book traces the processes connecting segregation and class division to political contention as the two classes have become susceptible to divergent political appeals -- populist on the one hand, authoritarian on the other. The book is focused on Manila, but Professor Garrido uses the case to tell a larger story about the spatial and social transformations occurring in cities across the Global South.
In 2018-2019, CISSR also funded a monograph enhancement for this manuscript.
The Patchwork City: Class, Space and Politics in Metro Manila was published by The University of Chicago Press in August 2019. The book won the 2020 American Sociological Association (ASA) Global and Transnational Sociology Section: Best Scholarly Book Award (co-Winner), ASA Political Sociology Section: Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award for 2020, ASA Community and Urban Sociology Section: Robert E. Park Award, ASA Asia and Asian American Section: Asia/Transnational Book Award for 2020, and the Society for the Study of Social Problems: Global Division Book Award.