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Landscapes of Care
Immigration and Health in Rural America

Thurka Sangaramoorthy
Honorable Mention, 2023 Society for the Anthropology of North America Book Prize
Honorable Mention, 2024 Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award, Racial and Ethnic Minorities Section, American Sociological Association.
This book examines the ways immigrants, mainly from Latin America and the Caribbean, navigate the health care system in rural Maryland. Thurka Sangaramoorthy reveals that that the corporatization of health care delivery and immigration policies are deeply connected in rural America. Drawing from fieldwork that centers on Maryland's sparsely populated Eastern Shore, Sangaramoorthy shows how longstanding issues of precarity among rural health systems along with the exclusionary logics of immigration have mutually fashioned a "landscape of care" in which shared conditions of physical suffering and emotional anxiety among immigrants and rural residents generate powerful forms of regional vitality and social inclusion. Sangaramoorthy connects the Eastern Shore and its immigrant populations to many other places around the world that are struggling with the challenges of global migration, rural precarity, and health governance. Her extensive ethnographic and policy research shows the personal stories behind health inequity data and helps to give readers a human entry point into the enormous challenges of immigration and rural health.

The Ethics of Staying
Social Movements and Land Rights Politics in Pakistan

Mubbashir Rizvi
American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2021 Book Prize
The military coup that brought General Pervez Musharraf to power as Pakistan's tenth president resulted in the abolition of a century-old sharecropping system that was rife with corruption. In its place the military regime implemented a market reform policy of cash contract farming. Ostensibly meant to improve living conditions for tenant farmers, the new system, instead, mobilized one of the largest, most successful land rights movements in South Asia—still active today. In The Ethics of Staying, Mubbashir A. Rizvi presents an original framework for understanding this major social movement, called the Anjuman Mazarin Punjab (AMP). This group of Christian and Muslim tenant sharecroppers, against all odds, successfully resisted Pakistan military's bid to monetize state-owned land, making a powerful moral case for land rights by invoking local claims to land and a broader vision for subsistence rights. The case of AMP provides a unique lens through which to examine state and society relations in Pakistan, one that bridges literatures from subaltern studies, military and colonial power, and the language of claim-making. Rizvi also offers a glimpse of Pakistan that challenges its standard framing as a hub of radical militancy, by opening a window into to the everyday struggles that are often obscured in the West's terror discourse.

The Archaeology of the Homed and the Unhomed

Daniel Sayers
Choice Outstanding Academic Title
In a time when the idea of home has become central to living the American dream, The Archaeology of the Homed and the Unhomed brings to the forefront the concept of homelessness. The book points out that homelessness remains underexplored in historical archaeology, a fact which may reflect societal biases and marginalization, and it provides the field’s first comprehensive discussion of the subject. Daniel Sayers argues that the unhomed and the home have been inherently interconnected in the real world across the past several centuries. Sayers builds a conceptual model that focuses on this dynamic and uses it to generate new insights into pre–Civil War communities of Maroons and Indigenous Americans, Great Depression–era hobo communities, and Midwest farmsteads. In doing so, he highlights the social complexities, ambiguities, and significance of the home and the unhomed in the archaeological record. Using a variety of data sources including documentary records and material culture and drawing on extensive fieldwork, Sayers illuminates how homelessness can be created, reproduced, and disparaged by the dominant culture. The book also emphasizes the importance of applied archaeology. Through these studies, Sayers contends that activist archaeologists have a role—and responsibility—to share their knowledge to help policy makers and stakeholders understand the unhomed, homelessness, and the American experience in this area.

Tip of the Spear
Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt

Orisanmi Burton
25th Susanne M. Glasscock Book Prize, Finalist
Museum of African American History Stone Book Award Shortlist 2024
Tip of the Spear boldly and compellingly argues that prisons are a domain of hidden warfare within US borders. With this book, Orisanmi Burton explores what he terms the Long Attica Revolt, a criminalized tradition of Black radicalism that propelled rebellions in New York prisons during the 1970s. The reaction to this revolt illuminates what Burton calls prison pacification: the coordinated tactics of violence, isolation, sexual terror, propaganda, reform, and white supremacist science and technology that state actors use to eliminate Black resistance within and beyond prison walls. Burton goes beyond the state records that other histories have relied on for the story of Attica and expands that archive, drawing on oral history and applying Black radical theory in ways that center the intellectual and political goals of the incarcerated people who led the struggle. Packed with little-known insights from the prison movement, the Black Panther Party, and the Black Liberation Army, Tip of the Spear promises to transform our understanding of prisons—not only as sites of race war and class war, of counterinsurgency and genocide, but also as sources of defiant Black life, revolutionary consciousness, and abolitionist possibility.

• Thurka Sangaramoorthy serves as a co-investigator on a 5-year study examining policies and best practices to improve the respiratory health outcomes of migrant and seasonal farmworkers. The project, entitled "Research Employing Environmental Systems and Occupational Health Policy Analyses to Interrupt the Impact of Structural Racism on Agricultural Workers and Their Respiratory Health (RESPIRAR)," recently received supplemental funding of $77,597Ěýfrom the University of Maryland, bringing the total to $165,676.
• Mubbashir Rizvi’s current research focus is on informal urbanism in Karachi’s food markets, and the role of these markets in structuring relations of coexistence in the aftermath of urban violence.
• Zev Cossin is currently collaborating with the Anacostia Watershed Society to connect students with the organization's efforts to research, protect and build a thriving Anacostia River watershed in the DMV.
• Zev Cossin is completing article manuscripts on archaeological research of the impacts of Spanish haciendas and the resilience of laborer families over five centuries in the Ecuadorian highlands.Ěý
• Zev Cossin is engaged in ongoing lab ananlysis and interpetation of artifacts from Winnipeg Junction, MN, a railroad boomtown abandoned around 1910. He is working with a large group of devoted students to analyze, interpret, and present that research on campus and beyond.
• C. Anne Claus received funding from Fulbright and the Wenner-Gren Foundation to conduct fieldwork among chefs, home cooks, and seafood advocates in Japan. Claus is also conducting research with graduate students on food waste in the DMV as part of a 5-year interdisciplinary NSF grant.
• Daniel Sayers is actively involved in a collaborative interdisciplinary project focused on an 18th Century Maroon fortress located along the Savannah River; an essay on the project and its initial field survey for the fortress site appeared in the New Yorker in June of 2023.
• Daniel Sayers continues to develop his research design and projects for his “Archaeology, Species, and Human Entitlement Study”.
• Daniel Sayers is busily working with media companies on developing television and streaming projects to bring archaeology and past peoples into public awareness and dialogues.
• Orisanmi Burton was recently awarded a 2024 research stipend from the Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC) to support his research into the history of biomedical experimentation on incarcerated people and other vulnerable populations.
• Manissa Maharawal is a co-lead investigator on the NIH funded project “Examining the Effects of Housing, Structural Racism and Policy Change on Health.”
• Chuck Sturtevant is currently working on a book that explores the colonization of Bolivia’s “Amazonian frontier” as a settler colonial project. This research challenges the uncritical application of Anglocentric racial ideologies to settler colonial projects in Latin America and expands the applicability of settler colonial theory to help us understand the ways that national identity and state sovereignty are intertwined through processes of violence, erasure, and forgetting.