Struggles for Justice in Canada and Mexico examines Canadian and Mexican communities engaged in collective action to address problems related to the context of aggressive capitalism, which favours economic freedom of the powerful over the needs of people and the planet. The book’s several case examples portray income-generating projects; action to promote health, adequate housing, and a safe environment (including resistance to mining); women’s resource and advocacy programs; as well as grassroots support organizations and independent organizers. The author gathered stories in six states in the south of Mexico and two provinces in Canada between 2004 and 2010, with follow-up to 2012. Thematically, they centre on oppression and struggles for rights experienced by the poor, women, and Indigenous peoples. The author’s case-study method bolsters her narratives by including interviews, observation, and some participant-observation, with analysis that draws on social movement theory from sociology and community organizing theory from social work as well as knowledge from social psychology, liberation theology, popular education, and political science. The book presents the common themes and illustrates the central theories for practitioners in the many fields that promote social justice: social work, social development, health, human rights, environmental protection, and faith-based justice movements, among others. The conclusion presents a framework for conceptualizing social justice practice as a congruent paradigm composed of values, theory, objectives, and practice methods.

One of the New York Times’s Best Books of the 21st Century Named one of the most important nonfiction books of the 21st century by Entertainment Weekly‚ Slate‚ Chronicle of Higher Education‚ Literary Hub, Book Riot‚ and Zora A tenth-anniversary edition of the iconic bestseller—"one of the most influential books of the past 20 years," according to the Chronicle of Higher Education—with a new preface by the author "It is in no small part thanks to Alexander's account that civil rights organizations such as Black Lives Matter have focused so much of their energy on the criminal justice system." —Adam Shatz, London Review of Books Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the prestigious NAACP Image Award; and it has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Most important of all, it has spawned a whole generation of criminal justice reform activists and organizations motivated by Michelle Alexander's unforgettable argument that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it." As the Birmingham News proclaimed, it is "undoubtedly the most important book published in this century about the U.S." Now, ten years after it was first published, The New Press is proud to issue a tenth-anniversary edition with a new preface by Michelle Alexander that discusses the impact the book has had and the state of the criminal justice reform movement today.

In the sixteenth century hundreds of thousands of indios—indigenous peoples from the territories of the Spanish empire—were enslaved and relocated throughout the Iberian world. Although various laws and decrees outlawed indio enslavement, several loopholes allowed the practice to continue. In Global Indios Nancy E. van Deusen documents the more than one hundred lawsuits between 1530 and 1585 that indio slaves living in Castile brought to the Spanish courts to secure their freedom. Because plaintiffs had to prove their indio-ness in a Spanish imperial context, these lawsuits reveal the difficulties of determining who was an indio and who was not—especially since it was an all-encompassing construct connoting subservience and political personhood and at times could refer to people from Mexico, Peru, or South or East Asia. Van Deusen demonstrates that the categories of free and slave were often not easily defined, and she forces a rethinking of the meaning of indio in ways that emphasize the need to situate colonial Spanish American indigenous subjects in a global context.

In the fifty years since Rawls seminal work A Theory of Justice, the concept has been debated with those on the political right and left advocating very different understandings. This unique global collection, written by a group of international experts, offers wide-ranging analyses of the meaning of social justice that challenge the ability of the market to provide social justice for all. The Handbook also looks at how the theory of social justice informs practice within a range of occupations or welfare divisions.

In 1968, ten thousand students marched in protest over the terrible conditions prevalent in the high schools of East Los Angeles, the largest Mexican community in the United States. Chanting Chicano Power, the young insurgents not only demanded change but heralded a new racial politics. Frustrated with the previous generation's efforts to win equal treatment by portraying themselves as racially white, the Chicano protesters demanded justice as proud members of a brown race. The legacy of this fundamental shift continues to this day. Ian Haney Lopez tells the compelling story of the Chicano movement in Los Angeles by following two criminal trials, including one arising from the student walkouts. He demonstrates how racial prejudice led to police brutality and judicial discrimination that in turn spurred Chicano militancy. He also shows that legal violence helped to convince Chicano activists that they were nonwhite, thereby encouraging their use of racial ideas to redefine their aspirations, culture, and selves. In a groundbreaking advance that further connects legal racism and racial politics, Haney Lopez describes how race functions as common sense, a set of ideas that we take for granted in our daily lives. This racial common sense, Haney Lopez argues, largely explains why racism and racial affiliation persist today. By tracing the fluid position of Mexican Americans on the divide between white and nonwhite, describing the role of legal violence in producing racial identities, and detailing the commonsense nature of race, Haney Lopez offers a much needed, potentially liberating way to rethink race in the United States.

Brian P. Owensby is Associate Professor in the University of Virginia's Corcoran Department of History. He is the author of Intimate Ironies: Modernity and the Making of Middle-Class Lives in Brazil (Stanford, 1999).

From student movements to staff unions, the fight for accessible, high-quality public education has turned university campuses into sites of resistance. This critical collection features analysis by students and staff members from twelve different countries.