A questioning of the belief in the power of LGBTQ visibility through the lives of queer women in the rural Midwest Today most LGBTQ rights supporters take for granted the virtue of being “out, loud, and proud.” Most also assume that it would be terrible to be LGBTQ in a rural place. By considering moments in which queerness and rurality come into contact, Visibility Interrupted argues that both positions are wrong. In the first monograph on LGBTQ women in the rural Midwest, Carly Thomsen deconstructs the image of the rural as a flat, homogenous, and anachronistic place where LGBTQ people necessarily suffer. And she suggests that visibility is not liberation and will not lead to liberation. Far from being an unambiguous good, argues Thomsen, visibility politics can, in fact, preclude collective action. They also advance metronormativity, postraciality, and capitalism. To make these interventions, Thomsen develops the theory of unbecoming: interrogating the relationship between that which we celebrate and that which we find disdainful—the past, the rural, politics—is crucial for developing alternative subjectivities and politics. Unbecoming precedes becoming. Drawing from critical race studies, disability studies, and queer Marxism, in addition to feminist and queer studies, the insights of this book will be useful to scholars theorizing issues far beyond sexuality and place and to social justice activists who want to move beyond visibility.

Science Interrupted examines how scientists in China pursue environmental sustainability within the constraints of domestic and international bureaucracies. Timothy G. McLellan offers a theoretical framework for analyzing the formal procedural work of Chinese bureaucracy—work that is overlooked when China scholars restrict their gaze to the informal and interpersonal channels through which bureaucracy is often navigated. Homing in on an agroforestry research organization in southwest China, the author takes the experiences of the organization's staff in navigating diverse international funding regimes and authoritarian state institutions as entry points for understanding the pervasiveness of bureaucracy in contemporary science. He asks: What if we take the tools, sensibilities, and practices of bureaucracies seriously not only as objects of critique but as resources for re-thinking scientific practice? Extending a mode of anthropological research in which ethnography serves as source of theory as well as source of data, Science Interrupted thinks with, and not only against, bureaucracy. McLellan shows that ethnographic engagement with bureaucracy enables us to imagine more democratic and more collaborative modes of scientific practice.

This book presents archaeological research conducted within the Highlands of Sicily. Results of an archaeological survey in the Madonie mountain range, in northern Sicily, supported by a chronological and cultural grid, drawn by the excavation of Vallone Inferno, deal with complex and fascinating problems of uplands and mountainous landscape. Settlement patterns, between the Late Pleistocene and the Medieval era, are investigated through the support of spatial analyses. A diversified use of the mountain is currently attested by this research, according to the different prehistoric and historical times. This work is innovative for the Mediterranean area, where there are no similar examples of such extensive territorial research in a mountainous context. The research has been focused on particular aspects of ancient peopling: economic and social issues, human-environment interactions and the long term interest in the mountain range.

An inside look at Black LGBTQ college students and their experiences Black and Queer on Campus offers an inside look at what life is like for LGBTQ college students on campuses across the United States. Michael P. Jeffries shows that Black and queer college students often struggle to find safe spaces and a sense of belonging when they arrive on campus at both predominantly white institutions and historically black colleges and universities. Many report that in predominantly white queer social spaces, they feel unwelcome and pressured to temper their criticisms of racism amongst their white peers. Conversely, in predominantly straight Black social spaces, they feel ignored or pressured to minimize their queer identity in order to be accepted. This fraught dynamic has an impact on Black LGBTQ students in higher education, as they experience different forms of marginalization at the intersection of their race, gender, and sexuality. Drawing on interviews with students from over a dozen colleges, Jeffries provides a new, much-needed perspective on the specific challenges Black LGBTQ students face and the ways they overcome them. We learn through these intimate portraits that despite the gains of the LGBTQ rights movement, many of the most harmful stereotypes and threats to black queer safety continue to haunt this generation of students. We also learn how students build queer identities. The traditional narrative of “coming out” does not fit most of these students, rather, Jeffries describes a more gradual transition to queer acceptance and pride. Black and Queer on Campus sheds light on the oft-hidden lives of Black LGBTQ students, and how educational institutions can better serve them. It also highlights the quiet beauty and joy of Black queer social life, and the bonds of friendship that sustain the students and fuel their imagination.

Home Is Where Your Politics Are is a transnational consideration of queer and trans activism in the US South and South Africa. Through ethnographic exploration of queer and trans activist work in both places, Jessica Scott paints a vibrant picture of what life is like in relation to a narrative that says that queer life is harder, if not impossible, in rural areas and on the African continent. The book asks questions like, what do activists in these places care about and how do stories about where they live get in the way of the life they envision for the queer and trans people for whom they advocate? Answers to these questions provide insight that only these activists have, into the complexity of locally based advocacy strategies in a globalized world.

Since the late 1980s sociologists have been drawing our attention to an international surge in the public visibility of religion. This has increasingly challenged two central aspects of modern western European culture: first, the assumption that as we became more modern we would become more secularised and religion would disappear; and secondly, that religion and politics should occupy radically differentiated spheres in which private conviction did not exert itself within the public realm. The new visibility of religion is not simply a matter of what Keppel famously called 'The Revenge of God', that is, the resurgence of Christian, Islamic and Jewish fundamentalism. Religion is permeating western culture in many different forms from contemporary continental philosophy, the arts and the media, to the rhetoric of international politicians. This collection of essays brings together a unique collection of voices from theology, aesthetics, social and political science, philosophy and cultural theory in an exploration of four major aspects of this new visibility of religion: the revision of the secularisation thesis, the relationship between religion and violence, the new re-enchantment of reality and the return of metaphysics. The exploration is conducted through essays by and interviews with figures at the forefront of reflecting upon this major cultural shift and its implications. It is distinctively multidisciplinary, examining the phenomenon of the rise of religion in Western Europe from a number of interrelated perspectives.