Abigail “Art“ Ruth Teller thought her sophomore year would include the usual teenage worries: getting good grades, breaking away from an overprotective mom, dealing with hormones, having fun with friends and starting to date. Unfortunately, the School Board decided to throw a wrench in her plans by proposing to water down the science program to teach the decidedly unscientific creationism. With such a subpar curriculum, how would Art get into a top university so she could discover a cure for her diabetes? Someone was going to have to stop them and it looked as if it was going to be her. As if high school wasn’t hard enough. Art didn’t know if one teenager could really defeat a group of religious zealots dead set on bringing their political beliefs into the classroom but she vowed she would stop at nothing to save her school.

While higher education is still far from universal in the United States, it plays an increasingly large role in shaping our collective understanding of what knowledge counts as legitimate and important. Therefore, understanding the college curriculum and how it is changed and shaped helps us to understand the overall dynamics of knowledge in contemporary society. This book considers the emergence of three curricular fields that have developed and spread over the past half century in American higher education - Women's studies, Asian American studies and Queer/LGBT studies. It details the broader history of their development as knowledge fields and then explains how, when, and why individual colleges and universities may choose to adopt such innovations. Based on in-depth case studies of curricular change processes at six colleges and universities across the United States, the book demonstrates that social movements targeting colleges and universities play a major role in curricular change and sets forward a new model for understanding what it takes for social movements targeting organizations to make an impact.

NAMED A BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE ECONOMIST AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2021 BY THE TIMES AND THE SUNDAY TIMES "Irreversible Damage . . . has caused a storm. Abigail Shrier, a Wall Street Journal writer, does something simple yet devastating: she rigorously lays out the facts." —Janice Turner, The Times of London Until just a few years ago, gender dysphoria—severe discomfort in one’s biological sex—was vanishingly rare. It was typically found in less than .01 percent of the population, emerged in early childhood, and afflicted males almost exclusively. But today whole groups of female friends in colleges, high schools, and even middle schools across the country are coming out as “transgender.” These are girls who had never experienced any discomfort in their biological sex until they heard a coming-out story from a speaker at a school assembly or discovered the internet community of trans “influencers.” Unsuspecting parents are awakening to find their daughters in thrall to hip trans YouTube stars and “gender-affirming” educators and therapists who push life-changing interventions on young girls—including medically unnecessary double mastectomies and puberty blockers that can cause permanent infertility. Abigail Shrier, a writer for the Wall Street Journal, has dug deep into the trans epidemic, talking to the girls, their agonized parents, and the counselors and doctors who enable gender transitions, as well as to “detransitioners”—young women who bitterly regret what they have done to themselves. Coming out as transgender immediately boosts these girls’ social status, Shrier finds, but once they take the first steps of transition, it is not easy to walk back. She offers urgently needed advice about how parents can protect their daughters. A generation of girls is at risk. Abigail Shrier’s essential book will help you understand what the trans craze is and how you can inoculate your child against it—or how to retrieve her from this dangerous path.

Qualitative Research in Health and Illness provides a highly accessible, pragmatic approach to conducting qualitative research in the health fields, including nursing, health studies, public health, medical sociology, and medical anthropology. Targeted toward novice researchers, Jessica Smartt Gullion aims to provide tools to address common scenarios that will arise in professional practice.

Researching With: A Decolonizing Approach to Community-Based Action Research offers guidance on how to build successful interventions from the ground up, planned and implemented by the people that will benefit from them, using community-based action research. This text advocates for collaboration, researching with communities, rather than conducting research on them.

Contributions by Janet Allured, Lisa Pertillar Brevard, Jami L. Carlacio, Cheryl J. Fish, Angela Hornsby-Gutting, Jennifer McFarlane-Harris, Neely McLaughlin, Darcy Metcalfe, Phillip Luke Sinitiere, P. Jane Splawn, Laura L. Sullivan, and Hettie V. Williams Activism in the Name of God: Religion and Black Feminist Public Intellectuals from the Nineteenth Century to the Present recognizes and celebrates twelve Black feminists who have made an indelible mark not just on Black women’s intellectual history but on American intellectual history in general. The volume includes essays on Jarena Lee, Theressa Hoover, Pauli Murray, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs, to name a few. These women’s commitment to the social, political, and economic well-being of oppressed people in the United States shaped their work in the public sphere, which took the form of preaching, writing, singing, marching, presiding over religious institutions, teaching, assuming leadership roles in the civil rights movement, and creating politically subversive print and digital art. This anthology offers readers exemplars with whose minds and spirits we can engage, from whose ideas we can learn, and upon whose social justice work we can build. The volume joins a burgeoning chorus of texts that calls attention to the creativity of Black women who galvanized their readers, listeners, and fellow activists to seek justice for the oppressed. Pushing back on centuries of institutionalized injustices that have relegated Black women to the sidelines, the work of these Black feminist public intellectuals reflects both Christian gospel ethics and non-Christian religious traditions that celebrate the wholeness of Black people.