By Frantz Fanon. Translated by Lamb Marksman. “.. it is Fanon the man, rather than the medical specialist or intellec­tual, who makes this book so hard to put down. His ideas and feelings fairly pour out...he became a fighter ancfa voice for the op­pressed, whom he also had the courage to warn: no religious or mystical attitude, no psychologi­cal ‘defense’ will enable the Negro to feel ‘secure’ or ‘himself’ until he is no longer the white man’s social and economic prey . . .”- Robert Coles, The New York Times Book Review

NY. Grove Press. 1967. 237p.

By Oliver Sacks

This is the extraordinary account of a group of 20 patients, survivors of the great sleeping-sickness epidemic which swept the world in the 1920s, and the astonishing, explosive ‘awakening’ effect they experienced 40 years later through a new drug L-DOPA administered by Dr Sacks. The stories he tells of these remarkable individuals are moving, often courageous and sometimes tragic. Through them he also explores the most general questions of health, disease, suffering, care and the human condition. Now hailed as a medical classic, Awakenings was first published in 1973 and won the Hawthomden Prize of that year. It has since inspired a TV documentary, radio and stage plays, including Pinter’s A Kind of Alaska, and a major feature film. For this revised edition the author has written much new material, including a section about Awakenings on stage and screen.

London. Pan Books. 1973. 424p.

By Robert Nozick

In this brilliant and widely acclaimed book, winner of the 1975 National Book Award, Robert Nozick challenges the most commonly held political and social positions of our age—liberal, socialist, and conservative.

[“Nozick’s] faculties of reasoning and imagination are rare; his learning is enormous and interconnected. . . . His ability to surround a subject, to anticipate objection, to see through weakness and pretense, to extract all the im­plications of a contention, to ask a huge number of rele­vant questions about a seemingly settled matter, to en­large into full significance what has only been sketched by others, is amazing.”           —George Kateb. The American Scholar

“No contemporary philosopher possesses a more imagina­tive mind, broader interests, or greater dialectical abilities than Robert Nozick.”        —Harper’s

“A brilliant and important book, bound to contribute no­tably both to theory and, in time, to the good of society.”—W. V. Quine. Harvard University

NY. Basic Books. 1974. 376p. CONTAINS MARK-UP

By Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele.

This book “is a solid indictment of how the rulemakers in Washington and the dealmakers on Wall Street have changed the rules of the game to favor the privileged, the powerful, and the influential — at the expense of everyone else.. Expanding on an unforgettable series of articles in the Philadelphia Inquirer, this book is the culmination of two years of research by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporters Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele. Assembling over 100,000 pages of documents and interviewing men and women at all levels of the work force across the nation, Barlett and Steele have managed to tell the story we all suspected in language so clear—and graphics so dramatic—that every reader will see how the lives of all of us have been touched by public acts and private greed. America: What Went Wrong? is a gripping portrayal of the painful dismantling of the American middle class.

Universal Press Syndicate. 1992. 246p.

By Sana Ashraf

In the past decade, Pakistan has witnessed incidents such as the public lynching of a student on a university campus, a Christian couple being torched alive, attacks on entire neighbourhoods by angry mobs and the assassination of a provincial governor by his own security guard over allegations of blasphemy. Finding the Enemy Within unpacks the meanings and motivations behind accusations of blasphemy and subsequent violence in Pakistan. This is the first ethnographic study of its kind analysing the perspectives of a range of different actors including accusers, religious scholars and lawyers involved in blasphemy-related incidents in Pakistan. Bringing together anthropological perspectives on religion, violence and law, this book reworks prevalent analytical dichotomies of reason/emotion, culture/religion, traditional/Western, state/nonstate and legal/extralegal to extend our understanding of the upsurge of blasphemy-related violence in Pakistan. Through the case study of blasphemy accusations in Pakistan, this book addresses broader questions of difference, individual and collective identities, social and symbolic boundaries, and conflict and violence in modern nation-states.

Canberra: ANU Press, 2021. 270p.

By Ciarán McCabe

Beggars and begging were ubiquitous features of pre-Famine Irish society, yet have gone largely unexamined by historians. This book explores at length for the first time the complex cultures of mendicancy, as well as how wider societal perceptions of and responses to begging were framed by social class, gender and religion. The study breaks new ground in exploring the challenges inherent in defining and measuring begging and alms-giving in pre-Famine Ireland, as well as the disparate ways in which mendicants were perceived by contemporaries. A discussion of the evolving role of parish vestries in the life of pre-Famine communities facilitates an examination of corporate responses to beggary, while a comprehensive analysis of the mendicity society movement, which flourished throughout Ireland in the three decades following 1815, highlights the significance of charitable societies and associational culture in responding to the perceived threat of mendicancy. The instance of the mendicity societies illustrates the extent to which Irish commentators and social reformers were influenced by prevailing theories and practices in the transatlantic world regarding the management of the poor and deviant. Drawing on a wide range of sources previously unused for the study of poverty and welfare, this book makes an important contribution to modern Irish social and ecclesiastical history.

Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018. 320p.

By Robert M. Zecker

Race was all over the immigrant newspaper week after week. As early as the 1890s the papers of the largest Slovak fraternal societies covered lynchings in the South. While somewhat sympathetic, these articles nevertheless enabled immigrants to distance themselves from the "blackness" of victims, and became part of a strategy of asserting newcomers' tentative claims to "whiteness." Southern and eastern European immigrants began to think of themselves as white people. They asserted their place in the U.S. and demanded the right to be regarded as "Caucasians," with all the privileges that accompanied this designation. Immigrant newspapers offered a stunning array of lynching accounts, poems and cartoons mocking blacks, and paeans to America's imperial adventures in the Caribbean and Asia. Immigrants themselves had a far greater role to play in their own racial identity formation than has so far been acknowledged.

New York; London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011. 360p.

Edited by Marco Castrignanò, Carolina Mudan Marelli and Teresa Carlone

Analyzing with an ethnographic approach The Wire, one of the most important TV series on American ghettos, to understand and question the sociological perspective that emerges from the series, positioning it into the broader scientific debate. This is, in a nutshell, the work presented in the book It's all in the Game, the outcome of a laboratorial research activity carried out in 2020 by students and teachers of the Sociology of Communities and Urban Neighborhoods class, at the University of Bologna. The text is structured into four chapters, resulting from the four topics used to analysis the TV series: forms of social capital, the relationship between structural forces- culture of poverty and individual agency, neighborhood effects mechanism and the relationship between statistics and political action. Four subjects that are the core of many neighborhood- studies related researches and on which the TV series makes a clear stand. We analyzed those topics through a critical perspective, not considering them as a truth about ghettos, but as a very precise way of thinking about life in the American suburbs.

Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2022. 158p.

By Pete Simi

A hypothetical “lone gunman” walks into a reproductive health care clinic spraying bullets from his assault rifle screaming that “abortion is murder!” and “the Army of God seeks revenge for the unborn fetuses murdered every year!” The shooting rampage leaves three individuals dead and 11 others injured. Additional weapons and explosives are discovered in the shooter’s van parked outside the clinic. Inside the van, a slew of literature explains how abortion is part of a liberal, feminist initiative to “enslave white Americans.” During the shooter’s interview with law enforcement later that day, he explains his motive was to “intimidate the general public by enforcing God’s law while sending a message to any other abortion killers that they might want to find another line of work.” In the days following the attack, scattered media coverage describes the gunman as “deranged,” “crazed,” and “unstable.” Few, if any, note the clear political and religious motivation nor do any of the articles describe the incident as “terrorism” or the shooter as a “terrorist.” What should we conclude about this scenario? The fact that the shooter was driven by ideological concerns seems obvious, yet the response suggests the link is apparently not so obvious. Understanding the relationship between ideas and violence presents several substantial challenges. These challenges are magnified given our tendency toward employing a highly inconsistent assessment of when and how ideas influence violence.

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  We tend to perceive a close connection between ideas and violence when the incident involves a Muslim perpetrator, while relying on a far different metric when the perpetrator is not Muslim. And the consequences are tremendous with major differences in terms of public perceptions and legal treatment.

Washington, DC: George Washington University, Program on Extremism, 2020. 12.

By Hans-Georg Betz 

Radical right-wing populist parties have been a fixture of Western European party systems for several decades. Once considered “flash parties” they have become part of the political establishment. A number of factors account for their staying power. For one, radical rightwing populist parties offer an attractive mixture of anti-establishment rhetoric (populism) and an exclusionary policy program (nativism) which appeals to a diverse range of constituencies. At the same time, they evoke and play to a range of strong emotions engendered by large-scale structural changes, which threaten to disrupt the lives of a substantial number of citizens in advanced capitalist societies. When in a position of power, however, these parties largely fail to meet the needs of their core constituencies.  

London, UK: Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right, 2020. 42p.

By Jason Xidias 

In the past two years, Spain’s far-right party Vox has gone from no representation in the Spanish parliament to 52 seats, making it the third most representative political force nationally behind the People’s Party (PP) and the Socialist Party (PSOE). This has radically transformed Spanish politics, leading to a level of polarization not seen since the Spanish Second Republic (1931-9). Until Vox’s recent electoral success, Spain was considered immune to the far right because of its Francoist past and relatively favorable attitude toward globalization, the EU, and immigration. However, as this article shows, Franco has never completely gone away—Vox is both a modernized version of Spain’s ultraconservative past and a condition and manifestation of international neoliberal and authoritarian trends. The article analyzes Vox’s ideological roots, emergence, political program, voter base, and influence in Spanish politics in relation to key events—notably the Great Recession, the success of far-left party Podemos, corruption scandals in mainstream politics, and Catalonia’s pursuit of independence—and speculates about the party’s future against the backdrop of COVID-19.   

 London, UK: Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right, 2020. 23p.

By Jason Xidias

While 85 years have now passed since the end of the Spanish Civil War, and 46 since the end of the Franco Dictatorship, historical memory continues to be a great source of political and social tension in Spain today. In comparison to nations such as Germany and Greece, the country remains an outlier insofar as it transitioned to democracy without ever achieving legal justice. This is due to deeply-embedded myths of reconciliation and equal accountability created and maintained by the ruling class, the royal family, the education system, the judiciary, and the mainstream media. Since the 1990s, the Socialist Party, motivated by political opportunism and pressure from the far left, regional parties, and domestic and international human rights organizations, has fractured “the pact of forgetting”; however, as the article argues, its own ideological shortcomings and institutional constraints have prevented a full rupture. As such, while the newly-proposed Law of Democratic Memory, which the current leftist coalition government (PSOE-Unidas Podemos) foresees passing this year, does represent significant progress, the Socialist Party’s own limitations prevent justice—in the form of an independent truth commission and the prosecution of Francoist crimes—and contribute to promoting a cultural of impunity, which is one of Spain’s principal deficiencies in terms of democracy.

 London, UK: Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right, 2021. 29p