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In this paper, we consider how news stories about one area of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, the Rio Grande Valley of south Texas, further propagate notions of a region filled with people characterized as dangerously noncompliant with American ideals of citizenship, prosperity, and security. Using Ethnographic Content Analysis, we conducted a systematic analysis of Valley, state and national mainstream news media stories from 2010-2016 about health or health care in the Rio Grande Valley. Ethnographic research with Valley leaders, residents, and journalists completed the media analysis. We argue that the Rio Grande Valley is framed as both an unruly internal colony as well as a racialized periphery, due to its proximity to Mexico. We detail how these news stories are received and acted upon by seasoned local journalists who use their trade to offer different scripts, rooted in actual lives and experiences of residents. We conclude with alternative versions of the U.S.-Mexico border region from borderlands scholars to reflect on how dominant media representations of places and people can be weathervanes for political discourse that shape state and national action about 'the border.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public discourse narrative positions Detroit's post-bankruptcy revitalization as a rapid process of business and investment descending upon the city. In spite of this narrative, Detroit today remains a city of intense poverty and inequality. Between 2009 and 2013, an estimated 39 percent of Detroit residents were living below the Federal Poverty Line. This figure renders Detroit as statistically the poorest city in the country. In addition to a mythical narrative of rapid-fire investment, popular media representations of Detroit are peppered with racialized references to white business investment. These references position whiteness as 'saving' Detroit and center whiteness in the urban process. This racialized narrative is false and divisive in a city that is upwards of 83 percent African American. In this paper, we map the disparity between the racial politics of Detroit and the anti-black public discourse narrative currently surrounding the city. We demonstrate that the public discourse valorization of a profit-driven urban process results in an anti-black prioritization of whiteness in Detroit's post-bankruptcy redevelopment process. This narrative, if unchecked, will have serious consequences in the city's present and future. As such, we propose a re-centering of the blackness of the city and the racial politics of generations that have shaped current conditions, toward a more equitable recovery process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extensive literature on care work or domestic work - childcare, eldercare, and housecleaning - in the United States and internationally has highlighted how the sector's affective aspects, e.g., intimacy, personalism, and fictive kin relationships, extract 'surplus emotional labor' (Hochschild 1983 from women workers, who, in turn, often justify their caregiving labor through expressions of sentiment and kin obligation. In this article, I draw on three women's narrative framings of their domestic work jobs to argue that immigrant women in New York City emphasize structural, practical, and contextual elements of their domestic/caregiving labor, challenging constructions of care sector labor as evidence of innate caring aptitudes, womanly duty, or moral service. These characterizations have direct labor policy implications for paid care work - as evidenced in recent reforms. They also provide a theoretical basis for broader redistributive politics linking paid and unpaid caregiving labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do American Charismatic Evangelicals imagine human difference? Ethnographic fieldwork with the Vineyard, a Southern California originated but now nation-wide Charismatic Evangelical movement, suggests that for many lay American Charismatic Evangelicals, difference is conceptualized in three different modes, involving potentialities, relations, and boundedness. Much like a grammar shapes communication without imposing a single meaning, these forms of conceiving human difference mandate no single intrinsic political position, but do affect the way that American Charismatic evangelicals express and contest notions of human difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars of unauthorized migration have generally agreed that a lack of legal status can constrain undocumented workers' resistance to their marginalization and exploitative treatment. Yet in recent years, undocumented workers and youth have been at the forefront of immigrant rights mobilizations and have organized around their status as undocumented people. In this article, we explore how the conferral of a conditional immigration status has affected undocumented youth activism. In particular, we show that the implementation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals ( DACA) program in 2012 had varied and complicated consequences for youth activism in Chicago-at once stifling the urgency of comprehensive immigration reform and galvanizing efforts to expand and strengthen protections against deportation. More broadly, we consider how prolonged states of liminal legality (Menjivar 2006) bring people more tightly under the purview of state surveillance without removing their vulnerability to deportation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article starts with a question: what sociopolitical and/or sociocultural factors are flattened in prevention narratives? Focusing on the case of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder ( FASD) and drawing on narratives and practices that argue FASD is 100% preventable-this article argues these fictions of prevention strip the very context within which a particular medical phenomenon is occurring. Focusing on legislation in Alaska and proposed amendments to the Criminal Code in Canada that target FASD, layered with interview material, the article analyzes policy and practices that could impact women's reproductive health through troublesome frameworks of cost and responsibility. The article illustrates the potentially negative impact of policies and discourses that frame FASD as 100% preventable. The article argues that overly simplistic, or purposefully simplistic, understandings of the condition serve to mask the broader structural issues that demand attention including legacies of colonialism and structural inequality. In so doing, this article illustrates the ways in which prevention practices have implications in the areas of women's reproductive health, law and policy, social justice, and welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the recent development of an anti-deportation movement with distinct strategies and tactics that distinguish it from previous immigrant rights activism centered on immigration reform. We study the strategies and tactics of the anti-deportation movement, focusing on the strategies of non-staged civil disobediences and anti-deportation campaigns. We argue that the specific tactics used in these alternative strategies a) depart from normative activism and b) challenge dominant perceptions about undocumented immigrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Latina migrant women in California in the post 9/11 era experience structural vulnerability that extends beyond their undocumented status, residence in poor neighborhoods with gangs, employment in informal sector jobs to their reproductive bodies. Although unauthorized women may access prenatal health, often they are intimidated or are unaware, and face many barriers to accessing reproductive health related to language, transportation, or their low incomes and their ignorance about their bodies. Research on those migrants who do access reproductive health illustrates they experience subjectification in U.S. institutions and neglect and even obstetric violence in Mexican institutions. In this transnational context, the nonprofit organization, California Latinas for Reproductive Justice, has organized an Instituto de Autonomía y Justicia with outreach to Spanish-speaking Latina migrants. I argue that through health literacy training within a reproductive justice framework that weaves intersectionality and human rights, California Latinas for Reproductive Justice engages in the 'feminist politics of translation.' They produce locally situated knowledge and pedagogies sensitive to the complexities of migrant Latinas' lives. The diverse Latina participants begin a consciousness raising process that leads them to explore their own health practice and participate in policy advocacy for their communities. My analysis is based on ethnographic research that includes participant observation and interviews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the construction of 21st-century language and identities in an era of global displacement and social media when increasing numbers of youth are growing up undocumented. Building on prior research on anti-immigrant rhetoric, it is based on participant observation, interviews, and document analysis conducted with Latin@ activists in California (1999-2001) and Illinois (2010-2014). Language has been central to the U.S. undocumented youth movement, as 1.5.-generation immigrant activists creatively use self-naming for empowerment. New, positive identities help young immigrants to challenge anti-immigrant rhetoric and love themselves, locate and support each other, and advocate for assistance and rights. Activist identities have changed over time along with changing political contexts and strategies, moving from close alignment with legislative efforts to increasing recognition of intersectional, marginalized, and transnational social locations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the social condition of Bosnian Americans, Islam, and whiteness in post-9/11 U.S. It says that while some were mistreated for their Muslim ethnic-religious identities in Yugoslavia, once they resided in the safe haven of Chicago, Illinois, they continued to struggle with the probability of meeting anti-Muslim hostility from other European immigrants.

Critics of policing often utter the phrase 'to protect and serve,' in order to point out the gap between discourses of ethical policing and practices of punitive policing in black communities. However, the present analysis asserts that a more appropriate representation of the policing function is 'to protect and serve whiteness.' Drawing ethnographic observations, the Ferguson Report and Officer Darren Wilson's Grand Jury Testimony, I shift the locus of critique away from the putative problems of 'police brutality,' 'excessive force,' and 'police militarization.' I argue that these critiques naturalize the forms of psychic violence, dehumanization and dispossession inflicted in routine and professional encounters between police and black people. Instead, I argue that anti-blackness is imbricated in policing itself. Then, by examining the ways in which modern policing and 'order maintenance' approaches developed from southern slave patrols, I assert that policing in the United States is always already racialized policing. It plays a foundational role assigning of racial meanings, helping to produce whiteness as a subject of protection and blackness an object of regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Institutional racism is a concept that has gotten into a muddle. Ubiquitous in policing in the UK, but relegated to the margins of discussion in the US, this important and useful idea has been misunderstood on both sides of the Atlantic as a pervasive form of unconscious or cultural bias. This article argues that a clearer distinction is needed between cognitive bias and institutional racism especially with regard to the racial disparities in the enforcement outcomes in New York City. The numbers-driven management system, often called Compstat, paired with zero-tolerance enforcement of violations and misdemeanors, facilitates a pattern of institutional racism in which police motivation need not be bias, but, if anything, careerist: 'activity' in the form of stop-question-and-frisk reports, summonses, and arrests in higher crime neighborhoods is the measure of 'productivity' for officers and supervisors. Ultimately, this article argues that clarification of institutional racism is an important step bureaucratically and politically toward the positive reform of policing. The clarification of this distinction is also important in other fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on neoliberalism and the shaping of home among service workers in the Gatlinburg, Tennessee which is a tourist attraction. Topics discussed include the practice of living in weekly rental residences among low-wage, tourist industry workers in the city, the impact of neoliberalism on tourism-based economy of the city, and lack of permanent housing for Gatlinburg's low-income contingent workers.

The article discusses the ways in which Muslim organizations in the U.S. have responded to anti-Muslim sentiment to fight against racism and xenophobia of the post 9/11 attack. Topics include interfaith talk between Muslims and other religious communities, Islamic Representative Organizations' concern on Islamophobia, and the concept of cultural citizenship for Muslims in the West.

The article discusses the Canadian court system's views on indigenous and state authority in aboriginal title litigation in Canada. Topics discussed include the court case Delgamuukw v. the Queen related to legal traditions in court to prove continued ownership and governance of traditional lands, relations between indigenous and colonial authorities in courtrooms, and litigating claims within colonial courts.