Columbia University Press Distinguished Book Award

From the collages of Romare Bearden and paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat to the fiction of Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison to the music of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, Robert G. O’Meally explores how the worlds of African American jazz, art, and literature have informed one another.

From fibs about royal incest in America’s first newspaper to social-media-driven conspiracy theories surrounding Barack Obama’s birthplace, Andie Tucher explores how American audiences have argued over what’s real and what’s not—and why that matters for democracy.

DeFries weaves together a highly readable book that approaches our contemporary complex, and potentially failing, society with a spirit of curiosity and pragmatism. Rather than using natural sciences to tell us why our social world can’t be changed, she uses the natural world as a source of inspiration for how we might get out of the various muddles we’ve gotten ourselves into.

Chatterjee’s genealogy of populist politics, in India and around the world, is at once a significant intervention into political theory and a trenchant diagnosis of our contemporary condition. Chatterjee brings critical theory to life, using it not only to deconstruct the modern nation-state but also to excavate the more hopeful possibilities embedded in the present.

Freeman’s rich historical account illustrates how pernicious processes of racial domination and exclusion created predominantly Black neighborhoods in Northern U.S. cities.  Yet he also shows how these same processes created the conditions of possibility for autonomous Black social institutions and collective identities.  Freeman seamlessly combines statistical and archival data with the voices of Black artists, activists, intellectuals, and business and political leaders across nearly 150 years of U.S. history for an account that is at once soaring and surprisingly intimate.

Working for Respect: Community and Conflict at Walmart by Adam Reich and Peter Bearman is a deeply moving account that is like no other analysis of labor struggle. It is both a study of a workforce and a study of the labor activism that the authors jumpstarted with a summer student project. Their method is an experimental sociology that pursues multiple angles, from introducing Columbia and Barnard students to the challenges of organizing Walmart employees into labor unions to studying the efforts of Our Walmart, the workers’ own answer to the union they can’t have. While some of the students had local organizing success, others failed and went on to delve into why their efforts didn’t work. Ultimately what Walmart workers say they most want is respect.

This is likely news to the well-intentioned reader who picks up this book and who may in reading come to grasp the class divide quite differently. While the issue of a living wage and workplace respect might matter to many people, it may matter most to the millennials and students who are not only essential to addressing these issues but also in the best position to tackle them. This is an important book not only because it engages with an important problem that has extraordinarily high visibility but also because of the way it handles its material. We might have expected a simple denunciation and a simple solution: Walmart exploits its workers, they need a union to protect them. But the goal of Working for Respect is also to help us understand why people work at Walmart, how the company gets considerable efforts from them at shockingly low pay, and why there is not a union representing them. Working for Respect is not only a highly engaging read, it also illustrates the way power and privilege benefits some at the great expense of the far too many.

Neil Krishan Aggarwal’s timely study finds that mental-health and biomedical professionals have created new forms of knowledge and practice in their desire to understand and fight terrorism. In the process, the state has used psychiatrists and psychologists to furnish knowledge on undesirable populations, and psychiatrists and psychologists have protected state interests.

Professional interpretation, like all interpretations, is subject to cultural forces. Drawing on cultural psychiatry and medical anthropology, Aggarwal analyzes the transformation of definitions for normal and abnormal behavior in a vast array of sources: government documents, professional bioethical debates, legal motions and opinions, psychiatric and psychological scholarship, media publications, and policy briefs. Critical themes emerge on the use of mental health in awarding or denying disability to returning veterans, characterizing the confinement of Guantánamo detainees, contextualizing the actions of suicide bombers, portraying Muslim and Arab populations in psychiatric and psychological scholarship, illustrating bioethical issues in the treatment of detainees, and supplying the knowledge and practice to deradicalize terrorists. Throughout, Aggarwal explores this fascinating, troublesome transformation of mental-health science into a potential instrument of counterterrorism.

When journalists, developers, surf tourists, and conservation NGOs cast Papua New Guineans as living in a prior nature and prior culture, they devalue their knowledge and practice, facilitating their dispossession. Paige West’s searing study reveals how a range of actors produce and reinforce inequalities in today’s globalized world. She shows how racist rhetorics of representation underlie all uneven patterns of development and seeks a more robust understanding of the ideological work that capital requires for constant regeneration.

To understand how countries grow and develop, it is essential to know how they learn and become more productive and what government can do to promote learning. In Creating a Learning Society, Joseph E. Stiglitz and Bruce C. Greenwald cast light on the significance of this insight for economic theory and policy. Taking as a starting point Kenneth J. Arrow’s 1962 paper “Learning by Doing,” they explain why the production of knowledge differs from that of other goods and why market economies alone typically do not produce and transmit knowledge efficiently. Closing knowledge gaps and helping laggards learn are central to growth and development. But creating a learning society is equally crucial if we are to sustain improved living standards in advanced countries. Combining accessible prose with technical economic analysis, Stiglitz and Greenwald provide new models of “endogenous growth,” up-ending the thinking about both domestic and global policy and trade regimes.

Wael B. Hallaq boldly argues that the “Islamic state,” judged by any standard definition of what the modern state represents, is both impossible and inherently self-contradictory. Comparing the legal, political, moral, and constitutional histories of premodern Islam and Euro-America, he finds the adoption and practice of the modern state to be highly problematic for modern Muslims. He also critiques more expansively modernity’s moral predicament, which renders impossible any project resting solely on ethical foundations.