Quadrant Books
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Removing Mountains: Extracting Nature and Identity in the Appalachian Coalfields
A rich ethnography of life in Appalachia that examines mountaintop removal in light of controversy and protests from environmental groups calling for its abolishment. The paradox that faces this community—forced to destroy their land to make a wage—raises important questions about environment, American national identity, place, and white working-class masculinity.
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Rebirth of the Clinic: Places and Agents in Contemporary Healthcare
Indebted to Michel Foucault’s Birth of the Clinic, but recognizing the gap between what the modern clinic hoped to be and what it has become, Rebirth of the Clinic explores medical practices that shed light on the fraught relationship between medical systems, practitioners, and patients.
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Brand Aid: Shopping Well to Save the World
Using the Product RED campaign as its focal point, Brand Aid examines the relationship between the AIDS pandemic, global capital, celebrity-centered awareness campaigns, and practices of consumption.
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Swamplife: People, Gators, and Mangroves Entangled in the Everglades
Drawing on a decade of fieldwork with hunters in the Everglades, Laura A. Ogden explores the lives and labors of people, animals, and plants in this most delicate and tenacious ecosystem. Swamplife offers a unique insight into the hidden life of the Everglades—and into how an appreciation of oppositional culture and social class operates in our understanding of wilderness in the United States.
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The Interface: IBM and the Transformation of Corporate Design, 1945-1976
The Interface is the first critical history of the industrial design of the computer, of Eliot Noyes’s career at IBM, and of some of the most important work of the Office of Charles and Ray Eames. John Harwood supplies a crucial chapter on architecture and design in postwar America—and an invaluable perspective on the computer and corporate cultures of today.
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The Tourist State: Performing Leisure, Liberalism, and the Racial Imagination
Addressing the embodied dimensions of biopolitics and exploring the collision of race, performance, and the cultural poetics of the state, Margaret Werry exposes the real drama behind the new New Zealand. Weaving together interpretive history, performance ethnography, and cultural criticism, she offers new ways to think about race and indigeneity—and about the role of human agency in state-making.
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The Slumbering Masses Sleep, Medicine, and Modern American Life
Addresses the phenomena of sleep and sleeplessness in the U.S., tracing the influence of medicine and industrial capitalism on Americans’ sleeping habits since the nineteenth century. Drawing on untapped archival sources and ethnographic research, Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer analyzes and critiques how sleep and its supposed disorders are understood and treated.
