Honorable Mention, 2025 Richard Frisbie Award for Adult Nonfiction, sponsored by the Society of Midland Authors

Honorable Mention, 2025 Frederick Jackson Turner Prize, sponsored by the Organization of American Historians

A 2025 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title in Environmental Studies

Housewives, hard hats, and an Ohio town's restoration of the radioactive wasteland in its backyardIn 1984, a uranium leak at Ohio's outdated Fernald Feed Materials Production Center highlighted the decades of harm inflicted on Cold War communities by negligent radioactive waste disposal. Casey A. Huegel tells the story of the unlikely partnership of grassroots activists, regulators, union workers, and politicians that responded to the event with a new kind of environmental movement.

The community group Fernald Residents for Environmental Safety and Health (FRESH) drew on the expertise of national organizations while maintaining its autonomy and focus on Fernald. Leveraging local patriotism and employment concerns, FRESH recruited blue-collar allies into an innovative program that fought for both local jobs and a healthier environment. Fernald's transformation into a nature reserve with an on-site radioactive storage facility reflected the political compromises that left waste sites improved yet imperfect. At the same time, FRESH's outsized influence transformed how the government scaled down the Cold War weapons complex, enforced health and safety standards, and reckoned with the immense environmental legacy of the nuclear arms race.

A compelling history of environmental mobilization, Cleaning Up the Bomb Factory details the diverse goals and mixed successes of a groundbreaking activist movement.

This book explores the historical relationship between 'technonatures' and urban transformations in the Global North. In recent years, various interdisciplinary movements such as Urban Political Ecology, STS and New Materialism have affected urban history and generated new scholarly insights into the formation of cities and urban life based on notions of hybridity, entanglement and metabolism. While scholars have increasingly attempted to grasp the socio-natural and technical complexity of cities, studies dealing with urban transformation within urban history have, however, mostly concentrated on political actors or broader social and economic changes. Seeking to introduce the concept of technonatures to the field of urban environmental history, this book instead takes its empirical and analytical starting point in the technonatural fabric of cities. Focusing on urban rivers, dumps, railways, flood walls and housing, the chapters of the book thus examines how different entanglementsof environment, technology and agency have shaped cities and processes of urbanization in the Global North from the seventeenth century onwards. By foregrounding the transformative role of urban natures, materialities and technologies in shaping the politics of urban life and cities more broadly, the book aspires to probe the potentiality of technonatures as a conceptual and analytical strategy for urban environmental historians.

This timely book expertly draws on a wide range of disciplines and theories, in considering the limitations imposed by unpredictable dynamics of power, discourse and affect and the shifting boundaries of what is governable. The authors demonstrate the creative potential of both instabilities and rigidities in governance. Chapters detail the basics of evolutionary governance theory, developing and applying it to transition strategy by engaging in an accessible manner with post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, institutional economics, systems theory and critical management studies. In a clearly constructed theoretical narrative, the results of this engagement become clear, in a new understanding of the weight of the past on governance and community, the construction of temporality, change and strategic change, contextual notions of good governance, and how these affect major shifts towards sustainability.

Strategy for Sustainability Transitions is an important addition to an ever-expanding and crucial field. Particularly relevant to practitioners and policy makers interested in sustainable development and environmental governance, it will greatly appeal to students and scholars of human geography, public policy and administration, environmental politics and planning and development studies.

Commencing with a review of green economy's development from the 1980s onwards, the Research Handbook on the Green Economy examines its progression through the 1990s, illustrating the lack of progress in the early years until sustainable development gathered traction in the early 2000s. Taking a theoretical approach to green economy research, this Research Handbook examines recent trends and developments within global industries and sectors including product circulation and manufacturing, alongside green services, construction, renewable energy and tourism. Chapters also discuss the directions and challenges for future research, in particular the concepts of 'lean', waste reduction and greenwashing in the green economy.

This timely and fascinating book will be an excellent resource for scholars and researchers in the fields of environmental economics, economic geography, business and management studies, and environmental governance and regulation. The illustrated future strategies highlighted in this Research Handbook will also provide excellent guidance for policymakers at both local and national government levels.

Providing cutting-edge insights into the field, the Handbook explores the analytical category of infrastructure, clarifying and expanding upon the importance of an infrastructural perspective within academic and policy debates. An interdisciplinary range of contributors provides an ambitious examination of infrastructures and cities, with chapters covering the transformations of traditional networked infrastructure systems; novel understandings of how infrastructures matter; socio-technical processes of infrastructuring; forms of social violence involving infrastructural developments; and the role of infrastructures in human pressures on the biosphere. Ultimately, this Handbook proposes directions for further infrastructure research, highlighting its relevance in a shifting socio-political landscape.

The Handbook of Infrastructures and Cities provides valuable insight for scholars of urban studies, urban sociology, human geography, planning and regional studies. It will also prove to be a vital reference point for academics and policy-makers seeking to progress social equality and challenge current structural obstacles to the advent of more sustainable infrastructures.

Chapters highlight the macro-historical context of the urban, and conduct a critical and reflexive review of mainstream theories and concepts. They examine key debates in urban sociology, analysing varied approaches to gentrification, neighbourhood effects, race and gender. Looking beyond the dominant anglophone academic sphere, contributors explore case studies from diverse world regions and local settings. Ultimately, the Research Handbook clarifies and advances the wide range of contemporary sociological approaches to urban studies.

The Research Handbook on Urban Sociology will prove to be a vital read for researchers and students across sociology, geography, anthropology, urban planning and design, economics and political science. It will also be of great benefit to practitioners and policy-makers seeking to better understand the urban space.

This Research Agenda explores the future of spatial analysis, and how the field informs and challenges the policy landscape. A wide range of contributors from different intellectual communities address the problem of causality in geographic analysis, arguing that diversity is crucial for the future success of the discipline.

Chapters define and explore specific concepts and practices within the field, for instance data science and geosimulation, providing perspectives on the current state of the art of these areas within geography, and how they will shift in the future. In the first section, contributors cover the fundamentals of the topic, as well as various ways to handle the 'spatial variable', including the concept of space, the scale of spatial patterns and what those patterns reveal. The book then analyses schools of practice, including geographical data science, causality, generative modelling and machine learning.

A Research Agenda for Spatial Analysis will prove an invaluable resource for spatial analysts and geographic information scientists interested in learning about the direction of future developments in the field. Additionally, scholars and students of human and urban geography and geographic research methods will benefit from this crucial overview of the topic.

Bringing together an array of esteemed academics, this Research Handbook explores housing in its broadest sense, encapsulating generations of housing knowledge, policy interventions, experiences and representations of home, practices enacted within the home, and the intersection of housing and the home with economy and society. Chapters cover insightful topics from unique angles including crime and the home, ageing in place, econometric methods in housing research, the digitization of housing, and home and gentrification. Ultimately, this Research Handbook uses contemporary analyses to recommend future housing policy, advocating for a fairer market with greater building opportunities, fostering accepting communities and embracing digital technology.

An invaluable resource for researchers, academics and students, this Research Handbook will benefit those specialising in sociology and social policy, political science, criminology, and economics. Offering practical policy recommendations, this book will also be of great interest for professionals working in governmental policy, interdisciplinary think tanks, and other national government organisations involved in social housing and urban planning.

Capitalism and Classical Social Theory offers a rigorous introduction to classical social theory, highlighting the enduring relevance of classical works for understanding the many crises of the contemporary world. This popular theory book introduces students to a selection of classical social thinkers and demonstrates the relevance of the classical canon in contemporary society - a society marked by social inequality, insecurity, transformative AI, and the climate emergency.

The fourth edition features updated examples, data, and images throughout, as well as new material on early American sociology and new literature on classical social theorists from the past five years. It reintroduces a chapter on Georg Simmel and urbanism, and it includes a new chapter exploring the intersection of the COVID-19 pandemic and class, race, and gender.

While attentive to historical context, Capitalism and Classical Social Theory argues that classical theorists speak directly to the present challenges of inequality, social change, and the climate crisis in the twenty-first century.

Focusing on the work of Hartmut Rosa, this book provides an in-depth account of the extent to which we, as humans, are obliged to face up to the uncontrollability of the world. Rosa is widely regarded as one of the most original contemporary European social theorists. Along with the concepts of 'acceleration', 'alienation', and 'resonance', the notion of 'uncontrollability' [Unverfuegbarkeit] ranks among the most important reference points in Rosa's critical theory, especially in his recent work. It is no accident, then, that - following his extensive inquiries into 'acceleration' and 'alienation' and the publication of his magnum opus on 'resonance' - Rosa has found it necessary to offer a brief, but powerful, account of the place occupied by the concept of 'uncontrollability' in his critical theory. The first half of this book comprises a detailed outline of Rosa's central arguments on 'uncontrollability', before moving, in the second half, to a thorough assessment of the most significant limitations of his approach.

This book will appeal to students and scholars of the social sciences and humanities - particularly to those interested in social theory, social philosophy, and the history of ideas.

How mid-century television anthologies reflected and shaped US values and identities.

From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, anthology dramas presented "quality" television programming in weekly stand-alone television plays meant to entertain and provide cultural uplift to American society. Programs such as Playhouse 90, Studio One, and The Twilight Zone became important emblems of American creative potential on television. But their propensity for addressing matters of major social concern also meant that they often courted controversy. Although the anthology's tenure would be brief, its importance in the television landscape would be great, and the ways the format negotiated ideas about "Americanness" at midcentury would be a crucial facet of its significance.

In Gold Dust on the Air, Molly Schneider traces a cultural history of the "Golden Age" anthology, addressing topics such as the format's association with Method acting and debates about "authentic" American experience, its engagement with ideas about "conformity" in the context of Cold War pressures, and its depictions of war in a medium sponsored by defense contractors. Drawing on archival research, deep textual examination, and scholarship on both television history and broader American culture, Schneider posits the anthology series as a site of struggle over national meaning.

How twenty-first-century Latin American comics transgress social, political, and cultural frontiers.

Given comics' ability to cross borders, Latin American creators have used the form to transgress the political, social, spatial, and cultural borders that shape the region. A groundbreaking and comprehensive study of twenty-first-century Latin American comics, Latin American Comics in the Twenty-First Century documents how these works move beyond national boundaries and explores new aspects of the form, its subjects, and its creators.

Latin American comics production is arguably more interconnected and more networked across national borders than ever before. Analyzing works from Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay, James Scorer organizes his study around forms of "transgression," such as transnationalism, border crossings, transfeminisms, punk bodies, and encounters in the neoliberal city. Scorer examines the feminist comics collective Chicks on Comics; the DIY comics zine world; nonfiction and journalistic comics; contagion and zombie narratives; and more. Drawing from archives across the United States, Europe, and Latin America, Latin American Comics in the Twenty-First Century posits that these comics produce micronarratives of everyday life that speak to sites of social struggle shared across nation states.