Every day in the United States, an average of three people are killed by police officers. Black and Indigenous victims are disproportionately represented, and their stories are too often distorted by courts and media to justify their deaths and exonerate police actions.

In Complex Innocence, Lisa Marie Cacho examines five police killings that occurred between 2012 and 2019 across the continental U.S., Hawai?i, and the Muckleshoot Nation. Many of the victims - queer people, women of color, and other multiply marginalized individuals - had prior encounters with law enforcement, leading their deaths to be framed as deserved or inevitable. Cacho challenges these narratives by interrogating the legal, cultural, and historical frameworks that determine which acts of self-defense are protected and which are criminalized.

Drawing on self-defense law, Supreme Court cases, anti-resisting arrest statutes, and policing practices, Cacho reveals how "self-defense" as a right has been repeatedly redefined to privilege police officers while denying protection to victims of state violence. Through careful analysis of reports, testimonies, and media portrayals, she demonstrates how people of color's efforts at self-preservation are recast as threats, while officers' violence is framed as justifiable.

By reclaiming the complex innocence of those killed, Complex Innocence exposes the racial, sexual, and colonial foundations of policing. It offers an urgent critique of how U.S. law and culture sustain the cycle of sanctioned state violence.

This is the first systematic theorization of digital modernity, arguing that the digital age cannot be understood apart from the long historical arc of modernity.

Bridging digital humanities, critical theory, sociology, philosophy, and global history, Digital Modernity demonstrates that contemporary digital systems are continuations rather than ruptures of the modern project. It offers a robust conceptual framework for examining how technological infrastructures intersect with democracy, governance, colonial legacies, and the public sphere. Across nine chapters, the book moves from conceptual foundations to future-facing proposals. Topics include the cultural logic of Silicon Valley, digital colonialism, digital infrastructure, and the epistemic crisis of the digital public sphere. It also engages philosophical questions about emergence, historicism, and artificial intelligence. Drawing on applied digital humanities, the book rejects technological determinism while offering accessible accounts of computing's technical and political histories. Readers benefit from a coherent theoretical lens that integrates history with socio-technical critique, enabling a clearer understanding of digital modernity's present and future stakes.

This book is intended for scholars and students across digital humanities, media and communication studies, science and technology studies, sociology, the philosophy of technology, and modern history. Its interdisciplinary scope also supports research and teaching in software studies, critical AI, infrastructure studies, and global modernities. Suitable for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate courses, it will be especially valuable for researchers seeking to historicize digital systems while advancing critiques grounded in cultural theory, political economy, and postcolonial perspectives. By placing the digital within a longer history of modernity, the book offers both a foundational text and a springboard for further research in critical digital studies.

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 International license.

Why have mass public shootings in the United States become more frequent and lethal over the last two decades? This question cannot be answered by looking exclusively at the biographies, personalities, or mental health problems of individual shooters. Instead, to paraphrase C. Wright Mills, human behavior is never self-contained and must be understood at the intersection between the personal and social realms. Employing a sociological perspective and drawing from various data sources and case studies, this book offers a theoretical analysis of mass public shootings and the structural factors that drive these incidents. Our analysis highlights how neoliberalism-not simply as a set of pro-market policies but as an ideology and governing rationality-is linked to the mass shooting phenomenon in the United States.

Since the late twentieth century, neoliberalism has not only heightened economic precarity and feelings of despair but also encouraged ruthlessness, ideological extremism, and the prioritization of personal aims over others' well-being. These tendencies have been amplified by digital technologies that encourage social isolation and egoistical forms of agency, all of which weaken social bonds, erode empathy, and drive some individuals to kill as an effort to seek respect and recognition-what the classical Greeks called "thymos"-in a society that strips them of their dignity and makes them feel devalued and irrelevant.

This book will be an appropriate and useful supplementary text for various types of courses within sociology, criminology, and other social sciences that look at the social dimension of violence. In addition, the book should be of interest to a wider, nonacademic audience that seeks a data-driven, sociological analysis of this phenomenon that is written in clear, accessible language.

An examination of Japan's maritime resurgence in an age of strategic competition

This book is the first to examine Japan as a comprehensive maritime power in the twenty-first century and to consider what that status means in an age of great power competition. Geoffrey F. Gresh argues that Japan has grown its maritime capabilities and influence across an array of economic, industrial, and security sectors throughout the Indo-Pacific and is vital to both regional and international stability.

Given Japan's position as a harbinger state confronting many macro trends-such as China's rise, an aging population, and climate change-Gresh draws critical lessons for other industrialized nations. Grasping how Japan envisions, invests in, and wields its diverse tools of maritime power and statecraft is essential to understanding its pursuit of a strategic vision for the Indo-Pacific and beyond.

For over four decades, the US federal government has undertaken efforts to police and prosecute environmental crimes to protect public health and the natural environment. Yet, we still know very little about how US federal agencies have monitored and sanctioned water pollution violations and if these actions actually deter crime. In Rivers on Fire and Corporate Liars, Joshua Ozymy and Melissa Jarrell Ozymy examined over one thousand federal water pollution investigations and prosecutions undertaken by the US EPA and Department of Justice from 1983 to 2023 to answer these questions. Their analysis provides the most comprehensive empirical examination to date of how the criminal enforcement of water pollution has evolved over time, patterns in prosecutions, and how criminals were sanctioned.