Explores encounters between those who make their living by engaging in street-based prostitution and the criminal justice and social service workers who try to curtail it     Working together every day, the lives of sex workers, police officers, public defenders, and social service providers are profoundly intertwined, yet their relationships are often adversarial and rooted in fundamentally false assumptions.  The criminal justice-social services alliance operates on the general belief that the women they police and otherwise regulate choose sex work as a result of traumatization, rather than acknowledging the fact that socioeconomic realities often inform their choices. Drawing on extraordinarily rich ethnographic research, including interviews with over one hundred street-involved women and dozens of criminal justice and social service professionals, Women of the Street argues that despite the intimate knowledge these groups have about each other, measures designed to help these women consistently fail because they do not take into account false assumptions about street life, homelessness, drug use and sex trading.  Reaching beyond disciplinary silos by combining the analysis of an anthropologist and a legal scholar, the book offers an evidence-based argument for the decriminalization of prostitution.

Product Description: This volume looks forward and re-examines present day education and pedagogical practices in music and dance in the diverse cultural environments found in Oceania. The book also identifies a key issue of how teachers face the prospect of taking a reflexive view of their own cultural legacy in music and dance education as they work from and alongside different cultural worldviews...read more

Product Description: Children of the Welfare State uses the case of Denmark—employed as emblematic of the European state—to consider the ways in which children are “civilized” within child-focused institutions, such as schools, daycare, and the family unit, under the auspices of the welfare state...read more

Product Description: “Provides rich new ethnographic material on a little-known population, the Bedouin of the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon. It positions such marginal populations in the broader theoretical context of modernization and health and demographic transitions...read more

Product Description: How people conceive of happiness reveals much about who they are and the values they hold dear. Drawing on ethnographic insights from diverse field sites around the world, this book offers a unique window onto the ways in which people grapple with fundamental questions about how to live and what it means to be human...read more

Product Description: The Art of Life and Death explores how the world appears to people who have an acute perspective on it: those who are close to death. Based on extensive ethnographic research, Andrew Irving brings to life the lived experiences, imaginative lifeworlds, and existential concerns of persons confronting their own mortality and non-being...read more

Product Description: Interviews with young, black Muslims in Chicago explore the complexity of those with identities formed at the crossroads of Islam and hip hop This groundbreaking study of race, religion and popular culture in the 21st century United States focuses on a new concept, “Muslim Cool...read more

Product Description: The subject of climate change could hardly be more timely. In Climate and Cultural Change in Prehistoric Europe and the Near East, an interdisciplinary group of contributors examine climate change through the lens of new archaeological and paleo-environmental data over the course of more than 10,000 years from the Near East to Europe...read more

Product Description: What causes violent conflicts around the Middle East? All too often, the answer is sectarianism--popularly viewed as a timeless and intractable force that leads religious groups to conflict. In Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon, Joanne Nucho shows how wrong this perspective can be...read more

Product Description: Interest in the anthropology of food has grown significantly in recent years. This is the first handbook to provide a detailed overview of all major areas of the field.Twenty original essays by leading figures in the discipline examine traditional areas of research as well as cutting-edge areas of inquiry...read more