Graham Cassano – författare

Crisis, Politics and Critical Sociology draws upon the work of contemporary sociologists searching for the roots of our present social and economic problems. This peer-reviewed volume offers insights into our current reality by exploring the content and consequences of power relationships under capitalism and by considering the spaces of opposition and resistance to these changes that have defined our new age.

In 1936, director John Ford claimed to be making movies for 'a new kind of public' that wanted more honest pictures. Cassano argues that this new kind of public was forged in the fires of class struggle and economic calamity. Those struggles appeared in Hollywood productions, as the movies themselves tried to explain the causes and consequence of the Great Depression. Using the tools of critical Marxism and cultural theory, Cassano surveys Hollywood's political economic explanations and finds a field of symbolic struggle between the classes.

In Eleanor Smith's Hull House Songs: The Music of Protest and Hope in Jane Addams's Chicago, the authors re-publish Hull House Songs (1916), together with critical commentary. Hull-House Songs contains five politically engaged compositions written by the Hull-House music educator, Eleanor Smith. The commentary that accompanies the folio includes an examination of Smith's poetic sources and musical influences; a study of Jane Addams's aesthetic theories; and a complete history of the arts at Hull-House. Through this focus upon aesthetic and cultural programs at Hull-House, the author-editors identify the external, and internalized, forces of domination (class position, racial identity, patriarchal disenfranchisement) that limited the work of the Hull-House women, while also recovering the sometimes hidden emancipatory possibilities of their legacy. With an afterword by Jocelyn Zelasko.

This volume places the Flint, Michigan, water contamination disaster in the context of a broader crisis created by neoliberal governance in the United States. Authors from a range of disciplines (including sociology, criminal justice, anthropology, history, communications, and jurisprudence) examine the failures in Flint, with an emphasis on comparison. Their analysis calls attention to similar trajectories for cities like Detroit and Pontiac, in Michigan, and Stockton, in California. While the studies collected here emphasize policy failures, class conflict, and racial oppression, they also attend to the resistance undertaken by Flint residents, Michiganders, and U.S. activists, as they fought for environmental and social justice.Contributors include: Terressa A. Benz, Jon Carroll, Graham Cassano, Daniel J. Clark, Katrinell M. Davis, Michael Doan, David Fasenfest, A.E. Garrison, Peter J. Hammer, Ami Harbin, Shea Howell, Jacob Lederman, Raoul S. Lievanos, Benjamin J. Pauli, and Julie Sze.