As summer winds down, August's new books from Ideas on Fire authors invite you to reconsider the relationships that shape our collective futures.
Spanning reproductive justice, Black ecologies, queer kinship, gendered language, Indigenous agriculture, and Latinx dance, these projects explore how communities create belonging and sustain one another, as well as how they imagine alternatives to systems of extraction, exclusion, and violence.
Together, they offer powerful accounts of worldbuilding grounded in care, accountability, resilience, and resistance.
We’re honored to have supported these authors as they brought these ambitious, interdisciplinary works into the world.
Working on a book of your own? Our editorial team partners with scholars at every stage of the process, offering developmental editing, copyediting, manuscript reviews, indexing, and publisher research to help ambitious ideas reach their fullest expression. Learn more here.
Reproductive Justice, Queerly
Carly Thomsen
University of California Press
A radical framework reimagining reproductive justice through queer theory, collective liberation, and transformative political possibility.
¡Habla! Speaking Bodies and Dancing Our América
Jade Power-Sotomayor
A kinetic exploration of Latinx dance traditions as embodied resistance, relational worldmaking, and insurgent cultural knowledge.
California Futures: Haunted Ecologies, Decolonial Relations
Daniel Lanza Rivers
A decolonial study confronting California’s colonial ecologies through Indigenous, Black, queer, and anti-extractive visions of futurity.
Families We Lose: A New Explanation for Family Estrangement
Rin Reczek
A sociological account reframing family estrangement as a cultural struggle over accountability, care, and kinship in contemporary America.
An Archaeology of Milpa Cultures: Maize and Ecological Worldbuilding in Central Mexico
Keitlyn Alcántara
A restorative history of milpa agriculture illuminating ecological interdependence, food sovereignty, and Indigenous resilience.
Captive Ecologies: The Environmental Afterlives of Slavery
Jennifer C. James
A Black ecological critique tracing slavery’s enduring environmental violences across racial capitalism, enclosure, and cultural imagination.
Gather Your Ancestors: Gender, Language, and Belonging in Southeast Africa
Raevin Jimenez
A historical linguistics study revealing how gendered speech shaped belonging, migration, and community formation in Southeast Africa.
