Stanford University Press Blog

SCIENCE FAKE AND REAL

On Enlightenment scientists and the forgotten role of imagination.

by TITA CHICO

March for Science in San Francisco. Photo by Steve Rapport, CCBY2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Headlines today pop with accusations that traditional sources of knowledge and even experts are biased, ideological, and unreliable. Accusations of “fake science” have become particularly commonplace. The Heritage Foundation think tank reports on the pervasiveness of fake science, laying the blame on scientists themselves. In their view, climate change isn’t caused by humans, and scientists are mere lackeys for a liberal political agenda. In response, practicing scientists and advocates have responded vociferously: the 2017 earth Day “March for Science” took place not only in Washington DC, but in more than 600 cities worldwide. The Union of Concerned Scientists has reached out through panels, such as the one on “Defending Science and Scientific Integrity ” at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual conference.

As long as there has been modern science, there have been hoaxes. In 1726, Mary Toft, an illiterate English servant in Surrey, claimed to have given birth to dead animal parts and scores of rabbits, a wonder made all the more persuasive by the authorization of the royal anatomist, Nathaniel St. André. She was brought to London and revealed as a fraud. A year earlier, the physician Johann Beringer, Chair of Natural History at the University of Würzburg and chief physician to the city’s Prince Bishop, was duped into believing that 2000 pieces of limestone in the shape of animals, some engraved with the name of God, were fossils or were of divine origin fossils. They were really the prank of a jealous colleague.

The New Primitives

Ben Etherington, author of Literary Primitivism, on the historical and contemporary notions of primitivism. Excerpt courtesy of the Los Angeles Review of Books.

by BEN ETHERINGTON

 

George Catlin by William Fisk, 1849.

The idea for the Na’vi, the made-up humanoid species indigenous to the planet Pandora in James Cameron’s 2009 primitivist blockbuster Avatar, came to the director via his mother. In the 1970s, she told her son about a dream of a 12-foot blue woman, and this formed the basis for the brief he would deliver to his designers 30 years later. The Na’vi were to be blue, tall, muscular, sleek, and feline. They had to be alien enough to be plausibly otherworldly, but take a form, the concept artist Jordu Schell recalled Cameron stipulating, that “the audience has to want to fuck.” Among other things, this meant that the film’s female Na’vi lead, Neytiri, had “to have tits” even though, Cameron freely admitted to Playboy, the Na’vi are not placental mammals. As he developed prototypes, Schell pinned up pictures of “beautiful ethnic women” to ensure that his feline aliens would reflect the ids of the teenage boys who made up the film’s key demographics.

The plot of the film follows the tested formula of primitivist transformation. A man of civilization, in this case the paraplegic US marine Jake Sully, is sent to colonize the primitive lands beyond civilization’s perimeter only himself to “go primitive” after learning of their innocent beauty and recognizing the barbarism of his own destructive civilization. It’s a structure that underlies other blockbusters like Dances with Wolves, its sci-fi equivalents, and numerous journey-into-the-interior classics (especially the work of Joseph Conrad). Eros is built into this formula. Coition marks the point at which the civilized man gives himself over to the primitive tribe and discovers, or recovers, his primitive self. Primitivist utopias, in short, are fuckable utopias.

The Book of Radiance

An old Jew reflects on what the Zohar illuminates about the nature of the Jewish tradition.

by RABBI YEHIEL E. POUPKO

Photo by Kalie Caetano.

In 2002, Stanford University Press embarked on the ambitious initiative of publishing a 12-volume translation of the foundational work of Jewish mysticism, The Zohar. This monumental, 20-year translation project, generously underwritten by Margot Pritzker, was undertaken by Daniel Matt with assistance on the final three volumes from Nathan Wolski and Joel Hecker. I am honored to have supervised this program at the Press from the beginning, and have had the sincere pleasure of working with both Daniel Matt and Rabbi Yehiel Poupko, who has overseen and managed the work on behalf of the Zohar Education Project, Inc (ZEPI). In two companion blog posts, Daniel Matt and Rabbi Poupko reflect on their experiences. While the translation was completed in 2016, and the final volume was published in 2017, SUP will continue to develop the work and help it to reach new audiences. The beautiful, limited run Collector's Edition was released at the end of 2017, and we plan to release ebook editions of all twelve volumes in the summer of 2018, while at the same time re-releasing native HTML editions of the Aramaic source texts. Watch out for future new works on the Zohar web page.

—Alan Harvey, Director, Stanford University Press

Until the Zohar was written down, or emerged and erupted, or was composed, sometime in the late-thirteenth to early-fourteenth century, a Mitzvah, a Commandment, was just that: It was God’s instruction. If anyone wanted to know why the Jews obeyed the Mitzvot, or if anyone were curious as to the purpose of the Commandments, the answer was very simple: The purpose is to obey God. The reason why the Commandments are obeyed, followed, and observed is because God commanded them. Thou shalt not steal…; Remember the Sabbath Day…; Do not eat everything available out there…; and on, and on, and on. Any time a Jewish person asked that question from the first century onward (and even earlier), the given answer was the same. The reason for the Commandments is that God has commanded them.

Yet the Zohar changed the answer to that question in a fundamental way. One obeys the Mitzvot. One fulfills the Commandments. One integrates the Mitzvot-Commandments into one’s life not only because God commanded it but because the Mitzvot have far-reaching cosmic power. They can in fact have an effect, as if one can imagine it or even say it, on God’s very Self.

A New-Ancient Zohar

On translating the Zohar’s poetic and unruly Aramaic, while staying true to the text’s original ambiguity.

by DANIEL C. MATT

 

 The Zohar Collector's Set

In 2002, Stanford University Press embarked on the ambitious initiative of publishing a 12-volume translation of the foundational work of Jewish mysticism, The Zohar. This monumental, 20-year translation project, generously underwritten by Margot Pritzker, was undertaken by Daniel Matt with assistance on the final three volumes from Nathan Wolski and Joel Hecker. I am honored to have supervised this program at the Press from the beginning, and have had the sincere pleasure of working with both Daniel Matt and Rabbi Yehiel Poupko, who has overseen and managed the work on behalf of the Zohar Education Project, Inc (ZEPI). In two companion blog posts, Daniel Matt and Rabbi Poupko reflect on their experiences. While the translation was completed in 2016, and the final volume was published in 2017, SUP will continue to develop the work and help it to reach new audiences. The beautiful, limited run Collector's Edition was released at the end of 2017, and we plan to release ebook editions of all twelve volumes in the summer of 2018, while at the same time re-releasing native HTML editions of the Aramaic source texts. Watch out for future new works on the Zohar web page.

—Alan Harvey, Director, Stanford University Press

It has been an adventure to spend eighteen years translating the Zohar. This mystical commentary on the Torah is not only the masterpiece of Kabbalah, but also a gem of world literature that has remained mostly hidden ever since it was composed in Spain in the thirteenth century.

When the project was first proposed to me, back in 1995, I was simultaneously thrilled and frightened. How could I hope to complete such a vast undertaking, translating and explicating some 1,600 pages of dense, intentionally cryptic Aramaic? Yet, how could I turn down this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity? After thinking about it for a couple of weeks, and then a couple of months, I decided to try it before committing myself to the project; but this experiment drained me so much that I decided to decline the offer, amazing though it was. Then, however, I met Margot Pritzker, who had first proposed the idea to me. She said that she understood my hesitation, and then she asked how long such a project might take. “Twelve to fifteen years,” I replied, to which she responded simply, “You’re not scaring me.” When I heard that, something inside of me flipped. Maybe it was that I heard her words as a challenge: “I’m not scared. Why are you?” In any case, in that moment I changed my mind and said, “Okay, I’ll do it.”

The Zohar is not only the masterpiece of Kabbalah but also a gem of world literature.

Contested Foundations

How 20th-century debates reveal enduring tensions at the core of the human rights project.

by MARK GOODALE

Excerpt from a letter from W.H. Auden to Julian Huxley.

In 1947 and 1948, the bold and controversial first Director-General of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Julian Huxley, together with Jacques Havet, the young first head of UNESCO’s philosophy sub-section, took steps that were intended to shape the conceptual framework of what became the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948. During these years, UNESCO put in motion an extraordinary process that was meant to reveal a cross-cultural consensus on the basic philosophical and ethical principles upon which a new global social contract should be based. This process—which involved soliciting opinions on the question of human rights by notables such as T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and Gandhi—took place independently of the much more public one that unfolded somewhat later under the auspices of the UN’s Commission on Human Rights (CHR), which was chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt.

UNESCO put in motion an extraordinary process that was meant to reveal a cross-cultural consensus on the basic philosophical and ethical principles upon which a new global social contract should be based.

The work of UNESCO on human rights during this period, the debates surrounding its conflicts with the CHR, the specific results of the cross-cultural survey it undertook, and the broader implications of this survey for the meanings and legitimacy of human rights, were all lost to a history that was dominated by the geopolitical logics of the Cold War. Nevertheless, new research has revisited the UNESCO human rights survey in light of ongoing debates over what a recent volume by Hopgood, Snyder, and Vinjamuri has described as “human rights futures”: the possibilities for and limitations to human rights among the contemporary disorder and violence that Samuel Moyn calls the “neoliberal maelstrom.”

Why Cavemen Needed No Braces

Crooked teeth are a modern phenomenon and a telltale sign of an underlying epidemic.

by SANDRA KAHN and PAUL R. EHRLICH

A 1,000-year-old skull of a Philistine woman excavated in Israel reveals how pre-industrial people did not suffer from crooked teeth to the same extent we do today. Photo by Jim Hollander/EPA.

Modern industrialized societies are plagued by crowded, ill-aligned teeth, a condition that the dental profession refers to as “malocclusion”—which translates literally to “bad bite.” Survey data from 1998 suggests that as much as a fifth of the U.S. population has significant malocclusion, over half of which require at least some degree of orthodontic intervention. Braces, tooth extractions, and retainers are the bread and butter for all the dentists and orthodontists tasked with setting straight our dental deviations. Having braces as a child has become so common in the Western world that it can seem a rite of passage—today, an estimated 50 to 70 percent of U.S. children will wear braces before adulthood. But what did humans do to fix their teeth before modern dentistry, before Novocain, gauze, and rubber spacers?

As it turns out, our ancestors did not suffer from crooked teeth to the same extent that we do today. Our species’ fossil record reveals a telling story: the epidemic of crooked teeth developed in humans over time. Evolutionary biologist, Daniel Lieberman, notes the pattern in his book, The Story of the Human Body:

The museum I work in has thousands of ancient skulls from all over the world. Most of the skulls from the last few hundred years are a dentist’s nightmare: they are filled with cavities and infections, the teeth are crowded into the jaw, and about one-quarter of them have impacted teeth. The skulls of preindustrial farmers are also riddled with cavities and painful-looking abscesses, but less than 5 percent of them have impacted wisdom teeth. In contrast, most of the hunter-gatherers had nearly perfect dental health. Apparently, orthodontists and dentists were rarely necessary in the Stone Age.

Ample evidence abounds in support of Lieberman’s observations. A comparison of 146 medieval skulls from abandoned Norwegian graveyards with modern skulls indicated a trend toward bad bite in our more recent forebears. The skulls of people scored as being in “great” or “obvious” need of orthodontic treatment made up 36 percent of the medieval sample and 65 percent of the modern sample. And evidence of malocclusion in still earlier human fossils is vanishingly rare. The jaws of hunter-gatherers nearly uniformly reveal roomy, perfect arches of well aligned teeth, with no impacted wisdom teeth—a movie star’s dream smile, 15,000 years before the movies!

Plastic Pollution and Poetry

How American poets contend with the downstream consequences of today’s ecological crises.

by MARGARET RONDA

CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Earlier this week, the world marked Earth Day, the theme of which was plastic pollution. Environmental organizers around the globe are calling for increased awareness of plastic consumption and its protracted environmental effects, and hope to achieve a dramatic reduction in plastic pollution by Earth Day 2020. Contemporary poets, too, have been calling attention to the impacts of plastic on ecosystems and biospheric processes in their writings. In “The Age of Plastic,” a piece published in a recent anthology on the poetry of climate change, Chamorro eco-poet Craig Santos Perez catalogs the innumerable ways plastics are embedded in contemporary life. Found in household goods and medical products, technological, military, and transportation networks, bodily interiors and industrial processes, this synthetic material plays an enabling role in virtually all spheres of human activity. Perez highlights some of its beneficial, life-sustaining applications:

plastic keeps food fresh—
delivers medication and clean water—
forms cable and clothes—
ropes and nets—even
stops bullets—
“plastic is the perfect creation
because it never dies”—

In other sections, Perez explores how plastics facilitate the prenatal development, birth, and newborn care of his infant daughter, pointing to the birth tub in which his wife labors, the Ziploc bag holding the placenta, the plastic nipple that feeds his baby milk. Drawing together this personal description of plastic’s role in his own family’s reproductive dynamics with the larger imbrications of plastic in everyday existence, Perez portrays plastic as an intimate container for and enabler of bodily experience. He wryly contrasts this synthetic substance against the delicate, vulnerable bodies of new baby and mother, calling attention to the uncanny endurance of the “perfect creation” of plastic.

The rise of plastics and their deleterious ecological effects is one key story of the Great Acceleration.

The Creator’s Journey

The creative process is about much more than the “aha!” moment.

by MATTHEW A. CRONIN

Public domain via Pixnio.

If there is a part of the creative process that captures people’s imagination, it is the moment of inspiration. Stories of creativity via a sudden spark of inspiration abound; I am sure you, dear reader, can think of some as you are reading this. These stories trace the emergence of some fabulous invention or discovery back to a single fundamental insight—some breakthrough idea that grows out of a serendipitous, revelatory moment that others could not imagine. Not to be a killjoy (for we so love these stories), but it turns out that this fabled “aha!” moment is more reality TV than reality. But on the positive side, there is a better alternative—one that may be more useful if you actually want to take the creator’s journey.

Kepler—a case study in creativity

An example that illustrates the journey, and how it can be overlooked, was astronomer Johannes Kepler’s seventeenth-century “insight” about planetary motion. At the time, the universe was all about circles, which were both perfect and heavenly. Orbital paths were modeled as “circles-within-circles.” Once Kepler had had his say, however, he had literally changed the universe, or at least how people saw it. His insight could be summed up in a single idea: planets moved in elliptical orbits at a varying speed, not in circular orbits at a constant speed. But while Kepler’s journey may have ended at an idea, it did not start there.

The fabled “aha!” moment is more reality TV than reality.

Christian Theology’s Economy of Conquest

Martin Luther King Jr.’s challenge to the American church’s capitalist God of war.

by DEVIN SINGH

In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “Beyond Vietnam” speech.

As an extension of his fight against racist laws at home, Martin Luther King Jr. became increasingly critical of US policies abroad. Indeed, many speculate that King’s progressively strident critique of US militarism and intervention, particularly in Vietnam, and his challenge to American market priorities were factors that accelerated plans for his assassination—the 50th anniversary of which we recently marked as a nation. Among his many detractors were white clergy who, already incensed at King’s challenge to segregation and Jim Crow, were dumbfounded that he would move to oppose US warmongering and to call out the evils of capitalism. As King’s confrontation revealed, their theology was not only implicated in their racist vision of society, but also in a worldview that prioritized economic supremacy by any means necessary.

On April 4th, 1967, exactly one year to the day before he was murdered, King gathered with other religious leaders to protest the war in Vietnam at the Riverside Church in New York, where he delivered his famous sermon, “Beyond Vietnam.” As he began, King addressed his critics, those who asked, “Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent?”; “Peace and civil rights don’t mix.” To such complaints, King responded: “the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment, or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.”

China’s Political Paradox

The hallmark tensions in Chinese politics today first took shape in the 1911 Revolution.

by XIAOWEI ZHENG

Public gathering in Chengdu on November 27, 1911, for the Great Han Sichuan Military Government. United Church Archives, Toronto.

In the winter of 1911, legendary revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen returned to China after years of exile and found the country in the grip of a sweeping transformation. Between October 10, when junior officers in the Hubei New Army mutinied in Wuchang, and November 22, when the Sichuan constitutionalists declared independence from the Qing, fourteen provinces had severed their ties with the government of the Manchu dynasty.

Political elites throughout China were defecting from the court en masse. Among the most influential were the constitutionalists from Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces, who proposed a plan for uniting all of the southern forces into one polity under the banner of republicanism. It was they who initiated the truce between the Qing Beiyang Army and the revolutionary armies in Wuchang, elected the southern delegates to negotiate with the northern leader Yuan Shikai, promoted Sun Yat-sen as the first provisional president of the republic, and penned the abdication edict for the Qing court.

 

Imperial edict for abdication. Public domain.

 

This edict, which claimed that “the power to govern is now transferred to all in the country (tongzhiquan gongzhu quanguo)” and that “a constitutional republic is now the state system of our country (gonghe lixian guoti),” signaled the end of the monarchy and the birth of the Chinese republic. This seismic political shift was premised on the belief that “republicanism had been accepted by public opinion (yulun) in China,” and the constitutionalists looked to the federalist system of the United States as their model, vowing to “immediately emulate the United States of America in calling upon a national convention, regarding it as our temporary authoritative legislature.”

Crowdsourcing American History

A free, open, online history textbook offers a democratic alternative to the American past.

by JOSEPH L. LOCKE and BEN WRIGHT

George Caleb Bingham, “The County Election,” 1852.

Exploding costs plague higher education, and textbooks are at the center of this crisis. Over the past forty years, textbook prices have jumped fifteen-fold—three times the rate of inflation, and the College Board has found that the typical student now spends $1,200 every year on textbooks and supplies. Community colleges and other educational institutions catering to nontraditional or first-generation college students still rely heavily on traditional textbooks, which means that the very students least able to afford these ever-increasing costs are the most likely to bear them. Moreover, many students forego buying their textbooks altogether— found that two-thirds of students reported not buying a book because of cost, and nearly all of those did so knowing that this would affect their grade. As our campuses ring with calls for authentic assessment, we are left to wonder how authentic our assessments can be if over sixty percent of our students determine that they cannot afford to earn an A.

Our goal was not simply to create a free textbook. We also wanted to collaborate to make a better textbook.

Enter The American Yawp, the first massively collaborative, open U.S. history textbook produced by scholars of American history. We conceived of the project while teaching at community colleges in the greater Houston area as graduate students at Rice University. Frustrated at the high costs and occasionally uneven quality of existing U.S. history textbooks, we were shocked to find that an open alternative didn’t yet exist. And so we went to work. Our project was designed to achieve two goals: the first was to address the soaring costs of textbooks by creating an open alternative; the second was to experiment with new collaborative methods to build a textbook that was not only cheaper, but better.

The Promise of Peer Coaching

Helping relationships between peers can lead to significant breakthroughs.

by ILENE C. WASSERMAN and KATHY E. KRAM

Public domain via Pxhere.

In Cambridge, Massachusetts a small educational nonprofit called Breakthrough Greater Boston is changing the academic trajectories for underserved middle school students. The organization, which offers year-round, tuition-free instruction outside of regular school hours recruits college and high school students to teach in the program and act as coaches for the younger students. Breakthrough calls this its “students teaching students” model, and the resulting success of its programs have been phenomenal: the high school graduation rate for its students is 98 percent. Better still, college-bound students at Breakthrough—which has strong partnerships with local universities likes Tufts and MIT—have a college graduation rate of over 95 percent.

Peer Coaching at Work » delivers a hands-on guide to a powerful relational learning technique.

What the success of Breakthrough teaches us is how valuable peer coaching can be. We define peer coaching as a focused relationship between individuals of equal status who support each other’s personal and professional development goals, like the student teachers and their pupils at Breakthrough or that colleague you collaborate with closely at your office. Whether in not-for-profit entities such as Breakthrough, in learning circles to support CEO development, or in health care, business, or government sectors, people are forming collaborative relationships to support their growth both in and outside of the workplace. These helping relationships involve two or more individuals who supportively learn from, actively listen to, and judiciously question each other, which leads to breakthroughs that otherwise may lie dormant and prevent growth and effectiveness. In today’s turbulent, globalized, and complex world, collaborative relationships with peers are an important resource for tackling the challenges we face.

The Origins of the U.S. Surveillance State

In the U.S., carrying out military interventions abroad has undermined freedom at home.

by CHRISTOPHER J. COYNE and ABIGAIL R. HALL

Photo by Jonathan McIntosh. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

The Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal continues to be front-page news. According to current reports Cambridge Analytica obtained private Facebook data, which it used to send pro-Trump material to targeted Facebook users. These reports have been met with outrage in Washington, D.C. The Federal Trade Commission has opened an investigation and U.S. senators have called for Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook CEO, to testify in front of Congress.

Calls by Congress for increased oversight to prevent private companies from surveilling people are extremely ironic given that they themselves recently renewed a section of the 2008 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act which allows for the warrantless surveillance of Americans. Issues regarding the appropriate use of government surveillance are also at the center of Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump administration. These headlines provide an excellent opportunity to consider the history of the U.S. government’s surveillance state, which matters for people across the world whose liberties are at stake as government power expands.

The origins of the present-day surveillance state can be traced back to the U.S. government’s military occupation of the Philippines in the late 1890s.

The Secret Society and the Sociologist

What can the fieldwork of a plucky sociology student reveal about rural Chinese history?

by DI WANG

Today's Chongyiqiao (Hope Township). Photo by Di Wang.

In 1939, residents of Hope Township, a rural village close to Chengdu, watched Lei Mingyuan, a leader of the local chapter of a secret society called the Paoge, execute his own teenage daughter on the strength of a mere rumor that she and a young tailor who worked for his family were having an illicit affair. Despite the brutal and brazen nature of his crime, however, Lei did not face any charges; lynching was prevalent and the rule of law was problematic at the time. Six years later, in the summer of 1945, Shen Baoyuan, a female college student in the Department of Sociology at Beijing’s Yenching University, arrived in Hope Township to conduct fieldwork and research on the social organization of rural secret societies. She met Lei and his family and documented rare insights not only about the tragic murder but about the inner workings of the Paoge. This work never became published or recognized—at least, that is, until now.

I had wanted to write a book on the Paoge as early as the 1980s when I worked on a social history of Qing Sichuan. About a decade ago, a friend of mine found Shen’s report and offered me a copy. I realized that Shen’s report was useful, but as I was concentrating on another project at the time, I gave it no immediate thought, and the report languished on my shelf for years. During the spring of 2009, while teaching history at Berkeley, I poured over all “cultural and historical materials” (wenshi ziliao) from provincial and county to district administrations in Sichuan on the shelves of the C.V. Starr East Asian Library. This provided me with rich background information on the Paoge, and in 2014, with another book nearing completion, I began to give serious thought to a project on this influential and longstanding secret society. That summer, I taught a graduate seminar at East China Normal University in which I used several classic works of micro-history such as The Return of Martin Guerre by Natalie Zemon Davis and Robert Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre. These works inspired me to attempt a micro-history of my own, based on Shen Baoyuan’s investigation.

The Dreamers’ Fight

A syllabus for understanding the challenges facing undocumented youth.

Los Angeles March for Immigrant Rights, September 2017. Photo by Molly Adams. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr. 

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which granted provisional work permits and protection from deportation to undocumented youth, has been at the center of a maelstrom of political debate. Signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2012 and rescinded by President Donald Trump in 2017, the DACA program and those who are protected under it have been sent into a tailspin of uncertainty as Congress remains gridlocked on long-term immigration reform. This stalemate triggered a government shutdown in January, and though President Trump gave Congress a March 5th deadline to hammer out a new policy, no progress on a legislative solution has yet to be made.

In the meantime, challenges from federal courts in New York and California have issued injunctions against terminating the program, allowing those young immigrants who already have DACA permits to continue applying for renewals. This stay, however, is only temporary. If no long-term solution is reached, hundreds of thousands of young immigrants whose parents brought them to the United States as children could find themselves unable to legally work and eligible for deportation.

For a more detailed look at the recent political and cultural history that brought us to this moment, we’ve gathered below a short syllabus of books that explore the rhetoric, policies, and activism around the present US immigration debate.