Engaging emerging, multidisciplinary conversations across anthropology, American studies, and postcolonial studies about how empire operates and endures, "Ethnographies of U.S. Empire" is a reflection both on empire and on ethnography. Together, the chapters make a case for ethnographic research as a way of studying empire, as a method that offers not a bounded or concise definition of what makes an empire, but rather an expansive sense of how people live with and within the imperial present.

Brett Story’s "Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power" across Neoliberal America is a brilliant and timely study on prison geographies. Story, who is from Canada, arrives to the U.S. prison through her personal experiences of eviction, first as a child and then as a young student fighting against gentrification and documenting it as an amateur filmmaker.

In Barandiarán's groundbreaking book, one of the questions she grapples with is: what are the criteria that a state should use to decide in favor of or against proposed natural resources infrastructure projects? Because infrastructure developments have uneven impacts across the social and physical terrains of cities and nations, they are frequently controversial, producing political liabilities and enemies as often as they reinforce or engender political alliances.

The celebrations of the railroad as a symbol of national unity and progress are a reminder of its continued power in writing the myth of the nation, and of the importance of challenging such nation-valorizing narratives. Karuka does exactly this in his timely and provocative book, creating new ideas with which to re-examine the well-worn story of the railroad, and studying it through a broad array of distinct cases.

In "Rupture", Castells extends arguments developed most prominently in his "Information Age" trilogy. Specifically, Castells articulated a trend towards despatialization emerging from processes of accumulation mediated by information communication technologies, a new information age defined by a contradictory relationship between “the net and the self.”