Nayan Shah’s "Stranger Intimacy" examines the social history of migrant South Asian males in the Canadian and US West during the first half of the 20th century. He analyzes this world not in isolation from other social groups but rather paradoxically as a world full of encounter.

In Spaces Between Us, Morgensen recalls his first visit to a rural retreat in southern Oregon belonging to the Radical Faeries, a back-to-the-land collective of predominantly white urban American gay counter-culturists. In his efforts at decolonization, Morgensen takes issue with the means by which queer politics achieve citizenship through normatively non-Native belonging to a settler nation.

Originally published in 2007 and translated into English by Steven Miller in 2012, "The New Wounded" represents Malabou’s most sustained philosophical interrogation of neuroscience and extends her series of interventions into the new materialisms of contemporary continental philosophy. "The New Wounded" offers a profound and often moving account of the kinds of suffering and mental trauma produced by senseless accidents, lesions and catastrophes. How to think and respond to these wounds in relation to what we understand as the brain’s plasticity – its capacity to receive, and to give, form?

Alpa Shah has written a brilliant ethnography of life in the small village of Tapu in northeast India, and the potential contribution of her book extends far beyond debates on indigenous life in the subcontinent. "In the Shadows of the State" is an excellent analysis that cuts across several themes: the operation of tribal political orders, the dangers of some strands of indigenous rights and environmental activism, and the transformations of state practices as they are reproduced through class hierarchies and sometimes violent networks.

In "Techniques of Pleasure" Margot Weiss offers an ethnography of the pansexual BDSM scene in the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 2000s. The book draws on interviews with more than sixty BDSM practitioners, as well as extended ethnographic observations at dungeon play parties, community social gatherings (‘munches’), and workshops teaching BDSM techniques and etiquette around bondage, flogging, and forms of erotic role play.

Sociologist John Urry’s recent "Climate Change and Society" is worthwhile because of his insistence that social science perspectives on climate change are dangerously absent from climate change analyses and solutions. As a remedy, his book is a vision for a disciplinary reconsideration of high-carbon human lives, why social scientists should reconsider the centrality of carbon to modernity, and a suggested political and economic solution that addresses both human and non-human climate concerns.

Marieke de Goede has written an interesting and informative book about the practices and politics of the pursuit of monies with alleged terrorist connections, particularly insofar as this pursuit has been conducted in the years since the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks of September 2001. She shows that since 2001, the “money trails” of suspected terrorist activity have become a key Western security issue; to thwart terrorism, it has increasingly been seen as essential to stem the flows of money that fund it.

"Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis" is an inspiring book. Through a set of critical self-reflections on alliances involving feminist scholars in the United States and Canada and grassroots organizations around the world, the contributors to this edited volume explore both the potentials of transnational feminist collaborations and the relations of power embedded within them.

I opened up Fiona Robinson’s recent book with excitement when I received it, as I was working on a paper linking human security and disasters and needed to think more critically about the human security literature. Robinson achieves this goal handily.

Working from a psychoanalytic tradition, Renata Salecl demonstrates the important role that unconscious emotions and desires play in shaping subjectivity and agency. More precisely, she brings Lacanian theory to bear on questions of why and how we embrace economic rationalism as well as how these processes inhibit social change.