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.

What is strikingly novel in Signs in the Dust are Lyons' efforts to articulate and ground attempts to overcome the nature-culture binary by way of theories of signs found in the writings of three medieval and early modern thinkers. The scholastic semiotics of these three figures provides Lyons with the metaphysical means to find even in the very dust a physio-semiosis, or genuine exchange of signs.

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.

Whereas social and political theory has long concerned itself with the description and analysis of structures—states, classes, national economies—Mezzadra and Neilson ask what we might learn about contemporary capitalism by instead studying its operations. How are the global workings of capital reshaping the state and its institutions? What are the implications of these processes for the continued encroachment of capitalism on new spaces and new realms of social life?

Extensively researched, The Global Interior makes significant contributions to the growing body of scholarship that historicizes the relationship between natural resource sciences, empire, and nation building.

This book is a timely set of dialogues on a series of key coordinates to navigate the political economy of Big Data Capitalism. Chandler and Fuchs have successfully composed a well-rounded volume addressing a wide range of urgent themes that include digital governance, posthuman knowledge, digital affective labor and its gendered dimensions, new (and old) forms of slavery and their respective technologies, emerging forms of political organization, and the appropriation of fixed capital by workers – among others.

The recent work of Robert Beauregard, Laura Lieto and colleagues is at the forefront of attempts at reformulating planning theory around assemblage thinking and the new materialist, post-structuralist and post-humanist thrust it comes with.

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.”