Farah Godrej’s Freedom Inside? brings together a sustained attention to methodological, epistemological, and ethical challenges of studying violence within the carceral state. The book opens up the methodological entanglements at every step of the research process as Godrej navigates her own experience as a prison volunteer and participant-observer teaching yoga inside prisons. She examines these entangles as they relate to IRBs, interviewing and accessing formerly incarcerated persons, and ethnography in prison environments. Godrej carefully thinks through key methodological concepts, such as consent, confidentiality, anonymity, member-checking, without providing simple answers or resolutions. She also pushes the boundaries of who is considered a legitimate knowledge producer and what counts as scientific inquiry by co-authoring with two formerly incarcerated persons. Godrej also thoughtfully examines the role of race and gender within mass incarcerations, prisons, and population control, thus centering racial and gendered violence in a way that speaks to the Lee Ann Fujii Award.

Based on extraordinary ethnographic fieldwork, Sarah E. Parkinson’s Beyond the Lines demonstrates how insurgent groups survive in the face of state repression. Parkinson moves the reader between intimate, anecdotal excursions, informed by her ethical, interpretative lived experiences in Palestinian communities in Lebanon. In so doing, Parkinson provides a practical approach to studying militant organizations through careful relationship building, to learn with and from people she met in the course of fieldwork through their everyday social networks. Beyond the Lines also presents a challenge to political science as a discipline - to capture the complexity of the human experience in and beyond mass violence, to prioritize people’s contradictory and sometimes incomprehensible lived experiences. Parkinson’s findings illustrate the felt effects of violence, in its physical, emotional and structural forms in ways that speak to the goals of the Lee Ann Fujii award.

“Engaged Silences” illuminates how marginalized people exercise strategic agency in oppressive contexts. The chapter presents, more concretely, a close examination of how the poor widow of a Hutu participant in the Rwandan genocide navigates life post-genocide.

Natasha Behl’s Gendered Citizenship presents a fascinating and moving analysis of gendered violence. From an interpretive vantage point, this study asks why there exists pervasive genderbased discrimination, exclusion, and violence in India when the Indian constitution seemingly builds an inclusive democracy committed to gender and caste equality.

In this meticulously researched and theoretically sophisticated work, Professor Jana Krause explores key factors that contribute to the escalation of communal violence to the threshold of civil war and contrasts them with forces that succeed in preventing such escalation.