By Merrill Eisenberg
[merrill@u.arizona.edu]
University of Arizona

Merrill Eisenberg

It has been an honor and a pleasure to have served as your President for the past two years. As my term comes to an end, I will hand the gavel over to Roberto Alvarez at the Business Meeting in Denver. I thank you all for the privilege and look forward to continued service to SfAA in other capacities during the years to come. This last Presidential message to you is focused on the future of our organization.

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By Mark Schuller
[mschuller@niu.edu]
Chair, Human Rights and Social Justice Committee

Mark Schuller

The next generation of the committee will be facing many challenges and opportunities, and it welcomes your input as an SfAA member.

One opportunity to build upon the activist work is to join our discussion about the membership survey. Last fall almost 900 SfAA members filled out an over-100 question survey. The results show that the membership is engaged in many levels of activism, and want to see this work continue. Sixty-five percent of us are engaged in some form of social justice issues or activism. Many of us work alongside social justice groups and activists, collaboratively in research design, etc.

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By Christine G.T. Ho
[christineho@fielding.edu]
Fielding Graduate University

Christine G.T. Ho

The U.S. immigration detention system consists of approximately 250 privately-run prisons sprawled across the country in remote locations to warehouse unauthorized immigrants. Immigrant detention has tripled over the past decade. This spectacular growth has benefited mainly the privatized U.S. prison industry. In 2011, Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group, Inc., the two largest contractors for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), reported annual revenues of $1.73 billion and $1.6 billion respectively (National Immigration Forum 2012). During President Obama’s first term, 1.4 million immigrants have been deported, which is more than were deported during the eight years of the Bush Administration.

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By Jeanne Simonelli
[simonejm@wfu.edu]
Department of Anthropology
Wake Forest University

By Duncan Earle
[DEarle@marymountpv.edu]
Global Studies
Marymount College

Hydraulic Fracturing and New York State

I came to Otsego County, New York twenty five years ago, to a gentle valley nestled on the banks of the Susquehanna, and still call it home. For years I owned a 90-acre blueberry farm and wetlands which I sold just before the landmen came, offering gradually increasing sums of money for our natural gas mineral rights. Had they knocked on my door when I owned the land, I probably would have signed. Who knew?

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By Brian McKenna
[mckenna193@aol.com]
University of Michigan-Dearborn

Brian McKenna

“Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light”

Adorno, Min­ima Moralia, 1951

The First American Revolution was an improbable affair. It was sparked when the Spanish whipped 75 Pueblo religious leaders for practicing idolatry, killing four. Fueled by a fierce desire to rid his homeland of the invaders, who’d been there nearly a century, the Pueblo Shaman Po’Pay, one of the 75, led a revolt in 1680. It was a bloody reckoning that succeeded in a full-scale Spanish withdrawal for twelve years. The rebellion is largely credited for the longevity of Pueblo people to the present.

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