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For a city in India’s northeast that has been embroiled in the everyday militarization and violence of Asia’s longest-running armed conflict, Dimapur remains ‘off the map’. With no ‘glorious’ past or arenas where events of consequence to mainstream India have taken place, Dimapur’s essence is experienced in oral histories of events, visual archives of everyday life, lived realities of military occupation, and anxieties produced in making urban space out of tribal space. Ceasefire City captures the dynamics of Dimapur. It brings together the fragmented sensibilities granted and contested in particular spaces and illustrates the embodied experiences of the city. The first part explores military presence, capitalist growth, and urban expansion in Dimapur. The second part presents an ethnographic account of lived realities and the meanings that are forged in a frontier city.

Scholars have been debating the ethics of what is now called human gene editing for more than 60 years. This innovative book examines the historical debate and finds that it is set up as a slippery slope, with the ethically consensual acts of human gene editing at the top and the Brave New World or Gattaca at the dystopian bottom. More importantly, what stops the debate from slipping down the slope into unacceptable acts are agreed upon limits, which this book describes as barriers on the slope. The book describes what makes weak and strong barriers, and it shows how the first barriers were built on the slope. The first barrier was between modifying the existing human body (upslope of the barrier and acceptable) and modifying the species (downslope of the barrier and unacceptable). The second was between modifying to combat disease (upslope) and modifying to enhance a person’s abilities (downslope). The book shows how these barriers were weakened and finally knocked over, potentially allowing people to engage in any human gene editing they desired. The book then turns to describing barriers that could be built on the slope and also shows that many commonly advocated barriers are unstable. The debate about human gene editing, as well as many other debates in bioethics, would be greatly improved if participants would consider the insights of this book and only create defensible barriers.

The norms and expectations of father involvement have changed rapidly within one to two generations. Socially and economically marginalized fathers are being exposed to these messages through popular culture and the media; in state welfare, child protection, and probation offices; in jails, prisons, and post-release programs; and in child support and family courts. Moreover, they are being told that it is up to them to make better choices, to get themselves together, and to be involved fathers. Based on life history interviews with 138 low-income fathers, Black and Keyes show that fathers have internalized these messages and sound determined. After all, there is social worth in fatherhood, hope for creating meaningful lives or new beginnings, the fantasy of leaving something of value behind in the world, and a stake in resisting stigmatizing labels like the deadbeat dad. Most will, however, fall short for several reasons: first, while the expectations for father involvement were increasing, state and economic support for low-income families was decreasing; second, vulnerable fathers often lack viable models to guide them; third, living in dangerous neighborhoods compromises fatherhood and leaves fathers at odds with dominant institutional narratives about being nurturing fathers; and fourth, the dark side of poverty, inscribed on bodies and minds, leaves some struggling with childhood traumas and unhealthy routines to mitigate or numb these painful developmental disruptions. Consequently, the authors assert that without transformative economic, political, and social change that would facilitate and support engaged and nurturing fatherhood, these fathers are being “set up.”