Getting materials not at BU
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Interlibrary Loan. Interlibrary Loan services allow current BU faculty, staff, and students to request books, articles, book chapters, and other materials that our ILL staff will obtain from other libraries. Books generally take 1-3 weeks to arrive; articles are generally delivered electronically within 1-2 days.
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ILL online request forms for all patrons except those affiliated with the Schools of Law and Medicine
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Law Library's interlibrary loan page for Law School affiliates
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Alumni Medical Library’s ILL form for Medical School affilliates
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For general inquires to the Interlibrary Loan office, please call (617) 353-3706 or email ILLMML@bu.edu.
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- BLC Cards. A Boston Library Consortium Card allows the bearer to borrow—in person—circulating material from a member library, just as you would from a BU library. Boston University faculty, staff, and students on the Charles River Campus may obtain a Consortium Card by filling out an application form. Medical Campus affiliates apply at the Alumni Medical Library. Students, faculty, and staff may borrow books from Boston College, Brandeis University, and Northeastern University with their Boston University ID's.
Featured books & ebooks
Click on book jackets to read the following e-books:
Accidental Immigrants and the Search for Home by
The effect of immigration on individual lives is not short lived. Those who stay in an adopted country permanently go through a continual process of adjustment and learning both about their new country-and about themselves. The four women profiled in Carol Kelley's poignant "Accidental Immigrants and the Search for Home" challenge immigrant stereotypes as their lives are transformed by moving to new countries for reasons of marriage, education, or career--not economics or politics. The intimate stories of these accidental immigrants broaden conventional notions of home. From a Maori woman who moves to Norway to the daughter of an Iranian diplomat now living in France, Kelley weaves together these stories of the personal and emotional effects of immigration with interdisciplinary discussions drawn from anthropology and psychology. Ultimately, she reveals how the lifelong process of immigration affects each woman's sense of identity and belonging and contributes to better understanding today's globalized society. a
Location: Mugar Stacks JV6342 .K45 2013ISBN: 9781439909454Publication Date: 2013-01-25
American Karma : ace, culture, and identity in the Indian diaspora by
The Indian American community is one of the fastest growing immigrant communities in the U.S. Unlike previous generations, they are marked by a high degree of training as medical doctors, engineers, scientists, and university professors. American Karma draws on participant observation and in-depth interviews to explore how these highly skilled professionals have been inserted into the racial dynamics of American society and transformed into "people of color." Focusing on first-generation, middle-class Indians in American suburbia, it also sheds light on how these transnational immigrants themselves come to understand and negotiate their identities. Bhatia forcefully contends that to fully understand migrant identity and cultural formation it is essential that psychologists and others think of selfhood as firmly intertwined with sociocultural factors such as colonialism, gender, language, immigration, and race-based immigration laws. American Karma offers a new framework for thinking about the construction of selfhood and identity in the context of immigration. This innovative approach advances the field of psychology by incorporating critical issues related to the concept of culture, including race, power, and conflict, and will also provide key insights to those in anthropology, sociology, human development, and migrant studies.
Location: Mugar Stacks JV6465 .R83 2007ISBN: 9780814799581Publication Date: 2007-08-01
Cartographies of Diaspora by
By addressing questions of culture, identity and politics, Cartographies of Diaspora throws new light on discussions about `difference' and `diversity', informed by feminism and post-structuralism. It examines these themes by exploring the intersections of `race', gender, class, sexuality, ethnicity, generation and nationalism in different discourses, practices and political contexts. The first three chapters map the emergence of `Asian' as a racialized category in post-war British popular and political discourse and state practices. It documents Asian cultural and political responses paying particular attention to the role of gender and generation. The remaining six chapters analyse the debate on `difference', `diversity' and `diaspora' across different sites, but mainly within feminism, anti-racism, and post-structuralism.
Location: Mugar Stacks DA125.A84 B73 1996ISBN: 9780415121262Publication Date: 1996-10-21
The Changing Face of Home by
The children of immigrants account for the fastest growing segment of the U.S. population under eighteen years old--one out of every five children in the United States. Will this generation of immigrant children follow the path of earlier waves of immigrants and gradually assimilate into mainstream American life, or does the global nature of the contemporary world mean that the trajectory of today's immigrants will be fundamentally different? Rather than severing their ties to their home countries, many immigrants today sustain economic, political, and religious ties to their homelands, even as they work, vote, and pray in the countries that receive them. The Changing Face of Home is the first book to examine the extent to which the children of immigrants engage in such transnational practices. Because most second generation immigrants are still young, there is much debate among immigration scholars about the extent to which these children will engage in transnational practices in the future. While the contributors to this volume find some evidence of transnationalism among the children of immigrants, they disagree over whether these activities will have any long-term effects. Part I of the volume explores how the practice and consequences of transnationalism vary among different groups. Contributors Philip Kasinitz, Mary Waters, and John Mollenkopf use findings from their large study of immigrant communities in New York City to show how both distance and politics play important roles in determining levels of transnational activity. For example, many Latin American and Caribbean immigrants are "circular migrants" spending much time in both their home countries and the United States, while Russian Jews and Chinese immigrants have far less contact of any kind with their homelands. In Part II, the contributors comment on these findings, offering suggestions for reconceptualizing the issue and bridging analytical differences. In her chapter, Nancy Foner makes valuable comparisons with past waves of immigrants as a way of understanding the conditions that may foster or mitigate transnationalism among today's immigrants. The final set of chapters examines how home and host country value systems shape how second generation immigrants construct their identities, and the economic, social, and political communities to which they ultimately express allegiance. The Changing Face of Home presents an important first round of research and dialogue on the activities and identities of the second generation vis-a-vis their ancestral homelands, and raises important questions for future research.
Location: JV6455 .C434 2002ISBN: 9780871545176Publication Date: 2002-12-12
Elite Capture : How the powerful took over identity politics. by
A powerful indictment of the ways elites have co-opted radical critiques of racial capitalism to serve their own ends. "Identity politics" is everywhere, polarizing discourse from the campaign trail to the classroom. But the "identity politics" so compulsively referenced bears little resemblance to the concept as first introduced by the radical Black feminist Combahee River Collective. While the Collective articulated a political viewpoint grounded in their own position as Black lesbians with the explicit aim of building solidarity across lines of difference, "identity politics" is now frequently weaponized as a means of closing ranks around ever-narrower conceptions of group interests. But the trouble, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò deftly argues, is not with "identity politics" itself. Through a substantive engagement with the global Black radical tradition, Táíwò identifies the process by which a radical concept can be stripped of its political substance and become the victim of elite capture--deployed by political, social, and economic elites in the service of their own interests. Táíwò's crucial intervention both elucidates this complex process and helps us move beyond a binary of "class" vs. "race." By rejecting elitist identity politics in favor of a constructive politics of radical solidarity, he advances the possibility of organizing across our differences in the urgent struggle for a better world.
Location: Law Library Pappas Reading Room JA75.7 .T35 2022ISBN: 9781642597356Publication Date: 2022-05-03
Haitians in New York City by
Pierre-Louis offers a new perspective on the strategies Haitian immigrants used to adapt to life in the United States and to shield themselves from the harsh discrimination they faced as a minority. Struggling to assimilate while continuing to maintain ties to their homeland, they transformed themselves from Third World exiles into transnational citizens. For the laborers and political refugees who left Haiti in the last half-century, class had always been more important than skin color as a barometer of social standing. To cope with the racial and cultural tensions they encountered, they established structures that allowed them to live a dual life and to preserve an ethnic identity distinct from that of African Americans. The groups they formed - ""hometown associations"" - emphasized their entrepreneurial spirit, cultural and linguistic heritage, and Haiti's glorious past as the first black republic. At the same time the associations offered them practical training, technical assistance, and networking opportunities. While the immigrants created a political identity in New York City, they also learned to access public resources and compete successfully with other ethnic and minority groups for recognition. In fact, Pierre-Louis shows, the hometown associations encouraged their desire to participate in New York City politics, a finding that turns much of the current literature on transnational politics on its head. The book also presents a background of Haitian migration into the United States, the Haitian government's contribution to that diaspora in the 1960s, and the history of such Haitian American neighborhoods as the West Side of Manhattan and the East Flatbush area in Brooklyn.
Location: Mugar Stacks F128.9.H27 P54 2006ISBN: 9780813029368Publication Date: 2006-03-30
Measuring Identity : a guide for social scientists by
The concept of identity has become increasingly prominent in the social sciences and humanities. Analysis of the development of social identities is an important focus of scholarly research, and scholars using social identities as the building blocks of social, political, and economic life have attempted to account for a number of discrete outcomes by treating identities as causal factors. The dominant implication of the vast literature on identity is that social identities are among the most important social facts of the world in which we live. Abdelal, Herrera, Johnston, and McDermott have brought together leading scholars from a variety of disciplines to consider the conceptual and methodological challenges associated with treating identity as a variable, offer a synthetic theoretical framework, and demonstrate the possibilities offered by various methods of measurement. The book represents a collection of empirically-grounded theoretical discussions of a range of methodological techniques for the study of identities.
Location: Mugar Stacks GT4803.A2 F43 1995ISBN: 9780521518185Publication Date: 2009-04-06
Find/Browse more available library materials on:
Browse/Search for Articles
Key Journals
- Diaspora: a journal of transnational studies
- Journal of ethnic & cultural studies
- National identities
- Studies in ethnicity & nationalism
History
- Humanities Full Text / Humanities & Social Sciences Index Retrospective This link opens in a new window These combined databases provide access to journal articles, book reviews, performance reviews, interviews, bibliographies and more from a broad range of humanities and social sciences journals.
Search across disciplines
- BU Libraries Search This link opens in a new window BU Libraries Search provides a single place to search for a wide variety of research material provided by the library. Resources covered by the search includes books and eBooks, journals, scores and sheet music, video and audio recordings, and other physical and electronic items held by the library. Coverage encompasses materials relating to the prehistoric and antique world through to the present.
- JSTOR This link opens in a new window This database provides full text access to the back issues of core scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Book reviews are included as well as journal articles. Abstracts are available for some of the articles.
- Project Muse This link opens in a new window Project Muse provides digital access to scholarly journals and books in the humanities and social sciences. The scholarly content comes from non-profit scholarly publishers, including university presses and societies. The full text resources include journal articles, book reviews and book chapters.
- ProQuest Dissertations & Theses This link opens in a new window This database contains indexing and abstracts of American doctoral dissertations accepted at accredited institutions since 1861 and a selection from other countries. Masters level theses are included selectively.
Social Sciences
- Ethnic NewsWatch This link opens in a new window Full text articles from newspapers and periodicals published by ethnic, minority and native presses in the U.S. Includes both historic publications, starting in 1959, as well as current ones.
- eHRAF World Cultures This link opens in a new window A systematically organized collection of thousands of books and articles on cultures from all regions of the world; provides information on particular cultures, ethnic groups, or immigrant groups, their beliefs and superstitions, or subjects such as political structure, architecture, kinship units, or settlement patterns. The information is organized by cultures and ethnic groups and the full-text documents are subject-indexed at the paragraph level. It currently consists of 290 cultures.
- Social Sciences Full Text This link opens in a new window Social Sciences Full Text provides access to hundreds of English language journals in the social sciences. About two-thirds of the journals are peer-reviewed.
- Sociological Abstracts This link opens in a new window Sociological Abstracts indexes and abstracts the international literature of sociology and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences. The database provides abstracts of journal articles and citations to book reviews. It also provides abstracts of books, book chapters, dissertations, and conference papers. Forty percent of the content is published outside of North America.
- APA PsycInfo This link opens in a new window Provides access to articles, books and book chapters, and dissertations that cover the scholarly literature in the psychological, social, behavioral, and health sciences. Includes material of relevance to psychologists and professionals in related fields such as psychiatry, management, business, education, social science, neuroscience, law, medicine, and social work.
- Communication & Mass Media Complete This link opens in a new window CMMC indexes journals covering communication, mass media, linguistics, discourse, rhetoric, sociolinguistics, communication theory, language, logic, organizational communication and other closely related fields of study.
BU Libraries Search
You can use the BU Libraries Search box to look for print and electronic resources available thru the Boston University Libraries. These resources include print books and journals available in the library stacks, as well as e-books and full-text journal articles.
For search tips or questions regarding the search function: see the Search Help page.
For physical items, you will need the call number and library location to locate the books or journals in the stacks. See the location chart (available by the elevators and at the research center) to help you find the floor by call number range.
Browse/Search for Multimedia
Searchable catalogs & databases for films:
- Academic Video OnlineAcademic Video Online is a comprehensive, multidisciplinary video subscription that supports the entire range of curriculum, from anthropology to zoology. It includes a variety of video material available with curricular relevance: documentaries, interviews, feature films, performances, news programs and newsreels, and demonstrations. Patrons will find thousands of award-winning films, including Academy®, Emmy®, and Peabody® winners. Academic institutions will find frequently used films for classroom instruction, plus newly released films and previously unavailable archival material.
- Kanopy This link opens in a new window Kanopy is a provider of documentaries, training films, and theatrical releases available as streaming video. Clips from the videos can be embedded in presentations or shown in class. Films in the Boston University Libraries catalog are licensed to Boston University for educational and research use only, for BU students, faculty, and staff.
