Douglas Hartmann is an associate professor at the University of Minnesota. In addition to co-editing Contexts magazine and The Society Pages, Hartmann is the author of Race, Culture, and the Revolt of the Black Athlete: The 1968 Olympic Protests and Their Aftermath.

Christopher Uggen is Distinguished McKnight Professor and sociology department chair at the University of Minnesota. With Jeff Manza, he wrote Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy. In addition to co-editing Contexts magazine and The Society Pages, Uggen studies punishment and reentry, citizenship, substance use, discrimination, and most recently, health inequalities.

The Contexts Reader enables instructors to assign readings that are as accessible as a popular paperback, but as brief as a journal article, in one affordable anthology. Three-quarters of the articles were published in the last four years and are therefore new to the Second Edition.