Best of
Academia

2015

Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy


Tressie McMillan Cottom - 2015
    Yet little is known about why for-profits have expanded so quickly and even less about how the power and influence of this big-money industry impact individual lives. Lower Ed, the first book to link the rapid expansion of for-profit degrees to America’s increasing inequality, reveals the story of an industry that exploits the pain, desperation, and aspirations of the most vulnerable and exposes the conditions that allow for-profit education to thrive.Tressie McMillan Cottom draws on her personal experience as a former counselor at two for-profit colleges and dozens of interviews with students, senior executives, and activists to detail how these schools have become so successful and to decipher the benefits, credentials, pitfalls, and real costs of a for-profit education. By humanizing the hard choices about school and survival that millions of Americans face, Lower Ed nimbly parses the larger forces that deliver some of us to Yale and others to For-Profit U in an office park off Interstate 10.

The Professor Is In: The Essential Guide To Turning Your Ph.D. Into a Job


Karen Kelsky - 2015
     into their ideal job   Each year tens of thousands of students will, after years of hard work and enormous amounts of money, earn their Ph.D. And each year only a small percentage of them will land a job that justifies and rewards their investment. For every comfortably tenured professor or well-paid former academic, there are countless underpaid and overworked adjuncts, and many more who simply give up in frustration.   Those who do make it share an important asset that separates them from the pack: they have a plan. They understand exactly what they need to do to set themselves up for success.  They know what really moves the needle in academic job searches, how to avoid the all-too-common mistakes that sink so many of their peers, and how to decide when to point their Ph.D. toward other, non-academic options.   Karen Kelsky has made it her mission to help readers join the select few who get the most out of their Ph.D. As a former tenured professor and department head who oversaw numerous academic job searches, she knows from experience exactly what gets an academic applicant a job. And as the creator of the popular and widely respected advice site The Professor is In, she has helped countless Ph.D.’s turn themselves into stronger applicants and land their dream careers.   Now, for the first time ever, Karen has poured all her best advice into a single handy guide that addresses the most important issues facing any Ph.D., including:   -When, where, and what to publish -Writing a foolproof grant application -Cultivating references and crafting the perfect CV -Acing the job talk and campus interview -Avoiding the adjunct trap -Making the leap to nonacademic work, when the time is right  The Professor Is In addresses all of these issues, and many more.

Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness


Simone Browne - 2015
    She shows how contemporary surveillance technologies and practices are informed by the long history of racial formation and by the methods of policing black life under slavery, such as branding, runaway slave notices, and lantern laws. Placing surveillance studies into conversation with the archive of transatlantic slavery and its afterlife, Browne draws from black feminist theory, sociology, and cultural studies to analyze texts as diverse as the methods of surveilling blackness she discusses: from the design of the eighteenth-century slave ship Brooks, Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, and The Book of Negroes, to contemporary art, literature, biometrics, and post-9/11 airport security practices. Surveillance, Browne asserts, is both a discursive and material practice that reifies boundaries, borders, and bodies around racial lines, so much so that the surveillance of blackness has long been, and continues to be, a social and political norm.

Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work


Kimberly Kay Hoang - 2015
    Over the course of five years, author Kimberly Kay Hoang worked at four exclusive Saigon hostess bars catering to diverse clientele: wealthy local Vietnamese and Asian businessmen, Viet Kieus (ethnic Vietnamese living abroad), Western businessmen, and Western budget-tourists. Dealing in Desire takes an in-depth and often personal look at both the sex workers and their clients to show how Vietnamese high finance and benevolent giving are connected to the intimate spheres of the informal economy. For the domestic super-elite who use the levers of political power to channel foreign capital into real estate and manufacturing projects, conspicuous consumption is a means of projecting an image of Asian ascendancy to potential investors. For Viet Kieus and Westerners who bring remittances into the local economy, personal relationships with local sex workers reinforce their ideas of Asia’s rise and Western decline, while simultaneously bolstering their diminished masculinity. Dealing in Desire illuminates Ho Chi Minh City’s sex industry as not just a microcosm of the global economy, but a critical space where dreams and deals are traded.

Theatre of the Unimpressed: In Search of Vital Drama


Jordan Tannahill - 2015
    There were of course those rare moments of transcendence that kept me coming back. But why did they come so few and far between?A lot of plays are dull. And one dull play, it seems, can turn us off theatre for good. Playwright and theatre director Jordan Tannahill takes in the spectrum of English-language drama – from the flashiest of Broadway spectacles to productions mounted in scrappy storefront theatres – to consider where lifeless plays come from and why they persist. Having travelled the globe talking to theatre artists, critics, passionate patrons and the theatrically disillusioned, Tannahill addresses what he considers the culture of ‘risk aversion’ paralyzing the form.Theatre of the Unimpressed is Tannahill’s wry and revelatory personal reckoning with the discipline he’s dedicated his life to, and a roadmap for a vital twenty-first-century theatre – one that apprehends the value of ‘liveness’ in our mediated age and the necessity for artistic risk and its attendant failures. In considering dramaturgy, programming and alternative models for producing, Tannahill aims to turn theatre from an obligation to a destination.

From Topic to Thesis: A Guide to Theological Research


Michael Kibbe - 2015
    Professors have two options: use valuable class time to teach students as much as they can, or lower their standards with the understanding that students cannot be expected to complete tasks for which they have never been prepared. From Topic to Thesis: A Guide to Theological Research offers a third option. This affordable and accessible tool walks students through the process, focusing on five steps: finding direction, gathering sources, understanding issues, entering discussion and establishing a position. Its goal is to take students directly from a research assignment to a research argument--in other words, from topic to thesis.

McNamara's Folly: The Use of Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam War


Hamilton Gregory - 2015
    So, on October 1, 1966, McNamara lowered mental standards and inducted thousands of low-IQ men. Altogether, 354,000 of these men were taken into the Armed Forces and a large number of them were sent into combat. Many military men, including William Westmoreland, the commanding general in Vietnam, viewed McNamara’s program as a disaster. Because many of the substandard men were incompetent in combat, they endangered not only themselves but their comrades as well. Their death toll was appallingly high. In addition to low-IQ men, tens of thousands of other substandard troops were inducted, including criminals, misfits, and men with disabilities. This book tells the story of the men caught up in McNamara’s folly.

Lactivism: How Feminists and Fundamentalists, Hippies and Yuppies, and Physicians and Politicians Made Breastfeeding Big Business and Bad Policy


Courtney Jung - 2015
    New moms are pressured by doctors, health officials, and friends to avoid the bottle at all costs-often at the expense of their jobs, their pocketbooks, and their well-being. In Lactivism, political scientist Courtney Jung offers the most deeply researched and far-reaching critique of breastfeeding advocacy to date. Drawing on her own experience as a devoted mother who breastfed her two children and her expertise as a social scientist, Jung investigates the benefits of breastfeeding and asks why so many people across the political spectrum are passionately invested in promoting it, even as its health benefits have been persuasively challenged. What emerges is an eye-opening story about class and race in America, the big business of breastfeeding, and the fraught politics of contemporary motherhood.

Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network


Caroline Levine - 2015
    Caroline Levine argues that forms organize not only works of art but also political life-and our attempts to know both art and politics. Inescapable and frequently troubling, forms shape every aspect of our experience. Yet, forms don't impose their order in any simple way. Multiple shapes, patterns, and arrangements, overlapping and colliding, generate complex and unpredictable social landscapes that challenge and unsettle conventional analytic models in literary and cultural studies. Borrowing the concept of affordances from design theory, this book investigates the specific ways that four major forms-wholes, rhythms, hierarchies, and networks-have structured culture, politics, and scholarly knowledge across periods, and it proposes exciting new ways of linking formalism to historicism and literature to politics. Levine rereads both formalist and antiformalist theorists, including Cleanth Brooks, Michel Foucault, Jacques Rancière, Mary Poovey, and Judith Butler, and she offers engaging accounts of a wide range of objects, from medieval convents and modern theme parks to Sophocles's Antigone and the television series The Wire. The result is a radically new way of thinking about form for the next generation and essential reading for scholars and students across the humanities who must wrestle with the problem of form and context.

Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the New York City Hyperghetto


Eric Tang - 2015
    Unsettled chronicles the unfinished odyssey of Bronx Cambodians, closely following one woman and her family for several years as they survive yet resist their literal insertion into concentrated Bronx poverty.  Eric Tang tells the harrowing and inspiring stories of these refugees to make sense of how and why the displaced migrants have been resettled in the “hyperghetto.” He argues that refuge is never found, that rescue discourses mask a more profound urban reality characterized by racialized geographic enclosure, economic displacement and unrelenting poverty, and the criminalization of daily life. Unsettled views the hyperghetto as a site of extreme isolation, punishment, and confinement. The refugees remain captives in late-capitalist urban America. Tang ultimately asks: What does it mean for these Cambodians to resettle into this distinct time and space of slavery’s afterlife?

The Ferguson Report: Department of Justice Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department


U.S. Department of Justice - 2015
    For months afterward, protestors took to the streets demanding justice, testifying to the racist and exploitative police department and court system, and connecting the shooting of Brown with the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and other young black men at the hands of police across the country.In the wake of these protests, the Department of Justice launched a six-month investigation, resulting in a report that Colorlines characterizes as "so caustic it reads like an Onion article" and laying bare what the Huffington Post calls "a totalizing police regime beyond any of Kafka's ghastliest nightmares." Among the report's findings are that the Ferguson Police Department "Engages in a Pattern of Unconstitutional Stops and Arrests in Violation of the Fourth Amendment," "Detain[s] People Without Reasonable Suspicion and Arrest[s] People Without Probable Cause," "Engages in a Pattern of First Amendment Violations," "Engages in a Pattern of Excessive Force," and "Erode[s] Community Trust, Especially Among Ferguson's African-American Residents."Contextualized here in a substantial introduction by renowned legal scholar and former NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund president Theodore M. Shaw, The Ferguson Report is a sad, sobering, and important document, providing a snapshot of American law enforcement at the start of the twenty-first century, with resonance far beyond one small town in Missouri.

Settler: Identity and Colonialism in 21st Century Canada


Emma Battell Lowman - 2015
    But what does it mean to be Settler? And why does it matter?Through an engaging, and sometimes enraging, look at the relationships between Canada and Indigenous nations, Settler: Identity and Colonialism in 21st Century Canada explains what it means to be Settler and argues that accepting this identity is an important first step towards changing those relationships. Being Settler means understanding that Canada is deeply entangled in the violence of colonialism, and that this colonialism and pervasive violence continue to define contemporary political, economic and cultural life in Canada. It also means accepting our responsibility to struggle for change. Settler offers important ways forward -- ways to decolonize relationships between Settler Canadians and Indigenous peoples -- so that we can find new ways of being on the land, together.This book presents a serious challenge. It offers no easy road, and lets no one off the hook. It will unsettle, but only to help Settler people find a pathway for transformative change, one that prepares us to imagine and move towards just and beneficial relationships with Indigenous nations. And this way forward may mean leaving much of what we know as Canada behind.

Russell Kirk: American Conservative


Bradley J. Birzer - 2015
    Although conservative luminaries such as T. S. Eliot, William F. Buckley Jr., Leo Strauss, and Eric Voegelin all published important works at this time, none of their writings would match the influence of Russell Kirk's 1953 masterpiece The Conservative Mind. This seminal book became the intellectual touchstone for a reinvigorated movement and began a sea change in Americans' attitudes toward traditionalism.In Russell Kirk, Bradley J. Birzer investigates the life and work of the man known as the founder of postwar conservatism in America. Drawing on papers and diaries that have only recently become available to the public, Birzer presents a thorough exploration of Kirk's intellectual roots and development. The first to examine the theorist's prolific writings on literature and culture, this magisterial study illuminates Kirk's lasting influence on figures such as T. S. Eliot, William F. Buckley Jr., and Senator Barry Goldwater—who persuaded a reluctant Kirk to participate in his campaign for the presidency in 1964.While several books examine the evolution of postwar conservatism and libertarianism, surprisingly few works explore Kirk's life and thought in detail. This engaging biography not only offers a fresh and thorough assessment of one of America's most influential thinkers but also reasserts his humane vision in an increasingly inhumane time.

The Fallacy Detective: Thirty-Eight Lessons on How to Recognize Bad Reasoning


Nathaniel Bluedorn - 2015
    I thoroughly enjoyed this book and would recommend it to anyone who wants to improve his reasoning skills."--Tim Challies, curriculum reviewer"Cartoon and comic illustrations, humorous examples, and a very reader-friendly writing style make this the sort of course students will enjoy."--Cathy Duffy, homeschool curriculum reviewer"I really like The Fallacy Detective because it has funny cartoons, silly stories, and teaches you a lot!"--11 Year OldWhat is a fallacy? A fallacy is an error in logic a place where someone has made a mistake in his thinking. This is a handy book for learning to spot common errors in reasoning.- For ages twelve through adult.- Fun to use -- learn skills you can use right away.- Peanuts, Dilbert, and Calvin and Hobbes cartoons.- Includes The Fallacy Detective Game.- Exercises with answer key.

Finding My Way


Mavis Applewater - 2015
    Dr. Stephanie Grant has carefully planned out her life. After accepting a position at Prower University she quickly learns that life doesn't follow a plan. After meeting Allison Kendell she begins to question if she has ever been happy. Suddenly her well planned life is spiraling out of control.

John Knox


Jane E.A. Dawson - 2015
    Based in large part on previously unavailable sources, including the recently discovered papers of Knox’s close friend and colleague Christopher Goodman, Dawson’s biography challenges the traditionally held stereotype of this founder of the Presbyterian denomination as a strident and misogynist religious reformer whose influence rarely extended beyond Scotland. She maintains instead that John Knox relied heavily on the support of his “godly sisters” and conferred as well as argued with Mary, Queen of Scots. He was a proud member of the European community of Reformed Churches and deeply involved in the religious Reformations within England, Ireland, France, Switzerland, and the Holy Roman Empire.Casting a surprising new light on the public and private personas of a highly complex, difficult, and hugely compelling individual, Dawson’s fascinating study offers a vivid, fully rounded portrait of this renowned Scottish preacher and prophet who had a seismic impact on religion and society.

Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard


Jill Stauffer - 2015
    It is the result of multiple lapses on the part of human beings and political institutions that, in failing to listen well to survivors, deny them redress by negating their testimony and thwarting their claims for justice.Jill Stauffer examines the root causes of ethical loneliness and how those in power revise history to serve their own ends rather than the needs of the abandoned. Out of this discussion, difficult truths about the desire and potential for political forgiveness, transitional justice, and political reconciliation emerge. Moving beyond a singular focus on truth commissions and legal trials, she considers more closely what is lost in the wake of oppression and violence, how selves and worlds are built and demolished, and who is responsible for re-creating lives after they are destroyed.Stauffer boldly argues that rebuilding worlds and just institutions after violence is a broad obligation and that those who care about justice must first confront their own assumptions about autonomy, liberty, and responsibility before an effective response to violence can take place. In building her claims, Stauffer draws on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Jean Améry, Eve Sedgwick, and Friedrich Nietzsche, as well as concrete cases of justice and injustice across the world.

PhD: An uncommon guide to research, writing & PhD life


James Hayton - 2015
    “I started my PhD in September 2003, but it wasn’t long before I realised that it’s much easier to get onto a PhD programme than it is to complete one…”If the aim of a PhD is to develop the skills of a professional academic researcher, how should you go about it? Using the principles of skill development as a foundation, this book provides a unique approach to the most common challenges of PhD research, including:Getting to know the literature in your fieldDeveloping your research ideasBecoming a better academic writerCoping with the stress and unpredictability of researchPublications and presentationsWriting, submitting and defending your thesis

The Limits of Critique


Rita Felski - 2015
    Felski argues that critique is a sensibility best captured by Paul Ricoeur’s phrase “the hermeneutics of suspicion.” She shows how this suspicion toward texts forecloses many potential readings while providing no guarantee of rigorous or radical thought. Instead, she suggests, literary scholars should try what she calls “postcritical reading”: rather than looking behind a text for hidden causes and motives, literary scholars should place themselves in front of it and reflect on what it suggests and makes possible. By bringing critique down to earth and exploring new modes of interpretation, The Limits of Critique offers a fresh approach to the relationship between artistic works and the social world.

And: Phenomenology of the End


Franco "Bifo" Berardi - 2015
    Precarization and fractalization of labor have provoked a deep mutation in the psychosphere, and this can be seen in the rise of psychopathologies such as post-traumatic stress disorder, autism, panic, and attention deficit disorder. Sketching out an aesthetic genealogy of capitalist globalization, Berardi shows how we have arrived at a point of such complexity in the semiotic flows of capital that we can no longer process its excessive currents of information. A swarm effect now rules: it has become impossible to say "no." Social behavior is trapped in inescapable patterns of interaction coded by techno-linguistic machines, smartphones, screens of every size, and all of these sensory and emotional devices end up destroying our organism's sensibility by submitting it to the stress of competition and acceleration.Arguing for disentanglement rather than resistance, Berardi concludes by evoking the myth of La Malinche, the daughter of a noble Aztec family. It is a tale of a translator and traitor who betrayed her own people, yet what the myth portends is the rebirth of the world from the collapse of the old.

The Snowflake: Winter's Frozen Artistry


Kenneth Libbrecht - 2015
    Its journey starts when ice forms around a nucleus of dust and is blown by the winds through clouds where the crystals blossom into tiny ice stars. Because it weighs next to nothing, a snow crystal may take hours to fall--finally landing where Caltech physicist Kenneth Libbrecht can use microphotography to record the tiny, intricate, frozen artistry of the snowflake. In The Snowflake: Winter's Frozen Artistry, Libbrecht teams with author Rachel Wing to create the most fascinating book on snowflakes ever published. This book defines the art and science of snowflakes for generations.Join Libbrecht and Wing as they charmingly chronicle the creation of snow crystals, both in nature and in the laboratory. The Snowflake: Winter's Frozen Artistry touches the hand of Mother Nature, showing incredible microphotography of individual snow crystals from all over the world. The book tells the history of snowflake observations mixed with an entertaining blend of tales of hunting snowflakes, snowflakes in literature and art, and the science of snowflakes, to bring a flurry of delightful snowflakes into the hands of warm-bodied humans everywhere. With this captivating book, we can better appreciate snowflakes, winter's frozen artistry.

Campus Sex, Campus Security


Jennifer Doyle - 2015
    Sex has its own administrative unit. It is a bureaucratic progression. —from Campus Sex, Campus SecurityThe psychic life of the university campus is ugly. The idyllic green quad is framed by paranoid cops and an anxious risk-management team. A student is beaten, another is soaked with pepper spray. A professor is thrown to the ground and arrested, charged with felony assault. As the campus is fiscally strip-mined, the country is seized by a crisis of conscience: the student makes headlines now as rape victim and rapist. An administrator writes a report. The crisis is managed.Campus Sex, Campus Security is Jennifer Doyle's clear-eyed critique of collegiate jurisprudence, in the era of campus corporatization, “less-lethal” weaponry, ubiquitous rape discourse, and litigious anxiety. Today's university administrator rides a wave of institutional insecurity, as the process of administering student protests and sexual-assault complaints rolls along a Möbius strip of shifting legality. One thing (a crime) flips into another (a violation) and back again. On campus, the criminal and civil converge, usually in the form of a hearing that mimics the rituals of a military court, with its secret committees and secret reports, and its sanctions and appeals.What is the university campus in this world? Who is it for? What sort of psychic space does it simultaneously produce and police? What is it that we want, really, when we call campus security?

Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures (New Black Studies Series)


L.H. Stallings - 2015
    It is multisensory and multidimensional philosophy used in conjunction with the erotic, eroticism, and black erotica. It is the affect that shapes film, performance, sound, food, technology, drugs, energy, time, and the seeds of revolutionary ideas for black movements. But funk is also an experience to feel, to hear, to touch and taste, and in Funk the Erotic , L. H. Stallings uses funk in all its iterations as an innovation in black studies. Stallings uses funk to highlight the importance of the erotic and eroticism in Black cultural and political movements, debunking "the truth of sex" and its histories. Brandishing funk as a theoretical tool, Stallings argues that Western theories of the erotic fail as universally applicable terms or philosophies, and thus lack utility in discussions of black bodies, subjects, and culture. In considering the Victorian concept of freak in black funk, Stallings proposes that black artists across all media have fashioned a tradition that embraces the superfreak, sexual guerrilla, sexual magic, mama's porn, black trans narratives, and sex work in a post-human subject position. Their goal: to ensure survival and evolution in a world that exploits black bodies in capitalist endeavors, imperialism, and colonization. Revitalizing and wide-ranging, Funk the Erotic offers a needed examination of black sexual cultures, a discursive evolution of black ideas about eroticism, a critique of work society, a reexamination of love, and an articulation of the body in black movements.

Hollywood Forever


Harmony Holiday - 2015
    The "legacies" of Miles Davis and MLK and Billie Holiday and other icons collide, harnessing taboos they upheld triumphantly. Layers of a story coalesce in restricted space producing ghettos, or a mythological advertising omniverse wherein shadow and light integrate, complicating our fantasies.The New Mythology Begins to Love me With an immediacy that seems at once artless and profoundly sophisticated. You know how Billie Holiday sounds vague and precise like an unmarked grave that might your father's but he had another name for his disappearance, he called it love eventfully shattered with enough of itI heard black people don't get depressed, besides as luxury, and the bible says. What's popular now is the way the miracle of pure style cures or is it curses, crosses our heart, hopes to hide of what it don't get while new angels sing hexes into bottles of northern comfort. Uproar. Jesus, already these myths are obsolete too and fresh the cold details he was bleeding his twisted love into. He was bleeding his twisted love. He was bleeding his twisted love. He was bleeding his twisted love.Born in Waterloo, Iowa, poet and choreographer Harmony Holiday was educated at the University of California, Berkeley and at Columbia University. Her debut collection of poems, Negro League Baseball (2011), won the Motherwell Prize. Go Find your Father/A Famous Blues, a "dos-a-dos" book featuring poetry, letters and essays, came out in late 2013. Holiday lives in Los Angeles.

HBR 20-Minute Manager Boxed Set (10 Books) (HBR 20-Minute Manager Series)


Harvard Business Review - 2015
    Finance Basics explains the fundamentals of corporate finance—and its jargon; Running Meetings gives you the tools and checklists you need to keep your meetings effective and efficient; Presentations helps you create and deliver a persuasive performance, fast; Managing Projects shows you how to set up and execute on a project plan; Managing Time helps you to figure out where all the minutes of your day are going—and how to get them under control; Getting Work Done helps you to use each of those minutes more productively; Creating Business Plans shows you how to present the risks and rewards of your idea; Managing Up helps you to build your relationship with your boss; Delegating Work shows you how to hand work off right; and Giving Effective Feedback teaches you how to make potentially difficult confrontations and turn them into productive conversations. This 10-volume, specially priced boxed set makes a perfect gift for aspiring leaders who are short on time but need advice fast.Don't have much time? Get up to speed fast on the most essential business skills with HBR's 20-Minute Manager series. Whether you need a crash course or a brief refresher, each book in the series is a concise, practical primer that will help you brush up on a key management topic. Advice you can quickly read and apply, for ambitious professionals and aspiring executives—from the most trusted source in business. Also available as an ebook.

Learn to Program with Minecraft: Transform Your World with the Power of Python


Craig Richardson - 2015
    Learn how to customize Minecraft to make mini-games, duplicate entire buildings, and turn boring blocks into gold. You'll also write programs that: Take you on an automated teleportation tour around your Minecraft world Build massive monuments, pyramids, forests, and more in a snap! Make secret passageways that open when you activate a hidden switch Create a spooky ghost town that vanishes and reappears elsewhere Show exactly where to dig for rare blocks Cast a spell so that a cascade of flowers (or dynamite if you're daring!) follows your every move Make mischief with dastardly lava traps and watery curses that cause huge floods Whether you're a Minecraft megafan or a newbie, you'll see Minecraft in a whole new light while learning the basics of programming. Sure, you could spend all day mining for precious resources or building your mansion by hand, but with the power of Python, those days are over! Requires: Windows 7 or later; OS X 10.10 or later; or a Raspberry Pi. Uses Python 3

Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women


Mia E. Bay - 2015
    This collection of essays by fifteen scholars of history and literature establishes black women's places in intellectual history by engaging the work of writers, educators, activists, religious leaders, and social reformers in the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean. Dedicated to recovering the contributions of thinkers marginalized by both their race and their gender, these essays uncover the work of unconventional intellectuals, both formally educated and self-taught, and explore the broad community of ideas in which their work participated. The end result is a field-defining and innovative volume that addresses topics ranging from religion and slavery to the politicized and gendered reappraisal of the black female body in contemporary culture. Contributors are Mia E. Bay, Judith Byfield, Alexandra Cornelius, Thadious Davis, Corinne T. Field, Arlette Frund, Kaiama L. Glover, Farah J. Griffin, Martha S. Jones, Natasha Lightfoot, Sherie Randolph, Barbara D. Savage, Jon Sensbach, Maboula Soumahoro, and Cheryl Wall.

Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347-1600


Nükhet Varlık - 2015
    Using a wealth of archival and narrative sources, including medical treatises, hagiographies and travellers' accounts, as well as recent scientific research, Nükhet Varlik demonstrates how plague interacted with the environmental, social, and political structures of the Ottoman Empire from the late medieval through the early modern era. The book argues that the empire's growth transformed the epidemiological patterns of plague by bringing diverse ecological zones into interaction and by intensifying the mobilities of exchange among both human and non-human agents. Varlik maintains that persistent plagues elicited new forms of cultural imagination and expression, as well as a new body of knowledge about the disease. In turn, this new consciousness sharpened the Ottoman administrative response to the plague, while contributing to the makings of an early modern state.

The Need to Help: The Domestic Arts of International Humanitarianism


Liisa H. Malkki - 2015
    Malkki shifts the focus of the study of humanitarian intervention from aid recipients to aid workers themselves. The anthropological commitment to understand the motivations and desires of these professionals and how they imagine themselves in the world "out there," led Malkki to spend more than a decade interviewing members of the international Finnish Red Cross, as well as observing Finns who volunteered from their homes through gifts of handwork. The need to help, she shows, can come from a profound neediness—the need for aid workers and volunteers to be part of the lively world and something greater than themselves, and, in the case of the elderly who knit "trauma teddies" and "aid bunnies" for "needy children," the need to fight loneliness and loss of personhood. In seriously examining aspects of humanitarian aid often dismissed as sentimental, or trivial, Malkki complicates notions of what constitutes real political work. She traces how the international is always entangled in the domestic, whether in the shape of the need to leave home or handmade gifts that are an aid to sociality and to the imagination of the world.

An Act of Genocide: Colonialism and the Sterilization of Aboriginal Women


Karen Stote - 2015
    Though many people were targeted, the coercive sterilization of one group has gone largely unnoticed. An Act of Genocide unpacks long-buried archival evidence to begin documenting the forced sterilization of Aboriginal women in Canada. Grounding this evidence within the context of colonialism, the oppression of women and the denial of Indigenous sovereignty, Karen Stote argues that this coercive sterilization must be considered in relation to the larger goals of Indian policy — to gain access to Indigenous lands and resources while reducing the numbers of those to whom the federal government has obligations. Stote also contends that, in accordance with the original meaning of the term, this sterilization should be understood as an act of genocide, and she explores the ways Canada has managed to avoid this charge. This lucid, engaging book explicitly challenges Canadians to take up their responsibilities as treaty partners, to reconsider their history and to hold their government to account for its treatment of Indigenous peoples.

Scientific Babel: How Science Was Done Before and After Global English


Michael D. Gordin - 2015
    No matter which languages you know, if you want your work seen, studied, and cited, you need to publish in English. But that hasn’t always been the case. Though there was a time when Latin dominated the field, for centuries science has been a polyglot enterprise, conducted in a number of languages whose importance waxed and waned over time—until the rise of English in the twentieth century.   So how did we get from there to here? How did French, German, Latin, Russian, and even Esperanto give way to English? And what can we reconstruct of the experience of doing science in the polyglot past? With Scientific Babel, Michael D. Gordin resurrects that lost world, in part through an ingenious mechanism: the pages of his highly readable narrative account teem with footnotes—not offering background information, but presenting quoted material in its original language. The result is stunning: as we read about the rise and fall of languages, driven by politics, war, economics, and institutions, we actually see it happen in the ever-changing web of multilingual examples. The history of science, and of English as its dominant language, comes to life, and brings with it a new understanding not only of the frictions generated by a scientific community that spoke in many often mutually unintelligible voices, but also of the possibilities of the polyglot, and the losses that the dominance of English entails.   Few historians of science write as well as Gordin, and Scientific Babel reveals his incredible command of the literature, language, and intellectual essence of science past and present. No reader who takes this linguistic journey with him will be disappointed.

South: Scott and Amundsen's Race to the Pole


Hunter Stewart - 2015
    South, by historian Hunter Stewart, chronicles the competition between two fierce rivals - Robert F. Scott and Roald Amundsen - to secure their place in history as the first man to lead an expedition to the most uninhabitable place on earth. South dramatically tells the story of the quest that is marked by heartbreak, greed, ego, and bravery - not only by Scott and Amundsen but by the courageous crews and financial backers who supported them. The journey to reach the South Pole was truly, as it was later called, "The Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration."

Making and Unmaking Nations: War, Leadership, and Genocide in Modern Africa


Scott Straus - 2015
    To solve that puzzle, he examines postcolonial Africa, analyzing countries in which genocide occurred and where it could have but did not. Why have there not been other Rwandas? Straus finds that deep-rooted ideologies--how leaders make their nations--shape strategies of violence and are central to what leads to or away from genocide. Other critical factors include the dynamics of war, the role of restraint, and the interaction between national and local actors in the staging of campaigns of large-scale violence.Grounded in Straus's extensive fieldwork in contemporary Africa, the study of major twentieth-century cases of genocide, and the literature on genocide and political violence, Making and Unmaking Nations centers on cogent analyses of three nongenocide cases (C�te d'Ivoire, Mali, and Senegal) and two in which genocide took place (Rwanda and Sudan). Straus's empirical analysis is based in part on an original database of presidential speeches from 1960 to 2005. The book also includes a broad-gauge analysis of all major cases of large-scale violence in Africa since decolonization. Straus's insights into the causes of genocide will inform the study of political violence as well as giving policymakers and nongovernmental organizations valuable tools for the future.

Writing a Proposal for Your Dissertation: Guidelines and Examples


Steven R. Terrell - 2015
    Steven R. Terrell demonstrates how to write each chapter of the proposal, including the problem statement, purpose statement, and research questions and hypotheses; literature review; and detailed plan for data collection and analysis. Of special utility, end-of-chapter exercises serve as building blocks for developing a full draft of an original proposal. Numerous case study examples are drawn from across the social, behavioral, and health science disciplines. Appendices present an exemplary proposal written three ways to encompass quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods designs. User-Friendly Features *"Let's Start Writing" exercises leading up to a complete proposal draft. *"Do You Understand?" checklists of key terms plus an end-of-book glossary. *End-of-chapter quizzes with answers. *Case study examples from education, psychology, health sciences, business, and information systems. *Sample proposal with three variants of the methods chapter: quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods.

Paper Tiger: Law, Bureaucracy and the Developmental State in Himalayan India


Nayanika Mathur - 2015
    A welfare legislation aimed at providing employment and commanding a huge budget becomes 'unimplementable' in a region bedeviled by high levels of poverty and unemployment. Paper Tiger provides a lively ethnographic account of how such seemingly bizarre scenarios come to be in contemporary India. Based on eighteen months of intensive fieldwork, this book presents a unique explanation for why and how progressive laws can do what they do and not, ever-so-often, what they are supposed to do. It reveals the double-edged effects of the reforms that have been ushered in by the post-liberalization Indian state, particularly the effort to render itself more transparent and accountable. Through a meticulous detailing of everyday bureaucratic life on the Himalayan borderland, Paper Tiger makes an argument for shifting the very frames of thought through which we apprehend the workings of the developmental Indian state.

C. S. Lewis and his Circle: Essays and Memoirs from the Oxford C.S. Lewis Society


Roger White - 2015
    Lewis Society has met weekly in the medieval colleges of Oxford University. During that time, it has hosted as speakers nearly all those still living who were associated with the Inklings--the Oxford literary circle led by C.S. Lewis--as well as authors and thinkers of a prominence that nears Lewis's own.C.S. Lewis and His Circle offers the reader a chance to join this unique group. Roger White has worked with Society past-presidents Brendan and Judith Wolfe to select the best unpublished talks, which are here made available to the public for the first time. They represent the best of traditional academic essays, thoughtful memoirs, and informal reminiscences about C.S. Lewis and his circle. The reader will re-imagine Lewis's Cosmic Trilogy with former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams; read philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe's final word on Lewis's arguments for Christianity; hear the Reverend Peter Bide's memories of marrying Lewis and Joy Davidman in an Oxford hospital; and learn about Lewis's Narnia Chronicles from his former secretary.Representing the best of both personal and scholarly engagement with C.S. Lewis and the Inklings, the talks collected here set a new tone for engagement with this iconic Oxford literary circle--a tone close to Lewis's own Oxford-bred sharpness and wryness, seasoned with good humor and genuine affection for C.S. Lewis and his circle.

A Christian Guide to the Classics


Leland Ryken - 2015
    But for those of us who remain a bit intimidated or simply want to get more out of our reading, this companion to Crossway's Christian Guides to the Classics series is here to help.In this brief guidebook, popular professor, author, and literary expert Leland Ryken explains what the classics are, how to read them, and why they're still valuable. Written to help you become a seasoned reader and featuring a list of books to get you started, this guide will give you the tools you need to read and enjoy some of history's greatest literature.

Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling


Jason Mittell - 2015
    One of the most notable impacts of these shifts is the emergence of highly complex and elaborate forms of serial narrative, resulting in a robust period of formal experimentation and risky programming rarely seen in a medium that is typically viewed as formulaic and convention bound.Complex TV offers a sustained analysis of the poetics of television narrative, focusing on how storytelling has changed in recent years and how viewers make sense of these innovations. Through close analyses of key programs, including The Wire, Lost, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, Veronica Mars, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Mad Men the book traces the emergence of this narrative mode, focusing on issues such as viewer comprehension, transmedia storytelling, serial authorship, character change, and cultural evaluation. Developing a television-specific set of narrative theories, Complex TV argues that television is the most vital and important storytelling medium of our time.

A Short History of Disease


Sean Martin - 2015
    Even before recorded history began, disease plagued human civilizations, claiming more lives than natural disasters and warfare combined. The ongoing battle with new and resurgent diseases has challenged physicians, scientists, and historians in their struggle to identify causes, antidotes, and preventative measures to combat these epidemics. Analyzing case studies including the Black Death, Spanish Flu, cholera, leprosy, syphilis, cancer, and Ebola, this book systematically maps the development of trends and the latest research on disease into a concise and enlightening timeline. Offering a fascinating and compelling insight into a popular area of social history, this easy-to-read introduction will tell you all you need to know about disease and the ongoing quest to protect human health.

Queer Lovers and Hateful Others: Diversity, Racism and the Militarisation of Intimacy


Jin Haritaworn - 2015
    As images of same-sex intimacy have become an ordinary part of the Western mainstream and discourse, Haritaworn shows that politicians and pundits have used that acceptance as a weapon to attack “Muslim homophobia” to promote their Islamophobic agendas. Haritaworn argues that this is simply the newest wrinkle in a long history of the deliberate misuse of colonized and racialized intimacies, and he raises provocative questions about how we should think about identity and how we should enact it in political practice. What, he asks, would it mean to really decolonize gender and sexuality?

My Unsentimental Education


Debra Monroe - 2015
    Fearless but naive, she vaults over class barriers but never quite leaves her past behind. When it comes to men, she’s still blue collar. Negotiating the world of dating, Monroe pays careful attention to what love and sex mean to a woman ambivalent about her newfound status as “liberated.”Both the story of her steady rise into the professional class and a parallel history of unsuitable exes, this memoir reminds us how accidental even a good life can be. If Joan Didion advises us “to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be,” Monroe takes this advice a step further and nods at the people she might have become but didn’t. Funny, poignant, wise, My Unsentimental Education explores the confusion that ensues when a working-class girl ends up far from where she began.

The Intersectional Internet; Race, Sex, Class, and Culture Online


Safiya Umoja Noble - 2015
    These inquiries include, among others, how representation to hardware, software, computer code, and infrastructures might be implicated in global economic, political, and social systems of control.Contributors argue that more research needs to explicitly trace the types of uneven power relations that exist in technological spaces. By looking at both the broader political and economic context and the many digital technology acculturation processes as they are differentiated intersectionally, a clearer picture emerges of how under-acknowledging culturally situated and gendered information technologies are impacting the possibility of participation with (or purposeful abstinence from) the Internet.This book is ideal for undergraduate and graduate courses in Internet studies, library and information studies, communication, sociology, and psychology. It is also ideal for researchers with varying expertise and will help to advance theoretical and methodological approaches to Internet research.

Starting Your PhD: What You Need To Know (PhD Knowledge Book 1)


Helen Kara - 2015
    Presented in an accessible question-and-answer format, and packed with facts, it is easy to read and to find your way around. Whether you've recently started your doctoral study, you're still wondering whether doctoral study is for you, or you are supporting someone else through the process, this book will help. It is full of useful information and guidance for the early stages of this exciting new adventure.

Intimate Empire: Collaboration and Colonial Modernity in Korea and Japan


Nayoung Aimee Kwon - 2015
    After the Japanese empire’s collapse in 1945, new nation-centered histories in Korea and Japan actively erased these once ubiquitous cultural interactions that neither side wanted to remember.  Kwon reconsiders these imperial encounters and their contested legacies through the rise and fall of Japanese-language literature and other cultural exchanges between Korean and Japanese writers and artists in the Japanese empire. The contrast between the prominence of these and other forums of colonial era cultural collaborations between the colonizers and the colonized, and their denial in divided national narrations during the postcolonial aftermath, offers insights into the paradoxical nature of colonial collaboration, which Kwon characterizes as embodying desire and intimacy with violence and coercion. Through the case study of the formation and repression of imperial subjects between Korea and Japan, Kwon considers the imbrications of colonialism and modernity and the entwined legacies of colonial and Cold War histories in the Asia-Pacific more broadly.

Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch, 1934-1995


Iris Murdoch - 2015
    As well as her sharp sense of humour and irreverence, they also reveal her personal life, the subject of much speculation, in all its complexity: her emotional hunger and her tendency to live on the edge of what was socially acceptable. We see how this fed into her novels’ plots and characters, despite her claims that her fiction was not drawn from reality.These letters bring us closer than ever before to Iris Murdoch as a person. They make for an extraordinary and intimate reading experience: she is wonderful company.

The First World War: The War To End All Wars (Very Short History Book 17)


Tristan Clark - 2015
    Yet it became a human tragedy on a global scale. By war's end, after four terrible years, 93% of the world’s population had been dragged in to what became known as the Great War the war to end all wars. 65 million men had marched headlong into the conflict. Between eight and nine million of them never returned home. In total, some 21 million people were killed as a result of the Great War. For the first time in war, well over half of them – some 13 million – were civilians. The Very Short History series gives the reader a clear, concise, and very short, account of the people and events that have shaped world history. Each book provides an entertaining and engaging narrative, allowing the reader to master the subject in the shortest time possible.

Why Science Is Sexist (BWB Texts Book 34)


Nicola Gaston - 2015
    My optimism lies in the fact that I think that the answer to why science is sexist does all of these things.In this eye-opening BWB Text, Nicola Gaston, President of the New Zealand Association of Scientists, reveals the ways in which the discipline of science is sexist. From the under-representation of women to the argument that mental capabilities are gendered, Gaston demonstrates the extent of our unconscious bias against female scientists, and warns of its damaging consequences for science and for society. In asking what can be done to combat this bias, she calls for us to rethink not just our attitudes towards gender, but also towards scientific knowledge and inquiry.

Data Management for Researchers


Kristin Briney - 2015
    Kristin Briney offers practical advice and clearly explains policies and principles, in an accessible and in-depth text that will allow researchers to understand and achieve the goal of better research management.It includes sections on: The data problem; The data lifecycle; Planning for data management; Documenting your data; Organizing your data; Improving data analysis; Managing secure and private data; Short-term storage; Preserving and archiving your data; Sharing/publishing your data; and Reusing data.This book is designed for scientific researchers but it is useful for anyone who wants to get more from their data: academics, educators, professionals or anyone who teaches data management, sharing and preservation.

Post-Millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of 'Happy Gothic'


Catherine Spooner - 2015
    Catherine Spooner reads a comprehensive range of popular texts from Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series and Tim Burton's film adaptations of Sweeney Todd and Dark Shadows to fashion, advertising, tourism, TV makeover shows, stand-up comedy, sitcom and children's media. In doing so, she argues that conventional academic and media accounts of Gothic culture have overlooked the significance of this celebratory strain of 'Happy Gothic'.Identifying a shift in subcultural sensibilities following media coverage of the Columbine shootings, Spooner suggests that changing perceptions of Goth subculture have shaped the development of 21st-century Gothic. Reading these contemporary trends back into their sources, Spooner also explores how they serve to highlight previously neglected strands of comedy and romance in earlier Gothic literature.

Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age


Claire Jean Kim - 2015
    It examines three controversies: the battle over the "cruelty" of the live animal markets in San Francisco's Chinatown, the uproar over the conviction of NFL superstar Michael Vick on dogfighting charges, and the firestorm over the Makah tribe's decision to resume whaling in the Pacific Northwest after a hiatus of more than seventy years. Claire Jean Kim shows that each dispute demonstrates how race and species operate as conjoined logics, or mutually constitutive taxonomies of power, to create the animal, the Chinese immigrant, the black man, and the "Indian" in the white imagination. Analyzing each case as a conflict between single optics (the optic of cruelty and environmental harm vs. the optic of racism and cultural imperialism), she argues for a multi-optic approach that takes different forms of domination seriously, and thus encourages an ethics of avowal among different struggles.

Modernizing Marriage: Family, Ideology, and Law in Nineteenth- And Early Twentieth-Century Egypt


Kenneth M. Cuno - 2015
    That contrast reflected the spread of new ideals of family life that accompanied the development of Egypt's modern marriage system. Modernizing Marriage explores the evolution of marriage and marital relations, shedding new light on the social and cultural history of Egypt. Family is central to modern Egyptian history and in the ruling court did the political work. Indeed, the modern state began as a household government in which members of the ruler's household served in the military and civil service. Cuno discusses political and sociodemographic changes that affected marriage and family life and the production of a family ideology by modernist intellectuals, who identified the family as a site crucial to social improvement, and for whom the reform and codification of Muslim family law was a principal aim. Throughout Modernizing Marriage, Cuno examines Egyptian family history in a comparative and transnational context, addressing issues of colonial modernity and colonial knowledge, Islamic law and legal reform, social history, and the history of women and gender.

Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies


Heather Davis - 2015
    This brilliant collection of essays and projects, gathered from all over the world, reflects the limits and possibilities of how visual art might respond to what Sylvère Lotringer describes as a "state of emergency." Art in the Anthropocene is at once an investigation and an homage to the natural world. It describes what we possess and what we have lost.Chris Kraus – author of Where Art Belongs Art in the Anthropocene is an art book like no other, embracing an extraordinary range of subjects that affect what we call "our" environment. Visual artists are, for once, equal participants in these imaginative, intelligent, and informative discussions of the most pressing issues of our time, and deep time.Lucy R. Lippard – author of Undermining: A Wild Ride through Land Use, Politics and Art in the Changing West Call it the Anthropocene, the #misanthropocene, or something else—there’s a growing recognition that these are damaged times, even if nobody is quite sure how to see, think, or feel them. That’s why Art in the Anthropocene is so important. Davis and Turpin have gathered up the seeds for a whole biome of art and thought about the things that really matter in this world.McKenzie Wark – author of Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene This is a rich, ambitious, and beautifully edited collection that reimagines the Anthropocene as an affective rather than a scientific fact. It touches the very core of our being (post)human—and of the space around us we variously call “the environment” or “the world.” Art in the Anthropocene is vital read for anyone who cares about art, animals, climate, ethics, extinction, justice, plants, poetry and the weather!Joanna Zylinska, author of Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene

Integrating Mindfulness into Anti-Oppression Pedagogy: Social Justice in Higher Education


Beth Berila - 2015
    Authentic classroom discussions about oppression and diversity can be difficult; a mindful approach allows students to explore their experiences with compassion and to engage in critical inquiry to confront their deeply held beliefs and value systems. This engaging book is full of practical tips for deepening learning, addressing challenging situations, and providing mindfulness practices in anti-oppression classrooms. Integrating Mindfulness into Anti-Oppression Pedagogy is for all higher education professionals interested in pedagogy that empowers and engages students in the complex unlearning of oppression.

Spatializing Blackness: Architectures of Confinement and Black Masculinity in Chicago


Rashad Shabazz - 2015
    From the start, carceral powers literally and figuratively created a prison-like environment to contain these African Americans within the so-called Black Belt on the city's South Side. A geographic study of race and gender, Spatializing Blackness casts light upon the ubiquitous--and ordinary--ways carceral power functions in places where African Americans live. Moving from the kitchenette to the prison cell, and mining forgotten facts from sources as diverse as maps and memoirs, Rashad Shabazz explores the myriad architectures of confinement, policing, surveillance, urban planning, and incarceration. In particular, he investigates how the ongoing carceral effort oriented and imbued black male bodies and gender performance from the Progressive Era to the present. The result is an essential interdisciplinary study that highlights the racialization of space, the role of containment in subordinating African Americans, the politics of mobility under conditions of alleged freedom, and the ways black men cope with--and resist--spacial containment.A timely response to the massive upswing in carceral forms within society, Spatializing Blackness examines how these mechanisms came to exist, why society aimed them against African Americans, and the consequences for black communities and black masculinity both historically and today.

Is This America?: Katrina as Cultural Trauma


Ron Eyerman - 2015
    This violation of the social contract undermined the foundational narratives and myths of the American nation and spawned a profound, often contentious public debate over the meaning of Katrina’s devastation. A wide range of voices and images attempted to clarify what happened, name those responsible, identify the victims, and decide what should be done. This debate took place in forums ranging from mass media and the political arena to the arts and popular culture, as various narratives emerged and competed to tell the story of Katrina.Is This America? explores how Katrina has been constructed as a cultural trauma in print media, the arts and popular culture, and television coverage. Using stories told by the New York Times, New Orleans Times-Picayune, Time, Newsweek, NBC, and CNN, as well as the works of artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers, and graphic designers, Ron Eyerman analyzes how these narratives publicly articulated collective pain and loss. He demonstrates that, by exposing a foundational racial cleavage in American society, these expressions of cultural trauma turned individual experiences of suffering during Katrina into a national debate about the failure of the white majority in the United States to care about the black minority.

Love's Refraction: Jealousy and Compersion in Queer Women's Polyamorous Relationships


Jillian Deri - 2015
    In Love's Refraction, Jillian Deri explores the distinctive question of how and why polyamorists - people who practice consensual non-monogamy - manage jealousy. Her focus is on the polyamorist concept of "compersion" - taking pleasure in a lover's other romantic and sexual encounters.By discussing the experiences of queer, lesbian, and bisexual polyamorous women, Deri highlights the social and structural context that surrounds jealousy. Her analysis, making use of the sociology of emotion and feminist intersectionality theory, shows how polyamory challenges traditional emotional and sexual norms.Clear and concise, Love's Refraction speaks to both the academic and the polyamorous community. Deri lets her interviewees speak for themselves, linking academic theory and personal experiences in a sophisticated, engaging, and accessible way.

The War Of Art: Steven Pressfield: Book Summary of The War of Art


Michael Walton - 2015
    For some, it is a desire to write a novel, to create that masterpiece painting, or write that sonnet that will live on throughout the ages. We’re all capable of doing it; so, why don’t we? In all of our lives we face resistance. The War of Art explains how that resistance enters our lives, and holds us back from fulfilling those dreams that consume our minds. Resistance will always try and stop us, but if willpower is there then the outcome can be achieved. For even a mountain, if only one grain of dirt at a time, will be moved in its entirety with enough determination. The War of Art will provide anecdotes, advice, and explanations of how our psyche is both striving for fulfillment, and working to stop us as the ego and self battle for mastery. Do you have a dream, but you don’t know what’s really holding you back from it? The answers are out there, and your journey can begin inside these pages.

The Crisis of British Protestantism: Church Power in the Puritan Revolution, 1638 - 44


Hunter Powell - 2015
    It seeks to bring coherence to a pre-revolutionary historiography that focuses on questions of conformity to and (semi-)separatism from 'the church by law established' and a post-1642 historiography built around a coarse polarity of 'Presbyterian' and 'Independent', and modern notions of religious toleration.This book argues that the fundamental ecclesiological issue in 1638 - 44 was the question of church power. Once Parliament conceded that ecclesiastical power did not reside in the diocesan bishop, the state, along with its leading puritan divines, needed to isolate where church power existed and how that power was executed.Parliament wanted a church that would stymie a clerical usurpation of state control, but could equally fend off the burgeoning call for separation of church and state. When Parliament called the Westminster assembly of divines, it knew that one of the most destabilising elements of the body politic was an inchoate national church, where heterodoxy presented as much of a threat as prelacy.This book rigorously examines this pivotal moment of religious reform by analysing a small but vitally important group of these assembly divines, their writings, and their private interaction as Parliament began national church reform in the midst of a civil war. It challenges many long-held assumptions surrounding religious and political debates during the Puritan Revolution and will provide a new framework for both students and teachers to understand one of the most important moments in British history.

Mobilizing New York: AIDS, Antipoverty, and Feminist Activism


Tamar W. Carroll - 2015
    Drawing on a rich array of oral histories, archival records, newspapers, films, and photographs from post-World War II New York City, Carroll shows how poor people transformed the antipoverty organization Mobilization for Youth and shaped the subsequent War on Poverty. Highlighting the little-known National Congress of Neighborhood Women, she reveals the significant participation of working-class white ethnic women and women of color in New York City's feminist activism. Finally, Carroll traces the partnership between the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) and Women's Health Action Mobilization (WHAM!), showing how gay men and feminists collaborated to create a supportive community for those affected by the AIDS epidemic, to improve health care, and to oppose homophobia and misogyny during the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s. Carroll contends that social policies that encourage the political mobilization of marginalized groups and foster coalitions across identity differences are the most effective means of solving social problems and realizing democracy.

Strangers on Familiar Soil: Rediscovering the Chile-California Connection


Edward D. Melillo - 2015
    The book begins in 1786, when a French expedition brought the potato from Chile to California, and it concludes with Chilean president Michelle Bachelet’s diplomatic visit to the Golden State in 2008. During the intervening centuries, new crops, foods, fertilizers, mining technologies, laborers, and ideas from Chile radically altered California's development. In turn, Californian systems of servitude, exotic species, educational programs, and capitalist development strategies dramatically shaped Chilean history.   Edward Dallam Melillo develops a new set of historical perspectives—tracing eastward-moving trends in U.S. history, uncovering South American influences on North America’s development, and reframing the Western Hemisphere from a Pacific vantage point. His innovative approach yields transnational insights and recovers long-forgotten connections between the peoples and ecosystems of Chile and California.

The Most Beautiful Universities in the World


Guillaume de Laubier - 2015
    Following his acclaimed books on the world’s most beautiful libraries and opera houses, photographer Guillaume de Laubier now turns his lens toward a new aspect of world heritage. Sumptuous photographs showcase amphitheaters, libraries, reception halls, and hidden gardens, while the text describes the history of each campus, its architecture, research disciplines, and reference collections.

Confessions of a Headmaster


Paul F. Cummins - 2015
    In this entertaining and inspiring memoir, renowned educator Paul Cummins candidly shares his journey from privileged kid and ivory-tower scholar to hands-on progressive educator, working to achieve social justice through education for all youth: from children of celebrities to foster and incarcerated youth and those facing sometimes unimaginable circumstantial hurdles to education and accomplishment—proving time and again that all children can succeed given appropriate support.

FDA in the Twenty-First Century: The Challenges of Regulating Drugs and New Technologies


Holly Fernandez Lynch - 2015
    Today, these challenges are compounded by the pressures of globalization, the introduction of novel technologies, and fast-evolving threats to public health. With essays by leading scholars and government and private-industry experts, FDA in the Twenty-First Century addresses perennial and new problems and the improvements the agency can make to better serve the public good.The collection features essays on effective regulation in an era of globalization, consumer empowerment, and comparative effectiveness, as well as questions of data transparency, conflicts of interest, industry responsibility, and innovation policy, all with an emphasis on pharmaceuticals. The book also intervenes in the debate over off-label drug marketing and the proper role of the FDA before and after a drug goes on the market. Dealing honestly and thoroughly with the FDA's successes and failures, these essays rethink the structure, function, and future of the agency and the effect policy innovations may have on regulatory institutions abroad.

Anne Carson: Ecstatic Lyre


Joshua Marie Wilkinson - 2015
    Carson’s pathbreaking translations of Ancient Greek poetry and drama, as well as her scholarship on everything from Sappho to Celan, only continue to demonstrate the unique vision she has for what’s possible for a work of literature to become.Anne Carson: Ecstatic Lyre is the first book of essays dedicated to the breadth of Anne Carson’s works, individually, spanning from Eros the Bittersweet through Red Doc. With contributions from Kazim Ali, Dan Beachy-Quick, Julie Carr, Harmony Holiday, Cole Swensen, Eleni Sikelianos, and many others (including translators, poets, essayists, scholars, novelists, critics, and collaborators themselves), we learn from Carson’s greatest admirers and closest readers about the books that moved and inspired them.

The Data Science Handbook: Advice and Insights from 25 Amazing Data Scientists


Carl Shan - 2015
    

Getting By: Estates, Class and Culture in Austerity Britain


Lisa McKenzie - 2015
    This unique book redresses the balance. Lisa Mckenzie lived on the St Ann’s estate in Nottingham for more than 20 years. Her ‘insider’ status enables us to hear the stories of its residents, often wary of outsiders. St Ann's has been stigmatised as a place where gangs, guns, drugs, single mothers and those unwilling or unable to make something of their lives reside. Yet in this same community we find strong, resourceful, ambitious people who are 'getting by', often with humour and despite facing brutal austerity.

Sleepwalking Into a New World: The Emergence of Italian City Communes in the Twelfth Century


Chris Wickham - 2015
    "Sleepwalking into a New World" takes a bold new look at how these autonomous city-states came about, and fundamentally alters our understanding of one of the most important political and cultural innovations of the medieval world.Chris Wickham provides richly textured portraits of three cities Milan, Pisa, and Rome and sets them against a vibrant backcloth of other towns. He argues that, in all but a few cases, the elites of these cities and towns developed one of the first nonmonarchical forms of government in medieval Europe, unaware that they were creating something altogether new. Wickham makes clear that the Italian city commune was by no means a democracy in the modern sense, but that it was so novel that outsiders did not know what to make of it. He describes how, as the old order unraveled, the communes emerged, governed by consular elites chosen by the people, and subject to neither emperor nor king. They regularly fought each other, yet they grew organized and confident enough to ally together to defeat Frederick Barbarossa, the German emperor, at the Battle of Legnano in 1176."Sleepwalking into a New World" reveals how the development of the autonomous city-state took place, which would in the end make possible the robust civic culture of the Renaissance."

Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology


Michelle M. Wright - 2015
    Wright argues that although we often explicitly define Blackness as a “what,” it in fact always operates as a “when” and a “where.”By putting lay discourses on spacetime from physics into conversation with works on identity from the African Diaspora, Physics of Blackness explores how Middle Passage epistemology subverts racist assumptions about Blackness, yet its linear structure inhibits the kind of inclusive epistemology of Blackness needed in the twenty-first century. Wright then engages with bodies frequently excluded from contemporary mainstream consideration: Black feminists, Black queers, recent Black African immigrants to the West, and Blacks whose histories may weave in and out of the Middle Passage epistemology but do not cohere to it.Physics of Blackness takes the reader on a journey both known and unfamiliar—from Isaac Newton’s laws of motion and gravity to the contemporary politics of diasporic Blackness in the academy, from James Baldwin’s postwar trope of the Eiffel Tower as the site for diasporic encounters to theoretical particle physics’ theory of multiverses and superpositioning, to the almost erased lives of Black African women during World War II. Accessible in its style, global in its perspective, and rigorous in its logic, Physics of Blackness will change the way you look at Blackness.

The Oral History Reader (Routledge Readers in History)


Robert Perks - 2015
    Twenty-seven new chapters introduce the most significant developments in oral history in the last decade to bring this invaluable text up to date, with new pieces on emotions and the senses, on crisis oral history, current thinking around traumatic memory, the impact of digital mobile technologies, and how oral history is being used in public contexts, with more international examples to draw in work from North and South America, Britain and Europe, Australasia, Asia and Africa. Arranged in five thematic sections, each with an introduction by the editors to contextualise the selection and review relevant literature, articles in this collection draw upon diverse oral history experiences to examine issues including: Key debates in the development of oral history over the past seventy years First hand reflections on interview practice, and issues posed by the interview relationship The nature of memory and its significance in oral history The practical and ethical issues surrounding the interpretation, presentation and public use of oral testimonies how oral history projects contribute to the study of the past and involve the wider community. The challenges and contributions of oral history projects committed to advocacy and empowerment With a revised and updated bibliography and useful contacts list, as well as a dedicated online resources page, this third edition of The Oral History Reader is the perfect tool for those encountering oral history for the first time, as well as for seasoned practitioners.

Islamic Intellectual History in the Seventeenth Century: Scholarly Currents in the Ottoman Empire and the Maghreb


Khaled El-Rouayheb - 2015
    Ottomanists typically saw the seventeenth century as marking the end of Ottoman cultural florescence, while modern Arab nationalist historians tended to see it as yet another century of intellectual darkness under Ottoman rule. This book is the first sustained effort at investigating some of the intellectual currents among Ottoman and North African scholars of the early modern period. Examining the intellectual production of the ranks of learned ulema (scholars) through close readings of various treatises, commentaries, and marginalia, Khaled El-Rouayheb argues for a more textured - and text-centered - understanding of the vibrant exchange of ideas and transmission of knowledge across a vast expanse of Ottoman-controlled territory.

Bread from Stones: The Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism


Keith Watenpaugh - 2015
    Genocide and mass violence, human trafficking, and the forced displacement of millions in the early twentieth century Eastern Mediterranean form the background for this exploration of humanitarianism’s role in the history of human rights. Watenpaugh’s unique and provocative examination of humanitarian thought and action from a non-Western perspective goes beyond canonical descriptions of relief work and development projects. Employing a wide range of source materials—literary and artistic responses to violence, memoirs, and first-person accounts from victims, perpetrators, relief workers, and diplomats—Watenpaugh argues that the international answer to the inhumanity of World War I in the Middle East laid the foundation for modern humanitarianism and the specific ways humanitarian groups and international organizations help victims of war, care for trafficked children, and aid refugees. Bread from Stones is required reading for those interested in humanitarianism and its ideological, institutional, and legal origins, as well as the evolution of the movement following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the advent of late colonialism in the Middle East.

Current Directions in Ecomusicology: Music, Culture, Nature


Aaron S. Allen - 2015
    Twenty-two authors provide a range of theoretical, methodological, and empirical chapters representing disciplines such as anthropology, biology, ecology, environmental studies, ethnomusicology, history, literature, musicology, performance studies, and psychology. They bring their specialized training to bear on interdisciplinary topics, both individually and in collaboration. Emerging from the whole is a view of ecomusicology as a field, a place where many disciplines come together. The topics addressed in this volume-contemporary composers and traditional musics, acoustic ecology and politicized soundscapes, material sustainability and environmental crisis, familiar and unfamiliar sounds, local places and global warming, birds and mice, hearing and listening, biomusic and soundscape ecology, and more-engage with conversations in the various realms of music study as well as in environmental studies and cultural studies. As with any healthy ecosystem, the field of ecomusicology is dynamic, but this edited collection provides a snapshot of it in a formative period. Each chapter is short, designed to be accessible to the nonspecialist, and includes extensive bibliographies; some chapters also provide further materials on a companion website: http: //www.ecomusicology.info/cde/. An introduction and interspersed editorial summaries help guide readers through four current directions-ecological, fieldwork, critical, and textual-in the field of ecomusicology.

The Straight Line: How the Fringe Science of Ex-Gay Therapy Reoriented Sexuality


Tom Waidzunas - 2015
    Even though the fit is bad, and such therapies and their theorists now inhabit the scientific fringe, the science of sexuality has made some adjustments, too, Tom Waidzunas tells us in this provocative work.Intervening in the politics of sexuality and science, The Straight Line argues that scientific definitions of sexual orientation do not merely reflect the results of investigations into human nature, but rather emerge through a process of social negotiation between opposing groups. The demedicalization of homosexuality and the discrediting of reparative therapies, ex-gay ministries, and reorientation research have, Waidzunas contends, required scientists to enforce key boundaries around scientific expertise and research methods. Drawing on extensive participant observation at conferences for ex-gays, reorientation therapists, mainstream psychologists, and survivors of ex-gay therapy, as well as interviews with experts and activists, The Straight Line traces reorientation debates in the United States from the 1950s to the present, following homosexuality therapies from the mainstream to the margins. As the ex-gay movement has become increasingly transnational in recent years, Waidzunas turns to Uganda, where ideas about the scientific nature of homosexuality influenced the passage of the Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2014.While most studies treat the ex-gay movement as a religious phenomenon, this book looks at how the movement, in its attempts to establish legitimacy, has engaged with scientific institutions, shaping virulent anti-gay public policy.

Teacher, Scholar, Mother: Re-Envisioning Motherhood in the Academy


Anna M. YoungErin Graybill Ellis - 2015
    This multi- and trans-disciplinary book features mother scholars who bring their theoretical and disciplinary lenses to bear on questions of identity, practice, policy, institutional memory, progress, and the gendered notion of parenting that still pervades the modern academy.

Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America


Patrick Iber - 2015
    Ultimately, they could not break free from the era’s rigid binaries, and found little room to promote their social democratic ideals without compromising them.

Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media


David S. RohAbigail De Kosnik - 2015
    Techno-Orientalism investigates the phenomenon of imagining Asia and Asians in hypo- or hyper-technological terms in literary, cinematic, and new media representations, while critically examining the stereotype of Asians as both technologically advanced and intellectually primitive, in dire need of Western consciousness-raising.  The collection’s fourteen original essays trace the discourse of techno-orientalism across a wide array of media, from radio serials to cyberpunk novels, from Sax Rohmer’s Dr. Fu Manchu to Firefly.  Applying a variety of theoretical, historical, and interpretive approaches, the contributors consider techno-orientalism a truly global phenomenon. In part, they tackle the key question of how these stereotypes serve to both express and assuage Western anxieties about Asia’s growing cultural influence and economic dominance. Yet the book also examines artists who have appropriated techno-orientalist tropes in order to critique racist and imperialist attitudes.  Techno-Orientalism is the first collection to define and critically analyze a phenomenon that pervades both science fiction and real-world news coverage of Asia. With essays on subjects ranging from wartime rhetoric of race and technology to science fiction by contemporary Asian American writers to the cultural implications of Korean gamers, this volume offers innovative perspectives and broadens conventional discussions in Asian American Cultural studies.

The Coach's Guide for Women Professors: Who Want a Successful Career and a Well-Balanced Life


Rena Seltzer - 2015
    I do everything else first and then write in the time left over.I'm not sure exactly what the promotion requirements are in my department.Since earning tenure, my service load has increased and my research is suffering. I don't get enough time with my family.This is a practical guide for women in academe whether adjuncts, professors or administrators who often encounter barriers and hostility, especially if women of color, and generally carry a heavier load of service, as well as household and care responsibilities, than their male colleagues. Rena Seltzer, a respected life coach and trainer who has worked with women professors and academic leaders for many years, offers succinct advice on how you can prioritize the multiplicity of demands on your life, negotiate better, create support networks, and move your career forward.Using telling but disguised vignettes of the experiences of women she has mentored, Rena Seltzer offers insights and strategies for managing the situations that all women face such as challenges to their authority while also paying attention to how they often play out differently for Latinas, Black and Asian women. She covers issues that arise from early career to senior administrator positions. This is a book you can read cover to cover or dip into as you encounter concerns about time management; your authority and influence; work/life balance; problems with teaching; leadership; negotiating better; finding time to write; developing your networks and social support; or navigating tenure and promotion and your career beyond.

Towards a Warmer World: What Climate Change Will Mean for New Zealand's Future (BWB Texts Book 32)


Veronika Meduna - 2015
    Even at its midway point, 2015 was already promising to take over this dubious record.As new thresholds are breached, acclaimed Radio New Zealand science writer Veronika Meduna explores our future in a warmer world. Beginning with lessons from our ancient geological past, this BWB Text draws on current observations and increasingly sophisticated climate models to describe possible end-of-century scenarios for New Zealand. Distorted ecosystems, extreme weather, new landscapes and adapted foods are just some of the likely changes that amount to a radically different future for our country.

Digital Diplomacy: Theory and Practice (Routledge New Diplomacy Studies)


Corneliu Bjola - 2015
    In some respects this revolution is long overdue. Digital technology has changed the ways firms conduct business, individuals conduct social relations, and states conduct governance internally, but states are only just realizing its potential to change the ways all aspects of interstate interactions are conducted. In particular, the adoption of digital diplomacy (i.e., the use of social media for diplomatic purposes) has been implicated in changing practices of how diplomats engage in information management, public diplomacy, strategy planning, international negotiations or even crisis management. Despite these significant changes and the promise that digital diplomacy offers, little is known, from an analytical perspective, about how digital diplomacy works. This volume, the first of its kind, brings together established scholars and experienced policy-makers to bridge this analytical gap. The objective of the book is to theorize what digital diplomacy is, assess its relationship to traditional forms of diplomacy, examine the latent power dynamics inherent in digital diplomacy, and assess the conditions under which digital diplomacy informs, regulates, or constrains foreign policy. Organized around a common theme of investigating digital diplomacy as a form of change management in the international system, it combines diverse theoretical, empirical, and policy-oriented chapters centered on international change. This book will be of much interest to students of diplomatic studies, public diplomacy, foreign policy, social media and international relations.

E-Flux Journal - The Internet Does Not Exist


Julieta Aranda - 2015
    

Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy


Barry R. Posen - 2015
    Posen argues in Restraint, has grown incapable of moderating its ambitions in international politics. Since the collapse of Soviet power, it has pursued a grand strategy that he calls liberal hegemony, one that Posen sees as unnecessary, counterproductive, costly, and wasteful. Written for policymakers and observers alike, Restraint explains precisely why this grand strategy works poorly and then provides a carefully designed alternative grand strategy and an associated military strategy and force structure. In contrast to the failures and unexpected problems that have stemmed from America's consistent overreaching, Posen makes an urgent argument for restraint in the future use of U.S. military strength.After setting out the political implications of restraint as a guiding principle, Posen sketches the appropriate military forces and posture that would support such a strategy. He works with a deliberately constrained notion of grand strategy and, even more important, of national security (which he defines as including sovereignty, territorial integrity, power position, and safety). His alternative for military strategy, which Posen calls command of the commons, focuses on protecting U.S. global access through naval, air, and space power, while freeing the United States from most of the relationships that require the permanent stationing of U.S. forces overseas.

The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology


Tom Perreault - 2015
    Located at the intersection of geography, anthropology, sociology, and environmental history, political ecology is one of the most vibrant and conceptually diverse fields of inquiry into nature-society relations within the social sciences. The Handbook serves as an essential guide to this rapidly evolving intellectual landscape. With contributions from over 50 leading authors, the Handbook presents a systematic overview of political ecology's origins, practices and core concerns, and aims to advance both ongoing and emerging debates. While there are numerous edited volumes, textbooks, and monographs under the heading 'political ecology, ' these have tended to be relatively narrow in scope, either as collections of empirically based (mostly case study) research on a given theme, or broad overviews of the field aimed at undergraduate audiences. The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology is the first systematic, comprehensive overview of the field. With authors from North and South America, Europe, Australia and elsewhere, the Handbook of Political Ecology provides a state of the art examination of political ecology; addresses ongoing and emerging debates in this rapidly evolving field; and charts new agendas for research, policy, and activism.The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology introduces political ecology as an interdisciplinary academic field. By presenting a 'state of the art' examination of the field, it will serve as an invaluable resource for students and scholars. It not only critically reviews the key debates in the field, but develops them. The Handbook will serve as an excellent resource for graduate and advanced undergraduate teaching, and is a key reference text for geographers, anthropologists, sociologists, environmental historians, and others working in and around political ecology.

Sex Museums: The Politics and Performance of Display


Jennifer Tyburczy - 2015
    In Sex Museums, Jennifer Tyburczy takes a hard look at the formation of Western sexuality—particularly how categories of sexual normalcy and perversity are formed—and asks what role museums have played in using display as a technique for disciplining sexuality. Most museum exhibits, she argues, assume that white, patriarchal heterosexuality and traditional structures of intimacy, gender, and race represent national sexual culture for their visitors. Sex Museums illuminates the history of such heteronormativity at most museums and proposes alternative approaches for the future of public display projects, while also offering the reader curatorial tactics—what she calls queer curatorship—for exhibiting diverse sexualities in the twenty-first century. Tyburczy shows museums to be sites of culture-war theatrics, where dramatic civic struggles over how sex relates to public space, genealogies of taste and beauty, and performances of sexual identity are staged. Delving into the history of erotic artifacts, she analyzes how museums have historically approached the collection and display of the material culture of sex, which poses complex moral, political, and logistical dilemmas for the Western museum. Sex Museums unpacks the history of the museum and its intersections with the history of sexuality to argue that the Western museum context—from its inception to the present—marks a pivotal site in the construction of modern sexual subjectivity.

The Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe


Ayesha Ramachandran - 2015
    Once a new, exciting, and frightening concept, “the world” was transformed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But how could one envision something that no one had ever seen in its totality?  The Worldmakers moves beyond histories of globalization to explore how “the world” itself—variously understood as an object of inquiry, a comprehensive category, and a system of order—was self-consciously shaped by human agents. Gathering an international cast of characters, from Dutch cartographers and French philosophers to Portuguese and English poets, Ramachandran describes a history of firsts: the first world atlas, the first global epic, the first modern attempt to develop a systematic natural philosophy—all part of an effort by early modern thinkers to capture “the world” on the page.

Race and Real Estate


Adrienne Brown - 2015
    Rather than simply rehearsing the standard account of how blacks were historically excluded from homeownership, the authors of these essays explore how the raced history of property affects understandings of home and citizenship. While the narrative of race and real estate in America has usually been relayed in terms of institutional subjugation, dispossession, and forced segregation, the essays collected in this volume acknowledge the validity of these histories while presenting new perspectives on this story.

The Great Endarkenment: Philosophy for an Age of Hyperspecialization


Elijah Millgram - 2015
    The form it now takes brings in its wake a series of problems that are simultaneously philosophical and practical, having to do with coordinating the activities of experts in different disciplines who do not understand one another. Because these problems are unrecognized, and because we do not have solutions for them, we are on the verge of an age in which decisions that depend on understanding more than one discipline at a time will be made badly. Since so many decisions do require multidisciplinary knowledge, these philosophical problems are urgent.Some of the puzzles that have traditionally been on philosophers' agendas have to do with intellectual devices developed to handle less extreme forms of specialization. Two of these, necessity and the practical 'ought', are given extended treatment in Elijah Millgram's The Great Endarkenment. In this collection of essays, both previously published and new, Millgram pays special attention to ways a focus on cognitive function reframes familiar debates in metaethics and metaphysics. Consequences of hyperspecialization for the theory of practical rationality, for our conception of agency, and for ethics are laid out and discussed. An Afterword considers whether and how philosophers can contribute to solving the very pressing problems created by contemporary division of labor."These always interesting, often brilliant, and contentious essays focus on the question of how we need to reason practically, if we are to flourish, given Millgram's account of our human nature and of the environments that we inhabit. The originality of his thought is matched by his clarity and his wit." -- Alasdair MacIntyre, University of Notre Dame