Stationery and miscellaneous items

Book SynopsisNorth Korea may be known as the world''s most secluded society, but it too has witnessed the rapid rise of new media technologies in the new millennium, including the introduction of a 3G cell phone network in 2008. In 2009, there were only 70,000 cell phones in North Korea. That number has grown tremendously in just over a decade, with over 7 million registered as of 2022. This expansion took place amid extreme economic hardship and the ensuing possibilities of destabilization. Against this social and political backdrop, Millennial North Korea traces how the rapidly expanding media networks in North Korea impact their millennial generation, especially their perspective on the outside world.Suk-Young Kim argues that millennials in North Korea play a crucial role in exposing the increasing tension between the state and its people, between risktakers who dare to transgress strict social rules and compliant citizens accustomed to the state''s centralized governance, and b

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Book SynopsisSince Kenya''s invasion of Somalia in 2011, the Kenyan state has been engaged in direct combat with the Somali militant group Al-Shabaab, conducting airstrikes in southern Somalia and deploying heavy-handed police tactics at home. As the hunt for suspects has expanded within Kenya, Kenyan Muslims have been subject to disappearances and extrajudicial killings at the hands of U.S.-trained Kenyan police.War-Making as Worldmaking explores the entanglement of militarism, imperialism, and liberal-democratic governance in East Africa today. Samar Al-Bulushi argues that Kenya''s emergence as a key player in the War on Terror is closely linkedbut not reducible tothe U.S. military''s growing proclivity to outsource the labor of war. Attending to the cultural politics of security, Al-Bulushi illustrates that the war against Al-Shabaab has become a means to produce new fantasies, emotions, and subjectivities about Kenya''s place in the world. Meanwhile, Kenya''s alignment with the

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Book SynopsisDespite focused efforts to stop the perpetration of campus sexual violence, the statistic that one in four college women will experience such violence has remained steady over the last sixty years. The number of higher education institutions under federal Title IX investigation for mishandling sexual violence cases also continues to grow.In Hear Our Stories, Jessica Harris demonstrates how preventive efforts often fall short because they lack intersectional perspectives, and often obscure how sexual violence is imbued with racial significance. Drawing on interviews with Women of Color student survivors, staff, and documents from three different universities, this book analyzes sexual violence on the college campus from an intersectional lens, centering the stories of Women of Color. Harris explores the intersectional realities of campus sexual violence, including survivors'' racialized and gendered experiences with campus rape culture, institutional betrayal, preventio

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Book SynopsisIn recent years, debates over healthcare have accompanied rapid advances in technology, from the expansion of telehealth services to artificial intelligence driven diagnostics. In this book, Shawn Bender delves into the world of Japanese robots engineered for care. Care robots (kaigo robotto) emerged early in the 21st century, when roboticists began converting assembly line technologies into responsive machines for older adults and people with disabilities. These robots are meant to be felt and programmed to feel. While some greet them with enthusiasm, others fear that they might replace a fundamentally human task. Based on fieldwork in Japan, Denmark, and Germany, Bender traces the emergence of care robots in Japan and examines their impact on therapeutic practice around the world.Social science scholarship on robotics tends to be either speculativeimagining life together with robotsor experimentalobserving robot-human interaction in laboratories or thro

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Book SynopsisAgainst the backdrop of the global refugee crisis, Unsettled Families investigates the parameters that Global North governments and international humanitarian organizations use to classify most displaced familiesmore than 99% globallyas ineligible for resettlement, and often as fraudulent. But fraud as a category is not as self-evident as it may first appear. Nor is the family. Based on long-term fieldwork between Nairobi, Kenya and Columbus, Ohio, Sophia Balakian tells stories of Somali and Congolese refugees navigating a complicated global assemblage of humanitarian organizations, immigration bureaucracies, and national security agencies as they seek permanent, new homes. Viewing the concepts of fraud and family from different vantage points in this context, Balakian shows how the categories begin to blur out of focus, sometimes to evaporate altogether; what seems to be contained within them scatter outside their received boundaries. Practices that resettlement organizations deem fraudulent are often understood by people living as refugees to be moral actions in an unequal world. Such practices allow them to fulfill obligations to kinkin defined expansively, in ways that at times exceed the boundaries of normative, US frameworks. Bringing questions of kinship into current discussions on humanitarianism, Balakian locates the family as a crucial category in processes of producing, policing, and contesting the boundaries of nation-states in the 21st century.

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Book SynopsisIn this book, Daina Sanchez examines how Indigenous Oaxacan youth form racial, ethnic, community, and national identities away from their ancestral homeland. Assumptions that Indigenous peoples have disappeared altogether, or that Indigenous identities are fixed, persist in the popular imagination. This is far from the truth. Sanchez demonstrates how Indigenous immigrants continually remake their identities and ties to their homelands while navigating racial and social institutions in the U.S. and Latin America, and, in doing so, transform notions of Indigeneity and push the boundaries of Latinidad.Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork between Los Angeles, California and San Andrés Solaga, a Zapotec town in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, The Children of Solaga centers Indigenous ways of knowing and being in the world, and adds a much-needed transnational dimension to the study of Indigenous immigrant adaptation and assimilation. Sanchez, herself a diasporic

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Book SynopsisIn 2019, after decades of ecological damage from oil, Waorani people took to the streets of Amazonian Ecuador to protest drilling on their ancestral lands. Working with international activists, lawyers, and other Indigenous groups, they successfully sued the government for selling oil concessions without prior consent. Placing their struggle for territorial autonomy in the global spotlight, this unprecedented legal victory for environmental rights by an Indigenous people reflected the new forms of collaboration emerging in contemporary Amazonia. Translating Worlds, Defending Land explores how Waorani collaborations, whether with environmentalists or academic researchers, bring about new possibilities, challenges, and imaginative horizons. Based on fieldwork over a period of twenty-five years, Casey High interrogates what these engagements mean for Indigenous communities and how they offer critical reflection on collaboration as a concept, method, and practice. The alliances, misunderstandings, and conflicts that emerge in these contexts challenge the assumption that productive collaborations reflector requireshared purposes, generating important implications for an engaged anthropology open to reconsidering what constitutes ethnographic knowledge and who it is for. As some young Waorani adults become not just community leaders or environmental citizens, but also skilled researchers and ethnographers, translating between Indigenous understandings of land and the Western language conservation, they create a powerful new voice in international environmental politics.

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Book SynopsisHow hackers facilitate community technology projects that counter the monoculture of big tech and point us to brighter, innovative horizons. A digital world in relentless movementfrom artificial intelligence to ubiquitous computinghas been captured and reinvented as a monoculture by Silicon Valley big tech and venture capital firms. Yet very little is discussed in the public sphere about existing alternatives. Based on long-term field research across San Francisco, Tokyo, and Shenzhen, Common Circuits explores a transnational network of hacker spaces that stand as potent, but often invisible, alternatives to the dominant technology industry. In what ways have hackers challenged corporate projects of digital development? How do hacker collectives prefigure more just technological futures through community projects? Luis Felipe R. Murillo responds to these urgent questions with an analysis of the hard challenges of collaborative, autonomous community-making through technical objects conceived by hackers as convivial, shared technologies. Through rich explorations of hacker space histories and biographical sketches of hackers who participate in them, Murillo describes the social and technical conditions that allowed for the creation of community projects such as anonymity and privacy networks to counter mass surveillance; community-made monitoring devices to measure radioactive contamination; and small-scale open hardware fabrication for the purposes of technological autonomy. Murillo shows how hacker collectives point us toward brighter technological futuresa renewal of the digital commonswhere computing projects are constantly being repurposed for the common good.

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Book SynopsisBecause whiteness is not a given for Brazilians in the U.S., some immigrants actively construct it as a protective mechanism against the stigma normally associated with illegality. In The Borders of Privilege, Kara Cebulko tells the stories of a group of 1.5-generation Brazilians to show how their ability to be perceived as whitetheir power without papersshapes their everyday interactions. By strategically creating boundaries with other racialized groups, these immigrants navigate life-course rituals like college, work, and marriage without legal documentation. Few identify as white in the U.S., even as they benefit from the privileges of whiteness. The legal exclusion they feel as undocumented immigrants from Latin America makes them feel a world apart from their white citizen peers. However, their constructed whiteness benefits them when it comes to interactions with law enforcement and professional advancement, challenging narratives that frame legality as a "master-status." Understanding these experiences requires us to explore interlocking systems of power, including white supremacy and capitalism, as well as global histories of domination. Cebulko traces the experiences of her interviewees across various stages of life, applying a "power without paper" lens, and making the case for integrating this perspective into future scholarship, collective broad-based movements for social justice, and public policy.

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Book SynopsisOn Goethe contains the full range of Walter Benjamin's reflections on the central figure in modern German culture. The writings in this volumenewly translated, fully annotated, and framed by an extensive introductiondisplay a variety of styles and cover a vast array of topics. The collection revolves around two strikingly different essays. Whereas Goethe's Elective Affinities develops a theory of critique in which a work is illuminated wholly from within itself, an article Benjamin wrote on Goethe for the Soviet Encyclopedia represents his first large-scale attempt to elaborate an historical-materialist methodology. The other thirty translations stand in similarly productive tension with one another. Some are concerned with concepts of beauty and categories of the aesthetic, others with the relation of art to politics and the status of classical authors in contemporary culture, and still others with what remains of humanistic traditions in the wake of their disappearance under fascist regimes and what synthesis is required for the construction of an historical object. The volume provides a glimpse into the laboratory of Benjamin's thought, while granting readers a series of insights into the epochal phenomena that gather around the name Goethe.

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Book SynopsisLiving Oncenters around the unprecedented mobilization of mental health professionals in the wake of a massive earthquake that struck western Turkey in 1999a disaster that left more than 20,000 people dead and hundreds of thousands of residents displaced. Working amid unimaginable destruction and suffering, volunteer psychiatrists and psychologists would quickly improvise a makeshift response, offering thousands of survivors access to psychiatric care for the first time. Never before had there been such a collective expression of concern for people's psychological well-being. Christopher Dole explores how this psychiatric response fashioned individual and collective lives far into the disaster's future. Based on research spanning two decades, from the earthquake to its twentieth anniversary, he considers how this convergence of geological activity and psychiatric expertise introduced novel psychiatric and psychological discourses into everyday lives of survivors, as it also animated new visions of self, society, and technopolitical promise. Living On not only offers insight into Turkey's transformations over the opening decades of the twenty-first century, but it also sheds light on a more general arrangement of disaster, governance, and medical expertiseone that increasingly characterizes our era of planetary ecological crisis.

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Book SynopsisQueer Vietnam recovers the forgotten stories of variant genders and sexualities in early twentieth-century Vietnam. By the beginning of the 1900s, European imperialism had spread Western notions of gender across much of Asia, narrowing and delegitimizing what had been a wide range of acceptable gender practices. But in Vietnam, Western influence on gender remained uneven at best. Through archival research and innovative readings of literary sources, Richard Quang-Anh Tran argues that Vietnamese culture embraced a much less rigid view of the human body, and that a far more capacious vision of gendered personhood existed in this period than has been previously assumed. Popular love stories involved cross-dressing monks and traditional women who don male garb to fight in battle. And accounts of proto-lesbian friendships and a futuristic human civilization populated by a higher form of hermaphroditic species all found avid readers. Together, this material reveals that in Vietnam's interwar period, "tradition" coexisted with and jostled against the modern. While current perceptions of Vietnamese history rest on the exclusion of the "queer"subjects who depart from heteronormative ways of beingthis book brings them to the center, and opens up new directions for both the historical study of gender and Vietnam's modernity.

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Book SynopsisIn The Global Journey of Racism, Michelle Christian provides a unified narrative of how the world's racial hierarchies came to be. Christian's story begins before the Ku Klux Klan, Nazi Germany, and South African Apartheid, tracing the historical lineage of white supremacy to the expansion of western, European empire. She uncovers the vast network of legal, political, economic, and social mechanismsmost potently, enslavementthat made up the original design for racialized knowledge, capitalist systems, and colonial management. Contemporary manifestations of this design may have new rhythms, beats, and faces, but they are all rooted in the modern hierarchy of global white supremacy and global anti-Blackness. Christian brings imperial history into conversation with the present, and places the racial mechanisms at work in distinct nations alongside each other, advancing a novel analysis of the global racial system. In doing so, she responds to scholarship on race and racism that emphasizes cultural specificity, and asserts the dominance of a modern world that, despite appeals to the contrary, remains brazenly, and without question, racist.

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Book SynopsisLasting from September 1980 to August 1988, the Iran-Iraq War was the longest conventional war fought between two states in the twentieth century. It marked a period that began just after a revolutionary government in Iran became an Islamic Republic and Saddam Hussein consolidated power in Iraq. It ended with both wartime governments still in power, borders unchanged, yet hundreds of thousands of people dead. Neither side emerged as a clear victor, but both sides would eventually claim victory in some form. Dust That Never Settles considers how Iraqi and Iranian writers have wrestled with representing the Iran-Iraq War and its legacy, from wartime to the present. It demonstrates how writers from both countries have transformed once militarized, officially sanctioned war literatures into literatures of mourning, and eventually, into vehicles of protest that presented powerful counternarratives to the official state narratives. In writing the first comparative study of the literary output of this war, Amir Moosavi presents a new paradigm for the study of modern Middle Eastern literatures. He brings Persian and Arabic fiction into conversation with debates on the political importance of cultural production across the Middle East and North Africa, and he puts an important new canon of works in conversation with comparative literary and cultural studies within the Global South.

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Book SynopsisWould you read this book if a computer wrote it? Would you even know? And why would it matter? Today's eerily impressive artificial intelligence writing tools present us with a crucial challenge: As writers, do we unthinkingly adopt AI's time-saving advantages or do we stop to weigh what we gain and lose when heeding its siren call? To understand how AI is redefining what it means to write and think, linguist and educator Naomi S. Baron leads us on a journey connecting the dots between human literacy and today's technology. From nineteenth-century lessons in composition, to mathematician Alan Turing's work creating a machine for deciphering war-time messages, to contemporary engines like ChatGPT, Baron gives readers a spirited overview of the emergence of both literacy and AI, and a glimpse of their possible future. As the technology becomes increasingly sophisticated and fluent, it's tempting to take the easy way out and let AI do the work for us. Baron cautions that such efficiency isn't always in our interest. As AI plies us with suggestions or full-blown text, we risk losing not just our technical skills but the power of writing as a springboard for personal reflection and unique expression. Funny, informed, and conversational, Who Wrote This? urges us as individuals and as communities to make conscious choices about the extent to which we collaborate with AI. The technology is here to stay. Baron shows us how to work with AI and how to spot where it risks diminishing the valuable cognitive and social benefits of being literate.

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Book SynopsisHow consumer and environmental activists became significant players in U.S. and world politicsAmid the mass protests of the 1960s, another, less heralded political force arose: public interest progressivism. Led by activists like Ralph Nader, organizations of lawyers and experts worked inside the system. They confronted corporate power and helped win major consumer and environmental protections. By the late 1970s, some public interest groups moved beyond U.S. borders to challenge multinational corporations. This happened at the same time that neoliberalism, a politics of empowerment for big business, gained strength in the U.S. and around the world. No Globalization Without Representation is the story of how consumer and environmental activists became significant players in U.S. and world politics at the twentieth century's close. NGOs like Friends of the Earth and Public Citizen helped forge a progressive coalition that lobbied against the emerging neoliberal world order and in favor of what they called fair globalization. From boycotting Nestlé in the 1970s to lobbying against NAFTA to the Battle of Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization in the 1990s, these groups have made a profound mark. This book tells their stories while showing how public interest groups helped ensure that a version of liberalism willing to challenge corporate power did not vanish from U.S. politics. Public interest groups believed that preserving liberalism at home meant confronting attempts to perpetuate conservative policies through global economic rules. No Globalization Without Representation also illuminates how professionalized organizations became such a critical part of liberal activismand how that has affected the course of U.S. politics to the present day.

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Book SynopsisHow middle-class families in Nepal pursue well-being in a rapidly changing social landscapeModern Dharma asks how Nepalese people live dharma, an ethical, good life, in a rapidly evolving society. In the aftermath of a decade-long civil war that raged between 1996 and 2006, social change accelerated in Nepal as the shift to a market economy and the spread of education and media built the foundation for a new middle class to form. As it did, tension built between the expression of individual will and the expectation to submit to traditional social hierarchies. Today, people in Nepal are confronted by the need to restructure moral codes and to care for their families, while at the same time, they face intense pressure to keep up with the cost of education and to find work in an increasingly competitive labor market. Amidst these changes, people often describe their choices as falling under the broader goal of pursuing well-being. Modern Dharma investigates how and whyamidst often conflicting prioritiespeople make choices in pursuit of well-being. Anthropologist Paola Tiné investigates why many large families separate into smaller nuclei, while others maintain intra-generational homes. She asks why and how young people seek the support of their friends, while often hiding private desires from their parents. And she investigates the ways that marriage choices and friendship relationships help people navigate the ongoing tangible difficulties engendered by socioeconomic change. By delving into the intricacies of domestic lives among a growing middle class, Modern Dharma works to center the household and kinship relationships as the places where broader global transitions are reflected, resisted, and negotiated. Providing a new perspective on moral personhood in South Asia, this book ultimately sheds new light on the centrality of kinship relationships in initiating and shaping social change.

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Book SynopsisWhen the army comes out, it is to kill.Augusto PinochetFollowing his bloody September 1973 coup d'état that overthrew President Salvador Allende, Augusto Pinochet, commander-in-chief of the Chilean Armed Forces and National Police, became head of a military junta that would rule Chile for the next seventeen years. The violent repression used by the Pinochet regime to maintain power and transform the country's political profile and economic system has received less attention than the Argentine military dictatorship, even though the Pinochet regime endured twice as long. In this primary study of Chile Under Pinochet, Mark Ensalaco maintains that Pinochet was complicit in the enforced disappearance of thousands of Chileans and an unknown number of foreign nationals. Ensalaco spent five years in Chile investigating the impact of Pinochet's rule and interviewing members of the truth commission created to investigate the human rights violations under Pinochet. The political objective of human rights organizations, Ensalaco contends, is to bring sufficient pressure to bear on violent regimes to induce them to end policies of repression. However, these efforts are severely limited by the disparities of power between human rights organizations and regimes intent on ruthlessly eliminating dissent.

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Book Synopsis Navigating Trauma in the Church It''s time for church leaders and believers to stop offering prettily packaged responses from a safe distance. It''s time for us to sit in the ashes with the hurting, our Sunday clothes covered in dirt and grime, our faces lined with tears. Trauma brings people to the ash heap, so that is where the church needs to go. The church should serve as a refuge for people in pain. And yet, we often end up unintentionally causing more hurt to trauma survivors. Theological platitudes and positive thinking aren''t simply dismissive to those who suffer, but they inevitably retraumatize the wounded. Does the Bible have anything practical to offer for church leaders as they engage the pain in their congregations? Biblical scholar Michelle Keener shows us that the book of Job provides embodied and practical answers for the church today. In this incredible tool for ministry leaders and trauma survivors alike, Keener offers: deep wisdom at the intersection of trauma theory and the book of Job for Christian communities reflection questions for ministry practitioners and those walking alongside those who have experienced trauma engagement with the idea of a shattered worldview and how to overcome the effects of that experience. Comfort in the Ashes helps leaders navigate their own trauma and gives practical guidance for supporting others whose worlds are falling apart. God meets us in our ashes and our pain. It''s time for the church to do the same.

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Book SynopsisFor decades, contemporary artworks with reflective properties have stimulated public forms of spectatorship. According to Cristina Albu, these artworks, which can include elements such as mirrors, live video feedback, or sensors, draw attention to affective interdependence and mechanisms of social control. In Mirror Affect, Albu provides a historical account of mirroring processes in contemporary art and offers insight into the phenomenological and sociopolitical concerns that have inspired artists to stage processes of affective, perceptual, and behavioral mirroring between art viewers. Beginning with the 1960s, Albu charts the rise of interpersonal modes of art spectatorship. She reveals contemporary artists' strategic use of reflective and responsive interfaces to instill doubt in visual representation and appeal to active scrutiny of the changing social dynamics. She suggests that the mirroring processes envisioned by contemporary artists such as Joan Jonas, Dan Graham, Lynn Hershm

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Book SynopsisWhy and how menstrual pain needs to be incorporated into discussions of gender, embodiment, and disability Honing a cranky approach to being a menstruating body expected to accept and embrace trauma, Ungendering Menstruation examines menstrual suppression, toxicity, and the cooptation of menstrual positivity rhetoric. Drawing on their own experiences as a toxic shock survivor and a menstrual pain and period dysphoria sufferer, Ela Przybylo questions why, on what terms, and for whom menstruation has been fixed around experiences of pain. Instead, they present a vision for menstrual justice that refuses the womaning of bleeding and the further erasure, dismissal, and denial of menstrual pain as real pain. If menstruating is framed as somatechnically elective, Przybylo contends, it provides avenues for both celebrating and appreciating cultures of bleeding as well as for remaining critical of the ways in which bleeding has been used as a transphobic and sexist tool to fix gender in place.

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Book SynopsisAs one of the UK's leading fine art wildlife artists, Bree Merryn'sartwork is both charmingly unique and highly-detailed. The Bumble & Buddiesslim diary for 2023 showcases her much loved artwork and offers plenty ofspace to plan your year. This diary is free of plastic packaging.

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Book SynopsisThe first book to seriously identify how artistic activism works and how to make it work betterThe past decade has seen an explosion in the hybrid practice of artistic activism, as artists have turned toward activism to make their work more socially impactful and activists have adopted techniques and perspectives from the arts to make their interventions more creative. Yet questions haunt the practice: Does artistic activism work aesthetically? Does it work politically? And what does working even mean when one combines art and activism? In Æffect, author Stephen Duncombe sets out to address these questions at the heart of the field of artistic activism. Written by the co-founder and current Research Director of the internationally recognized Center for Artistic Activism, Æffect draws on Duncombe's more than twenty-five years of experience in the field and one hundred in-depth interviews with artistic activists worldwide. More than a mere academic exercise, the theory, research, and tools in this book lay the groundwork for artistic activists to evaluate and strengthen their practice and to create better projects. The exploration of good artistic activism is grounded in three sets of concerns. 1) Change: Upon what theories of change is artistic activism based? 2) Intention: What do we hope and expect artistic activism to do, and how does it do this? 3) Evaluation: What actually happens as the result of an artistic activist intervention? Can it be measured?Æffect is rich with examples that demonstrate successful artistic activism, including Undocubus, an old bus painted No Fear across its side that was driven cross-country by a group of undocumented immigrant activists; Journal Rappé, a video show created by Senegalese rappers who created long-form investigative reports by rapping the current news in French and Wolof; and War on Smog, a staged a public performance piece by artistic activists in the city of Chongqing in Southwest China. Scannable QR codes are included to provide tools that help readers assess the æffect of their artistic activism.

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Book SynopsisThe tale of New York's Young Redsa riveting journey through the YPA's rise and influenceYoung Reds in the Big Apple: The New York YPA, 19231934 by Jack Hodgson is a compelling historical account that delves into the heart of American communism through the lens of New York City's Young Pioneers of America (YPA). This meticulously researched book sheds light on a neglected aspect of American history, revealing the intricate details of the YPA's formation, ideologies, and activities from 1923 to 1934. Hodgson illustrates the YPA's journey, from its early days as a branch of the Communist Party USA, intended for youth aged 816, to its eventual disbandment. The book explores the organization's unique structure, ethos, and activities, showcasing how it became a formidable force in New York's political landscape. He vividly portrays the YPA members' involvement in public protests, education reform, and their bold stance against prevailing social norms, including racial and gender issues. The narrative goes beyond mere historical recounting, offering deep insights into the internal dynamics of the YPA, its relationship with the adult Communist Party, and its interactions with other political entities. Hodgson's analysis of the YPA's impact on its young members and the broader community is both insightful and thought-provoking. Young Reds in the Big Apple stands out for its rigorous approach to a controversial subject, avoiding partisanship to provide a balanced view of the YPA's legacy. This book is not just a historical account; it's an exploration of youthful activism, political movements, and the complexities of American communism during a pivotal era.

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Book SynopsisA profound exploration into the spiritual beliefs and practices of Seattle's unhoused youthSoul Woundedness is an intimate, piercing book about everyday life for young adults living on the streets of Seattle. Based on over five years of research and as a participant-observer, Paul Houston Blankenship-Lai presents the personal experiences of street kids, highlighting how their spiritual beliefs and practices offer them comfort, a sense of community, and a feeling of belonging amidst their struggles. They also demonstrate how spirituality on the streets can alienate people from themselves and the world. The stories Blankenship-Lai tells here are about how social wounds go soul deep, and how seemingly antireligious spiritual practices, fashioned in an almost unlivable local world, help people create a life still worth living. By paying deep, sustained attention to what spirituality is like on the streets and what difference it makes, Blankenship-Lai uncovers an important, overlooked dimension in the experience and study of homelessness. They invite us to enter these stories and to question how our own spiritual and otherwise practices can help create a more loving love.Aimed at a diverse audience, Soul Woundedness is a book not merely to educate but to transform. It is particularly relevant for those interested in spirituality's role in addressing social inequities and underscores the importance of spiritual practices in overcoming adversity and promoting social change, making a compelling case for a world where everyone has a place to call home.

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Book SynopsisAn exploration of how contemporary Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity preserves and protects sacred ideas and relationshipsEthiopia stretches her hand upon God, the narrative of Sheba and Solomon, the material presence of the Ark of the Covenant in Axum. For Ethiopian Orthodox Christians, these classic understandings of the covenant are prized narratives. For historical and scriptural scholarship, a central focus is to explain the characteristics of Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity as retaining key Old Testament qualities to demonstrate a wide chasm with post-Enlightenment, secular societies. By widening the lens of analysis to include a body of knowledge best accessed through Orthodox Christian devotional culture, The Covenant's Veil offers an interpretation that challenges the reader to adopt a novel understanding of these well-established ideas.The multiple, complex ways that the covenant idea appears as ideas, idioms, customs, symbols, and articulations in

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Book SynopsisAn innovative and much-needed critical work on music and memorialization in relation to AIDS, 9/11, and anti-Black violence in AmericaMusic has long served as a powerful medium for communal mourning and remembrance in times of crisis. Audible Loss examines musical responses to three major crises in US society at the turn of the twenty-first century: the AIDS epidemic, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the ongoing conditions of anti-Black violence. Analyzing a range of works written to commemorate these losses, Andrea Zarafshon Moore explores how contemporary classical music (aka new music) frames and narrates these crises, gives voice to grief, imagines other possibilities, and makes loss audible. These crises are read alongside one another to reveal the ways they are mutually imbricated, while also recognizing the sheer commemorative dominance of 9/11 in this century. Attending to broader debates and discourses through which commemoration is always filtered and the ways interpretive consensus has been sought and articulated in both musical and other memorial forms, Moore probes the conventional claims of commemoration, particularly those for the necessity of remembrance to healing and the prevention of future crises. Audible Loss concludes by reflecting on the limits of existing commemorative forms and the possibility, even necessity, of new ones. Taking the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study, it proposes that while memorials of all kinds may provide outlets for collective remembrance and even mourning, their power to forge a sense of collectivity is diminished as public discourse grows more fragmented. Deeply informed yet highly approachable, Audible Loss is a major contribution to the fields of music and memory studies and essential reading for anyone interested in memory culture in the United States today.

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Book SynopsisExamines the need to recenter the category of sextheorizing sex itself as nonbinaryin contemporary studies of gender and sexualityGender has largely replaced sex as a category in critical theory, in progressive cultural circles, and in everyday bureaucratic language. Much of this development has been salutary. Gender has become a crucial site for theorizing trans identifications and embodiments. Yet, without a concomitant theory of sex, gender's contemporary uses also intersect with late neoliberalism's emphasis on micro-identities, flexibility, avatar culture, and human capital. Contemporary culture has also grown more ambivalent about sexual desire and its expression. Sex is seen as both ubiquitous and ubiquitously a problem. In Defense of Sex theorizes sex as both a nonbinary form of embodiment (one that can complement recent trans conceptions of gender as multiple and nonbinary) and a crucial form of social desire. Drawing on intersex and trans theory as well as Marxist theory, feminist new materialism, psychoanalysis, and accounts of the flesh in Black studies, author Christopher Breu argues for a materialist understanding of embodiment and the workings of desire as they structure contemporary culture. Moving from critique to theorizing embodiment, desire, and forms of bioaccumulation, In Defense of Sex concludes by proposing the unabashedly utopian project of building a sexual and embodied commons. In Defense of Sex: Nonbinary Embodiment and Desire is available from Knowledge Unlatched on an open-access basis.

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Book SynopsisOn the Colors of Vowels investigates the nineteenth-century emergence of discourses attributing visual properties (color, brightness) to vowels in linguistics, poetics, acoustics, opera, and experimental psychology.

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Book SynopsisA richly cinematic and compelling look at priest-politicians in Brazil and their religious and secular entanglementsWhat does desire have to reveal about the nature of power? Through a detailed focus on the lives and loves of Catholic priests as they enter the profane world of party politics, Maya Mayblin explores the complex intersection of democracy, patriarchy, and religiosity in Brazil. For over a hundred years, Catholic priests have been running for government office, challenging Brazil's constitutional separation of church and state and its self-image as a modern, secular nation. Priests find themselves walking a tightrope between religious and secular demands in one of Brazil's poorest regions. Vote of Faith is a beautifully crafted ethnography based upon decades of fieldwork that tells the story of the ambiguous and frequently transgressive relationship between Catholicism and state governance, a relationship ultimately mediated by kinship, gender, and se

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Book SynopsisA vivid, artfully crafted, and deeply hopeful account of one community's struggle to rediscover and reinvent itself after a century of genocidal loss, dispossession, and displacementTo the extent that Middle Eastern Christians register in Euro-American political imaginaries, they are usually invoked to justify Western military intervention into countries like Iraq or Syria, or as an exemption to anti-Islamic immigration policies because of an assumption that their Christianity makes them easily assimilable in the so-called Judeo-Christian West.Using the tools of multisensory ethnography, Sonic Icons uncovers how these views work against the very communities they are meant to benefit. Through long term fieldwork in the Netherlands among Syriac Orthodox Christiansalso known as Assyrians, Aramaeans, and SyriacsBakker Kellogg reveals how they intertwine religious practice with political activism to save Syriac Christianity from the twin threats of political vio

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Book SynopsisA testament to the resilience and determination of Black North Carolinians to achieve educational equalityThis book examines the educational experiences of Black North Carolinians during the American Civil War and Reconstruction period, 18611877. By highlighting the collaborative efforts that led to the growing network of schools for the formerly enslaved people, it argues that schooling the Freedpeople was a contested terrain, fraught with conflicting visions of Black freedom and the role education should play. Although Black men and women emerged as the driving force behind the educational endeavors of this period, their work was facilitated by Northern aid and missionary societies, the federally-mandated Freedmen's Bureau, and over 1,400 teachers from various regional and racial backgrounds. Yet the educational landscape was far from uniform, and the individuals and organizations involved had their distinct visions regarding the nature and purpose of Freedpeople's education. Through the use of qualitative and quantitative research methods, this book offers new insights into the reasons why Black and white Northerners and Southerners elected to become teachers. By examining their diverse motivations and experiences, it argues that attitudes toward Freedpeople's education were complex and fluid, defying neat characterization. Despite mounting obstacles and opposition to their work, Black North Carolinians' unrelenting quest for education ultimately gave rise to free public schooling for both races, the professionalization of Black teachers, and an extensive network of Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

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Book SynopsisA fresh look at film through its invisible visible objects.

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Book SynopsisBringing together lyric poetry, documentary photographs, and lives lived along the U.S.-Mexico borderland Written during extended periods in Brownsville, McAllen, and Marfa, Texas, in Carbonate of Copper Roberto Tejada gives voice to unsettled stories from the past, as well as to present-day experiences of custody and displacement. The poems stage scenes adjacent to the U.S.-Mexico border and to the realities of migration warped by jarring political vitriol, bearing witness to past and present-day hazards and sorrows wagered by those in search of asylum. So enabled, these poems make visible not only the infrastructure of militarized surveillance and its detention complex but also the aspiration to justice and mercy, and the resilient self-organized order of time for migrants seeking human dignity while awaiting passage to the other side of the dividing line. The book's title refers also to a mineral found in azurite and malachite, a color medium that had an impact on art during the first phase of globalization, the ensuing colonial enterprise and its systems of extraction. Carbonate of copper was less desirable than the deeper ultramarine made from ground lapis lazuli, but Renaissance artists and patrons nonetheless coveted it and prompted a market for the blue derivative used in tempera and oil pigment. The blue powder pigment serves, too, as a form of sorcery: one that would ward off those who deal in injury of the already dispossessed. Turning his attention to the forced relocation of peoples, the covid-19 death toll, the encroaching dangers of illiberal rule, the meanings of home and eviction, the power of cultural memory as well as his artistic forebears, Tejada accounts for the uncounted and those excluded from belonging in voices that tell the cruel fortunes and joyful vitality of human and non-human life forms.

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