Search results for ""Collective""

Much research on the city in developing societies has focused mainly on one of three areas—planning, demography, or economics—and has emphasized either power elites or the masses, but not both. The published literature on Latin America has reflected these interests and has so far failed to provide a comprehensive view of Latin American urbanization. Urban Latin America is an attempt to integrate research on Latin American social organization within a single theoretical framework: development as fundamentally a political problem. Alejandro Portes and John Walton have included material on both elites and marginal populations and on the three major areas of research in order to formulate and address some of the key questions about the structure of urban politics in Latin America. Following an introduction that delineates the scope of Latin American urban studies, Portes discusses the Latin American city as a creation of European colonialism. He goes on to examine political behavior among the poor, with central reference to system support and countersystem potential. Walton provides material for a comparative study of four cities: Monterrey and Guadalajara in Mexico and Medellín and Cali in Colombia. He also summarizes a large number of urban elite studies and develops a theoretical interpretation of their collective results, based on class structure and vertical integration. Material in each chapter is cross-referenced to other chapters, and the authors have used a common methodological approach in synthesizing and interpreting the research literature. In the final chapter they generalize current findings, elaborating on the interface between elite and mass politics in the urban situation. They make some observations on approaching changes and pinpoint possible research strategies for the future.

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Beginning in the late eighteenth century, Europeans embarked on a new way of classifying the world, devising genealogies that determined degrees of relatedness by tracing heritage through common ancestry. This methodology organized historical systems into family trees, transforming the closest contemporaneous terms on trees of languages, religions, races, nations, species, or individuals into siblings. Encompassing political fraternity, sister languages, racial discourse on brotherhood, evolutionary sibling species, and intense, often incestuously inclined brother-sister bonds in literature, siblinghood stands out as a ubiquitous-yet unacknowledged-conceptual touchstone across the European long nineteenth century. In all such systems the sibling term, not-quite-same and not-quite-other, serves as an active fault line, necessary for and yet continuously destabilizing definition and classification. In her provocative book, Stefani Engelstein explores the pervasive significance of sibling structures and their essential role in the modern organization of knowledge and identity. Sibling Action argues that this relational paradigm came to structure the modern subject, life sciences, human sciences, and collective identities such as race, religion, and gender. Engelstein considers theoretical constructions of subjectivity through Sophocles' Antigone; fraternal equality and its exclusion of sisters in political rhetoric; the intertwining of economic and kinship theory by Friedrich Engels and Claude Levi-Strauss; Darwin and his contemporaries' accounts of speciation; anthropological and philological depictions of Muslims and Jews at the margins of Europe; and evolutionary psychology's theorizing around the incest taboo. Integrating close readings across the disciplines with panoramic intellectual history and arresting literary interpretations, Sibling Action presents a compelling new understanding of systems of knowledge and provides the foundation for less confrontational formulations of belonging, identity, and agency.

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Despite religious claims of a spiritual egalitarianism in the heavenly kingdom, there was a definite tendency in the Middle Ages to organize the celestial realm according to the established customs, values, and hierarchy of earthly society. In this study of over 2500 female and male saints, Jane Schulenburg explores women's status and experience in early medieval society and in the Church. She focuses on the changing social contexts of female sanctity (women saints as embodiments of cultural models) as well as extravagant, "transgressive" or "deviant" female behaviour which frequently challenged male order and authority. She argues that between 500-1100 a clear gender-based asymmetry existed in the selection of saints, which became more exaggerated during certain eras. The title, "Forgetful of Their Sex," is taken from St Jerome's writings and refers to women's ability to deny or transcend the "natural frailty" of their sex, or to act in a "virile" or heroic manner. This study depicts the lives of these strong, creative, independent-minded women who achieved a visibility in their society which led to recognition of sanctity. She also examines some of the major contributing factors involved in establishing reputations for sanctity and the recruitment and promotion of saints, including family wealth and power, patronage, monasticism, virginity, motherhood, and longevity. Invaluable for what they tell us about early medieval society and the Church, the lives of these early saints also afford rare insight into the private world of medieval men and women, the special bonds of family and friendship, and the collective mentalities of the period. This book should constitute a major contribution to the study of medieval history, gender and religion.

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Sovereignty and the Sacred challenges contemporary models of polity and economy through a two-step engagement with the history of religions. Beginning with the recognition of the convergence in the history of European political theology between the sacred and the sovereign as creating “states of exception”—that is, moments of rupture in the normative order that, by transcending this order, are capable of re-founding or remaking it—Robert A. Yelle identifies our secular, capitalist system as an attempt to exclude such moments by subordinating them to the calculability of laws and markets. The second step marshals evidence from history and anthropology that helps us to recognize the contribution of such states of exception to ethical life, as a means of release from the legal or economic order. Yelle draws on evidence from the Hebrew Bible to English deism, and from the Aztecs to ancient India, to develop a theory of polity that finds a place and a purpose for those aspects of religion that are often marginalized and dismissed as irrational by Enlightenment liberalism and utilitarianism.Developing this close analogy between two elemental domains of society, Sovereignty and the Sacred offers a new theory of religion while suggesting alternative ways of organizing our political and economic life. By rethinking the transcendent foundations and liberating potential of both religion and politics, Yelle points to more hopeful and ethical modes of collective life based on egalitarianism and popular sovereignty. Deliberately countering the narrowness of currently dominant economic, political, and legal theories, he demonstrates the potential of a revived history of religions to contribute to a rethinking of the foundations of our political and social order.

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(Not) All Roads Lead to Rome is the result of the highly engaging debate within the “Annual Meeting of Postgraduates in Ancient History”, a yearly congress of young graduates and researchers held in April 2022 in the University of Barcelona. In this volume, the issue of mobility in Antiquity in its broadest sense is approached from a multidisciplinary perspective. One of the main objectives is, also, to give promising young scholars (postgraduates and PHD students) the opportunity to publish their early research on mobility and build a cohesive but thematically broad work. Although mobility is always present in studies of exchange and cultural diffusion, in this case it becomes the main subject of this collective research effort. We aim to encourage academic discussion around mobility as a key feature of societies, inherent to their functioning and where cultural, social and economic processes meet. The Mediterranean, and the Roman Empire by extension, is a dynamic area, and thus, it allows us to study mobility from many perspectives. In this volume, the movement of ideas, be they ideological or religious, is explored as it relates to underlying social and economic patterns. Likewise, the physical mobility of people across empires or within settlements is treated as a consequence of and a way to ease social relations. Social mobility too is discussed in the broader framework of socioeconomic dynamics, with case studies ranging from Egypt to Rome. Finally, the movement of goods (trade) is also part of this volume, as it was essential at bolstering interconnectivity in the Mediterranean. In that regard, archaeology holds the largest potential to provide new data regarding mobility of products, and thus long-distance contact and exchange.

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This book presents a group of small and inconspicuous barrows that were recently discovered in the forest of Apeldoorn, the Netherlands. They are part of an extensive barrow landscape of which little was yet known. Fieldwork carried out in and around them yielded a wealth of new data. It was discovered that even the most inconspicuous and heavily damaged mound of this group still contained many special features.This special place was anchored around a site that probably had a particular significance in the Late Neolithic, and where special rituals were carried out during the Bronze Age, resulting in the construction of an enigmatic row of pits – rituals the likes of which have not previously been attested around barrows in the Netherlands, but which are known elsewhere in Europe. The dead were buried at locations that were probably only later covered by monuments. During the Bronze Age (between the 18th and 15th centuries BC) the mounds of this small barrow group were used as collective graves for what was probably perceived as one specific ‘community of ancestors’.The burial practices in the mounds show strong similarities and it is argued that these barrows were each other’s successors, representing the funeral history of people who wished to unite their forebears in death as one unproblematic whole without distinctions. The fieldwork showed that even small-scale, partial excavations of a seemingly minor barrow group can inform us on the significance of the extensive barrow landscapes they are part of – a knowledge that can help us to understand the prehistoric legacy of the Netherlands and to protect it for the future as heritage.

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Arqueología de las sociedades locales en la Alta Edad Media: San Julián de Aistra y las residencias de las élites rurales presents the main results obtained in the archaeological project of San Julián de Aistra (Zalduondo-Araia, Álava) carried out between 2006 and 2020 by University College London and the University of the Basque Country. The remains of a hermitage dedicated to Santa Julián and Santa Basilisa, built in the 10th century and renovated in the Romanesque period and in the 18th century, are preserved in the deserted village of Aistra, which is documented since the 11th century. Excavation has shown that the site was occupied in prehistoric, Roman and medieval times. While prehistoric and Roman materials have been recovered in secondary contexts, four medieval phases of a domestic, productive, and funerary nature have been defined. One of the most important results of the project has been the discovery of residential spaces of elites who exercised territorial dominion throughout the Early Middle Ages. In the 14th century, the place was depopulated and, since then, the Aistra area has been managed and disputed by the nearby villages of Zalduondo and Araia, which created a community aimed at jointly managing the resources and spaces of Aistra. This community, active between the 14th and 20th centuries, broke up from the 19th century onwards, when individual management of resources became accentuated, and the commons were divided up. This collective volume brings together a large number of specialized studies and provides an interpretation of the site of Aistra in terms of socio-political practices that define the main characteristics of early medieval local societies in the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula.

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The first comprehensive survey of the photographs, films, and videos of Ori Gersht, this richly illustrated book presents the best of Gersht's achingly beautiful work and explores how he intertwines spectacles of painterly and narrative imagery with personal and collective memory, metaphysical journeys, contextualized spaces, and the history of art and photography. Pushing the camera to the limits of what it can record, Gersht engages an aesthetic that reflects both a highly researched and instinctive approach to his chosen media. Be it the scars left on the sunlit yet war-torn interiors of buildings in Sarajevo, the white noise of a modern-day train journey to Auschwitz, or the clearing of trees in a forest that once stood witness to mass murder in the Ukraine, Gersht's vision bridges a history that is full of violent horror and a world of emergent, transcendent beauty. Ori Gersht was born in Israel in 1967 and is currently based in London. A conduit between the past and present, his large-scale photographs and videos wed old masters to new technologies, quoting from such sources as Spanish and Dutch still- life painting and the Hudson River Valley School. Gersht's interest in history also goes beyond the visual arts, encompassing the political history that has shaped his personal identity and that of all of us scarred by violence in our contemporary world. His work has been acquired and commissioned by major art institutions such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, London, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

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The complete riveting transcript of the historic case against the president for igniting the January 6 siege of the Capitol Prosecution of an Insurrection is the complete, riveting transcript of the historic case against President Donald J. Trump for igniting the January 6 siege of the Capitol. Following the norm-shattering attempt by his followers to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, the second impeachment trial of the president seared a new lexicon into our collective consciousness and marked a watershed moment in American history. The case, presented to the Senate by impeachment managers from the House, marked a bravura performance by members of Congress who were themselves the targets of the rioters incited by the president only days earlier. Citizens disturbed by the events of January 2021 and Republican attempts to rewrite history will find in these pages the most authoritative record of one of our democracy’s darkest hours, including: • The official articles of impeachment against the president for incitement of an insurrection • The response of President Trump to the articles of impeachment, on behalf of the House defense lawyers • The complete trial transcript, including the full text of the arguments made by the House representatives and the full text of the president’s defense • Headshots from the trial of all nine House impeachment managers in action, including lead manager Representative Jamie Raskin, as well as all three House defense lawyers • Photographs, timelines, and screenshots of tweets entered as evidence, as well as stills from the videos presented Prosecution of an Insurrection preserves for posterity an episode that ranks with the McCarthy hearings, Watergate, and the Iran-Contra investigation for its importance in American political history.

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Investment banks have disappeared overnight, industrial firms have gone bankrupt, and the financial order has been shaken to the core: our world is in the grips of the most calamitous economic crisis since the Great Depression with its epicentre is the imperial USA. Many around may wonder if another world is possible, but few are mapping out potential avenues - and flagging wrong turns - en route to a post-capitalist future. In this groundbreaking analysis, renowned radical political economists Albo, Gindin and Panitch lay bare the roots of the crisis, which they locate in the dynamic expansion of capital on a global scale over the last quarter century - and in the inner logic of capitalism itself. In and Out of Crisis challenges the call by much of the Left for a return to a mythical Golden Age of economic regulation as a check on finance capital and shows how neo-liberal free markets have been sustained by massive state intervention. With clarity and erudition, they argue that given the balance of social forces regulation is not a means of fundamentally reordering power in society, but rather a way of preserving markets. Contrary to those who believe US hegemony is on the wane, Albo, Gindin and Panitch contend that the meltdown has, in fact, reinforced the centrality of the American state as the dominant force within global capitalism, while simultaneously increasing the difficulties entailed in managing its imperial role. In conclusion, the authors argue that it's time to start thinking about genuinely transformative alternatives to capitalism - and how to build the collective capacity to get us there. We should be thinking bigger and preparing to go further.

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A lavishly illustrated monograph that spans the entire career of Gerhard Richter, one of the most celebrated contemporary artists "Spans the contemporary German artist's six-decade career. . . . [A] stirring exhibition in [its] own right."—New York Times"[A] weighty catalogue... illuminat[es] some less-visited corners of Richter's oeuvre."—New York Review of Books Over the course of his acclaimed 60-year career, Gerhard Richter (b. 1932) has employed both representation and abstraction as a means of reckoning with the legacy, collective memory, and national sensibility of post–Second World War Germany, in both broad and very personal terms. This handsomely designed book features approximately 100 of his key canvases, from photo paintings created in the early 1960s to portraits and later large-scale abstract series, as well as select works in glass. New essays by eminent scholars address a variety of themes: Sheena Wagstaff evaluates the conceptual import of the artist’s technique; Benjamin H. D. Buchloh discusses the poignant Birkenau paintings (2014); Peter Geimer explores the artist’s enduring interest in photographic imagery; Briony Fer looks at Richter’s family pictures against traditional painting genres and conventions; Brinda Kumar investigates the artist’s engagement with landscape as a site of memory; André Rottmann considers the impact of randomization and chance on Richter’s abstract works; and Hal Foster examines the glass and mirror works. As this book demonstrates, Richter’s rich and varied oeuvre is a testament to the continued relevance of painting in contemporary art.Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University PressExhibition Schedule:The Met Breuer, New York (March 4–July 5, 2020)Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (August 14, 2020–January 19, 2021)

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Bringing together classic and new writings of the trailblazing feminist theorist Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders addresses some of the most pressing and complex issues facing contemporary feminism. Forging vital links between daily life and collective action and between theory and pedagogy, Mohanty has been at the vanguard of Third World and international feminist thought and activism for nearly two decades. This collection highlights the concerns running throughout her pioneering work: the politics of difference and solidarity, decolonizing and democratizing feminist practice, the crossing of borders, and the relation of feminist knowledge and scholarship to organizing and social movements. Mohanty offers here a sustained critique of globalization and urges a reorientation of transnational feminist practice toward anticapitalist struggles.Feminism without Borders opens with Mohanty's influential critique of western feminism ("Under Western Eyes") and closes with a reconsideration of that piece based on her latest thinking regarding the ways that gender matters in the racial, class, and national formations of globalization. In between these essays, Mohanty meditates on the lives of women workers at different ends of the global assembly line (in India, the United Kingdom, and the United States); feminist writing on experience, identity, and community; dominant conceptions of multiculturalism and citizenship; and the corporatization of the North American academy. She considers the evolution of interdisciplinary programs like Women's Studies and Race and Ethnic Studies; pedagogies of accommodation and dissent; and transnational women's movements for grassroots ecological solutions and consumer, health, and reproductive rights. Mohanty's probing and provocative analyses of key concepts in feminist thought—"home," "sisterhood," "experience," "community"—lead the way toward a feminism without borders, a feminism fully engaged with the realities of a transnational world.

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How social scientists' disagreements about their key words and distinctions have been misconceived, and what to do about itSocial scientists do research on a variety of topics—gender, capitalism, populism, and race and ethnicity, among others. They make descriptive and explanatory claims about empathy, intelligence, neoliberalism, and power. They advise policymakers on diversity, digitalization, work, and religion. And yet, as Gabriel Abend points out in this provocative book, they can’t agree on what these things are and how to identify them. How to tell if something is a religion or a cult or a sect? What is empathy? What makes this society a capitalist one? Disputes of this sort arise again and again in the social sciences.Abend argues that these disagreements have been doubly misconceived. First, they conflate two questions: how a social science community should use its most important words, and what distinctions it should accept and work with. Second, there’s no fact of the matter about either. Instead, they’re practical reason questions for a community, which aim at epistemically and morally good outcomes. Abend calls on social science communities to work together on their words, distinctions, and classifications. They must make collective decisions about the uses of words, the acceptability of distinctions, and the criteria for assessing both. These decisions aren’t up to individual scholars; the community gets the last word. According to Abend, the common good, justice, and equality should play a significant role in the logic of scientific research.Gabriel Abend is professor of sociology at University of Lucerne and the author of The Moral Background: An Inquiry into the History of Business Ethics (Princeton).

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'He makes us see a subject we thought we knew so well from a completely different angle; in writing that is deeply researched, but inviting, warm, and full of personality' Katy Hessel 'Charlie Porter is a magician' Olivia LaingWhy do we wear what we wear? To answer this question, we must go back and unlock the wardrobes of the early twentieth century, when fashion as we know it was born.In Bring No Clothes, acclaimed fashion writer Charlie Porter brings us face to face with six members of the Bloomsbury Group, the collective of artists and thinkers who were in the vanguard of a social and sartorial revolution. Each of them offers fresh insight into the constraints and possibilities of fashion today: from the stifling repression of E. M. Forster's top buttons to the creativity of Vanessa Bell's wayward hems; from the sheer pleasure of Ottoline Morrell's lavish dresses to the clashing self-consciousness of Virginia Woolf's orange stockings. As Porter carefully unpicks what they wore and how they wore it, we see how clothing can be a means of artistic, intellectual and sexual liberation, or, conversely, a tool for patriarchal control.Travelling through libraries, archives, attics and studios, Porter uncovers fresh evidence about his subjects, revealing them in a thrillingly intimate, vivid new light. And, as he is inspired to begin making his own clothing, his perspective on fashion - and on life - starts to change. In the end, he shows, we should all 'bring no clothes,' embracing a new philosophy of living: one which activates the connections between the way we dress and the way we think, act and love.

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Ever wondered if your intentions, prayers or wishes have a real, calculable effect on the world? Here, from Lynne McTaggart, groundbreaking author of ‘The Field’, comes riveting accounts of scientific investigations and real case histories with evidence that we are all connected and our intentions can be harnessed as a collective force for good. For the last 40 years renegade scientists, experimenting with the limits of quantum physics, have made seemingly impossible discoveries. 1966: a lie-detector expert accidentally discovers that plants can read thoughts. 1982: meditating Buddhist monks in the Himalayas turn their bodies into a human furnace. 1994: a psychologist's experiments reveal a stream of light flowing from healers during healing. These events form part of an extraordinary scientific story and revolutionary discovery - that thought is a thing that affects other things. In The Intention Experiment, Lynne McTaggart, author of the international bestseller The Field, joins forces with a team of international, renowned scientists to test the effects of focused group intention on scientifically quantifiable targets - animal, plant and human. The Intention Experiment is a truly revolutionary book that invites you, the reader, to take part in the greatest intention experiment in history. The results of McTaggart's 'global laboratory' started with the focused intention that made a geranium leaf glow to evidence to show that group intention is powerful enough to affect targets more than 5000 miles away and may even affect global warming. These remarkable results prove human thought and intention has the power to focus our lives, heal our illnesses, clean up our communities and improve the planet. This book also shows you how to harness that power to make changes in your own life.

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The pace of modern life is undoubtedly speeding up, yet this acceleration does not seem to have made us any happier or more content. If acceleration is the problem, then the solution, argues Hartmut Rosa in this major new work, lies in “resonance.” The quality of a human life cannot be measured simply in terms of resources, options, and moments of happiness; instead, we must consider our relationship to, or resonance with, the world. Applying his theory of resonance to many domains of human activity, Rosa describes the full spectrum of ways in which we establish our relationship to the world, from the act of breathing to the adoption of culturally distinct worldviews. He then turns to the realms of concrete experience and action – family and politics, work and sports, religion and art – in which we as late modern subjects seek out resonance. This task is proving ever more difficult as modernity’s logic of escalation is both cause and consequence of a distorted relationship to the world, at individual and collective levels. As Rosa shows, all the great crises of modern society – the environmental crisis, the crisis of democracy, the psychological crisis – can also be understood and analyzed in terms of resonance and our broken relationship to the world around us. Building on his now classic work on acceleration, Rosa’s new book is a major new contribution to the theory of modernity, showing how our problematic relation to the world is at the crux of some of the most pressing issues we face today. This bold renewal of critical theory for our times will be of great interest to students and scholars across the social sciences and humanities.

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The area of Los Angeles known as South Central is often overshadowed by dismal stereotypes, problematic racial stigmas, and its status as the home to some of the city's poorest and most violent neighborhoods. Amid South Central's shifting demographics and its struggles with poverty, sociologist Pamela J. Prickett takes a closer look, focusing on the members of an African American Muslim community and exploring how they help each other combat poverty, job scarcity, violence, and racial injustice. Prickett's engaging ethnography relates how believers in this longstanding religious community see Islam as a way of life, a comprehensive blueprint for individual and collective action, guiding how to interact with others, conduct business, strive for progress, and cultivate faith. Prickett offers deep insights into the day-to-day lived religion of the Muslims who call this community home, showing how the mosque provides a system of social support and how believers deepen their spiritual practice not in spite of, but through, conditions of poverty. Prickett breaks past the stigmas of urban poverty, revealing a complex and vibrant community by telling the stories of longstanding residents of South Central--like Sister Ava, who offers food to the local unhoused people and finds the sacred in her extensive DVD collection. In addition to her portraits of everyday life among Muslims in South Central, Prickett also provides vivid and accessible descriptions of Ramadan and histories of the mosque, situates this community within the larger story of the Nation of Islam, explores gender issues, and unpacks the interaction between African American Muslims and South Asian and Arab American Muslims, revealing both the global and local significance of this religious tradition.

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Located in north eastern Spain, Catalonia has long displayed the attributes of a nation: distinct language and culture, separate social and political institutions, and a strong collective identity. At the same time, it is one of Spain's centres of economic dynamism and innovation. As such, it is an especially striking instance of what has come to be known as 'minority' or 'internal' nations within a larger political order. Even after the Franco dictatorship's systematic suppression of Catalan language and culture, the idea that the Catalan nation needed to have an independent state of its own remained at the margins of Catalan politics. Yet, in recent years Catalan independence has become: the formal objective of Catalonia's nationalist parties; the focus of a strongly mobilized social movement; and the primary option of as much as half of Catalonia's electorate. This drive to independence even led to a failed unilateral declaration of independence. How can this remarkable transformation best be explained and what does it portend for the future of Catalonia and Spain? This new edition seeks to answer these questions. At the same time, the book analyzes the proposal for an independent Catalan state while also showing how the Catalan question might be resolved within Spain, by creating a multinational federation. It also explains why there is little prospect of either project coming to pass. The book demonstrates the dangers and contradictions of a state nationalism that denies the very existence of internal nations, while also exploring the terms under which such nations can be accommodated within a larger political order. On this basis, it addresses a critical challenge to the political institutions of much of Europe and North America.

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War presents the most degraded moral environment humanity creates. It is an arena where individuality is subsumed in collective violence and humanity is obscured as a faceless, merciless enemy pitted against its reflection in an elemental struggle for survival. A barbaric logic has guided the conduct of war throughout history. Yet as Cathal Nolan reveals in this gripping, poignant, and powerful book, even as war can obliterate hope and decency at the grand level it simultaneously produces conditions that permit astonishing exceptions of mercy and shared dignity. Pulling the trigger is usually both the expedient thing and required by war's grim and remorseless calculus. Yet somehow the trigger is not always pulled. A different choice is made. Restraint triumphs. Humanity is rediscovered and honored in a flash of recognition. This book gathers and explores acts of singular mercy, giving them form and substance—across wars, causes, and opposing uniforms. These acts demand our attention not only for the moral uplift they supply but because they challenge assumptions about humanity itself. Rising above ordinary courage, they may ultimately transcend our understanding, entering the realm of the ineffable. Nevertheless, as Nolan shows, acts of mercy in war are not the provenance of saints but of ordinary men and women who perform them at great personal risk. As much or more than the normal war hero stories, we must recognize the extraordinary courage of the merciful in war. Mercy is an exceptional book about exceptions, challenging myths and heroic fabrications, refuting claims to exclusive moral virtue. It reminds us that decency in warfare is also universal, offering a haunting and compellingly humane counternarrative to war's usual inhumane logic.

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This book is the first in English to address contemporary Israeli poetry of the Holocaust. The unique character of the book consists in its capacity to approach simultaneously the fervent feelings and scalding, emotional scars associated with the Holocaust and the aesthetic 'infrastructure' that is inlaid and operates in the very depth of the poems under consideration. In this respect, the book functions on two simultaneous levels:it views the emotional strata engaged with the Holocaust while analyzing its literary mechanism from an artistic perspective. The book also turns to the congruence between the very collective nature of contemporary Israeli poetry and the capacity to cope with the Holocaus while enlisting literary means. Hence contemporary Israeli poetry tends to display a poetic might while being also emotionally oriented. Memory of the Holocaust should never be dimmed by passing years nor by the fact that the last survivors are saying farewell to all earthly things. There are numerous ways to commemorate the Holocaust. This book introduces a very effective way to do so. One may wonder about combining the Holocaust with art. That doubt, however, is proven wrong by this book. Accordingly, it deftly illustrates how an artistic text can deliver the most scorching emotions of the Holocaust. This aesthetic dexterity does not cloud the Holocaust but rather introduces it in the most artistically challenging fashion. The fact that the Holocaust poetry discussed here is also Israeli poetry makes the book even more important and relevant. One may cogently argue that the sate of Israel was established on the ashes of the Holocaust. If so, the fact that contemporary Israeli poetry is dedicated to the topic of the Holocaust celebrates the victory of humankind over Nazi atrocities. This book should be of interest to students, teachers and scholars of the Holocaust, modern Hebrew/Israeli poetry, and literature in general.

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An illuminating story of a Sufi community that sought the revelation of God. In the Afghan highlands of the sixteenth century, the messianic community known as the Roshaniyya not only desired to find God’s word and to abide by it but also attempted to practice God’s word and to develop techniques of language intended to render their own tongues as the organs of continuous revelation. As their critics would contend, however, the Roshaniyya attempted to make language do something that language should not do—infuse the semiotic with the divine. Their story thus ends in a tower of skulls, the proliferation of heresiographies that detailed the sins of the Roshaniyya, and new formations of “Afghan” identity. In Singing with the Mountains, William E. B. Sherman finds something extraordinary about the Roshaniyya, not least because the first known literary use of vernacular Pashto occurs in an eclectic, Roshani imitation of the Qur’an. The story of the Roshaniyya exemplifies a religious culture of linguistic experimentation. In the example of the Roshaniyya, we discover a set of questions and anxieties about the capacities of language that pervaded Sufi orders, imperial courts, groups of wandering ascetics, and scholastic networks throughout Central and South Asia. In telling this tale, Sherman asks the following questions: How can we make language shimmer with divine truth? How can letters grant sovereign power and form new “ethnic” identities and ways of belonging? How can rhyme bend our conceptions of time so that the prophetic past comes to inhabit the now of our collective moment? By analyzing the ways in which the Roshaniyya answered these types of questions—and the ways in which their answers were eventually rejected as heresies—this book offers new insight into the imaginations of religious actors in the late medieval and early modern Persianate worlds.

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This posthumous collection of interviews and occasional papers given by Castoriadis between 1974 and 1997 is a lively, direct introduction to the thinking of a writer who never abandoned his radically critical stance. It provides a clear, handy résumé of his political ideas, in advance of their times and profoundly relevant to today’s world. For this political thinker and longtime militant (co-founder with Claude Lefort of the revolutionary group “Socialisme ou Barbarie”), economist, psychoanalyst, and philosopher, two endless interrogations—how to understand the world and life in society—were intertwined with his own life and combats. An important chapter discusses the history of “Socialisme ou Barbarie” (1949—1967); in it, Castoriadis presents the views he defended, in that group, on a number of subjects: a critique of Marxism and of the Soviet Union, the bureaucratization of society and of the workers’ movement, and the primacy of individual and collective autonomy. Another chapter presents the concept, central to his thinking, of “imaginary significations” as what make a society “cohere.” Castoriadis constantly returns to the question of democracy as the never-finished, deliberate creation by the people of societal institutions, analyzing its past and its future in the Western world. He scathingly criticizes “representative” democracy and develops a conception of direct democracy extending to all spheres of social life. He wonders about the chances of achieving freedom and autonomy—those requisites of true democracy—in a world of endless, meaningless accumulation of material goods, where the mechanisms for governing society have disintegrated, the relationship with nature is reduced to one of destructive domination, and, above all, the population has withdrawn from the public sphere: a world dominated by hobbies and lobbies—”a society adrift.”

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This text introduces a group of young black artists who painted their way out of the despair awaiting them in the citrus groves and packing houses of 1950s Florida. As their story recaptures the imagination of Floridians and their paintings fetch ever-escalating prices, the legacy of their freshly conceived landscapes exerts a new and powerful influence on the popular conception of the Sunshine State. Emerging in the late 1950s, the Highwaymen created idyllic, quickly realized images of the Florida dream and peddled some 100,000 of them from the trunks of their cars. Working with inexpensive materials, the Highwaymen produced an astonishing number of landscapes that depict a romanticized Florida - a faraway place of wind-swept palm trees, billowing cumulus clouds, wetlands, lakes, rivers, ocean, and setting sun. With paintings still wet, they loaded their cars and travelled the state's east coast, selling the images door-to-door and store-to-store, in restaurants, offices, courthouses and bank lobbies. Sometimes characterized as motel art, the work is a hybrid form of landscape painting, corrupting the classically influenced ideas of the Highwaymen's white mentor, A.E. ""Bean"" Backus. At first, the paintings sold like boom-time real estate. In succeeding decades, however, they were consigned to attics and garage sales. Rediscovered in the mid-1990s, today they are recognized as the work of American folk artists. Gary Monroe tells the story behind the Highwaymen, a loose association of 25 men and one woman from the Ft. Pierce area - a fascinating mixture of individual talent, collective enterprise and cultural heritage. He also offers a critical look at the paintings and the movement's development. Added to this are personal reminiscences by some of the artists, along with a gallery of 63 full-colour reproductions of their paintings.

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During William L. Dwyer's fifteen-year tenure as a U.S. District Court judge, he presided over many complex and groundbreaking cases. In one of his most controversial rulings, he engaged environmentalists and the timber industry in a heavily publicized and emotionally fraught battle over the territory of the northern spotted owl, ultimately approving the bird for “threatened species” status and forcing the Forest Service to substantially reduce logging in owl-habitat areas. Before his appointment to the district court in 1987, Dwyer had spent more than thirty years as a trial lawyer, never shying away from the most difficult cases. He argued the libel suit of accused Communist sympathizer John Goldmark; he represented newspaper employees in the contested proposal for a joint-operating agreement between the Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer; and he brought a suit against baseball's American League that resulted in the return of the Mariners to Seattle. The fifteen speeches in this volume cover a span from 1978 to 2002 and reveal the breadth and scope of Dwyer's legal wisdom. He championed libraries as keepers of our language, ideas, and history; he taught students the history and philosophy of litigation; and he challenged members of the legal profession to do more pro bono work. His respect for the rule of law and his belief in the necessary contribution of lawyers to society come through clearly in his own words, whether he was speaking to the American Library Association, the Federal Bar Association, or first-year law students. The volume includes several speeches that express Dwyer's hopes for the American legal system. “If we use our heads,” Dwyer avers, “we have the collective ability to survive and to let the rest of life survive with us.”

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Modern states increasingly seek to regulate religious expression, practice and discourse. This is profoundly evident at many levels of Islamic policy interaction: from debates about the banning of the Muslim face-veil in Europe to civic re-education programmes for Muslim citizens in China. Governance of Islam in Pakistan provides a systematic account of how interactions between multiple public and private bodies direct the regulation and standardisation of Islam in one of the largest Muslim-majority states in the world. Analysis centres on the institutional development of the Council of Islamic Ideology, a constitutional body tasked with issuing advice to the executive and legislature about the compatibility of laws with Islamic principles. Based on archival material that has been subject to little scholarly attention, and interviews with Council members and staff of other state bodies, Sarah Holz proposes governance as an analytical framework to study the negotiation of religious expression, practice and discourse. In contrast to the established Islamisation narrative which generally labels such religious institutions as mere rubberstamps in the process of policy-making, the study of governance offers an alternative approach that enables examination of the dynamic competition and cooperation among multiple actors. Through collective interaction the Council and other relevant bodies are active players in the governance of Islam. Insights gained from analysis of the ideational, structural and functional evolution of the Council offers a Global South perspective on liberal democratic ideas about the functionality of the modern state and its institutional structure. Issues of economic, cultural and local/international political influence bear strongly in governance analysis. Engagement with the governance policy tool has applicability across the social sciences, but is particularly relevant for South Asian/Near and Middle East Studies.

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A pioneering approach to contemporary historical writing on the First Crusade, looking at the texts as cultural artefacts rather than simply for the evidence they contain. The First Crusade (1095-1101) was the stimulus for a substantial boom in Western historical writing in the first decades of the twelfth century, beginning with the so-called "eyewitness" accounts of the crusade and extending to numerous second-hand treatments in prose and verse. From the time when many of these accounts were first assembled in printed form by Jacques Bongars in the early seventeenth century, and even more so since their collective appearance in the great nineteenth-century compendium of crusade texts, the Recueil des historiens des croisades, narrative histories have come to be regarded as the single most important resource for the academic study of the early crusade movement. But our understanding of these texts is still far from satisfactory. This ground-breaking volume draws together the work of an international team of scholars. It tackles the disjuncture between the study of the crusades and the study of medieval history-writing, setting the agenda for future research into historical narratives about or inspired by crusading. The basic premise that informs all the papers is that narrative accounts of crusades and analogous texts should not be primarily understood as repositories of data that contribute to a reconstruction of events, but as cultural artefacts that can be interrogated from a wide range of theoretical, methodological and thematic perspectives. MARCUS BULL is Andrew W Mellon Distinguished Professor of Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; DAMIEN KEMPF is Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Liverpool. Contributors: Laura Ashe, Steven Biddlecombe, Marcus Bull, Peter Frankopan, Damian Kempf, James Naus, Léan Ní Chléirigh, Nicholas Paul, William J. Purkis, Luigi Russo, Jay Rubenstein, Carol Sweetenham,

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Meetings with remarkable activists since the 1960s American social change movements dominated the 1960s and 1970s, an era brought about and influenced not by a handful of celebrity activists but by people who cared. These history makers together transformed the political and spiritual landscape of America and laid the foundation for many of the social movements that exist today. Through a series of 43 vignettes—tight biographical sketches of the characters and intimate memories of her personal encounters with them—the author creates a collective portrait of the rebels, artists, radicals, and thinkers who through word and action raised many of the issues of justice, the environment, feminism, and colonialism that we are now familiar with. From Berkeley to Bolivia, from New York to New Mexico, a complex, multi-layered radical history unfolds through the stories and lives of the characters. From Marty Schiffenhauer, who fought through the first rent-control law in the United States, to Ponderosa Pine, who started the All-Species Parade and never wore shoes, to Dan and Patricia Ellsberg, who released the Pentagon Papers and became life-long anti-war and antinuclear activists, the portraits bring out some of the vibrant, irreverent energy, the unswerving commitment, and the passion for life of these generations of activists. In our present moment, as many people find themselves in the streets protesting for the first time in their lives, In the Company of Rebels makes the connection to this relatively recent rebellious era. As the author comments on her own twenty-year old self, sitting at the counter of Cody’s Books in Berkeley in the early 1970s, thrilled about the times but oblivious of the work that came before: “I didn’t know anything about this courageous and colorful past. But now I know.”

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A close-up history of the Yugoslav artists who broke down the boundaries between public and private In the decades leading up to the dissolution of socialist Yugoslavia, a collective of young artists based in Zagreb took to using the city’s public spaces as a platform for radical individual expression. This Is Not My World presents a detailed account of the Group of Six Authors and their circle in the prolific and experimental period from 1975 to 1985, highlighting the friction between public and private that underlied their innovative practices. Looking to circumvent the rigid bureaucracy of official art institutions, this freewheeling group of conceptual artists and their peers brought artistic activities directly to an unwitting public by staging provocative performances, exhibiting artworks, and interacting with passersby on the streets. Exploring artworks such as Vlasta Delimar’s act of tying herself to a tree in a busy pedestrian area, Željko Jerman’s production of a giant banner declaring “Intimate Inscription” in the city’s central square, and Vlado Martek’s creation of an artwork on a seaside beach using women’s underwear, Adair Rounthwaite examines the work of these artists as a site of tension between the intimacy of artistic expression and the political structure of the public sphere under state socialism. Whereas many histories of modern and contemporary art in formerly socialist countries tend to be dominated by discussions of ideology and resistance, This Is Not My World focuses its attention on the affective aspects of the group’s activities, using artist interviews and extensive documentation to bring the reader closer to the felt experience of their public interventions. Situating the group’s work within the context of broader developments in conceptualism and theories of the avant-garde, Rounthwaite provides a fresh consideration and newly detailed account of this marginalized episode in global art history.

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When the First Crusade ended with the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, jubilant crusaders returned home to Europe bringing with them stories, sacred relics, and other memorabilia, including banners, jewelry, and weapons. In the ensuing decades, the memory of the crusaders' bravery and pious sacrifice was invoked widely among the noble families of western Christendom. Popes preaching future crusades would count on these very same families for financing, leadership, and for the willing warriors who would lay down their lives on the battlefield. Despite the great risks and financial hardships associated with crusading, descendants of those who suffered and died on crusade would continue to take the cross, in some cases over several generations. Indeed, as Nicholas L. Paul reveals in To Follow in Their Footsteps, crusading was very much a family affair.Scholars of the crusades have long pointed to the importance of dynastic tradition and ties of kinship in the crusading movement but have failed to address more fundamental questions about the operation of these social processes. What is a "family tradition"? How are such traditions constructed and maintained, and by whom? How did crusading families confront the loss of their kin in distant lands? Making creative use of Latin dynastic narratives as well as vernacular literature, personal possessions and art objects, and architecture from across western Europe, Paul shows how traditions of crusading were established and reinforced in the collective memories of noble families throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Even rulers who never fulfilled crusading vows found their political lives dominated and, in some ways, directed by the memory of their crusading ancestors. Filled with unique insights and careful analysis, To Follow in Their Footsteps reveals the lasting impact of the crusades, beyond the expeditions themselves, on the formation of dynastic identity and the culture of the medieval European nobility.

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Synergic Influence of Gaseous, Particulate, and Biological Pollutants on Human Health is a unique merger of two divergent parts. The first part is a presentation of the existing knowledge on the characteristics of basic air pollutants and their documented impact on human health. The focus is on the main gaseous, airborne particles (including fiber particles) and biological pollutants. The first part is a literature review conducted by the authors who are actively engaged in studying the described pollutants. The second part contains a study of methods used for the evaluation and prognosis of health effects to exposure to particular pollutants.Most of the chapters of this book go beyond the well-documented, solid facts and contain the authors' own evaluation of the utility and limitations of particular methods, as well as their suggestions for further studies. The reader who manages to wade through this part is sure to understand that the main drawback of the described methods is the impossibility to precisely assess the health effects of exposure to the combination of a few/many air pollutants, while one of the biggest problems is the effect of synergy. The last chapters of the book focus on the attempts to consider the effect of synergy and the analysis of the tedious work of many researchers to construct the tools enabling, to some extent, the prognosis of the health effects of simultaneous exposure to many air pollutants. The book also reveals the synergism of pollutants and social problems, reinforcing the adverse health effect of the population living not only in highly industrialized areas, but also in postindustrial areas. According to the authors, the construction of suitable tools which would at least partially allow for the evaluation of the collective impact of social factors and the conglomerate of the air pollutants on health of particular communities constitutes a great challenge and may inspire t

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Nearly a week after George Zimmerman was found not guilty of killing Trayvon Martin, President Obama walked into the press briefing room and shocked observers by saying that “Trayvon could have been me.” He talked personally and poignantly about his experiences and pointed to intra-racial violence as equally serious and precarious for black boys. He offered no sweeping policy changes or legislative agendas; he saw them as futile. Instead, he suggested that prejudice would be eliminated through collective efforts to help black males and for everyone to reflect on their own prejudices. Obama’s presidency provides a unique opportunity to engage in a discussion about race and politics. In The Race Whisperer, Melanye Price analyzes the manner in which Barack Obama uses race strategically to engage with and win the loyalty of potential supporters. This book uses examples from Obama’s campaigns and presidency to demonstrate his ability to authentically tap into notions of blackness and whiteness to appeal to particular constituencies. By tailoring his unorthodox personal narrative to emphasize those parts of it that most resonate with a specific racial group, he targets his message effectively to that audience, shoring up electoral and governing support. The book also considers the impact of Obama’s use of race on the ongoing quest for black political empowerment. Unfortunately, racial advocacy for African Americans has been made more difficult because of the intense scrutiny of Obama’s relationship with the black community, Obama’s unwillingness to be more publicly vocal in light of that scrutiny, and the black community’s reluctance to use traditional protest and advocacy methods on a black president. Ultimately, though, The Race Whisperer argues for a more complex reading of race in the age of Obama, breaking new ground in the study of race and politics, public opinion, and political campaigns.

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Provides new perspectives on women's print media in the long eighteenth centuryThis innovative volume presents for the first time collective expertise on women's magazines and periodicals of the long eighteenth century. While this period witnessed the birth of modern periodical culture and its ability to shape aspects of society from the popular to the political, most studies have traditionally obscured the very active role women's voices and women readers played in shaping the periodicals that in turn shaped Britain. The 30 essays here demonstrate the importance of periodicals to women, the importance of women to periodicals, and, crucially, they correct the destructive misconception that the more canonized periodicals and popular magazines were enemy or discontinuous forms. This collection shows how both periodicals and women drove debates on politics, education, theatre, celebrity, social practice, popular reading and everyday life itself.Divided into 6 thematic parts, the book uses innovative methodologies for historical periodical studies, thereby mapping new directions in eighteenth-century and Romantic studies, women's writing as well as media and cultural history. While our period witnessed the birth of modern periodical culture, most studies have obscured the active role women's voices and women readers played in shaping the periodicals that in turn shaped Britain.Key FeaturesPresents the first major study of the key role women played as authors, editors, and readers of periodicals and magazines in the long eighteenth centuryFeatures cutting-edge and interdisciplinary research by senior and early career specialists in the fields of periodical studies, material culture studies, theatre history, and cultural historyIn its exposition of innovative methodologies for historical periodical studies, the book maps new directions in eighteenth-century and Romantic studies, women's writing, and media and cultural historyMoves British women's print media to the centre of long eighteenth-century print culture

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There’s history as it’s told, and then there’s history as it actually happened. You may think you know the stories behind the world’s most well-known, groundbreaking achievements, but To Her Credit is here to make you reevaluate our collective story as it has been written. This book celebrates the stories of women, from ancient times until the 1990s, whose contributions have been overwritten and, far too often, accredited to men. The pattern of female achievements being stolen, overwritten, or straight-up ignored is as old as time. Authors Kaitlin Culmo and Emily McDermott—with stunning art by Kezia Gabriella—reclaim the work of these deserving heroines and offer reminders of what we lose when we don’t question history as it has been written. We’re often told that Cervantes “invented fiction” with the novel Don Quixote in 17th century Europe, but what about Lady Murasaki’s The Tale of Genji in 11th-century Japan? Elvis Presley is widely considered as “The King” and—for all intents and purposes—the inventor of rock and roll music. But what about Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who was the first to engineer the rock and roll sound, or Big Mama Thornton, for whom the song “Hound Dog” was explicitly written? Albert Einstein is a household name and so too is his famed equation E = mc2. But what about his first wife, Mileva Marić, who not only helped with the Nobel Prize–winning discovery, but also collaborated with Albert throughout the pivotal early years of his career? This book tells the stories of women who have been left out of history’s accolades. It’s time to talk about the thousands of years’ worth of art, inventions, innovations, and world-changing achievements made by women that have been ascribed to men.

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Can the university solve the social and political crisis in America?Higher education occupies a difficult place in twenty-first-century American culture. Universities—the institutions that bear so much responsibility for the future health of our nation—are at odds with the very publics they are intended to serve. As Kathleen Fitzpatrick asserts, it is imperative that we re-center the mission of the university to rebuild that lost trust. Critical thinking—the heart of what academics do—can today often negate, refuse, and reject new ideas. In an age characterized by rampant anti-intellectualism, Fitzpatrick charges the academy with thinking constructively rather than competitively, building new ideas rather than tearing old ones down. She urges us to rethink how we teach the humanities and to refocus our attention on the very human ends—the desire for community and connection—that the humanities can best serve. One key aspect of that transformation involves fostering an atmosphere of what Fitzpatrick dubs "generous thinking," a mode of engagement that emphasizes listening over speaking, community over individualism, and collaboration over competition.Fitzpatrick proposes ways that anyone who cares about the future of higher education can work to build better relationships between our colleges and universities and the public, thereby transforming the way our society functions. She encourages interested stakeholders to listen to and engage openly with one another's concerns by reading and exploring ideas together; by creating collective projects focused around common interests; and by ensuring that our institutions of higher education are structured to support and promote work toward the public good. Meditating on how and why we teach the humanities, Generous Thinking is an audacious book that privileges the ability to empathize and build rather than simply tear apart.

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In the 20th century, we were introduced to several subdivisions of the mind: the conscious, unconscious, subconscious, preconscious, and so on. But what we didn't know was that there was another level of consciousness, an all-encompassing, infinite dimension of shared intelligence: the One Mind. This universal consciousness connects all of us through space and time. Emerging studies have shown that the One Mind isn't just an idea; it's a reality. In this book, Larry Dossey shares compelling experiences and research that support the One Mind concept, such as: Shared thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations with a distant individual Communication between humans and sentient nonhumans, such as pets Acquisition of previously unknown knowledge from a person who has died Hidden or lost objects found through mental means alone Direct contact with a transcendent domain through near-death experiences Through engaging stories, fascinating case studies, and brilliant insights from great thinkers throughout history, One Mind explores the outer reaches of human consciousness. In it, you will discover a new way to interpret the great mysteries of our experience and learn how to develop the empathy necessary to engender more love, peace, and collective awareness. The result is a rich new understanding of what it means to be human and a renewed hope that we can successfully confront any challenges we face. 'The Buddha said: Isolation is the world's great misery. In an increasingly complex world, we feel overwhelmed, discouraged, and more and more alone. Dr. Larry Dossey, a gifted physician of the soul, relieves the agony of modern isolation. He reveals our deep connections to everything around us, to reassert our belonging with everything everywhere.' Rev. Wayne Muller, best-selling author of Sabbath and A Life of Being, Having, and Doing Enough

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It's a story that has a beginning, a middle, but as yet, no end. John McGrath's winding, furious, innovative play tracks the economic history and exploitation of the Scottish Highlands from the post-Rebellion suppression of the clans to the story of the Clearances: in the 19th century, aristocratic landowners discovered the profitability of sheep farming, and forced a mass emigration of rural Highlanders, burning their houses in order to make way for the Cheviot sheep. Described by the playwright as having a “ceilidh” format, The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil draws on historical research alongside Gaelic song and the Scots' love of variety and popular entertainment to tell this epic story. A totally distinctive cultural and theatrical phenomenon, the play championed several new approaches to theatre, raising its profile as a means of political intervention; proposing a collective and collaborative approach to creating theatre; offering a language of performance accessible to working-class people; producing theatre in non-purpose-built theatre spaces; breaking down the barrier between audience and performers through interaction; and taking theatre to people who otherwise would not access it. The play received its premiere in 1973 by the agit-prop theatre group 7:84. Methuen Drama’s iconic Modern Plays series began in 1959 with the publication of Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey and has grown over six decades to now include more than 1000 plays by some of the best writers from around the world. This new special edition hardback of The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil was published to celebrate 60 years of Methuen Drama’s Modern Plays in 2019, chosen by a public vote and features a new foreword by Kate McGrath.

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Political Science has traditionally employed empirical research and analytical resources to understand, explain and predict political phenomena. One of the long-standing criticisms against empirical modeling targets the static perspective provided by the model-invariant paradigm. In political science research, this issue has a particular relevance since political phenomena prove sophisticated degrees of context-dependency whose complexity could be hardly captured by traditional approaches. To cope with the complexity challenge, a new modeling paradigm was needed. This book is concerned with this challenge. Moreover, the book aims to reveal the power of computational modeling of political attitudes to reinforce the political methodology in facing two fundamental challenges: political culture modeling and polity modeling. The book argues that an artificial polity model as a powerful research instrument could hardly be effective without the political attitude and, by extension, the political culture computational and simulation modeling theory, experiments and practice. This book: Summarizes the state of the art in computational modeling of political attitudes, with illustrations and examples featured throughout. Explores the different approaches to computational modeling and how the complexity requirements of political science should determine the direction of research and evaluation methods. Addresses the newly emerging discipline of computational political science. Discusses modeling paradigms, agent-based modeling and simulation, and complexity-based modeling. Discusses model classes in the fundamental areas of voting behavior and decision-making, collective action, ideology and partisanship, emergence of social uprisings and civil conflict, international relations, allocation of public resources, polity and institutional function, operation, development and reform, political attitude formation and change in democratic societies. This book is ideal for students who need a conceptual and operational description of the political attitude computational modeling phases, goals and outcomes in order to understand how political attitudes could be computationally modeled and simulated. Researchers, Governmental and international policy experts will also benefit from this book.

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Workers and their organizations are facing enormous obstacles today. Corporations wield immense power, not only in the marketplace but also in politics, which has, for many years, effectively blocked the updating of antiquated laws governing labor relations. Instead, unions have been subjected to a steady onslaught of attacks at the state level and growing hostility from the US Supreme Court. They have all but lost basic protections that the legal system once provided—making organizing, bargaining, and striking increasingly difficult. Black workers continue to face a decades-long job crisis characterized by disproportionate unemployment (compared with White workers) and poor job quality. Immigrant workers of all statuses feel the threat of exclusionary immigration policies and heightened xenophobic rhetoric coming from the top echelons of the US government.Similar to worker organizing in the United States before the New Deal contract, organizations in the late 20th and early 21st centuries have been scrambling to find leverage within an increasingly hostile economic, political, and legal environment. Despite formidable obstacles, this volume shows that vibrant, creative experimentation has never ceased. In lieu of new federal regulation, public and private sector national unions and local affiliates have been actively trying out new approaches that pair organizing with mechanisms that support bargaining. They have doubled down on electoral politics and creative policy fights to raise standards and facilitate organizing, with an unprecedented focus on low-wage workers. They have forged closer, more equal partnerships with community organizations than ever before. Still much more work needs to be done.New organizational models are also emergent. These experiments, which include worker centers and what some refer to as "alt labor" groups, diverge from traditional labor unions in a number of ways. They aim to represent workers and their workplace interests but do not typically work within the New Deal collective bargaining construct regulated by the government.

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We may think we know what defines religious fanaticism: violent action undertaken with dogmatic certainty. But the term fanatic, from the European Reformation to today, has never been a stable one. Then and now it has been reductively defined to justify state violence and to delegitimize alternative sources of authority. Unknowing Fanaticism rejects the simplified binary of fanatical religion and rational politics, turning to Renaissance literature to demonstrate that fanaticism was integral to how both modern politics and poetics developed, from the German Peasants’ Revolt to the English Civil War. The book traces two entangled approaches to fanaticism in this long Reformation moment: the targeting of it as an extreme political threat and the engagement with it as a deep epistemological and poetic problem. In the first, thinkers of modernity from Martin Luther to Thomas Hobbes and John Locke positioned themselves against fanaticism to pathologize rebellion and abet theological and political control. In the second, which arose alongside and often in response to the first, the poets of fanaticism investigated the link between fanatical self-annihilation—the process by which one could become a vessel for divine violence—and the practices of writing poetry. Edmund Spenser, John Donne, and John Milton recognized in the fanatic’s claim to be a passive instrument of God their own incapacity to know and depict the origins of fanaticism. Yet this crisis of unknowing was a productive one. It led these writers to experiment with poetic techniques that would allow them to address fanaticism’s tendency to unsettle the boundaries between human and divine agency and between individual and collective bodies. These poets demand a new critical method, which this book attempts to model: a historically-minded and politicized formalism that can attend to the complexity of the poetic encounter with fanaticism.

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Because the Internet has changed and is changing the ways in which we think and act, it must also be changing the ways in which we think Christianity and its theology. Cybertheology is the first book to explore this process from a Catholic point of view. Drawing on the theoretical work of authors such as Marshall McLuhan, Peter Levy, and Teilhard de Chardin, it questions how technologies redefine not only the ways in which we do things but also our being and therefore the way we perceive reality, the world, others, and God. “Does the digital revolution affect faith in any sense?” Spadaro asks. His answer is an emphatic Yes. But how, then, are we to live well in the age of the Internet? Spadaro delves deeply into various dimensions of the impact of the Net on the Church and its organization, on our understanding of revelation, grace, liturgy, the sacraments, and other classical theological themes. He rightly points out that the digital environment is not merely an external instrument that facilitates human communication or a purely virtual world, but part of the daily experience of many people, a new “anthropological space” that is reshaping the way we think, know, and express ourselves. Naturally, this calls for a new understanding of faith so that it makes sense to people who live and work in the digital media environment. In developing the notion of cybertheology, Spadaro seeks to propose an intelligence of faith (intellectus fidei) in the era of the Internet. The book’s chapters include reflections on man the decoder and the search engines of God, networked existence and the mystical body, hacker ethics and Christian vision, sacraments and “virtual presence,” and the theological challenges of collective intelligence.

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Given its long tradition of authentic dialogue with other religious and philosophical perspectives, Jesuit education is uniquely suited to address the range of opportunities and challenges teachers and students face in the twenty-first century. At first glance, Jesuit and feminist ways of understanding the world appear to be antagonistic approaches to teaching and learning. But much can be gained by focusing on how feminism, in dialogue with Jesuit education, can form, inform, and transform each other, our institutions, and the people in them. Both traditions are committed to educating the whole person by integrating reason and emotion. Both also argue for connecting theory and practice and applying knowledge in context. As unabashedly value-driven educational approaches, both openly commit to social justice and an end to oppression in its many forms. With strong humanistic roots, Jesuit and feminist education alike promote the liberal arts as critical to developing engaged citizens of the world. This book explores how the principles and practices of Ignatian pedagogy overlap and intersect with contemporary feminist theory in order to gain deeper insight into the complexities of today’s multicultural educational contexts. Drawing on intersectionality, a method of inquiry that locates individual and collective standpoints in relation to social, political, and economic structures, the volume highlights points of convergence and divergence between Ignatian pedagogy, a five-hundred year old humanistic tradition, and more recent feminist theory in order to explore how educators might find strikingly similar methods that advocate common goals—including engaging with issues such as race, gender, diversity, and social justice. By reflecting on these shared perspectives and inherent differences from both practical and theoretical approaches, the contributors of this volume initiate a dynamic dialogue about Jesuit and feminist education that will enliven and impact our campuses for years to come.

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In nearly every account of modern Argentine history, the first Peronist regime (1946–55) emerges as the critical juncture. Appealing to growing masses of industrial workers, Juan Perón built a powerful populist movement that transformed economic and political structures, promulgated new conceptions and representations of the nation, and deeply polarized the Argentine populace. Yet until now, most scholarship on Peronism has been constrained by a narrow, top-down perspective. Inspired by the pioneering work of the historian Daniel James and new approaches to Latin American cultural history, scholars have recently begun to rewrite the history of mid-twentieth-century Argentina. The New Cultural History of Peronism brings together the best of this important new scholarship.Situating Peronism within the broad arc of twentieth-century Argentine cultural change, the contributors focus on the interplay of cultural traditions, official policies, commercial imperatives, and popular perceptions. They describe how the Perón regime’s rhetoric and representations helped to produce new ideas of national and collective identity. At the same time, they show how Argentines pursued their interests through their engagement with the Peronist project, and, in so doing, pushed the regime in new directions. While the volume’s emphasis is on the first Perón presidency, one contributor explores the origins of the regime and two others consider Peronism’s transformations in subsequent years. The essays address topics including mass culture and melodrama, folk music, pageants, social respectability, architecture, and the intense emotional investment inspired by Peronism. They examine the experiences of women, indigenous groups, middle-class anti-Peronists, internal migrants, academics, and workers. By illuminating the connections between the state and popular consciousness, The New Cultural History of Peronism exposes the contradictions and ambivalences that have characterized Argentine populism.Contributors: Anahi Ballent, Oscar Chamosa, María Damilakou, Eduardo Elena, Matthew B. Karush, Diana Lenton, Mirta Zaida Lobato, Natalia Milanesio, Mariano Ben Plotkin, César Seveso, Lizel Tornay

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Since the American Revolution, there has been broad cultural consensus that “the people” are the only legitimate ground of public authority in the United States. For just as long, there has been disagreement over who the people are and how they should be represented or institutionally embodied. In Constituent Moments, Jason Frank explores this dilemma of authorization: the grounding of democratic legitimacy in an elusive notion of the people. Frank argues that the people are not a coherent or sanctioned collective. Instead, the people exist as an effect of successful claims to speak on their behalf; the power to speak in their name can be vindicated only retrospectively. The people, and democratic politics more broadly, emerge from the dynamic tension between popular politics and representation. They spring from what Frank calls “constituent moments,” moments when claims to speak in the people’s name are politically felicitous, even though those making such claims break from established rules and procedures for representing popular voice.Elaborating his theory of constituent moments, Frank focuses on specific historical instances when under-authorized individuals or associations seized the mantle of authority, and, by doing so, changed the inherited rules of authorization and produced new spaces and conditions for political representation. He looks at crowd actions such as parades, riots, and protests; the Democratic-Republican Societies of the 1790s; and the writings of Walt Whitman and Frederick Douglass. Frank demonstrates that the revolutionary establishment of the people is not a solitary event, but rather a series of micropolitical enactments, small dramas of self-authorization that take place in the informal contexts of crowd actions, political oratory, and literature as well as in the more formal settings of constitutional conventions and political associations.

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In Black and Green, Kiran Asher provides a powerful framework for reconceptualizing the relationship between neoliberal development and social movements. Moving beyond the notion that development is a hegemonic, homogenizing force that victimizes local communities, Asher argues that development processes and social movements shape each other in uneven and paradoxical ways. She bases her argument on ethnographic analysis of the black social movements that emerged from and interacted with political and economic changes in Colombia’s Pacific lowlands, or Chocó region, in the 1990s. The Pacific region had yet to be overrun by drug traffickers, guerrillas, and paramilitary forces in the early 1990s. It was better known as the largest area of black culture in the country (90 percent of the region’s population is Afro-Colombian) and as a supplier of natural resources, including timber, gold, platinum, and silver. Colombia’s Law 70, passed in 1993, promised ethnic and cultural rights, collective land ownership, and socioeconomic development to Afro-Colombian communities. At the same time that various constituencies sought to interpret and implement Law 70, the state was moving ahead with large-scale development initiatives intended to modernize the economically backward coastal lowlands. Meanwhile national and international conservation organizations were attempting to protect the region’s rich biodiversity. Asher explores this juxtaposition of black rights, economic development, and conservation—and the tensions it catalyzed. She analyzes the meanings attached to “culture,” “nature,” and “development” by the Colombian state and Afro-Colombian social movements, including women’s groups. In so doing, she shows that the appropriation of development and conservation discourses by the social movements had a paradoxical effect. It legitimized the presence of state, development, and conservation agencies in the Pacific region even as it influenced those agencies’ visions and plans.

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Theology of Money is a philosophical inquiry into the nature and role of money in the contemporary world. Philip Goodchild reveals the significance of money as a dynamic social force by arguing that under its influence, moral evaluation is subordinated to economic valuation, which is essentially abstract and anarchic. His rigorous inquiry opens into a complex analysis of political economy, encompassing markets and capital, banks and the state, class divisions, accounting practices, and the ecological crisis awaiting capitalism. Engaging with Christian theology and the thought of Carl Schmitt, Georg Simmel, Karl Marx, Adam Smith, and many others, Goodchild develops a theology of money based on four contentions, which he elaborates in depth. First, money has no intrinsic value; it is a promise of value, a crystallization of future hopes. Second, money is the supreme value in contemporary society. Third, the value of assets measured by money is always future-oriented, dependent on expectations about how much might be obtained for those assets at a later date. Since this value, when realized, will again depend on future expectations, the future is forever deferred. Financial value is essentially a degree of hope, expectation, trust, or credit. Fourth, money is created as debt, which involves a social obligation to work or make profits to repay the loan. As a system of debts, money imposes an immense and irresistible system of social control on individuals, corporations, and governments, each of whom are threatened by economic failure if they refuse their obligations to the money system. This system of debt has progressively tightened its hold on all sectors and regions of global society. With Theology of Money, Goodchild aims to make conscious our collective faith and its dire implications.

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Combining anthropological methods and theories with political philosophy, Sian Lazar analyzes everyday practices and experiences of citizenship in a satellite city to the Bolivian capital of La Paz: El Alto, where more than three-quarters of the population identify as indigenous Aymara. For several years, El Alto has been at the heart of resistance to neoliberal market reforms, such as the export of natural resources and the privatization of public water systems. In October 2003, protests centered in El Alto forced the Bolivian president to resign; in December 2005, the country’s first indigenous president, Evo Morales, was elected. The growth of a strong social justice movement in Bolivia has caught the imagination of scholars and political activists worldwide. El Alto remains crucial to this ongoing process. In El Alto, Rebel City Lazar examines the values, practices, and conflicts behind the astonishing political power exercised by El Alto citizens in the twenty-first century.Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 1997 and 2004, Lazar contends that in El Alto, citizenship is a set of practices defined by one’s participation in a range of associations, many of them collectivist in nature. Her argument challenges Western liberal notions of the citizen by suggesting that citizenship is not only individual and national but in many ways communitarian and distinctly local, constituted through different kinds of affiliations. Since in El Alto these affiliations most often emerge through people’s place of residence and their occupational ties, Lazar offers in-depth analyses of neighborhood associations and trade unions. In so doing, she describes how the city’s various collectivities mediate between the state and the individual. Collective organization in El Alto and the concept of citizenship underlying it are worthy of attention; they are the basis of the city’s formidable power to mobilize popular protest.

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Contentious Lives examines the ways popular protests are experienced and remembered, individually and collectively, by those who participate in them. Javier Auyero focuses on the roles of two young women, Nana and Laura, in uprisings in Argentina (the two-day protest in the northwestern city of Santiago del Estero in 1993 and the six-day road blockade in the southern oil towns of Cutral-co and Plaza Huincul in 1996) and the roles of the protests in their lives. Laura was the spokesperson of the picketers in Cutral-co and Plaza Huincul; Nana was an activist in the 1993 protests. In addition to exploring the effects of these episodes on their lives, Auyero considers how each woman's experiences shaped what she said and did during the uprisings, and later, the ways she recalled the events. While the protests were responses to the consequences of political corruption and structural adjustment policies, they were also, as Nana’s and Laura’s stories reveal, quests for recognition, respect, and dignity.Auyero reconstructs Nana’s and Laura’s biographies through oral histories and diaries. Drawing on interviews with many other protesters, newspaper articles, judicial records, government reports, and video footage, he provides sociological and historical context for their stories. The women’s accounts reveal the frustrations of lives overwhelmed by gender domination, the deprivations brought about by hyper-unemployment and the withering of the welfare component of the state, and the achievements and costs of collective action. Balancing attention to large-scale political and economic processes with acknowledgment of the plurality of meanings emanating from personal experiences, Contentious Lives is an insightful, penetrating, and timely contribution to discussions of popular resistance and the combined effects of globalization, neoliberal economic policies, and political corruption in Argentina and elsewhere.

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During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a wide variety of American writers proposed the existence of energies connecting human beings to cosmic processes. From varying points of view—scientific, philosophical, religious, and literary—they suggested that such energies would eventually result in the perfection of individual and collective bodies, assuming that assimilation into larger networks of being meant the expansion of humanity’s powers and potentialities—a belief that continues to inform much posthumanist theory today.Universes without Us explores a lesser-known countertradition in American literature. As Matthew A. Taylor’s incisive readings reveal, the heterodox cosmologies of Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Adams, Charles Chesnutt, and Zora Neale Hurston reject the anthropocentric fantasy that sees the universe as a kind of reservoir of self-realization. For these authors, the world can be made neither “other” nor “mirror.” Instead, humans are enmeshed with “alien” processes that are both constitutive and destructive of “us.” By envisioning universes no longer our own, these cosmologies picture a form of interconnectedness that denies any human ability to master it.Universes without Us demonstrates how the questions, possibilities, and dangers raised by the posthuman appeared nearly two centuries ago. Taylor finds in these works an untimely engagement with posthumanism, particularly in their imagining of universes in which humans are only one category of heterogeneous thing in a vast array of species, objects, and forces. He shows how posthumanist theory can illuminate American literary texts and how those texts might, in turn, prompt a reassessment of posthumanist theory. By understanding the posthuman as a materialist cosmology rather than a technological innovation, Taylor extends the range of thinkers who can be included in contemporary conversations about the posthuman.

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