Search results for ""the university of michigan press""

Drawing on perspectives from anthropology and social theory, this book explores the quotidian routines of debt collection in nineteenth-century capitalism. It focuses on Switzerland, an exemplary case of liberal rule. Debt collection and bankruptcy relied on received practices until they were standardized in a Swiss federal law in 1889. The vast array of these practices was summarized by the idiomatic Swiss legal term “Rechtstrieb” (literally, “law drive”). Analyzing these forms of summary justice opens a window to the makeshift economies and the contested political imaginaries of nineteenth-century everyday life. Ultimately, the book advances an empirically grounded and theoretically informed history of quotidian legal practices in the everyday economy; it is an argument for studying capitalism from the bottom up.

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Listening with a Feminist Ear is a study of the cultural politics of sound in Bollywood cinema. Taking as its subject the expansive domain of the aural in cinema, this book identifies singing, listening, and speaking in cinema as key sites in which notions of identity and difference take form. The book traces sonic representations of gender and community across seven decades of Hindi film history and asks which sounds and tongues Bombay and its cinema call their own. The book takes seriously the radical potential of listening and models a critical orientation to the aural that can engender new imaginaries, while still being attuned to questions of difference, power, and privilege. Keeping in play the many different sonic elements that films use, as well as the “inter-aural” fields in which those sounds register, Listening with a Feminist Ear helps chart new and interdisciplinary paths through the history of cinema. Challenging the ocular-centrism of cinema studies and its emphasis on medium specificity, the book offers a feminist interpretive practice that centers sound and listening. It also moves beyond national, monolingual, and Eurocentric frameworks, generating counter-hegemonic understandings of belonging so sorely needed in our times.

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In The Tender Friendship and the Charm of Perfect Accord, Gavriel Shapiro contends that Vladimir Nabokov’s worldview and verbal artistry cannot be fully understood without first understanding the relationship between the writer and his father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, the distinguished jurist and prominent statesman at the turn of the 20th century, who at the same time was a great connoisseur of literature, painting, theatre, and music; a passionate lepidopterist; an enthusiastic chess player; and an avid athlete. Although Nabokov experts have long noted the importance of this relationship, this is the very first book-length study on this crucial subject.In this book, Shapiro explores the unique nature of their bond, which Nabokov characterised as that of the “tender friendship” marked by the “charm of our perfect accord,” particularly exceptional when compared to numerous father-and-son relationships in Russian and Western European literature of the 19th and 20th centuries.

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In the late nineteenth century, the United States was known internationally as a place full of gaudiness and glitter. While scholars have long assumed that this visual excess was literal, linked to the United States-utilization of sophisticated modern light and consumer technologies, Fashion Nation argues that far from being linked to technology or consumerism, the reputation of the United States as a place of glittery bodies and landscapes was rooted in early nineteenth-century British and European ethnic nationalism, and the fashion of wearing colorful ethnic costuming that was adopted as part of these movements. In this work, Sandra Tomc traces the history of the idea of America as a gauche, flashy place from its early proliferation in the 1820s and 1830s, when American flashiness was associated primarily with colorful clothes, to its fruition in late nineteenth-century mass entertainment when the notion of American visual audacity shifted from clothes to elaborate lights and technological displays. Tomc argues that in the wake of pressure in the first half of the nineteenth century to embrace racially and ethnically saturated national types, significant branches of U.S. nationalist culture developed national types distinguished by their refusal to divulge racial and ethnic affiliation. To make its case, Fashion Nation reads literature alongside an extraordinary, colorful, and largely forgotten archive of international costume books, theatrical spectacles, travelogues, and world's fair extravaganzas to show how America was textually and visually constructed for transatlantic audiences.

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Administering Justice examines the leadership role of chief justices in the American states, including how those duties require chief justices to be part of the broader state political environment. Vining and Wilhelm focus extensively on the power of chief justices as public spokespersons, legislative liaisons, and reform leaders. In contrast to much existing research on states’ chief justices, theirs is primarily on their extrajudicial responsibilities rather than intracourt leadership. They analyze the reform agendas advanced by chief justices by assessing the content of State of the Judiciary remarks delivered over a period of sixty years. The authors also determine what factors influence the likelihood of success when chief justices request legislators to enact reforms. These analyses confirm that chief justices engage with state politics in meaningful ways and that reactions to their proposals are influenced by ideological congruence with other political elites and the scope of their requests. They also examine the chief justice position as an institution, provide a collective profile of its occupants, and examine growing diversity among court leaders.

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“Creativity” is a word that excites and dazzles us. It promises brilliance and achievement; it is a shield against conformity, a channel for innovation across the arts, sciences, technology, and education, and a mechanism for economic revival and personal success. But it has not always evoked these ideas. Once a term reserved for the ultimate power of the divine, and later associated primarily with the work of the artist, creativity has become attached to ideas about economics, politics, and the self in particular ways. The Creativity Complex traces the history of how creativity has come to mean the things it now does, and explores the ethical implications of how we use this term today for both the arts and for the social world more broadly.Richly researched, the book explores how creativity has been invoked in arenas as varied as Enlightenment debates over the nature of the cognition, Victorian-era intelligence research, the Cold War technology race, contemporary K-12 education, and even modern electoral politics. Along the way, the book turns to a set of art works—from mobile steampunk sculptures to bicentennial adaptations of Frankenstein to a musical about the 2016 US Presidential election—that ask how our ideas about creativity are bound up with those of self-fulfillment, responsibility, and the individual, and how these might seduce us into joining a worldview and even a set of social imperatives that we might otherwise find troubling.

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While the loss of sight—whether in early modern Japan or now—may be understood as a disability, blind people in the Tokugawa period (1600–1868) could thrive because of disability. The blind of the era were prominent across a wide range of professions, and through a strong guild structure were able to exert contractual monopolies over certain trades. Blind in Early Modern Japan illustrates the breadth and depth of those occupations, the power and respect that accrued to the guild members, and the lasting legacy of the Tokugawa guilds into the current moment. The book illustrates why disability must be assessed within a particular society’s social, political, and medical context, and also the importance of bringing medical history into conversation with cultural history. A Euro-American-centric disability studies perspective that focuses on disability and oppression, the author contends, risks overlooking the unique situation in a non-Western society like Japan in which disability was constructed to enhance blind people’s power. He explores what it meant to be blind in Japan at that time, and what it says about current frameworks for understanding disability.

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This title provides a conceptual framework for understanding the development of improvised dance in late 20th-century America. ""I Want To Be Ready"" draws on original archival research, careful readings of individual performances, and a thorough knowledge of dance scholarship to offer an understanding of the 'freedom' of improvisational dance. While scholars often celebrate the freedom of improvised performances, they are generally focusing on freedom from formal constraints. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and Houston Baker, among others, Danielle Goldman argues that this negative idea of freedom elides improvisation's greatest power. Far from representing an escape from the necessities of genre, gender, class, and race, the most skillful improvisations negotiate an ever shifting landscape of constraints. This work will appeal to those interested in dance history and criticism, and also interdisciplinary audiences in the fields of American and cultural studies.

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El Sistema is a nationwide, state-funded music education program in Venezuela. Founded in 1975 by economist and musician JosÉ Antonio Abreu, the institution has weathered seven jolting changes in government. Hugo ChÁvez and, after his death, president NicolÁs Maduro enthusiastically included the institution into the political agenda of the socialist project and captured the affective power of music for their own aims. Fueled by the oil boom in the 2000s, El Sistema grew over the years to encompass 1,210 orchestras for children and young people in Venezuela, reached almost 1 million people out of the 30 million in the country, and served as a model in more than 35 countries around the world.Sonorous Worlds is an ethnography of the young Venezuelan musicians who participate in El Sistema, many of whom live in urban barrios and face everyday gang violence, state repression, social exclusion, and forced migration in response to sociopolitical crisis. This book looks at how these young people engage with what the author calls “enchantment,” that is, how through musical practices they create worlds that escape, rupture, and critique dominant structures of power. Stainova’s focus on artistic practice and enchantment allows her to theorize the successes and failures of political projects through the lens of everyday transformations in people’s lives.

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Community colleges in the United States are the first point of entry for many students to a higher education, a career, and a new start. They continue to be a place of personal and, ultimately, societal transformation. And first-year composition courses have become sites of contestation. This volume is an inquiry into community college first-year pedagogy and policy at a time when change has not only been called for but also mandated by state lawmakers who financially control public education. It also acknowledges new policies that are eliminating developmental and remedial writing courses while keeping mind that, for most community college students, first-year composition serves as the last course they will take in the English department toward their associate's degree. Chapters focusing on pedagogy and policy are integrated within cohesively themed parts: (1) refining pedagogy; (2) teaching toward acceleration; (3) considering programmatic change; and (4) exploring curriculum through research and policy. The volume concludes with the editors' reflections regarding future work; a glossary and reflection questions are included. This volume also serves as a call to action to change the way community colleges attend to faculty concerns. Only by listening to teachers can the concerns discussed in the volume be addressed; it is the teachers who see how societal changes intersect with campus policies and students' lives on a daily basis.

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This is a handy booklet for researchers/scholars writing literature reviews. ""Telling a Research Story: Writing a Literature Review"" is concerned with the writing of a literature review and is not designed to address any of the preliminary processes leading up to the actual writing of the literature review. This volume represents a revision and expansion of the material on writing literature reviews that appeared in English in ""Today's Research World"". It progresses from general to specific issues in the writing of literature reviews. It opens with some orientations that raise awareness of the issues that surround the telling of a research story. Issues of structure and matters of language, style, and rhetoric are then discussed. Sections on metadiscourse, citation, and paraphrasing and summarizing are included.

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Examines the savage coed killings that rocked Southeastern Michigan in the late in the late 1960s, covering every step of the case. It fell out of print for more than a decade before being revived for this special edition.

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This is the complete and indispensable illustrated guide to long walks, overnight hikes, and wilderness treks in Michigan. With 50 photographs and 60 maps, this detailed guide to the state's hiking trails gives hikers at all levels everything they need to plan their next Michigan backpacking trip. Featuring 50 trails ranging from hour-long all the way to multiple-day treks in both the Upper and Lower peninsulas, ""Backpacking in Michigan"" offers something for every hiker. Each of the book's trails is accompanied by information on the nearest towns, the length of the hike, the amount of time needed to hike the trail, and the difficulty of the hike. The author also provides detailed reference maps - a necessity for every hiker - along with a description of the treks' highlights. Multiple outings, including overnight hikes, are suggested for large areas such as the Porcupine Mountains in the Upper Peninsula, Wilderness State Park at the tip of the Lower Peninsula, Sleeping Bear Dunes National Park, and Isle Royale National Park, offering readers tips on the best ways to enjoy Michigan's greatest natural treasures. While the book focuses primarily on the trails themselves, it also provides information on routes to and from the trailhead, park fees, and reservation information for overnight camping, making planning your Michigan adventure as easy as possible.

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Dramatizes the events surrounding the May 7, 1965 collision between the Norwegian freighter Topdalsfiord and the American freighter Cedarville in Northern Lake Huron, the Coast Guard investigation into the tragedy, and the role played by U.S. Steel in attempting to manipulate the evidence. Original.

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A Papyrus Codex of the Shepherd of Hermas presents a publication of a manuscript of The Shepherd of Hermas, a Christian religious text of generally the first century CE. The author documents its condition and date, presentational conventions, spelling and grammatical forms, and so on. It offers a text together with supplementary notes.

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How can immortality be a curse? According to the Wandering Jew legend, as Jesus made his way to Calvary, a man refused him rest, cruelly taunting him to hurry to meet his fate. In response, Jesus cursed the man to wander until the Second Coming. Since the medieval period, the legend has inspired hundreds of adaptations by artists and writers. Instrument of Memory: Encounters with the Wandering Jew, the first English-language study of the legend in over fifty years, is also the first to examine the influence of the legend’s medieval and early modern sources over the centuries into the present day. Using the lens of memory studies, the work shows how the Christian tradition of the legend centered the memory of the Passion at the heart of the Wandering Jew’s curse. Instrument of Memory also shows how Jewish artists and writers have reimagined the legend through Jewish memory traditions. Through this focus on memory, Jewish adaptors of the legend create complex renderings of the Wandering Jew that recognize not only the entanglement of Jewish and Christian memory, but also the impact of that entanglement on Jewish subjects. This book presents a complex, sympathetic, and more fully realized version of the legend while challenging the limits of the presentism of memory studies.

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Contingent Encounters offers a sustained comparative study of improvisation as it appears between music and everyday life. Drawing on work in musicology, cultural studies, and critical improvisation studies, as well as his own performing experience, Dan DiPiero argues that comparing improvisation across domains calls into question how improvisation is typically recognized. By comparing the music of Eric Dolphy, Norwegian free improvisers, Mr. K, and the Ingrid Laubrock/Kris Davis duo with improvised activities in everyday life (such as walking, baking, working, and listening), DiPiero concludes that improvisation appears as a function of any encounter between subjects, objects, and environments. Bringing contingency into conversation with the utopian strain of critical improvisation studies, DiPiero shows how particular social investments cause improvisation to be associated with relative freedom, risk-taking, and unpredictability in both scholarship and public discourse. Taking seriously the claim that improvisation is the same thing as living, Contingent Encounters overturns longstanding assumptions about the aesthetic and political implications of this notoriously slippery term.

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The films of Georges MÉliÈs (1861–1938) are landmarks in the early history of narrative filmmaking and cinematic special effects. He was a harbinger of modern aesthetics and media manipulation, and this book, written by his granddaughter, is the only one that tells his full story. Magnificent MÉliÈs is a thoroughly researched but highly accessible book that is a crucial source for the scholar and an entertaining read for the nonspecialist. The core of the biography provides detailed accounts of MÉliÈs’s filmmaking years (1896–1912), from his first motion pictures shortly after the public premiere of the LumiÈre CinÉmatographe through such worldwide successes as his film Le Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon) and his eventual marginalization by the very industry he had helped to found. The biography also chronicles MÉliÈs’s formative work as director of Paris’s preeminent magic theater, the ThÉ tre Robert-Houdin; his subsequent career staging operettas for the ThÉ tre des VariÉtÉs Artistiques (1917–1923) in Montreuil on the site of one of his former film studios; and his later years selling toys and candy at the Gare Montparnasse (1926–1932) before being rediscovered by journalists and the avant-garde. These and other fascinating chapters highlight the remarkable range of MÉliÈs’s creative work while suggesting how his singular life was nevertheless shaped by the seismic historical shifts of Second Empire and Third Republic France.

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The Politics of Military Force examines the dynamics of discursive change that made participation in military operations possible against the background of German antimilitarist culture. Once considered a strict taboo, so-called out-of-area operations have now become widely considered by German policymakers to be without alternative. The book argues that an understanding of how certain policies are made possible (in this case, military operations abroad and force transformation), one needs to focus on processes of discursive change that result in different policy options appearing rational, appropriate, feasible, or even self-evident. Drawing on Essex School discourse theory, the book develops a theoretical framework to understand how discursive change works, and elaborates on how discursive change makes once unthinkable policy options not only acceptable but even without alternative. Based on a detailed discourse analysis of more than 25 years of German parliamentary debates, The Politics of Military Force provides an explanation for: (1) the emergence of a new hegemonic discourse in German security policy after the end of the Cold War (discursive change), (2) the rearticulation of German antimilitarism in the process (ideational change/norm erosion) and (3) the resulting making-possible of military operations and force transformation (policy change). In doing so, the book also demonstrates the added value of a poststructuralist approach compared to the naive realism and linear conceptions of norm change so prominent in the study of German foreign policy and International Relations more generally.

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What soldiers do on the battlefield or boxers do in the ring would be treated as criminal acts if carried out in an everyday setting. Perpetrators of violence in the classical world knew this and chose their venues and targets with care: killing Julius Caesar at a meeting of the Senate was deliberate. That location asserted Senatorial superiority over a perceived tyrant, and so proclaimed the pure republican principles of the assassins. The contributors to The Topography of Violence in the Greco-Roman World take on a task not yet addressed in classical scholarship: they examine how topography shaped the perception and interpretation of violence in Greek and Roman antiquity. After an introduction explaining the “spatial turn” in the theoretical study of violence, “paired” chapters review political assassination, the battlefield, violence against women and slaves, and violence at Greek and Roman dinner parties. No other book either adopts the spatial theoretical framework or pairs the examination of different classes of violence in classical antiquity in this way. Both undergraduate and graduate students of classics, history, and political science will benefit from the collection, as will specialists in those disciplines. The papers are original and stimulating, and they are accessible to the educated general reader with some grounding in classical history.

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This book offers a bold reconsideration of the meaning of 1960s San Francisco counterculture.""Counterculture Kaleidoscope"" explores the traditions represented in the cultural and musical practices of the late Sixties San Francisco counterculture. Dismantling the notion that the movement was all about rebellion and opposition, the book dislodges two myths: first, that the counterculture was an organized socio political movement consisting of progressive people (dubbed ""hippies"") with a shared agenda who opposed the mainstream, and second, that the counterculture was a pure and innocent entity co-opted by commercialism and transformed over time into an agent of so-called ""hip consumerism.""As several recent books on the concept of hipness illustrate, counterculture has become synonymous with rebellion and opposition. Movement-based Sixties histories, nostalgic accounts of the great ""sex, drugs, and rock n' roll"" era, and conservative polemics stigmatizing counter cultural radicalism have reinforced this equation. As an alternative, this book examines primary source material (including music, artwork, popular literature, personal narratives, and first-hand historical accounts) to demonstrate that the San Francisco counterculture in 1966-67 displayed no interest in commitment to a cause and made no association with divisive issues - embracing everything in general, but nothing in particular.

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When the United States violates the laws of war, who should bear the responsibility? The US has historically relied on the checks and balances of Congress and the Supreme Court to constrain executive power, and yet these boundaries are challenged by presidential war power. While other scholars have focused on presidents starting military conflicts abroad or infringing on civil liberties at home, Stuart Streichler integrates international humanitarian law into an analysis of the repercussions of presidential war powers for human rights.Presidential Accountability in Wartime starts by outlining the history of the development of the laws of war, including the Geneva Conventions and Nuremberg Trials. Then, using President George W. Bush’s authorization of interrogating detainees of the CIA and US armed forces during a national security crisis as a case study, Streichler examines how the checks and balances of Congress and the Supreme Court failed to hold anyone personally responsible. He uses originally classified documents to unravel the decision-making process of the White House and how it fits into the wider context. The book closes with an insightful interpretation of the torture debate that highlights the hazards of relying on the body politic to hold wartime presidents accountable and the repercussions for basic human rights in times of war. In doing so, it raises profound questions about the character of the presidency, the unreliability of checks and balances, and the American constitutional system of government.

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One of the most significant global events in the last forty years has been the rise of China— economically, technologically, politically, and militarily. The question on people's minds for decades has been whether China will replace the United States as a superpower in the near future. But for China, this power must be comprehensive — having strong economic and militant forces are only two pieces of the puzzle. China must also possess soft power, such as attractive ideologies, values, and culture.China as Number One? explores China’s soft powers through the eyes of Chinese citizens. Utilizing data from the World Values Survey, the contributors to this collection explore the potential soft power of a rising China by examining its residents' social values. A comprehensive study of changes and continuities in the political and social values of Chinese citizens, the book examines findings in the context of evolutionary modernization theory and cross-national comparison.

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Gender, Separatist Politics, and Embodied Nationalism in Cameroon illuminates how issues of ideal womanhood shaped the Anglophone Cameroonian nationalist movement in the first decade of independence in Cameroon, a west-central African country. Drawing upon history, political science, gender studies, and feminist epistemologies, the book examines how formally educated women sought to protect the cultural values and the self-determination of the Anglophone Cameroonian state as Francophone Cameroon prepared to dismantle the federal republic. The book defines and uses the concept of embodied nationalism to illustrate the political importance of women’s everyday behavior—the clothes they wore, the foods they cooked, whether they gossiped, and their deference to their husbands. The result, in this fascinating approach, reveals that West Cameroon, which included English-speaking areas, was a progressive and autonomous nation. The author’s sources include oral interviews and archival records such as women’s newspaper advice columns, Cameroon’s first cooking book, and the first novel published by an Anglophone Cameroonian woman.

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The Bodies of Others explores the politics of gender in motion. From drag ballerinas to faux queens, and from butoh divas to the club mothers of modern dance, this book delves into four decades of drag dances on American stages, tracing the ways in which bodies can be imagined otherwise. Drag dances take us beyond glittery one-liners and into the spaces between gender norms. In these backstage histories, we see dancers who give their bodies over to other selves, opening up the category of realness. When realness becomes a practice, dancing can become a way of restaging the histories of bodies. The book maps out a drag politics of embodiment, connecting drag dances to queer hope, memory, and mourning. There are aging étoiles, midnight shows, mystical séances, and all of the dust and velvet of divas in their dressing-rooms. But these forty years of drag dances are also a cultural history, including Mark Morris dancing the death of Dido in the shadow of AIDS, and the swans of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo sketching an antiracist vision for ballet. Drawing on queer theory, dance history, and the embodied practices of dancers themselves, The Bodies of Others examines the ways in which drag dances undertake the work of a shared queer and trans politics. The book will be of interest to scholars and students working on performance, gender and sexuality, and embodiment.

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As all manner of commerce becomes increasingly global, states must establish laws to protect property rights, human rights, and national security. In many cases, states delegate authority to resolve disputes regarding these laws to an independent court, whose power depends upon its ability to enforce its rulings.Examining detailed case studies of the International Court of Justice and the transition from the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade to the World Trade Organization, Leslie Johns finds that a court’s design has nuanced and mixed effects on international cooperation. A strong court is ideal when laws are precise and the court is nested within a political structure like the European Union. Strong courts encourage litigation but make states more likely to comply with agreements when compliance is easy and withdraw from agreements when it is difficult. A weak court is optimal when law is imprecise and states can easily exit agreements with minimal political or economic repercussions. Johns concludes the book with recommendations for promoting cooperation by creating more precise international laws and increasing both delegation and obligation to international courts.

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These uproariously funny stories of Russia's leading but outlawed humorist give a behind-the-scenes look at daily life in the Soviet Union—a country of housing shortages and consumers' goods shortages, of inefficiency and bad roads, of bureaucracy and red tape, whose heroes are often fools, knaves, charlatans, fakers, poseurs.

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The ability to give a successful presentation in an academic setting is critical to success both on and off campus. Making Academic Presentations describes the five moves, or parts, of a typical presentation and provides examples of language that can be used to successfully accomplish these moves. Although language is vital to giving a good presentation, the book also addresses other factors that influence the success of a presentation, such as overcoming nervousness, nonverbal communication, and pronunciation and paralinguistics. The book includes a variety of tasks that will help students practice developing and analyzing presentations as well as practice projects for applying these lessons. In addition, rubrics and evaluation forms are included for instructors to adapt and use for evaluation purposes.

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Are you looking for activities to use in your listening classes beyond asking students to answer comprehension questions? In Task-Based Listening, author Steven Brown defines task-based listening (TBL) and describes how to build a task-based listening program, how to create a task-based listening lesson, ways to activate vocabulary acquisition and improve grammatical knowledge, and the links between listening and pronunciation. In addition, he covers the ways that metacognitive strategies can assist students when listening, the advantages of extensive listening, and the benefits of interactive listening. Readers will find specific tips and suggestions for using these concepts in the classroom.

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This book provides case studies from several higher education contexts to represent the diverse ways that L2 specialists can build up programs and courses that contribute to their institutions' internationalization by promoting language and cultural exchange. This volume contributes to emerging interdisciplinary conversations in higher education about how to refine internationalization in terms of praxis and how to coordinate curricular and pedagogical efforts to achieve meaningful learning outcomes for all students. The chapters provide suggestions for how L2 specialists can reframe their work in their individual programs to help internationalize the entire university in ways that lead to improved learning outcomes for students at different points in their degree programs, including: Orientation programs (early arrival on campus, before classes start) Language Center contexts (support during studies) Volunteer programs for International Teaching Assistants (ITA) and undergraduate students Graduate-level writing support structures Instructional design (virtual learning spaces) Virtual Partner programs (co-curricular) Intercultural composition (placement, interdisciplinary collaborations)

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The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance stakes a claim for the cultural work that poems can perform—from providing refuge to embodying resistance, from recovering silenced voices to imagining and building a more just and peaceful world, in communities of solitude and solidarity. Gathering a decade of writing on poetry after his Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront since 1941 (2007), Philip Metres widens our sense of poetry as a way of being in the world, proposing that poems can offer a permeability to marginalized voices and a shelter from the imperial noise and despair that can silence us. The Sound of Listening ranges between expansive surveys of neglected poetries (the poetry of 9/11, Arab American poetry, documentary poetry, landscape poetry, installation poetry, peace poetry); personal explorations of singular poets such as Adrienne Rich, Khalil Gibran, Lev Rubinstein, and Arseny Tarkovsky; and intimate dialogues with Randa Jarrar, Fady Joudah, and Micah Cavaleri, that illuminate the poet’s practice of listening in Sand Opera.

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Latin America underwent two major transformations during the 2000s: the widespread election of left-leaning presidents (the so-called left turn) and the diffusion of conditional cash transfer programs (CCTs)—innovative social programs that award regular stipends to poor families on the condition that their children attend school. Combining cross-national quantitative research covering the entire region and in-depth case studies based on field research, Human Capital versus Basic Income: Ideology and Models of Anti-Poverty Programs in Latin America challenges the conventional wisdom that these two transformations were unrelated. In this book, author Fabián A. Borges demonstrates that this ideology greatly influenced both the adoption and design of CCTs. There were two distinct models of CCTs: a “human capital” model based on means-tested targeting and strict enforcement of program conditions, exemplified by the program launched by Mexico’s right, and a more universalistic “basic income” model with more permissive enforcement of conditionality, exemplified by Brazil’s program under Lula. These two models then spread across the region. Whereas right and center governments, with assistance from international financial institutions, enacted CCTs based on the human capital model, the left, with assistance from Brazil, enacted CCTs based on the basic income model. The existence of two distinct types of CCTs and their relation to ideology is supported by quantitative analyses covering the entire region and in-depth case studies based on field research in three countries. Left-wing governments operate CCTs that cover more people and spend more on those programs than their center or right-wing counterparts. Beyond coverage, a subsequent analysis of the 10 national programs adopted after Lula’s embrace of CCTs confirms that program design—evaluated in terms of scope of the target population, strictness of conditionality enforcement, and stipend structure—is shaped by government ideology. This finding is then fleshed out through case studies of the political processes that culminated in the adoption of basic income CCTs by left-wing governments in Argentina and Bolivia and a human capital CCT by a centrist president in Costa Rica.

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The Emigrants is an elaborately conceived novel, dense with dynamic characters and evocative details. First published in 1954, it focuses initially on the emigrant journey, then on the settling-in process. The journey by sea and subsequent attempts at resettlement provide the fictional framework for Lamming's exploration of the alienation and displacement caused by colonialism.This is the epic journey of a group of West Indians who emigrate to Great Britain in the 1950s in search of educational opportunities unattainable at home. Seeking to redefine themselves in the "mother country," an idealized landscape that they have been taught to revere, the emigrants settle uncomfortably in England's industrial cities. Within two years, ghettoization is firmly in place. The emigrants discover the meaning of their marginality in the British Empire in an environment that is unexpectedly hostile and strange. For some, alienation prompts a new sense of community, a new sense of identity as West Indians. For others, alienation leads to a crisis of confrontation with the law and fugitive status.There is a wealth of information here about the genesis of the black British community and about the cultural differences between the black British and West Indian/Caribbean.

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Brings together a selection of the morning talks' delivered by the renowned authors who teach at the prestigious Rainier Writing Workshop MFA program. These morning talks are a highlight of the residencies at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, featuring inspiring, innovative approaches to writing and literature across genres.

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Examines over a dozen regions, comparing and contrasting successful cases to abandoned, unsuccessful, or dormant cases. While each chapter is written by a country expert, the contributions rely on a range of methods, from comparative historical analysis, to ethnography, field interviews, and data from public opinion surveys.

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Historically, national borders have evolved in ways that serve the interests of central states in security and the regulation of trade. Security. Cooperation. Governance.explores Canada–US border and security policies that have evolved from successive trade agreements since the 1950s, punctuated by new and emerging challenges to security in the twenty-first century. The sectoral and geographical diversity of cross-border interdependence of what remains the world’s largest bilateral trade relationship makes the US–Canada border a living laboratory for studying the interaction of trade, security, and other border policies that challenge traditional centralized approaches to national security. The book’s findings show that border governance straddles multiple regional, sectoral, and security scales in ways rarely documented in such detail. These developments have precipitated an Open Border Paradox: extensive, regionally varied flows of trade and people have resulted in a series of nested but interdependent security regimes that function on different scales and vary across economic and policy sectors. These realities have given rise to regional and sectoral specialization in related security regimes. For instance, just-in-time automotive production in the Great Lakes region varies considerably from the governance of maritime and intermodal trade (and port systems) on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, which in turn is quite different from commodity-based systems that manage diverse agricultural and food trade in the Canadian Prairies and U.S. Great Plains. The paradox of open borders and their legitimacy is a function of robust bilateral and multilevel governance based on effective partnerships with substate governments and the private sector. Effective policy accounts for regional variation in integrated binational security and trade imperatives. At the same time, binational and continental policies are embedded in each country’s trade and security relationships beyond North America.

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Growing numbers of people are displaced by war and violent conflict. In Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Syria, and elsewhere violence pushes civilian populations from their homes and sometimes from their countries, making them refugees. In previous decades, millions of refugees and displaced people returned to their place of origin after conflict or were resettled in countries in the Global North. Now displacements last longer, the number of people returning home is lower, and opportunities for resettlement are shrinking. More and more people spend decades in refugee camps or displaced within their own countries, raising their children away from their home communities and cultures. In this context, international policies encourage return to place of origin.Using case studies and first-person accounts from interviews and fieldwork in post-conflict settings such as Uganda, Liberia, and Kosovo, Sandra F. Joireman highlights the divergence between these policies and the preferences of conflict-displaced people. Rather than looking from the top down, at the rights that people have in international and domestic law, the perspective of this text is from the ground up—examining individual and household choices after conflict. Some refugees want to go home, some do not want to return, some want to return to their countries of origin but live in a different place, and others are repatriated against their will when they have no other options. Peace, Preference, and Property suggests alternative policies that would provide greater choice for displaced people in terms of property restitution and solutions to displacement.

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For much of history, people have been treated as subjects to those with political and economic power and wealth. It is only in the last 250 years that people (in some parts of the world) have become citizens as opposed to subjects. This change happened in a very short period, between 1780 and 1820, when the foundation for democracy was laid. This was also the basis upon which a century later, local governments responded to rapid industrialization, urbanization, and population growth.During the twentieth century, all democratic governments came to perform a range of tasks, functions, and services that had no historical precedent. In the thirty years following the Second World War, Western democracies created welfare states that, for the first time in history, significantly reduced the gap between the wealthy and the rest. Many of the reforms of that postwar period have been rolled back since then because of the belief that government should be more “businesslike”. The changes in the role of government in society have been massive in the past 250 years, and so little is known about why.Jos C.N. Raadschelders examines the questions that citizens should have about their connections to government, why there is a government, what it does, how it does it, and why we can no longer do without government. The Three Ages of Government rises above stereotypical thinking about government.

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Despite international conventions and human rights declarations, millions of people have suffered and continue to suffer torture, slavery, or violent deaths, with no remedy or recourse. They have fallen, in essence, “below the law,” outside of law’s protection. Often violated by their own governments, sometimes with support from transnational corporations, or nations benefiting from human rights violations, how can these victims find justice? Lawyers Beyond Borders reveals the inner workings of the advances and retreats in the quest for redress and restoration of human rights for those whom international legal-political systems have failed. The process of justice begins in the US, with a handful of human rights lawyers steeped in the American tradition of advancing civil rights through civil litigation. As the civil rights movement gained traction and an ample supply of lawyers, this small cadre turned their attention toward advancing international human rights, via the US legal system. They sought to build another piece of the rights revolution, this time for survivors of egregious human rights violations in faraway lands. These cases were among the most unlikely to be slated for victory: The abuses occurred abroad; the victims are aliens, usually with few, if any, resources; the perpetrators are politically powerful, resourced, and well connected, often members of governments, militaries, or multinational corporations. The legal and political systems’ structures are mostly stacked against these survivors, many who bear the scars of trauma and terror.Lawyers Beyond Borders is about agency. It is about how, in the face of powerful interests and seemingly insurmountable obstacles—political, psychological, economic, geographical, and physical—a small group of lawyers and survivors navigated a terrain of daunting barriers to begin building, case-by-case, new pathways to justice for those who otherwise would have none.

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The Black Widows of of The Eternal City offers, for the first time, a book-length study of an infamous cause célèbre in seventeenth-century Rome, how it resonated then and has continued to resonate: the 1659 investigation and prosecution of Gironima Spana and dozens of Roman widows, who shared a particularly effective poison to murder their husbands. This notorious case has been frequently discussed over 350 years, but the earliest writers concentrated more on fortifying their reading constituency’s shared attitudes than accurately narrating facts. Subsequent authors remained largely content to follow their predecessors or keen to improve upon them. Most recent writers and bloggers were unaware that their earlier sources were generally unconcerned with a correct portrayal of real events. In the present study, Craig A. Monson takes advantage of a recent discovery—the 1,450-page notary’s transcript of the 1659 investigation. It is supplemented here by many ancillary archival sources, unknown to all previous writers. Since the story of Gironima Spana and the would-be widows is partially about what people believed to be true, however, this investigation also juxtaposes some of the “alternative facts” from earlier, sensational accounts with what the notary’s transcript and other, more reliable archival documents reveal. Written in a style that avoids arcane idioms and specialist jargon, the book can potentially speak to students and general readers interested in seventeenth-century social history and gender issues. It rewrites the life story of Gironima Spana (largely unknown until now), who has dominated all earlier accounts, usually in caricatures that reiterate the tropes of witchcraft. It also concentrates on the dozen other widows whose stories could be the most recovered from archival sources and whom Spana had totally eclipsed in earlier accounts. Most were women “of a very ordinary sort” (prostitutes; beggars; wives of butchers, barbers, dyers, lineners, innkeepers), the kinds of women commonly lost to history. The book seeks to explain why some women were hanged (only six, in fact, most of whom may not have directly poisoned anyone), while dozens of others who did poison their husbands escaped the gallows and, in some cases, were not even interrogated. It also reveals what happened to these other alleged perpetrators, whose fates have remained unknown until now. Other purported culprits, about whom less complete pictures emerge, are briefly discussed in an appendix. The study incorporates illustrations of archival manuscripts to demonstrate the challenges of deciphering them and illustrates “scenes of the crime” and other important locations, identified on seventeenth-century, bird’s eye-perspective views of Rome and in modern photographs. It also includes GPS coordinates for any who might wish to revisit the sites.

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The Body in Crisis introduces the English-speaking world to the work of leading Latin American dance scholar and philosopher of the body, Christine Greiner. The book offers an innovative set of tools with which to examine the role of moving bodies and bodily actions in relation to worldwide concerns, including identity politics, alterity, migration, and belonging. The book places the concept of bodymedium in dialogue with the work of Giorgio Agamben to investigate notions of alterity, and shows how an understanding of the body-environment continuum can shed light on things left unnamed and at the margins. Greiner’s analyses draw from a broad range of theory concerned with the epistemology of the body, including cognitive science, political philosophy, evolutionary biology, and performance studies to illuminate radical experiences that question the limits of the body. Her analysis of the role that bodies play in negotiations of power relations offers an original and unprecedented contribution to the field of dance studies and expands its scope to recognize theoretical models of inquiry developed in the Global South.

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