Search results for ""oxford university press inc""

Many people who have thought about God have not thought about animals, or about the relationship between the two. But among those who have are some of the most celebrated religious thinkers, including Michel de Montaigne, Thomas Tryon, John Wesley, John Ruskin, Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Albert Schweitzer, and Paul Tillich. This volume comprises 24 scholarly studies that detail challenges to the dominant anthropocentrism of most religious traditions. The editors have brought together Jewish, Unitarian, Christian, transcendentalist, Muslim, Hindu, Dissenting, deist, and Quaker voices, each offering a unique theological perspective that counters the neglect of the nonhuman. Animal Theologians is divided into three parts starting with the pioneers who first saw a relationship between animals and divinity, those who contributed to the expansion of social sensibility to animals, and ending with the work of contemporary theologians. The essays in this volume use contextual and historical background to describe what led animal theologians to their beliefs, and then pave way for further developments in this expanding field. This volume is an act of reclaiming different religious traditions for animals by recovering lost voices.

Read more less

The Qur'an is a text of extraordinary depth and complexity. In How the Qur'an Works, Leyla Ozgur Alhassen takes the reader on a journey through the Qur'an, moving from one verse to another, one story to another, focusing on narratological elements while conducting a close reading in order to understand particular Qur'anic stories and to show how the text's literary techniques enhance its theological agenda. She unpacks the text by focusing on Qur'anic narrative, and specifically, repetition in Qur'anic stories. Repetition is an important part of the Qur'an's literary technique. Ozgur Alhassen traces the use of repetition as a narrative device from the text's overall structure to individual letters. She compares different Qur'anic stories and explores the kinds of repetition that occur in them and what purposes they serve. Repetition, she shows, forges patterns, connections, and layers of meaning that develop, complicate, and comment on the Qur'an's messages.

Read more less

Philosophers and scientists both ask questions about what the world is like. How do these fields interact with one another? How should they? Naturalism Beyond the Limits of Science investigates an approach to these questions called methodological naturalism. According to methodological naturalism, when coming up with theories about what the world is like, philosophers should, whenever possible, make use of the same methodology that is deployed by scientists. Although many contemporary philosophers have implicit commitments that lead straightforwardly to methodological naturalism, few have a clear understanding of how widespread and disruptive methodological naturalism promises to be for the field. By way of a series of case studies involving laws of nature, composition, time and modality, and drawing on historical and contemporary scientific developments including the discovery of the neutrino, the introduction of dark energy, and the advent of relativity theory, this book demonstrates the ways in which scientists rely on extra-empirical reasoning and how that very same extra-empirical reasoning can yield surprising results when applied to philosophical debates. Along the way, Nina Emery's investigation illuminates the complex relationship between philosophy and the sciences, and makes the case that philosophers and scientists alike would benefit from a greater understanding of the connections between the two fields.

Read more less

Enchanted Revolution moves religion and gender to center stage in the Chinese Communist revolution, examining the mobilizational dynamics of anti-superstition propaganda in support of the Communist Party's rise from rural backwaters to national dominance. Xiaofei Kang argues that religion was not merely adversary for the revolutionaries-it also served as a model for the ways in which the Party mobilized support and constructed legitimacy. In this parallel and often paradoxical process, the Party attacked <"superstitions>" that had long supported the foundations of Chinese religious life. At the same time, Party propaganda co-opted these same religious resources for its own political ends. Kang demonstrates that the persuasive power of Party propaganda relied heavily on recasting the cosmic forces of yin and yang that sustained the traditional gender hierarchy and ritual order. Moreover, revolutionary art and literature revamped old narratives of female ghosts and ritual exorcism to inject the people with a new masculinist vision of the Party-state endowed with both scientific potency and the heavenly mandate. Gendered language and symbolism in Chinese religion thus remained central to inspiring pathos, ethos, and logos for the revolution. Enchanted Revolution sheds light on the contemporary significance of the Maoist legacy in China through a deft exploration of the complex interplay of religion, gender, and revolution.

Read more less

Through rapid cultural change and technological advances, kink subculture has become more visible and accessible--and less stigmatized--than ever before. Internet communities have created exciting new possibilities for social identities and communities in ways that were once thought unimageable, both online and in the real world. This book combines a range of psychological, sociological, and cultural theories with 74 interviews of gay men in this community to unpack their attraction to kink and its impact on their social and sexual identities. In examining how the internet has transformed these subcultures, this book presents an authentic picture of kink social networking sites that have empowered and enabled a whole new group of people to engage both on- and offline. Through its case study of pup play, this book follows the rich tradition of locating kinksters in their communities and cultural contexts. It also investigates new pathways for a wide range of gay men, such as "non-community participants" who want to practice kink without entering the community. Kinky in the Digital Age is a comprehensive, empirically deep exploration of gay men's social and sexual experiences of kink. It bolsters the voices of these men in an unprecedented way as it documents the history and potential of this fascinating subculture and social community.

Read more less

Why does someone join an extremist group? What are the pathways via which individuals join such groups? How does one show commitment to an extremist group? Why does someone participate in acts of terrorism? Drawing on 175 interviews with current and former members of Islamist extremist groups in Indonesia and the Philippines, Becoming Jihadis: Radicalization and Commitment in Southeast Asia answers these questions by exploring the socio-emotional underpinnings of joining an extremist group. This book argues that social ties play a critical role at every juncture in the joining process, from initial engagement to commitment to participation in jihad experiences, paramilitary training, and terrorism. It unpacks the process by which members build a sense of community, connection, solidarity, and brotherhood; how they come to trust and love one another; and how ideology functions as a binding agent, not a cause. Becoming Jihadis draws its conclusions from broad patterns data based on nearly a decade of iterated interviews with current and former members of Islamist extremist groups between 2010 and 2019, as well as partial life histories detailing the journeys of men and women who joined Indonesian and Filipino extremist groups. This book makes a unique contribution to the literature on terrorism and radicalization for students, practitioners, and policymakers.

Read more less

A detailed account, based on fieldwork and interviews, of how Women, Peace and Security norms are militarized and put at the service of operational effectiveness. International organizations and governments want to increase women's participation in military operations and peacebuilding. Gender equality is increasingly seen as the antidote to conflict, a key factor in achieving stability. While feminist activism inspired the emergence of these norms on gender and conflict, they were institutionalized through the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, with the military at the forefront of those changes. In Deploying Feminism, Stéfanie von Hlatky tells the story of how the military has been delegated authority to advance gender equality as part of their activities, while simultaneously tackling increasingly complex threats. Drawing upon fieldwork and interviews, she illustrates how NATO, the world's foremost alliance, has even embedded these ideas in the planning and execution of its missions. For troops deployed on NATO missions, this often means seeking out women in their operating area to improve intelligence gathering activities. While this helps the mission, does it help women and conflict-affected communities? Because of the military's focus on operational effectiveness above all else, von Hlatky argues that there is a distortion of WPS norms, as gender equality concerns fade into the background. Looking at NATO's ongoing operations in Iraq, Kosovo, and the Baltics, Deploying Feminism details the process by which Women, Peace and Security norms are militarized and put at the service of operational effectiveness. Further, it shows why an adjustment is necessary for gender equality to become a true planning priority.

Read more less

While Verb-third (V3) patterns have long been studied in verb-second (V2) languages, a similar pattern in which an initial adverbial constituent is resumed by a clause-internal element has been much less studied. The latter is referred to as 'adverbial resumption' and it also has the character of being a V3 phenomenon. Therefore, the pattern is labelled 'adverbial V3 resumption' or 'adverbial V3.' The present volume is an up-to-date overview of the subject featuring case studies of individual languages that display certain patterns of V3. The authors discuss this pattern in relation to several different languages, addressing among other things issues of microvariation in contemporary varieties and diachronic variation. The book covers Medieval Romance, Old Italian, Old English, diachronic and synchronic varieties of German, varieties of Flemish and Dutch, Icelandic, varieties of Swedish, and Norwegian. Through analyses of adverbial resumptive V3 orders in Germanic and Romance, the contributors explore the nature of V2: while adverbial resumption only occurs in varieties that observe the V2 rule, in itself it leads to apparent violations of linear V2 order, namely to V3 orders. Adverbial Resumption in Verb Second Languages provides comparative analyses which touch upon the nature of sentence-external versus sentence-internal adjuncts, and the fine-grained architecture of the clausal functional hierarchy. These papers constitute a valuable contribution to the theoretically important topics of V2 and V3 that will be of interest to comparative linguists, Germanic linguistics, Romance linguists, and anyone working on formal grammar in general.

Read more less

The “people” are the ultimate source of authority for a constitution. But who are the people? The danger is that populist leaders will define the people as one segment of the population that is unbound by law to create a new constitution that centralizes power in the leader's hands. This book retells the story of popular constitution-making in South America to develop an alternative theory of the relationship of the people to law. Braver examines how and how not to violate law to construct an inclusive people so they may realize their freedom to break with the past but still stave off the establishment of semi-authoritarian constitutions. Through the “extraordinary adaptation” of old institutions, the people and its constitutional convention may include all parties. Rather than overthrowing old institutions and opening a legal void, in extraordinary adaptation, the revolutionary party gains offices through democratic elections and then repurposes the old regime's institutions by bending, reinterpreting, and even breaking their rules. However, it never creates a legal vacuum, and this partial legal continuity facilitates the participation of old parties that continue to hold some power in the previous constitution's institutions. The adaptation must be principled: the revolutionary must first exhaust all legal channels, openly acknowledge the violation to seek popular vindication, and concede enough to the opposition so that it may begrudgingly acquiesce to the new constitution. The book develops the theories of constitution-making by examining all four instances of popular constitution-making in contemporary South America. It shows how populist leaders in Venezuela and Ecuador established semi-authoritarian constitutions through lawless constitution-making while Colombia and Bolivia managed to avoid the same fate by engaging in extraordinary adaptation.

Read more less

What is love's real intent? Why can love be so ruthlessly selective? How is it related to sex, beauty, and goodness? And is the child now the supreme object of love? In addressing these questions, Simon May develops a radically new understanding of love as the emotion we feel towards whomever or whatever we experience as grounding our life--as offering us a possibility of home in a world that we supremely value. He sees love as motivated by a promise of "ontological rootedness," rather than, as two thousand years of tradition variously asserts, by beauty or goodness, by a search for wholeness, by virtue, by sexual or reproductive desire, by compassion or altruism or empathy, or, in one of today's dominant views, by no qualities at all of the loved one. After arguing that such founding Western myths as the Odyssey and Abraham's call by God to Canaan in the Bible powerfully exemplify his new conception of love, May goes on to re-examine the relation of love to beauty, sex, and goodness in the light of this conception, offering among other things a novel theory of beauty--and suggesting, against Plato, that we can love others for their ugliness (while also seeing them as beautiful). Finally, he proposes that, in the Western world, romantic love is gradually giving way to parental love as the most valued form of love: namely, the love without which one's life is not deemed complete or truly flourishing. May explains why childhood has become sacred and excellence in parenting a paramount ideal--as well as a litmus test of society's moral health. In doing so, he argues that the child is the first genuinely "modern" supreme object of love: the first to fully reflect what Nietzsche called "the death of God." Readers will find Love "Excitingly new, yet immediately recognizable--that's the paradox at the very heart of love, and it is what Simon May has achieved." --Los Angeles Review of Books

Read more less

Hollywood's conversion to sound in the 1920s created an early peak in the film musical following the immense success of The Jazz Singer. The opportunity to synchronize moving pictures with a soundtrack suited the musical in particular, since the heightened experience of song and dance drew attention to the novelty of the technological development. Until the near-collapse of the genre in the 1960s, the film musical enjoyed around thirty years of development, as landmarks such as The Wizard of Oz, Meet Me in St. Louis, Singin' in the Rain, and Gigi showed the exciting possibilities of putting musicals on the silver screen. The first of three volumes, The Politics of the Musical Theatre Screen Adaptation: An Oxford Handbook traces how the genre of the stage-to-screen musical has evolved, starting with early screen adaptations such as the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie Roberta and working through to Into the Woods (2014). Many chapters examine specific screen adaptations in depth, while others deal with broad issues such as realism or the politics of the adaptation in works such as Li'l Abner and Finian's Rainbow. Together, the chapters incite lively debates about the process of adapting Broadway for the big screen and provide models for future studies. Volume I: The Politics of the Musical Theatre Screen Adaptation Volume II: Race, Sexuality, and Gender and the Musical Screen Adaptation Volume III: Stars, Studios, and the Musical Theatre Screen Adaptation

Read more less

A guided tour of spiritual autobiography that grants readers new insights and appreciation of the genre The genre of spiritual autobiography has flourished ever since Augustine essentially invented it in the fourth century. In Our Hearts Are Restless, Richard Lischer--himself the author of two spiritual memoirs--takes readers on a guided tour of the genre, examining the life writings of twenty-one figures from the expected (Thomas Merton) to the surprising (James Baldwin); from the sublime Julian of Norwich and Emily Dickinson to the outrageous Anne Lamott. Lischer is a perceptive reader and an engaging guide in the art and craft of spiritual writing. Our Hearts Are Restless shows readers how history's most brilliant spiritual writers have sought and found a pattern of meaning in the face of tragedy, conflict, and the responsibilities of daily life.

Read more less

In the Islamic tradition, fiqh (Islamic law) is generally regarded as the science of furū'al-dīn (matters complementary to the Islamic faith), as opposed to kalām (Islamic theology) which is known as the science of uṣūl al-dīn (matters primary to the Islamic faith). Over time, however, fiqh has significantly surpassed Kalām in terms of cognitive maturation and epistemic development. In The Higher Objectives of Islamic Theology, Mohammed Gamal Abdelnour argues that far too little attention has been paid to parallel developments in Islamic theology. Consequently, the theological project in the Islamic tradition has largely become limited to definitions and deliberations about the nature and qualities of the transcendent God, and has barely developed as a systematic discipline devoted to the higher objectives of Islamic theology, similar to those of Maqāṣid al-Sharī?a (higher objectives of Islamic law). Addressing this gap and drawing on the full-fledged genre of Maqāṣid al-Sharī?a, this study aims to develop a genre of Maqāṣid al-?Aqīda (higher objectives of Islamic theology) based on a scheme of core values (Truth, Justice, Beauty), instead of a scheme of ḥudūd (penalties). Arguing that the tradition's current overemphasis on law (Justice) has relegated both theology (Truth) and Sufism (Beauty) to the periphery of the tradition, Abdelnour illustrates how this marginalisation of theology and Sufism leaves less room for an "ethical Islam" and instead prioritises "legal" and "political Islam." In shifting the focus from law to theology, the book thereby grapples with such questions as: why did Islamic theology fail to develop a systemic genre of Maqāṣid al-?Aqīda? How do we chart out a map to guide the process of founding such an area? In what ways can the emerging Maqāṣid al-?Aqīda benefit from the well-established Maqāṣid al-Sharī?a? What are the ramifications of having an underdeveloped theology?

Read more less

Looks at the rollout of one of the largest infrastructure programs in human history to show how local governments play a complex role. China's high-speed railway network is one of the largest infrastructure programs in human history. Despite global media coverage, we know very little about the political process that led the government to invest in the railway program and the reasons for the striking regional and temporal variation in such investments. In Localized Bargaining, Xiao Ma offers a novel theory of intergovernmental bargaining that explains the unfolding of China's unprecedented high-speed railway program. Drawing on a wealth of in-depth interviews, original data sets, and surveys with local officials, Ma details how the bottom-up bargaining efforts by territorial authorities—whom the central bureaucracies rely on to implement various infrastructure projects—shaped the allocation of investment in the railway system. Demonstrating how localities of different types invoke institutional and extra-institutional sources of bargaining power in their competition for railway stations, Ma sheds new light on how the nation's massive bureaucracy actually functions.

Read more less

Michael Higgins broadens our understanding of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World by bringing science, engineering, and technology together with ancient documentation and archaeological findings. The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World (Pyramids of Giza, Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Statue of Zeus at Olympia, Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, Colossus of Rhodes, and the Pharos Lighthouse at Alexandria) have been a source of fascination for more than two thousand years. Even though six of the Wonders are now gone, historians and archaeologists have attempted to explain how and why these ancient monuments were created. However, never before have these attempts been synthesized with the contributions of science, engineering, and technology. In The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, Michael Higgins combines scientific research together with ancient documentation and archaeological findings to present a rich, multi-layered portrait of each monument. To build a Wonder took advanced social organization and wealth generated by agriculture and trade, both of which depended on regional geography and climate. It also took natural resources, as well as an understanding of the environment where the Wonder would stand. Even the natural processes often responsible for a Wonder's destruction sometimes contributed to the preservation of its ruins. These and other topics are accessibly explored in this book. After using science, engineering, and technology to answer key questions about the Wonders, Higgins speculates on how we could recreate these ancient monuments and make new wonders that could withstand environmental changes and natural disasters for the next two thousand years.

Read more less

"This is, for my money, the best single-source primer on the state of climate change." - New York Magazine "The right book at the right time: accessible, comprehensive, unflinching, humane." - The Daily Beast "A must-read." - The Guardian Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know is the essential primer on what will be the defining issue of our time. Newly updated with the latest in climate science from COP26 and beyond, this third edition offers user-friendly, scientifically rigorous answers to the most difficult (and commonly politicized) questions surrounding climate change. Drawing on the author's decades of experience as one of the country's most influential communicators on climate science and solutions, this authoritative guide highlights the following topics: · Key updates from the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow · Insights into changes in the political landscape, such as COVID-19 and Donald Trump's presidency, and what these have meant for climate action in the United States and internationally · Contemporary implications of the clean energy revolution, from solar and wind power to batteries and electric cars

Read more less

The story of how English became American -- and how it became Southern, Bostonian, Californian, African-American, Chicano, elite, working-class, urban, rural, and everything in between By the time of the Revolution, the English that Americans spoke was recognizably different from the British variety. Americans added dozens of new words to the language, either borrowed from Native Americans (raccoon, persimmon, caucus) or created from repurposed English (backwoods, cane brake, salt lick). Americans had their own pronunciations (bath rhymed with hat, not hot) and their own spelling (honor, not honour), not to mention a host of new expressions that grew out of the American landscape and culture (blaze a trail, back track, pull up stakes). Americans even invented their own slang, like stiff as a ringbolt to mean drunk. American English has continued to grow and change ever since. The United States of English tells the engrossing tale of how the American language evolved over four hundred years, explaining both how and why it changed and which parts of the "mother tongue" it preserved (I guess was heard in the British countryside long before it became a typical Americanism). Rosemarie Ostler approaches American English as part of the larger story of American history and culture, starting with what we know about the first colonists and their speech. Drawing on the latest research, she explores the roots of regional dialects, the differences between British and American language use, the sources of American slang, the development of African American English, current trends in political language, and much more. Plentiful examples of the American vernacular, past and present, bring the language to life and make for an engaging as well as enlightening read.

Read more less

Combining insights from evolutionary psychology with a broad sweep through history, down to the ideological civil war ripping the United States apart, the book explores the deeper roots of people's inability to accept claims about reality which come from the opposite ideological camp, no matter how valid they might be. After theorists around 1960 proclaimed the 'death of ideology', ideological divides and clashes have reemerged with renewed intensity throughout the world. In the United States they have become particularly venomous. Each side in America's escalating ideological civil war charges the other with concocting 'fake news' and 'alternative facts'. The other side is widely viewed as malicious, irrational or downright stupid, and, often, as barely legitimate. People are deaf to claims about reality that come from the opposite camp, no matter how valid they might be. The zeal of the opposing sides is often scarcely less than that which characterized the religious ideologies of old. Indeed, historical religious ideologies have largely been replaced by 'secular religions' or 'religion substitutes'. Ideology consists of normative prescriptions regarding how society should be shaped, together with an interpretive roadmap indicating how this normative vision can be implemented in reality. Ideological Fixation is the result of tensions and conflicts between these two elements. The book focuses on ideologies' factual claims about the world, typically subordinate to, and often distorted by, their normative commitment. In exploring this phenomenon, the book combines insights from evolutionary psychology regarding the nature of some of our deepest proclivities with a broad sweep through history and around the world. It proceeds from the Stone Age to the rise of civilization, the great religions and modernity, to a critique of fundamental factual premises that underlie some of the major debates dominating today's liberal democracies, not least the United States.

Read more less

Realism is one of the core theories within the field of international relations, and it generally posits a state system characterized by anarchy where states act in what they perceive to be their own self interests. It is a controversial theory, and it has many opponents. Yet effective debate among realists and those who identify with other schools of thought has diminished dramatically over time. As Patrick James argues in Realism and International Relations, scholars in the field have become dissatisfied with results from exchanges in words alone. He contends that translation of the vast amount of information in the field into knowledge requires a greater emphasis on communication beyond the use of text. Given the challenges posed by existing and intensifying information overload, he develops a new model that relies on the graphic representation of analytical arguments. As James explains, realist scholarship in the post-World War II era is the natural domain for the application of systemism, a graphic form of expression with straightforward rules for portrayal of analytical arguments, notably cause and effect within theories. Systemism goes beyond prior iterations of systems theory to offer a visualization technique borrowed and adapted from the philosophy of science. Systemist graphics reveal the shortcomings, contributions and potential of realism. These visualizations, which focus on realist theories about war, are intended to bring order out of what critics tend to describe, with some justification, as chaos. In sum, a graphic turn for realism in particular and international relations in general is essential in order to achieve the scientific progress that otherwise is likely to remain elusive. A major theoretical work by an eminent scholar, this will be of interest to all theorists focusing how the international system of states actually functions.

Read more less

For over 15 years, researchers have described a crisis in our nations' early learning classrooms. Hundreds of children are expelled from childcare and preschool every day; a rate nearly three times that of kindergarten-12th grade students. While policymakers have taken steps to mitigate this crisis, disparities in who is expelled persist. Boys and Black children are routinely over-represented among those pushed out of the exact environments that are supposed to help prepare them for school. Each child's expulsion is symptomatic of a larger crisis--an overburdened, underfunded, undervalued, and fragmented early education system. In early childhood, expulsion is the result of a series of adult decisions made within constrained contexts and at times blind to downstream consequences: exhausted and underpaid teachers deciding how to expend their limited attention and energy in a chaotic classroom; administrators on razor-thin budgets deciding among hiring additional personnel, providing high-quality training, or investing in adequate classroom resources; fragmented state agencies separately deciding on standards and policies and allocating funds for early intervention and consultation services. By examining these complex causes, No Longer Welcome starts a critical conversation between and across sectors of the early childhood field. Parents, teachers, preschool administrators, researchers, and policymakers all have a role to play in ensuring that all children can be retained in high-quality early care and education settings. Drawing on her research and interviews with teachers, program administrators, parents, and policymakers, Dr. Zinsser presents the reader with a rich description of the myriad of factors contributing to the expulsion crisis. She presents a compelling argument for not only the importance of ending the practice of excluding young children but also outlines roles that each and every member of the field (from classroom aide to legislator) must play in sustaining this change.

Read more less

The Covid-19 Pandemic has brought forth global anxiety about linkages between the environment and society at a fundamental structural level. Earthly Order: How Natural Laws Define Human Life provides an accessible exposition of the latest foundational knowledge on how natural and social systems science can inform planetary crises. Humanity has either tried to conquer or capitulate to natural order, whereas we should be seeking to understand latent structures and patterns that permeate all systems and develop an "earthly order," that is socially functional and sustainable. Current debates in politics often present what should constitute a "world order" while scientists have wrestled with what are fundamental conditions of "natural order." Author Saleem H. Ali provides a readable synthesis of these debates with practical guidance for the public with a host of current examples around environmental decision-making by consumers, the government and industry. Twitter: @saleem_ali

Read more less

A unique, timely, and wide-ranging book that formulates and applies an ethic of Jesus to the realm of global politics. Since the fourth century, Christians have wrestled with how they should interact with political authority. The most common view holds that while their ultimate loyalty rightfully belongs to God, Christians also have allegiance to their countries and a moral responsibility to transform their political systems. In The Global Politics of Jesus, Nilay Saiya provides a normative critique of this conventional view and advances an alternative approach. While it may seem natural for the church to fervently engage in political life and cultivate a close relationship with the state, Saiya argues that such beliefs result in a "paradox of privilege." As he shows, when the church yields to the seduction of political power when enjoying the benefits of an alliance with the state, it struggles to adhere to its tenets, and when it resists the allure of state power, it does its best work. This unique and wide-ranging book examines the paradox of privilege in some of the most important areas of global politics and considers its implications for the church itself.

Read more less

A sweeping, revisionist historical analysis of telecommunications networks, from the dawn of the republic to the 21st century. Telecommunications networks are vast, intricate, hugely costly systems for exchanging messages and information-within cities and across continents. From the Post Office and the telegraph to today's internet, these networks have sown domestic division while also acting as sources of international power. In Crossed Wires, Dan Schiller, who has conducted archival research on US telecommunications for more than forty years, recovers the extraordinary social history of the major network systems of the United States. Drawing on arrays of archival documents and secondary sources, Schiller reveals that this history has been shaped by sharp social and political conflict and is embedded in the larger history of an expansionary US political economy. Schiller argues that networks have enabled US imperialism through a a recurrent "American system" of cross-border communications. Three other key findings wind through the book. First, business users of networks--more than carriers, and certainly more than residential users--have repeatedly determined how telecommunications systems have developed. Second, despite their current importance for virtually every sphere of social life, networks have been consecrated above all to aiding the circulation of commodities. Finally, although the preferences of executives and officials have broadly determined outcomes, these elites have repeatedly had to contend against the ideas and organizations of workers, social movement activists, and other reformers. This authoritative and comprehensive revisionist history of US telecommunications argues that not technology but a dominative--and contested--political economy drove the evolution of this critical industry.

Read more less

This gripping account interweaves Nixon and Kissinger's pursuit of the war in Southeast Asia and their diplomacy with the Soviet Union and China with on-the-ground military events and US domestic reactions to the war conducted in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Fire and Rain is a compelling, meticulous narrative of the way national security decisions formed at the highest levels of government affect the lives of individuals at home and abroad. By drawing these connections, Carolyn Woods Eisenberg brings to life policy decisions about Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, conveying their significance to a new generation of readers. She breaks fresh ground in contextualizing Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger's decisions within a wider institutional and societal framework. While recognizing the distinctive personalities and ideas of these two men, this study more broadly conveys the competing roles and impact of the professional military, the Congress, and a mobilized peace movement. Drawing upon a vast collection of declassified documents, Eisenberg presents an important re-interpretation of the Nixon Administration's relations with the Soviet Union and China vis a vis the war in Southeast Asia. She argues that in their desperate effort to overcome, or at least overshadow, their failure in Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger made major concessions to both nations in the field of arms control, their response to the India-Pakistan war, and the diplomacy surrounding Taiwan--much of this secret. Despite policymakers' claims that the Vietnam War was a "national security" necessity that would demonstrate American strength to the communist superpowers and "credibility" to friendly governments, the historical record suggests a different reality. A half-century after the Paris Peace Conference marking the withdrawal of US troops and advisors from Vietnam and foreign troops from Laos and Cambodia, Fire and Rain is a dramatic account of geopolitical decision making, civil society, and the human toll of the war on the people of Southeast Asia.

Read more less

The Humanities and Human Flourishing series publishes edited volumes that explore the role of human flourishing in the central disciplines of the humanities, and whether and how the humanities can increase human happiness. The contributors to this volume of essays investigate the question: what do literary scholars contribute to social scientific research on human happiness and flourishing? Of all humanities disciplines, none is more resistant to the program of positive psychology or the prevailing discourse of human flourishing than literary studies. The approach taken in this volume of essays is neither to gloss over that antagonism nor to launch a series of blasts against positive psychology and the happiness industry. Rather, the contributors reflect on how their literary research--work to which they are personally committed--might become part of an interdisciplinary conversation about human flourishing. The contributors' areas of research are wide ranging, covering literary aesthetics, book history, digital humanities, and reader reception, as well as the important "inter-disciplines" of gender and sexuality studies, disability studies, and black studies-fields in which issues of stigma and exclusion are paramount, and which have critiqued the discourse of human flourishing for its failure to grapple with structural inequality and human difference. Literary scholars are drawn more readily to the problematic than to the decidable, but by dwelling on the trouble spots in a field of inquiry still largely confined to the sciences, Literary Studies and Human Flourishing provides the groundwork for new and more productive forms of interdisciplinary collaboration and exchange.

Read more less

A call to tone down our political rhetoric and embrace a common-sense approach to change. Many experts believe that we are at a fulcrum moment in history, a time that demands radical shifts in thinking and policymaking. Calls for bold change are everywhere these days, particularly on social media, but is this actually the best way to make the world a better place? In Gradual, Greg Berman and Aubrey Fox argue that, contrary to the aspirations of activists on both the right and the left, incremental reform is the best path forward. They begin by emphasizing that the very structure of American government explicitly and implicitly favors incrementalism. Particularly in a time of intense polarization, any effort to advance radical change will inevitably engender significant backlash. As Berman and Fox make clear, polling shows little public support for bold change. The public is, however, willing to endorse a broad range of incremental reforms that, if implemented, would reduce suffering and improve fairness. To illustrate how incremental changes can add up to significant change over time, Berman and Fox provide portraits of "heroic incrementalists" who have produced meaningful reforms in a variety of areas, from the expansion of Social Security to more recent efforts to reduce crime and incarceration. Gradual is a bracing call for a "radical realism" that prioritizes honesty, humility, nuance, and respect in an effort to transcend political polarization and reduce the conflict produced by social media.

Read more less

Many nations that are rich in oil and natural resources are plagued by undemocratic politics, war and civil conflict, corrupt governments, and volatile economies. Scholars have pointed to a "resource curse" as a root of the problem: the notion that valuable natural resources are connected to serious social, political, and economic problems. Entirely missing from the story, however, is an understanding about the role of the public in oil nations--specifically, the attitudes, values, and ideals they hold about important social, political, and economic issues. In Hydrocarbon Citizens, Nimah Mazaheri tells the story of how the discovery of oil dramatically transformed politics and society in the Middle East. He argues that the creation of oil-dependent economies cultivated a new type of citizen in the region: the "hydrocarbon citizen." These citizens hold attitudes, values, and beliefs about their governments and national politics that are very different from what is observed in countries that do not produce oil. Hydrocarbon citizens tend to view their governments as highly effective, generous, helpful, and responsive to the basic needs of society compared to the citizens of countries without oil. Hydrocarbon citizens also tend to be skeptical about the merits of democratization and more likely to believe that democratic governments are ineffective, unstable, and full of problems. Including a rich historical discussion, in-depth analysis of public opinion data, and original surveys conducted among Saudi Arabians and Emiratis, Mazaheri offers a new way of understanding the puzzling "resource curse" that has afflicted mineral-dependent nations around the world. Moreover, he provides a new way of thinking about current politics in the Middle East and explains why some of the region's long-lasting autocracies have been successful in resisting the rise of democracy.

Read more less

Theocritus: Space, Absence, and Desire discusses many of Theocritus's Idylls with emphasis on how these poems construct space--its contours and borders, along with the people, animals, and objects that fill it--and the equally important role of absence. Drawing on spatial theory from anthropology and cultural geography, author William G. Thalmann studies each poem in itself and in its connections with other poems, so that a loose coherence emerges among them. Spatially, the Ptolemaic empire provides a setting and reference point for the various types of Idylls (bucolic, urban, mythological, and encomiastic poems), in ways that help legitimate it. In all the idylls, however, space is constructed selectively from particular perspectives, so that it reflects and shapes people's relations with each other and humans' relations with nature. The bucolic Idylls in particular raise questions about being in and out of place and relations between self and other that would have been important under the conditions of mobility and intercultural contact in the early Hellenistic period. Yet theirs is a fictional world, defined more by its margins than by its center, and visions of fullness and presence of nature are always distanced from the reader. Absence is constitutive of this world, just as absence of the beloved is the precondition for the desire of bucolic characters and prompts their singing. Their desire mirrors the desire of readers for the absent bucolic world that the poems arouse and that keeps them reading.

Read more less

Achieving effectiveness of evidence-based psychotherapy across a diversity of patients continues to be a foremost concern, and many training programs and professional societies in clinical psychology are at a loss as to how to systematically approach this issue. In A Cultural Humility and Social Justice Approach to Psychotherapy, Anu Asnaani provides an applied guide for working with clients from a diverse set of intersectional identities within the context of evidence-based practice. Drawing on her extensive clinical experience with a range of clients and therapy protocols/approaches, her active and ongoing research program in addressing health disparities, and considerable work in training clinicians across practice settings to incorporate diversity perspectives into treatment, Asnaani presents practical ways to engage in culturally humble, socially just clinical practice. Guidelines are derived from the consensus across published literature and established practice, and cover the full trajectory of treatment, from assessment through to relapse prevention; the book further offers some considerations for adopting these principles within the context of clinical supervision. Suitable for a broad range of mental health practitioners providing evidence-based clinical care for individuals with psychological disorders, this book provides worksheets, reflection exercises, and short-hand figures, making these concepts as easy-to-use in clinical practice as possible.

Read more less

Supportive psychotherapy is widely practiced but poorly defined, often misunderstood, and unfairly disparaged. Dr. Markowitz and his colleagues manualized Brief Supportive Psychotherapy (BSP) as a time-limited control treatment to compare to "more active" established psychotherapies like cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT) in research studies. In fact, BSP, an emotion-focused, bare-bones treatment based on Carl Rogers' Client Centered Therapy, has since proven itself to be a robust treatment in multiple randomized controlled treatment trials. It has generally kept pace with the brand name treatments in treating patients with difficult disorders like chronic depression. Some therapists, previously trained only in cognitive and behavioral approaches, have found this affect-focused approach adds a new dimension to their thinking and to patients' lives. Brief Supportive Psychotherapy: A Treatment Manual and Clinical Approach is both an elaboration of the now well-tested research treatment manual for BSP and a primer for clinicians. It illustrates how BSP helps patients with mood and anxiety disorders to tolerate rather than avoid their powerful negative emotions. It describes the key elements of supportive psychotherapy, covering the crucial "common factors" that help make all evidence-based psychotherapies effective. These include affective arousal, helping the patient to feel understood, realistic optimism for improvement, a therapeutic ritual, clinical poise, and success experiences. BSP maximizes patient autonomy, letting the patient lead sessions, and prescribes no homework. It is an elemental, relatively simple approach for a psychotherapy, yet no psychotherapy is easy to do well. Its affect-focused approach enhances the application of all psychotherapeutic approaches. It deserves a place among evidence-based treatments in depression treatment guidelines.

Read more less

Guido Calabresi is an extraordinary person. His family, of Jewish heritage, occupied a secure and centuries-old position near the top of Italian society-- until the rise of fascism. Guido's parents fled to America on the eve of the war in Europe, with their children, to avoid political and religious persecution. They arrived without money or social standing. Guido's talents and good fortune helped him to thrive at several elite American institutions and to become a leading legal scholar, teacher, law school dean, and judge. He would receive prizes and awards for his contributions; to legal theory, especially for opening up the area of 'law and economics'; for contributions to the modern transformation of American law schools, as the Dean of Yale Law School; and for advancing the development of law including through progressive decisions as a member of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Outside In is a unique sort of account spread across two volumes and written in Guido's remarkable voice based on recordings that which took place over a decade. It is a unique amalgam of oral history and biography, with supplementary commentaries to explain, elaborate, validate, and interpret and situate the personal narrative within its larger historical context.

Read more less

"The Lord confused the language of all the earth," so the Tower of Babel story in the Hebrew Bible's book of Genesis tells us to explain why the world's people communicate in countless languages while previously they all spoke only one. This book argues that the biblical confusion really happened in the ancient Near East, not in speech, however, but in writing. It examines the millennia-long history of writing in the region and shows a radical change from the third and second millennia to the first millennium BC. Before "Babel" any intellectual who wrote did so as a participant in a cosmopolitan tradition with its roots in Babylonia, its language, and its cuneiform script. After "Babel" scribes from all over the eastern Mediterranean, including Greece, used a profusion of vernacular languages and scripts to express themselves. Yet they did so in dialogue with the Babylonian cuneiform tradition still maintained by the successive Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian empires that controlled their world, oftentimes as acts of resistance, aware of cosmopolitan ideas and motifs but subverting them. In order to frame the rich intellectual history of this region in the ancient past Before and after Babel describes and analyzes the Babylonian cosmopolitan system, how ancient Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, and other vernacular systems interacted with it in multiple and intricate ways, and their consequences.

Read more less

Love, Subjectivity, and Truth engages in a lively manner with the overlapping areas of philosophy and literature, philosophy of emotions, and existential thought. "Subjective truth," a phrase used in Proust's novel In Search of Lost Time, is rich with existential connotations. It invokes Kierkegaard above all, but significantly Nietzsche as well, and other philosophers who thematize love, subjectivity, and truth. In Search of Lost Time is especially concerned about what we can know about others through love. Insofar as it conveys and analyzes experience, the novel is capable not only of exploring existential issues but also of doing something like phenomenology. What we know is shaped by our way of knowing, just as the properties of visible, colored objects are determined by the wavelengths of light our eyes can see. Nowhere does the subjective basis of our awareness appear so evident as it does when we view things through loving eyes. In Proust's novel we find skeptical views about love expressed again and again. However, we also note countercurrents, in which love is shown to provide a unique sort of insight. At those times, love seems to be a prerequisite of veridical apprehension. Love, Subjectivity, and Truth investigates this tension as it is played out in Proust's fiction.

Read more less

The ethics of changemaking and peacebuilding may appear straightforward: advance dignity, promote well-being, minimize suffering. Sounds simple, right? Actually acting ethically when it really matters is rarely straightforward. If someone engaged in change-oriented work sets out to "do good," how should we prioritize and evaluate whose good counts? And, how ought we act once we have decided whose good counts? Practitioners frequently confront dilemmas where dire situations may demand some form of response, but each of the options may have undesirable consequences of one form or another. Dilemmas are not merely ordinary problems, they are wicked problems: that is to say, they are defined by circumstances that only allow for suboptimal outcomes and are based on profound and sometimes troubling trade-offs. Wicked Problems argues that the field of peacebuilding and conflict transformation needs a stronger and more practical sense of its ethical obligations. For example, it argues against posing false binaries between domestic and international issues and against viewing violence and conflict as equivalents. It holds strategic nonviolence up to critical scrutiny and shows that "do no harm" approaches may in fact do harm. The contributors include scholars, scholar practitioners in the field, and activists on the streets, and the chapters cover the role of violence in conflict; conflict and violence prevention and resolution; humanitarianism; community organizing and racial justice; social movements; human rights advocacy; transitional justice; political reconciliation; and peace education and pedagogy, among other topics. Drawing on the lived experiences and expertise of activists, educators, and researchers, Wicked Problems equips readers to ask--and answer--difficult questions about social change work.

Read more less

The people who live in border towns often have closer relations with people across their immediate borders than with people in the same country as them. Despite how intertwined these border communities often are, neither community can access the governmental institutions of the nation on the other side. Why are the citizens of neighboring regions that lie across an international border often subject to very different governance systems? More broadly, why can't public services be bought piecemeal, on an a-la-carte basis, with governments competing to provide higher quality services at the lowest cost in a marketplace for government services? These questions lie at the heart of modern International Relations. In The Cartel System of States, Avidit Acharya and Alexander Lee provide a powerful and field-shaping theory to address a fundamental issue in world politics: the character of the territorial nation-state. They contend that the modern territorial state system works as an economic cartel in which states have local, bounded monopolies in governing their citizens. States refuse to violate each other's monopolies, even when they could do so easily. Acharya and Lee examine what makes this system stable, when and how it emerged, how it spread, how it has been challenged, and what led it to be so resilient over time. Drawing from the centuries long process of modern state formation, The Cartel System of States explains both how the present system of territorial states--by no means a foregone conclusion in retrospect--took over the world and how it might change in the future.

Read more less

The Allure of Empire traces how American ideas about race in the Pacific were made and remade on the imperial stage before World War II. Following the Russo-Japanese War, the United States cultivated an amicable relationship with Japan based on the belief that it was a "progressive" empire akin to its own. Even as the two nations competed for influence in Asia and clashed over immigration issues in the American West, the mutual respect for empire sustained their transpacific cooperation until Pearl Harbor, when both sides disavowed their history of collaboration and cast each other as incompatible enemies. In recovering this lost history, Chris Suh reveals the surprising extent to which debates about Korea shaped the politics of interracial cooperation. American recognition of Japan as a suitable partner depended in part on a positive assessment of its colonial rule of Korea. It was not until news of Japan's violent suppression of Koreans soured this perception that the exclusion of Japanese immigrants became possible in the United States. Central to these shifts in opinion was the cooperation of various Asian elites aspiring to inclusion in a "progressive" American empire. By examining how Korean, Japanese, and other nonwhite groups appealed to the United States, this book demonstrates that the imperial order sustained itself through a particular form of interracial collaboration that did not disturb the existing racial hierarchy.

Read more less

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Undocumented Saints follows the migration of popular saints from Mexico into the US and the evolution of their meaning. The book explores how Latinx battles for survival are performed in the worlds of faith, religiosity, and the imaginary, and how the socio-political realities of exploitation and racial segregation frame their popular religious expressions. It also tracks the emergence of inter-religious states, transnational ethnic and cultural enclaves unified by faith. The book looks at five vernacular saints that have emerged in Mexico and whose devotions have migrated into the US in the last one hundred years: Jesús Malverde, a popular bandido turned saint caudillo; Santa Olguita, an emerging feminist saint linked to border women's experiences of sexual violence; Juan Soldado, a murder-rapist soldier who is now a patron for undocumented immigrants and the main suspect in the death of an eight-year-old victim known now as Santa Olguita; Toribio Romo, a Catholic priest whose ghost/spirit has been helping people cross the border into the US since the 1990s; and La Santa Muerte, a controversial personification of death who is particularly popular among LGBTQ migrants. Each chapter contextualizes a particular popular saint within broader discourses about the construction of masculinity and the state, the long history of violence against Latina and migrant women, female erasure from history, discrimination against non-normative sexualities, and as US and Mexican investment in the control of religiosity within the discourses of immigration.

Read more less

George Orwell is sometimes read as disinterested in (if not outright hostile) to philosophy. Yet a fair reading of Orwell's work reveals an author whose work was deeply informed by philosophy and who often revealed his philosophical sympathies. Orwell's written works are of ethical significance, but he also affirmed and defended substantive ethical claims about humanism, well-being, normative ethics, free will and moral responsibility, moral psychology, decency, equality, liberty, justice, and political morality. In George Orwell: The Ethics of Equality, philosopher Peter Brian Barry avoids a narrow reading of Orwell that considers only a few of his best-known works and instead considers the entirety of Orwell's corpus, including his fiction, journalism, essays, book reviews, diaries, and correspondence, contending that there are ethical commitments discernible throughout his work that ground some of his best-known pronouncements and positions. While Orwell is often read as a humanist, egalitarian, and socialist, too little attention has been paid to the nuanced versions of those doctrines that he endorsed and the philosophical sympathies that led him to embrace them. Barry illuminates Orwell's philosophical sympathies and contributions that have either gone unnoticed or been underappreciated. Philosophers interested in Orwell now have a text that explores many of the philosophical themes in his work and Orwell's readers now have a text that makes the case for regarding him as a worthy philosopher as well as one of the greatest Anglophone writers of the 20th century.

Read more less

Dispatches from the AIDS Pandemic is a unique firsthand account from three public health leaders of CDC's early response to AIDS. Drawing in part on interviews from the CDC's AIDS oral history project, the authors trace the evolution of AIDS from newly recognized disease to pandemic. The first section outlines the earliest days of the epidemic within the United States and the initial prevention strategies. The second section expands the borders of the response to Africa and Thailand, where CDC conducted its first international work on AIDS. The final section closes with an overview of the scientific and public health advancements that followed and the historic community activism that spurred essential funding and partnerships for the development of life-saving interventions. Authentic and insightful, Dispatches from the AIDS Pandemic provides an authoritative account of an epidemic and its central role in the expansion of global public health.

Read more less

From one of the world's leading experts on the subject, a fully updated introduction to the sustainability movement from the 1600s to today The word is nearly ubiquitous: at the grocery store we shop for "sustainable foods" that were produced from "sustainable agriculture"; groups ranging from small advocacy organizations to city and state governments to the United Nations tout "sustainable development" as a strategy for local and global stability; and woe betide the city-dweller who doesn't aim for a "sustainable lifestyle." Seeming to have come out of nowhere to dominate the discussion-from permaculture to renewable energy to the local food movement-the ideas that underlie and define sustainability can be traced back several centuries. In this illuminating and fascinating primer, newly revised and updated, Jeremy L. Caradonna does just that, approaching sustainability from a historical perspective and revealing the conditions that gave it shape. Locating the underpinnings of the movement as far back as the 1660s, Caradonna considers the origins of sustainability across many fields throughout Europe and North America. Taking us from the emergence of thoughts guiding sustainable yield forestry in the late 17th and 18th centuries, through the challenges of the Industrial Revolution, the birth of the environmental movement, and the emergence of a concrete effort to promote a balanced approach to development in the latter half of the 20th century, he shows that while sustainability draws upon ideas of social justice, ecological economics, and environmental conservation, it is more than the sum of its parts and blends these ideas together into a dynamic philosophy. Caradonna's book broadens our understanding of what "sustainability" means, revealing how it progressed from a relatively marginal concept to an ideal that shapes everything from individual lifestyles, government and corporate strategies, and even national and international policy. For anyone seeking understand the history of those striving to make the world a better place to live, here's a place to start.

Read more less

Ferruccio Busoni as Architect of Sound presents the composer as an innovator inspired not only by past musical traditions but also by a contemporary interest in experimentalism. In the twentieth-century, Busoni wrote pieces where sound radiates from different directions, created montage formal structures, and freely used all twelve pitches of the chromatic scale without avoiding consonances. This book reveals how he also applied his understanding of tangible architectural spaces, buildings, and floor plans to his music, reconciling the spatial and temporal divide in music through an interdisciplinary approach. His innovation prompted and inspired new trends in pitch organization, the spatialization of sound, and the expansion of formal structures. Transcending physical boundaries of compositional innovation, Busoni also engaged in a rich exchange of ideas with contemporary architects and artists. Through a broad analysis of Busoni's compositional activities, musicologist Erinn E. Knyt brings Busoni's music into dialogue with more recent accounts of modernism in music that move beyond elitist esotericism and notions of rupture with the past. In addition, she facilitates a discourse between Busoni and other twentieth-century artists and explores how Busoni's spatialized architectural music left a lasting imprint on future generations of musicians and early film pioneers.

Read more less

A novel explanation for state prison privatization: that they do so to limit legal and political accountability for inmate lawsuits. One of the most controversial developments in the American criminal justice in the last few decades has been the development of the modern private prison industry. While there are many explanations proffered for the adoption of this policy--including partisanship, economic stress, unionization, and lobbying efforts by private prison firms--none fully explain why states privatize their prisons. In Captive Market, Anna Gunderson proposes a novel explanation for why states adopt this policy. She shows that states privatize prisons to limit legal and political accountability for inmate lawsuits, an unintended consequence of the legal rights revolution for prisoners. Evidence from an original dataset and interviews with private prison companies, government officials, and advocacy groups suggest that growing prisoner lawsuits are a significant driver of prison privatization in the United States. With over 160,000 inmates currently held in private facilities across the country, it is vital to understand the causes of this rise and the nuances of private prison policy, one with significant consequences for the American criminal legal system. An eye-opening account of an industry that many are aware of but few know much about, this book will reshape our understanding of the fundamental nature of the American carceral state.

Read more less

As environmental destruction becomes more extreme around the planet, the way humans experience the natural world is changing, giving rise to more frequent and intense experiences of eco-anxiety. Not simply personal or social, eco-anxiety is distributed across the relationships that humans have with the life, land, air, and water of Earth. This anthology presents international and interdisciplinary perspectives on eco-anxiety, with attention to two of the most prominent sources of eco-anxiety today: pandemics, specifically with regards to COVID-19, and the climate crisis. From the microscopic scale of viruses to the macroscopic scale of Earth's atmosphere, instability in natural systems is causing unprecedented forms of psychological distress, including anxiety and related emotional or affective states like grief, anger, guilt, and depression. Eco-Anxiety and Pandemic Distress both builds upon and moves beyond the latest research in environmental psychology, conservation psychology, and clinical psychology. Dominant research paradigms in these areas rely primarily on experimental and observational methodologies that analyze quantitative data. In contrast, this book focuses on sophisticated traditions of social and cultural psychology in dialogue with other disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. The result is a nuanced understanding of the human experience of confronting eco-anxiety, offering critical insights into the subjective worlds of individuals as they grapple with the intertwined existential threats of the climate crisis and pandemics.

Read more less

The Humanities and Human Flourishing series publishes edited volumes that explore the role of human flourishing in the central disciplines of the humanities, and whether and how the humanities can increase human happiness. This volume presents essays on the significance of theater to wellbeing and human flourishing. Combining scholarship in psychology and positive psychology with new perspectives in theater and performance studies, the volume features eleven prominent theater and performance studies scholars who offer original, previously unpublished examinations of the social benefits of theater and performance. This volume explores the questions: Why is theater considered a "social good"? And what makes theater a valuable contribution to happiness and wellbeing? Contributors point to theater as a rich source of community and examine the unique value of live, theatrical performance as a medium through which trauma as well as socio-political differences can be expressed. The personal, societal, and artistic benefits of theater are examined through chapters on actors' suffering and acting training, community theater, theater and trauma, breaking social barriers through theater, etiquette in the theater, and the theatrical community as a refuge for minoritized groups. Like other titles in this series, Theater and Human Flourishing uses an interdisciplinary and collaborative approach, which here breaches the divide between science-focused fields that study human flourishing and the artistry of theatrical performance.

Read more less

Now in its second edition, Choral Repertoire is the definitive and comprehensive one-volume presentation of the canon of the Western choral tradition. Designed for conductors and directors, students and teachers of choral music, amateur and professional singers, scholars, and interested vocal enthusiasts alike, it is an account of the complete choral output of the most significant composers of this genre throughout recorded history. Organized by era (Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and Modern), Choral Repertoire covers general characteristics of each historical era; trends and styles unique to various countries; biographical sketches of over 500 composers; and performance annotations of more than 5,000 individual works. This book has been an essential guide to programming, a reference tool for program notes and other research, and, most importantly, a key resource for conductors, instructors, scholars, and students of choral music. This new edition features dozens of additional composers, updated biographical data, and broadly expanded scholarship that brings new life to this essential text.

Read more less

What is a thriving, meaningful, and flourishing human life? What practices, associations, policies, and institutions support flourishing lives? These questions are not new ones. Philosophers from Buddha and Socrates onward have stressed that love of wisdom is demonstrated by living well--not by thought or theory alone but by action and practice. In light of new developments in positive psychology, psychiatry, evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and behavioral economics, these questions can be addressed with fresh insight rooted in both theory and practice. This new perspective is further supported by recent research in feminist theory, critical race studies, philosophical psychology, neuro-ethics, and more. Philosophy and Human Flourishing both draws on and charts new directions for philosophy and humanistic thought aimed at human flourishing. To reflect the fact that human lives and cultures differ, the perspectives here are refreshingly pluralistic, a commitment evident in the breadth and diversity of its highly accomplished contributors. Their expertise spans philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, evolutionary theory, cognitive science, ethics, political theory, social epistemology, education, and the arts. Each chapter is crisp, clear, and free of technical jargon. All contributors write in explicit conversation and cross-reference each other to create a volume that is cohesive and engaging. Human flourishing does not happen automatically or by default. It demands careful reflection and imagination. This book takes up and applies that reflection and imagination to the search for a flourishing life.

Read more less

What is a thriving, meaningful, and flourishing human life? What practices, associations, policies, and institutions support flourishing lives? These questions are not new ones. Philosophers from Buddha and Socrates onward have stressed that love of wisdom is demonstrated by living well--not by thought or theory alone but by action and practice. In light of new developments in positive psychology, psychiatry, evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and behavioral economics, these questions can be addressed with fresh insight rooted in both theory and practice. This new perspective is further supported by recent research in feminist theory, critical race studies, philosophical psychology, neuro-ethics, and more. Philosophy and Human Flourishing both draws on and charts new directions for philosophy and humanistic thought aimed at human flourishing. To reflect the fact that human lives and cultures differ, the perspectives here are refreshingly pluralistic, a commitment evident in the breadth and diversity of its highly accomplished contributors. Their expertise spans philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, evolutionary theory, cognitive science, ethics, political theory, social epistemology, education, and the arts. Each chapter is crisp, clear, and free of technical jargon. All contributors write in explicit conversation and cross-reference each other to create a volume that is cohesive and engaging. Human flourishing does not happen automatically or by default. It demands careful reflection and imagination. This book takes up and applies that reflection and imagination to the search for a flourishing life.

Read more less

The police response to protests erupting on America's streets in recent years has made the militarization of policing painfully transparent. Yet, properly demilitarizing the police requires a deeper understanding of its historical development, causes, and social logics. Policing Empires offers a postcolonial historical sociology of police militarization in Britain and the United States to aid that effort. Julian Go tracks when, why, and how British and US police departments have adopted military tactics, tools, and technologies for domestic use. Go reveals that police militarization has occurred since the very founding of modern policing in the nineteenth century into the present, and that it is an effect of the "imperial boomerang." Policing Empires thereby unlocks the dirty secret of police militarization: Police have brought imperial practices home to militarize themselves in response to perceived racialized threats from minority and immigrant populations.

Read more less