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Virginia Woolf and the Power of Story: A Literary Darwinist Reading of Six Novels
Linda Nicole Blair
From novels to films, our everyday lives are filled with stories that comfort and connect us and enable new ways of thinking. One of the most innovative writers in modern history, Virginia Woolf changed the landscape of fiction and challenged our notions of what it means to be human. Her novels invite readers to envision a world in which stories have the power to effect positive change. This book explores the phenomenon of story as practiced by Woolf, interpreting her work in the context of literary Darwinism-a critical approach focusing on patterns of innate human behavior.
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Food Cults: How Fads, Dogma, and Doctrine Influence Diet
Kima Cargill
What do we mean when we call any group a cult? Defining that term is a slippery proposition – the word cult is provocative and arguably pejorative. Does it necessarily refer to a religious group? A group with a charismatic leader? Or something darker and more sinister? Because beliefs and practices surrounding food often inspire religious and political fervor, as well as function to unite people into insular groups, it is inevitable that "food cults" would emerge. Studying the extreme beliefs and practices of such food cults allows us to see the ways in which food serves as a nexus for religious beliefs, sexuality, death anxiety, preoccupation with the body, asceticism, and hedonism, to name a few. In contrast to religious and political cults, food cults have the added dimension of mediating cultural trends in nutrition and diet through their membership. Should we then consider raw foodists, many of whom believe that cooked food is poison, a type of food cult? What about paleo diet adherents or those who follow a restricted calorie diet for longevity? Food Cults explores these questions by looking at domestic and international, contemporary and historic food communities characterized by extreme nutritional beliefs or viewed as "fringe" movements by mainstream culture. While there are a variety of accounts of such food communities across disciplines, this collection pulls together these works and explains why we gravitate toward such groups and the social and psychological functions they serve. This volume describes how contemporary and historic food communities come together and foment fanaticism, judgment, charisma, dogma, passion, longevity, condemnation and exaltation.
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Inside the Video Game Industry: Game Developers Talk About the Business of Play
Judd Ruggill, Ken McAllister, Randy Nichols, and Ryan Kaufman
Inside the Video Game Industry offers a provocative look into one of today's most dynamic and creative businesses. Through in-depth structured interviews, industry professionals discuss their roles, providing invaluable insight into game programming, art, animation, design, production, quality assurance, audio and business careers. From hiring and firing conventions, attitudes about gender disparity, goals for work-life balance, and a span of legal, psychological, and communal intellectual property protection mechanisms, the book's combination of accessible industry talk and incisive thematic overviews is ideal for anyone interested in games as a global industry, a site of cultural study or a prospective career path. Designed for researchers, educators, and students alike, this book provides a critical perspective on an often opaque business and its highly mobile workforce.
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Wilderness Lessons
JM Miller
Wilderness Lessons by JM Miller is a love note to the planet that risks burning, a song of loss and connection, and a prayer for being alive and becoming “the animal you were meant to be.” An Eco-poetry book of personal and political honesty, of the violence and elegy of living, this debut collection considers the dissolution of human separateness as a way to create a new space for identity that is fluid—tracing the upwell of violence against people on the fringes of binary constructions and violence against animals and the planet. “Pronoun says the planet is burning,” the poet writes of sun rays and our beating hearts. Written by a poet of tremendous energy, ecstatic imagery, and deeply inherited wisdom, these poems conjure a new understanding of the American poem from JM’s trans-gender, trans-being, howling throat pointed at a sky still brimming with stars.
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Human Rights and Humanitarian Intervention: Law and Practice in the Field
Elizabeth M. Bruch
Human rights, peacekeeping, and humanitarian intervention have emerged in the past decades as important components of international law and practice. Adopting a methodology of Institutional Ethnography informed by Actor-Network Theory, this book traces the practices of law and expertise from global IGO headquarters to the ‘field’ and back again, and through various contemporary field missions from Bosnia to Afghanistan and East Timor to Sierra Leone. It answers several fundamental questions: How is human rights law engaged in ‘establishing the peace,’ ‘rebuilding the nation,’ and ‘restoring the rule of law’ in post-conflict situations? How do human rights experts use law in their everyday work in the context of humanitarian intervention? How are law and expertise established, sustained and transformed in the field? Offering a complex and nuanced explanation of humanitarian intervention based upon a multi-dimensional understanding of law and power, this book will be of interest and use to scholars, students and practitioners in international law and policy, human rights, and humanitarian intervention. Its cross-disciplinary approach should also appeal to the professional communities engaged directly and indirectly with projects of humanitarian intervention – including staff at inter-governmental organizations, international lawyers and practitioners, and activists.
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For God and Country: Butler's 1944 Education Act
Elizabeth Libi Sundermann
This postsecular study on Conservative and Christian thinkers intellectual ferment leading to England s 1944 Education Act examines how politicians and educationalists promoted Christian-civic humanism as the educational philosophy underlying the Act. It argues that Religious Education and secondary and further educational proposals were meant to go hand-in-hand to shape a national educational system that promoted an English national identity based on ideals of tradition and progress for the war-weary nation. The 1944 Act s historic Religious Education mandate, however, was overshadowed by the hopes and fears for secondary education for all in the postwar, class-conscious English society. The book focuses on the work and collaborations of politicians, educationalists, and intellectuals with special attention to three men: Minister of Education R. A. Butler, educationalist Fred Clarke, and sociologist Karl Mannheim. As Christian, political, and social thinkers these men worked in public and behind the scenes to create the landmark Education Act in order to bolster postwar England through appeals to God and country.
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Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing for a Socially Just Future
Asao B. Inoue
Asao B. Inoue theorizes classroom writing assessment as a complex system that is "more than" its interconnected elements. To explain how and why antiracist work in the writing classroom is vital to literacy learning, Inoue incorporates ideas about the white racial habitus that informs dominant discourses in the academy and other contexts. Inoue helps teachers understand the unintended racism that often occurs when teachers do not have explicit antiracist agendas in their assessments. Drawing on his own teaching and classroom inquiry, Inoue offers a heuristic for developing and critiquing writing assessment ecologies that explores seven elements of any writing assessment ecology: power, parts, purposes, people, processes, products, and places. | ASAO B. INOUE is Director of University Writing and Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Tacoma. He has published on writing assessment, validity, and composition pedagogy in Assessing Writing, The Journal of Writing Assessment, Composition Forum, and Research in the Teaching of English, among other journals and collections. His co-edited collection Race and Writing Assessment (2012) won the CCCC's Outstanding Book Award for an edited collection. This book won the Conference on College Composition and Communication's 2017 Outstanding Book Award for a monograph. This book won the Council of Writing Program Administrator's 2015 Outstanding Book Award (awarded in 2017).
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The Psychology of Overeating: Food and the Culture of Consumerism
Kima Cargill
Drawing on empirical research, clinical case material and vivid examples from modern culture, The Psychology of Overeating demonstrates that overeating must be understood as part of the wider cultural problem of consumption and materialism. Highlighting modern society's pathological need to consume, Kima Cargill explores how our limitless consumer culture offers an endless array of delicious food as well as easy money whilst obscuring the long-term effects of overconsumption.
The book investigates how developments in food science, branding and marketing have transformed Western diets and how the food industry employs psychology to trick us into eating more and more – and why we let them. Drawing striking parallels between 'Big Food' and 'Big Pharma', Cargill shows how both industries use similar tactics to manufacture desire, resist regulation and convince us that the solution to overconsumption is further consumption. Real-life examples illustrate how loneliness, depression and lack of purpose help to drive consumption, and how this is attributed to individual failure rather than wider culture.
The first book to introduce a clinical and existential psychology perspective into the field of food studies, Cargill's interdisciplinary approach bridges the gulf between theory and practice. Key reading for students and researchers in food studies, psychology, health and nutrition and anyone wishing to learn more about the relationship between food and consumption.
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Tacoma's Theater District
Kimberly M. Davenport
The history of Tacoma's Theater District is nearly as long as that of the city of Tacoma itself, spanning from the opening of the Tacoma Theater in 1890 to the present day, with restored historical facilities anchoring a renewed cultural district. This telling of the district's history reflects a range of engaging topics, including the boundless enthusiasm of the initial residents of Tacoma (the "City of Destiny"), the changing ways in which culture was shared and experienced over the decades of the 20th century, and a community working together through difficult times to save and restore historical buildings as gathering spaces for the benefit of future generations. The story is told through historical photographs of the theater venues themselves, as well as images capturing a myriad of cultural and community events taking place in those facilities and in the surrounding district.
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The Organization of Islamic Cooperation: Politics, Problems, and Potential
Turan Kayaoglu
The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) is the world’s leading international Islamic organization. Turan Kayaoglu provides the first accessible and concise introduction and overview of this important organization. This book details the OIC’s struggle to address popular Muslim demands balanced against the member states’ reluctance to support the OIC politically and materially. Despite this predicament, the organization has made itself increasingly relevant over the last decade through increasing its visibility as the representative body of Muslim unity and promoting its role as a reliable interlocutor on behalf of Muslims in global society. Outlining the history, workings and goals of the OIC, the book also highlights key issues that may influence the OIC’s ability to realize its potential in the future. This will be of great interest to students and scholars of international relations, international organizations and islamic studies.
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Women and Death in Film, Television and News: Dead But Not Gone
Joanne Clarke Dillman
Dead women litter the visual landscape of the 2000s. Films, television shows, and news reports are saturated with images of dead female bodies, women being murdered, women who have come back from the dead, disappeared women who are presumed to be dead, and women threatened with death. Compared to earlier decades, images of dead women are much more graphic and sensationalized in these contemporary, mainstream cultural products. In this book, Clarke Dillman explains the contextual environment from which these images have arisen, how the images relate to (and sometimes contradict) the narratives they help to constitute, and the cultural work that dead women perform in visual texts. Across the visual field, the bodies of dead women have both a haunting power and a disciplining function that can be seen but not stated as such. Although many of the visual texts gesture to and acknowledge feminist gains, their use of images of dead women has the symbolic effect of forcing women's immobilization while also reaffirming constraints on women within still powerful patriarchal structures.
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The Video Game Business
Randy Nichols
A dominant global cultural force, the video game business is diverse and increasingly influential. In this comprehensive industrial, historical, economic and theoretical overview of the business, Randy Nichols examines its emergence, culture, structure, production processes and relationship with audiences and other cultural industries. Including profiles of major players, case studies of key industrial moments, and data on audiences, labour and other crucial factors in the video game business's success, this illuminating book explores the key changes and challenges of its past, present and future.
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Human Rights, Human Dignity, and Cosmopolitan Ideals: Essays on Critical Theory and Human Rights
Amós Nascimento and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann
This book makes a significant contribution to the on-going international dialogue on the meaning of concepts such as human rights, humanity, and cosmopolitanism. The authors propose a new agenda for research into a Critical Theory of Human Rights. Each chapter pursues three goals: to reconstruct modern philosophical theories that have contributed to our views on human rights; to highlight the importance of humanity and human dignity as a complementary dimension to liberal rights; and, finally, to integrate these issues more directly in contemporary discussions about cosmopolitanism. The authors not only present multicultural perspectives on how to rethink political and international theory in terms of the normativity of human rights, but also promote an international dialogue on the prospects for a critical theory of human rights discourses in the 21st century.
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All Day, Talking
Sarah Chavez
Sarah A. Chavez is a mestiza born and raised in the California Central Valley where she worked every job from farm laborer, to janitor and maintenance, to barista, to waitress, house-sitter, web editor, tutor, and finally administrative assistant for a Native American drug and alcohol recovery home before going back to school to pursue writing and teaching. She earned a PhD in English with a focus in Creative Writing (poetry) and an interdisciplinary specialization in Ethnic Studies, with a focus on Chican@/Latin@ & Native American literature and culture, from the University of Nebraska - Lincoln. During her academic career her work has been the recipient of the Fredrick A. and Minnie J.M. Stuff Memorial Placement Fellowship (2014), the Quercus Press Review, Fall Poetry Book Award, Honorable Mention (2013), Stuff Dissertation Fellowship (2013), the Susan Atefat Peckham Fellowship, Literary Contest (2013), the Arts & Letters/ Rumi Prize for Poetry, finalist (2012), the Ford Foundation Predoctoral Competition, Honorable Mention (2012), the Vreeland Award (2011), Chancellor's Doctoral Fellowship (2009 – 2011), and the Excellence in Education, 2007 – 2008 teaching award from Ball State University’s Correctional Education Program.
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Sharecropper’s Troubadour: John L. Handcox, the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, and the African American Song Tradition (Palgrave Studies in Oral History)
Michael Honey
Folk singer and labor organizer John Handcox was born to illiterate sharecroppers, but went on to become one of the most beloved folk singers of the prewar labor movement. This beautifully told oral history gives us Handcox in his own words, recounting a journey that began in the Deep South and went on to shape the labor music tradition.
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Look Closer: Suburban Narratives and American Values in Film and Television
David Coon
In recent years, the media landscape in the United States has followed a pattern similar to that of the physical landscape by becoming increasingly suburbanized. Although it is a far cry from reality, the fantasy of a perfect suburban life still exists in the collective imagination of millions of Americans. This dream of suburban perfection is built around a variety of such ideologically conservative values and ideals as the importance of tradition, the centrality of the nuclear family, the desire for a community of like-minded neighbors, the need for clearly defined gender roles, and the belief that with hard work and determination, anyone can succeed.
Building on the relationships between suburban life and American identity, Look Closer examines and interprets recent narratives that challenge the suburban ideal to reveal how directors and producers are mobilizing the spaces of suburbia to tell new kinds of stories about America. David R. Coon argues that the myth of suburban perfection, popularized by postwar sitcoms and advertisements, continues to symbolize a range of intensely debated issues related to tradition, family, gender, race, and citizenship. Through close examinations of such films as American Beauty, The Truman Show, and Mr. & Mrs. Smith as well as such television series as Desperate Housewives, Weeds, and Big Love, the book demonstrates how suburbia is used to critique the ideologies that underpin the suburban American Dream.
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The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics
Claudia Gorbman
This handbook offers new ways to read the audiovisual. In the media landscapes of today, conglomerates jockey for primacy and the internet increasingly places media in the hands of individuals-producing the range of phenomena from movie blockbuster to YouTube aesthetics. Media forms and genres are proliferating and interpenetrating, from movies, music and other entertainments streaming on computers and iPods to video games and wireless phones. The audiovisual environment of everyday life, too-from street to stadium to classroom-would at times be hardly recognizable to the mid-twentieth-century subject. The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics provides powerful ways to understand these changes.
Earlier approaches tended to consider sound and music as secondary to image and narrative. These remained popular even as practices from theater, cinema and television migrated across media. However, the traversal, or "remediation," from one medium to another has also provided practitioners and audiences the chance to rewrite the rules of the audiovisual contract. Whether viewed from the vantage of televised mainstream culture, the Hollywood film industry, the cinematic avant-garde, or the participatory discourses of "cyberspace," audiovisual expression has changed dramatically.
The book provides a definitive cross-section of current ways of thinking about sound and image. Its authors-leading scholars and promising younger ones, audiovisual practitioners and non-academic writers (both mainstream and independent)- open the discussion on audiovisual aesthetics in new directions. Our contributors come from fields including film, visual arts, new media, cultural theory, and sound and music studies, and they draw variously from economic, political, institutional, psychoanalytic, genre-based, auteurist, internationalist, reception-focused, technological, and cultural approaches to questions concerning today's sound and image. All consider the aural dimension, and what Michel Chion calls "audio-vision:" the sensory and semiotic result of sound placed with vision, an encounter greater than their sum.
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Assessing the War on Terror
Mohammed Ayoob and Etga Ugur
Was the US-led war on terror, especially the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, a necessary response to the September 11 terrorist attacks? What did the two invasions accomplish? How have the fortunes of al-Qaeda and like-minded organizations been affected? The authors of this important contribution to ongoing debates address these questions as they assess the impact and implications of the war on terror for the Middle East, for Europe, and for the United States itself.
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Building Cosmopolitan Communities: A Critical and Multidimensional Approach
Amós Nascimento
Building Cosmopolitan Communities contributes to current cosmopolitanism debates by evaluating the justification and application of norms and human rights in different communitarian settings in order to achieve cosmopolitan ideals. Relying on a critical tradition that spans from Kant to contemporary discourse philosophy, Nascimento proposes the concept of a "multidimensional discourse community." The multidimensional model is applied and tested in various dialogues, resulting in a new cosmopolitan ideal based on a contemporary discursive paradigm. As the first scholarly text to provide an interdisciplinary survey of the theories and discourses on human rights and cosmopolitanism, Building Cosmopolitan Communities is a valuable resource to scholars of philosophy, political science, social theory, and globalization studies.
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The Return: A Native Environmental Health Story
Janice Brendible, Kelly Edwards, Amber Forslund, Rose James, Adib Jamshedi, Regina Wilson Johny, Mary Teri Kennedy, Michelle Montgomery, Amy Paul, Nicholas Salazar, Valerie Segrest, Jon Sharpe, and Buffy Towle
The Native Tradition, Environment And Community Health (TEACH) Project began in 2008 with a small collaborative grant funded by the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences. The Northwest Indian College and the Center for Ecogenetics and Environmental Health at the University of Washington shared the funding and co-managed the project. In the Western scientific tradition, “Environmental Health” is the study of how the environment affects people in order to promote healthier lives. One of the goals of the Native TEACH Project was to find out how Native ways of understanding the world and our place in it might lead to a unique understanding of environmental health – a “NATIVE Environmental Health Science.” To do this, we got input from Tribal college students, staff and faculty from 30 Tribal colleges around the U.S. We did this through a combination of talking circles, interviews, and written surveys administered at the Northwest Indian College and at the 2009 American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC) student conference in Missoula, MT. When we sifted through the information we gathered, we identified three core themes that seemed to appear over and over: Community, Wellness, and Inter-Relationship. Each of these core themes contains many rich associations and layers. Each theme can best be understood as a circle. Native Environmental Health Science is the study of how these three circles intersect and overlap, and what this means for our actions as individuals and communities. The Return is an original story based on our research findings. With it, we hope to share the essence of what we learned from the rich conversations we had with Tribal college students, staff and faculty. It can be read quietly or aloud, used as a coloring book, or even serve as the spark for a group or classroom discussion. Mostly though, it is meant as a gift back to the many people who helped create it by sharing their time, insights, and wisdom.
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Moments, Attachment and Formations of Selfhood: Dancing with Now
Kelly Forrest
What moments are people remembering from their lives? How do moments influence the way people think about themselves? What are moments telling us about the nature of self? These questions are explored in relation to the Moments project, an empirical study of moments people remember from their lives. Working at the intersection of psychology and critical theory, selected moments regarding Relationships, Change, and Death, such as the Wonderful sad monkey, the Black rocking chair, and Whoosh…here I am, are interpreted in an innovative analysis of empirical data. In the context of modern life, Moments argues the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of narrative and offers the inherent coherence of moments as an alternative grounding for self, with the key shift in attentional orientation for identity practices from narrative constructions based on answering the question 'Who am I?' to a focus on immediate experience responding to 'What is happening?'
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Race and Writing Assessment
Asao Inoue and Mya Poe
"Race and Writing Assessment brings together established and up-and-coming scholars in composition studies to explore how writing assessments needs to change in order to account for the increasing diversity of students in college classrooms today. Contributors identify where we have ignored race in our writing assessment approaches and explore issues related to assessment technologies, faculty and student responses to assessment, institutional responses to writing assessment, and context for assessing writing beyond composition programs. "Balancing practical advice and theoretical discussions, Race and Writing Assessment provides a variety of models, frameworks, and research methods to consider writing assessment approaches that are sensitive to the linguistic and cultural identities that diverse students bring to writing classrooms. This book illustrates that this is no one-size-fits-all model for addressing diversity in assessment practice but that assessment practices attuned to racial diversity must be rooted in the contexts in which they are found. In doing so, Race and Writing Assessment enriches contemporary research on contextualized approaches to writing assessment." -- Publisher's website.
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Trapped in Mediocrity: Why Our Schools Aren't World-Class and What We Can Do About It
Katherine Baird
Our students aren’t learning, we’re falling behind other countries, and many of our college graduates are even functionally illiterate. We offer our kids a weak and poorly thought out curriculum; too many teachers do not make good use of classroom time and follow lesson plans that are superficial and repetitive; almost all state governments define “proficiency” at low levels of competency; and because kids with very uneven skills populate a classroom, teachers spend considerable time on review before introducing new material. This dismal picture is tempered by the fact that the hard work and dedication of countless teachers and administrators means that many students get an excellent education. But it doesn’t temper it much. As a group, even our top students are not as strong as are those in a large majority of other rich countries.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. Katherine Baird, an economist, starts by clearly spelling out how our educational system is trapped in mediocrity. Yet, she doesn’t just expose where we are. She identifies the steps to get out of the trap. We need to (1) dramatically reform our education’s governance structure, (2) establish high expectations for all students, (3) provide adequate support to meet those expectations, and (4) introduce strong incentives for students to work hard in school so they do their part in meeting higher standards. Clearly, it isn’t as simple as it sounds, but Baird carefully examines each factor that has led to the current state in education and then spells out how a combination of policies will weaken the forces that keep our schools mediocre and instead make them ones worth copying
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Maestro: Recent Work by Lino Tagliapietra
Claudia Gorbman
Lino Tagliapietra is arguably the world's finest living glassblower. Raised on the island of Murano, the Venetian glass center, Tagliapietra began learning the trade at the age of 11 from Muranese masters and had earned the title of maestro by age 21. He first came to Seattle in 1979, and openly shared his unsurpassed experience, understanding, and knowledge of traditional Venetian glassblowing techniques with artists in the United States. In return, he gained an appreciation for the American artists' quest for creative expression through experimentation and individual creativity, pushing him beyond his excellence in execution and into the realm of studio art.
Claudia Gorbman explores Tagliapietra's current work in Maestro, which presents masterpieces created during the past decade (2002-2012). Her essay investigates the medium of glass as alchemy (its dichotomies, pleasures and properties) as well as the artist himself and his role in universally elevating the art and craft of glassmaking and changing the course of contemporary glass worldwide.
Claudia Gorbman is professor of film studies at the University of Washington Tacoma. She is the author of Unheard Melodies (a book on film music), the translator and editor of five books by the French critic and composer Michel Chion, and co-editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics.
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Cross-Cultural Technology Design: Creating Culture-Sensitive Technology for Local Users (Human-Technology Interaction)
Huatong Sun
The demand and opportunity for cross-cultural technology design is rapidly rising due to globalization. However, all too often resulting technologies are technically usable, yet cannot be immediately put to meaningful use by users in their local, concrete contexts. Support for concrete user activities is frequently missing in design, as support for decontextualized actions is typically the focus of design. Sun examines this disconnect between action and meaning in cross-cultural technology design and presents an innovative framework, Culturally Localized User Experience (CLUE), to tackle this problem. Incorporating key concepts and methods from activity theory, British cultural studies, and rhetorical genre theory, the CLUE approach integrates action and meaning through a dialogical, cyclical design process to design technology that engages local users within culturally meaningful social practices.
Illustrated with five in-depth case studies of mobile text messaging use by college students and young professionals in American and Chinese contexts spanning years, Sun demonstrates that a technology created for culturally localized user experience mediates both instrumental practices and social meanings. She calls for a change in cross-cultural design practices from simply applying cultural conventions in design to engaging with social affordances based on a rich understanding of meaningful contextualized activity. Meanwhile, the vivid user stories at sites of technology-in-use show the power of "user localization" in connecting design and use, which Sun believes is essential for the success of an emerging technology like mobile messaging in an era of participatory culture.
This book will be of interest to researchers, students, practitioners, and anyone who wants to create culture-sensitive technology in this increasingly globalized world that requires advanced strategies and techniques for culturally localized, participatory design.
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The Patriot's History Reader: Essential Documents for Every American
Mike Allen and Larry Schweikart
An original collection of the most influential documents in American history, from the bestselling authors of A Patriot's History of the United States. Since 2005, A Patriot's History of the United States has become a modern classic for its defense of America as a unique country founded on principles of justice, equality, and freedom for all. The Patriot's History Reader continues this tradition by going back to the original sources-the documents, speeches, and legal decisions that shaped our country into what it is today.
The authors explore both oft-cited documents-the Declaration of Independence, Emancipation Proclamation, and Roe v. Wade--as well as those that are less famous. Among these are George Washington's letter to Alexander Hamilton, which essentially outline America's military strategy for the next 150 years, and Herbert Hoover's speech on business ethics, which examines the government's role in regulating private enterprise. By helping readers explore history at its source, this book sheds new light on the principles and personalities that have made America great.
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Modern Power and Free Speech: Contemporary Culture and Issues of Equality
Chris Demaske
Modern Power and Free Speech explores the complicated relationship between the First Amendment and culturally disempowered and groups within the United States. By focusing on hate speech, Internet pornography, and political dissent, Chris Demaske analyzes First Amendment discourse and doctrine and questions the role of the concept of the autonomous individual. Demaske asserts that the presupposed equality of so-called 'autonomous individuals' does not exist and goes on to show how these specious claims to equality only serve to further silence those marginalized members of American society. Combining legal analysis, First Amendment theory, feminist theory, and political theory, Chris Demaske addresses the inadequacies of current free-speech doctrine and provides a possible solution to remedy them.
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"All Labor Has Dignity"
Martin Luther King Jr. and Michael K. Honey
People forget that Dr. King was every bit as committed to economic justice as he was to ending racial segregation. He fought throughout his life to connect the labor and civil rights movements, envisioning them as twin pillars for social reform. As we struggle with massive unemployment, a staggering racial wealth gap, and the near collapse of a financial system that puts profits before people, King's prophetic writings and speeches underscore his relevance for today. They help us imagine King anew: as a human rights leader whose commitment to unions and an end to poverty was a crucial part of his civil rights agenda.
Covering all the civil rights movement highlights-Montgomery, Albany, Birmingham, Selma, Chicago, and Memphis-award-winning historian Michael K. Honey introduces and traces King's dream of economic equality. Gathered in one volume for the first time, the majority of these speeches will be new to most readers. The collection begins with King's lectures to unions in the 1960s and includes his addresses during his Poor People's Campaign, culminating with his momentous "Mountaintop" speech, delivered in support of striking black sanitation workers in Memphis. Unprecedented and timely, "All Labor Has Dignity" will more fully restore our understanding of King's lasting vision of economic justice, bringing his demand for equality right into the present.
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Unraveling the Real: The Fantastic in Spanish-American Ficciones
Cynthia Duncan
In literary and cinematic fictions, the fantastic blurs the lines between reality and fantasy. Lacking a consensus on definition, critics often describe the fantastic as supernatural, or similar to, but quite different from fantasy, science fiction, and magical realism. In Unraveling the Real Cynthia Duncan provides a new theoretical framework for discussing how the fantastic explores both metaphysical and socially relevant themes in Spanish American fictions. Duncan deftly shows how authors and artists have used this literary genre to convey marginalized voices as well as critique colonialism, racism, sexism, and classism. Selecting examples from the works of such noted writers as Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, and Carlos Fuentes, among others, she shows how capacious the concept is, and why it eludes standard definition. Challenging the notion that the fantastic is escapist in nature, Unraveling the Real shows how the fantastic has been politically engaged throughout the twentieth century, often questioning what is real or unreal. Presenting a mirror image of reality, the fantastic does not promote a utopian parallel universe but rather challenges the way we think about the world around us and the cultural legacy of colonialism.
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Way up North in Louisville: African American Migration in the Urban South, 1930-1970
Luther Adams
Luther Adams demonstrates that in the wake of World War II, when roughly half the black population left the South seeking greater opportunity and freedom in the North and West, the same desire often anchored African Americans to the South. Way Up North in Louisville explores the forces that led blacks to move to urban centers in the South to make their homes. Adams defines "home" as a commitment to life in the South that fueled the emergence of a more cohesive sense of urban community and enabled southern blacks to maintain their ties to the South as a place of personal identity, family, and community. This commitment to the South energized the rise of a more militant movement for full citizenship rights and respect for the humanity of black people.
Way Up North in Louisville offers a powerful reinterpretation of the modern civil rights movement and of the transformations in black urban life within the interrelated contexts of migration, work, and urban renewal, which spurred the fight against residential segregation and economic inequality. While acknowledging the destructive downside of emerging postindustrialism for African Americans in the Jim Crow South, Adams concludes that persistent patterns of economic and racial inequality did not rob black people of their capacity to act in their own interests.
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