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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social issues > Ethical issues & debates > Censorship
WikiLeaks is famous-or infamous-for publishing secret material,
including classified government documents, confidential videos and
emails, and information leaked by whistleblowers, some of them
anonymous, others revealing their identities. WikiLeaks claims to
have compiled a database of more than ten million "forbidden"
documents. Its founder and leader, Australian activist Julian
Assange proclaims that the public is entitled to the truth and that
"information wants to be free." WikiLeaks activities have polarized
opinion, with some claiming its operations are traitorous and
harmful, and others defending its releases as necessary exposure of
wrongdoing. In WikiLeaking: The Ethics of Secrecy and Exposure,
professional philosophers with diverse opinions and backgrounds
deliver their provocative insights into WikiLeaks. If leaking
secrets sometimes causes harm, can this harm be outweighed by the
benefit of more people knowing the truth? How much of WikiLeaks
information is true, and does it matter that some of it might be
erroneous or misleading through lack of context? Is the prevalence
of leaking an automatic outcome of the value of free expression, as
enshrined in the First Amendment? If it's wrong to lie, does this
imply that it's always right to speak the truth? Does selective
media bias require to be countered by unpredictable leaking? Can
there be too much information? And if so, how can citizens protect
themselves against information overload? WikiLeaks activists are
guided by a code of ethics. How does this compare with the
professional ethics of conventional journalists? When French
politician Emmanuel Macron included deliberate falsehoods in his
emails, knowing they would be leaked, he showed the relation
between leaking and "bullshit," as defined by Harry Frankfurt. Can
we expect the prevalence of leaking to increase the volume of
bullshit? The existence of government necessitates the practice of
subterfuge and double-dealing by statesmen, but the culture of
democracy calls for transparency. How can we fix the boundary
between necessary deception and the public's "right to know"?
Leaking exposes what some powerful person wants to be kept secret.
Is leaking always justified whenever that person wants to keep
their own immoral actions secret, and is leaking not justified when
the keeper of secrets has done nothing wrong?
Cruising the Library offers a highly innovative analysis of the
history of sexuality and categories of sexual perversion through a
critical examination of the Library of Congress and its cataloging
practices. Taking the publication of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's
Epistemologies of the Closet as emblematic of the Library's
inability to account for sexual difference, Melissa Adler embarks
upon a detailed critique of how cataloging systems have delimited
and proscribed expressions of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and
race in a manner that mirrors psychiatric and sociological attempts
to pathologize non-normative sexual practices and civil subjects.
Taking up a parallel analysis, Adler utilizes Roderick A.
Ferguson's Aberrations in Black as another example of how the
Library of Congress fails to account for, and thereby "buries,"
difference. She examines the physical space of the Library as one
that encourages forms of governmentality as theorized by Michel
Foucault while also allowing for its utopian possibilities.
Finally, she offers a brief but highly illuminating history of the
Delta Collection. Likely established before the turn of the
twentieth century and active until its gradual dissolution in the
1960s, the Delta Collection was a secret archive within the Library
of Congress that housed materials confiscated by the United States
Post Office and other federal agencies. These were materials deemed
too obscene for public dissemination or general access. Adler
reveals how the Delta Collection was used to regulate difference
and squelch dissent in the McCarthy era while also linking it to
evolving understandings of so-called perversion in the scientific
study of sexual difference. Sophisticated, engrossing, and highly
readable, Cruising the Library provides us with a critical
understanding of library science, an alternative view of discourses
around the history of sexuality, and an analysis of the
relationship between governmentality and the cataloging of research
and information-as well as categories of difference-in American
culture.
Media Dictatorship: How Schools and Educators Can Defend Freedom of
Speech outlines how the American media amasses enormous power and
uses it to control every aspect of the people's lives-including
schools, elections, science, and freedom of thought. Even churches,
supposedly answerable to God only, are now being influenced and
controlled by media. This book discusses the devastating
consequences of such control on democracy and our civilization, and
then offers suggestions on what can be done to identify media
propaganda and defend freedom of speech. The school system has
always been the first line of defense for patriotism and democracy.
It is important for teachers to understand the consequences of a
powerful media that does not tolerate diversity of thought. This
book will encourage teachers to cultivate independence of thought
among students. School administrators, too, have a responsibility
to ensure that school campuses are sanctuaries of freedom of
thought where leaders of tomorrow are taught to be tolerant of
opposing views. In the larger public, outside the school campus,
Media Dictatorship will spur a robust debate about the kind of
media that can help nurture our democracy and civilization.
Media Dictatorship: How Schools and Educators Can Defend Freedom of
Speech outlines how the American media amasses enormous power and
uses it to control every aspect of the people's lives-including
schools, elections, science, and freedom of thought. Even churches,
supposedly answerable to God only, are now being influenced and
controlled by media. This book discusses the devastating
consequences of such control on democracy and our civilization, and
then offers suggestions on what can be done to identify media
propaganda and defend freedom of speech. The school system has
always been the first line of defense for patriotism and democracy.
It is important for teachers to understand the consequences of a
powerful media that does not tolerate diversity of thought. This
book will encourage teachers to cultivate independence of thought
among students. School administrators, too, have a responsibility
to ensure that school campuses are sanctuaries of freedom of
thought where leaders of tomorrow are taught to be tolerant of
opposing views. In the larger public, outside the school campus,
Media Dictatorship will spur a robust debate about the kind of
media that can help nurture our democracy and civilization.
Those who love and live by art tell us that it is the most exalted
expression of civilized life. In this provocative new book Jonathan
Dollimore argues that, far from confirming humane values,
literature more often than not violates them.
He begins with a polemical and witty attack on the spurious
radicalism of some fashionable academic theories about desire and
sexual dissidence. Dollimore then examines the ways in which the
media, literary critics and the state, as well as these literary
theorists, all deny or repress the disturbing and dangerous
knowledge conveyed by literature.
His own account of the volatile connections between aesthetics,
desire, politics and censorship unfolds through topics such as
homosexuality, bisexuality, sexual disgust, and the disturbing
relations between art and inhumanity, and through brilliant
insights into a wide range of authors including Euripides,
Shakespeare, Tennyson and Yeats.
Most persistently, this book is about how the experience of
desire in life and art compromises our most cherished ethical
beliefs; how it sets dissident desire against not just oppressive
social life, but also against what are widely agreed to be the
necessary limits of civilization itself. If this helps make art
irresistible and of indispensable value, it follows too that there
are reasonable grounds for wanting to censor it.
This compelling and accessibly written book will be essential
reading for students and scholars of literary, gender and cultural
studies, and will have a major impact on debates about art,
sexuality, censorship and the role of the intellectual.
Traditionally, the university or college is thought to be the
ultimate location for the discovery and sharing of knowledge. After
all, on these campuses are some of the great minds across all
fields, as well as students who are not only eager to learn, but
who often contribute to our shared wisdom. For those ideals to be
achieved, however, ideas require access to some kind of virtual
marketplace from which people can sample and consider them, discuss
and debate them. Restricting the expression of those ideas for
whatever reason is the enemy of not only this process, but also of
knowledge discovery. Speech freedom on our college and university
campuses, like everywhere else, is fragile. There are those who
wish to suppress it, more often than not when the words express
ideas, opinions, and even facts that conflict with their beliefs.
Why is this effort, so completely at odds with the foundational
values of this country, made? This topic explored in Speech Freedom
on Campus: Past, Present and Future is multi-layered, and its
analysis is best accomplished through multiple perspectives. Joseph
Russomanno's edited collection does precisely that, utilizing 10
different scholars to examine various aspects and issues related to
speech freedom on campus.
The horror genre has endured a long and controversial success
within popular culture. Fraught with accusations pertaining to its
alleged ability to harm and corrupt young people and indeed society
as a whole, the genre is constantly under pressure to suppress that
which has made it so popular to begin with - its ability to
frighten and generate discussion about society's darker side.
Recognising the circularity of patterns in each generational
manifestation of horror censorship, The Myth of Harm draws upon
cases such as the Slenderman stabbing and the James Bulger murder
amongst many others in order to explore the manner in which horror
has been repeatedly cast as a harmful influence upon children at
the expense of scrutinising other more complex social issues.
Focusing on five major controversies beginning in the 1930's Golden
Age of Horror Cinema and ending on a more contemporary note with
Cyber-Gothic horror - this book identifies and considers the
various myths and false hoods surrounding the genre of horror and
question the very motivation behind the proliferation and
dissemination of these myths as scapegoats for political and social
issues, platforms for "moral entrepreneurs" and tools of hyperbolae
for the news industry.
Free Expression and Democracy takes on the assumption that limits
on free expression will lead to authoritarianism or at least a
weakening of democracy. That hypothesis is tested by an examination
of issues involving expression and their treatment in countries
included on The Economist's list of fully functioning democracies.
Generally speaking, other countries allow prohibitions on hate
speech, limits on third-party spending on elections, and the
protection of children from media influences seen as harmful. Many
ban Holocaust denial and the desecration of national symbols. Yet,
these other countries all remain democratic, and most of those
considered rank more highly than the United States on the democracy
index. This book argues that while there may be other cultural
values that call for more expansive protection of expression, that
protection need not reach the level present in the United States in
order to protect the democratic nature of a country.
How civil liberties triumphed over national insecurity Between the
two major red scares of the twentieth century, a police raid on a
Communist Party bookstore in Oklahoma City marked an important
lesson in the history of American freedom. In a raid on the
Progressive Bookstore in 1940, local officials seized thousands of
books and pamphlets and arrested twenty customers and proprietors.
All were detained incommunicado and many were held for months on
unreasonably high bail. Four were tried for violating Oklahoma's
"criminal syndicalism" law, and their convictions and ten-year
sentences caused a nationwide furor. After protests from labor
unions, churches, publishers, academics, librarians, the American
Civil Liberties Union, members of the literary world, and prominent
individuals ranging from Woody Guthrie to Eleanor Roosevelt, the
convictions were overturned on appeal. Shirley A. Wiegand and Wayne
A. Wiegand share the compelling story of this important case for
the first time. They reveal how state power-with support from local
media and businesses-was used to trample individuals' civil rights
during an era in which citizens were gripped by fear of foreign
subversion. Richly detailed and colorfully told, Books on Trial is
a sobering story of innocent people swept up in the hysteria of
their times. It marks a fascinating and unnerving chapter in the
history of Oklahoma and of the First Amendment. In today's climate
of shadowy foreign threats-also full of unease about the way
government curtails freedom in the name of protecting its
citizens-the past speaks to the present.
Requests for the removal, relocation, and restriction of books-also
known as challenges-occur with some frequency in the United States.
Book Banning in 21st-Century American Libraries, based on thirteen
contemporary book challenge cases in schools and public libraries
across the United States argues that understanding contemporary
reading practices, especially interpretive strategies, is vital to
understanding why people attempt to censor books in schools and
public libraries. Previous research on censorship tends to focus on
legal frameworks centered on Supreme Court cases, historical case
studies, and bibliographies of texts that are targeted for removal
or relocation and is often concerned with how censorship occurs.
The current project, on the other hand, is focused on the why of
censorship and posits that many censorship behaviors and practices,
such as challenging books, are intimately tied to the how one
understands the practice of reading and its effects on character
development and behavior. It discusses reading as a social practice
that has changed over time and encompasses different physical
modalities and interpretive strategies. In order to understand why
people challenge books, it presents a model of how the practice of
reading is understood by challengers including "what it means" to
read a text, and especially how one constructs the idea of
"appropriate" reading materials. The book is based on three
different kinds sources. The first consists of documents including
requests for reconsideration and letters, obtained via Freedom of
Information Act requests to governing bodies, produced in the
course of challenge cases. Recordings of book challenge public
hearings constitute the second source of data. Finally, the third
source of data is interviews with challengers themselves. The book
offers a model of the reading practices of challengers. It
demonstrates that challengers are particularly influenced by what
might be called a literal "common sense" orientation to text
wherein there is little room for polysemic interpretation (multiple
meanings for text). That is, the meaning of texts is always clear
and there is only one avenue for interpretation. This common sense
interpretive strategy is coupled with what Cathy Davidson calls
"undisciplined imagination" wherein the reader is unable to
maintain distance between the events in a text and his or her own
response. These reading practices broaden our understanding of why
people attempt to censor books in public institutions.
Beginning in the nineteenth century with Anthony Comstock,
America's 'censor in chief,' The Mind of the Censor and the Eye of
the Beholder explores how censors operate and why they wore out
their welcome in society at large. This book explains how the same
tactics were tried and eventually failed in the twentieth century,
with efforts to censor music, comic books, television, and other
forms of popular entertainment. The historic examples illustrate
not just the mindset and tactics of censors, but why they are the
ultimate counterculture warriors and why, in free societies,
censors never occupy the moral high ground. This book is for anyone
who wants to know more about why freedom of speech is important and
how protections for free expression became part of the American
identity.
During the period of decolonisation in Africa, the CIA covertly
subsidised a number of African authors, editors and publishers as
part of its anti-communist propaganda strategy. Managed by two
front organisations, the Congress of Cultural Freedom and the
Farfield Foundation, its Africa programme stretched across the
continent. This Element unravels the hidden networks and
associations underpinning African literary publishing in the 1960s;
it evaluates the success of the CIA in secretly infiltrating and
influencing African literary magazines and publishing firms, and
examines the extent to which new circuits of cultural and literary
power emerged. Based on new archival evidence relating to the
Transcription Centre, The Classic and The New African, it includes
case studies of Wole Soyinka, Nat Nakasa and Bessie Head, which
assess how the authors' careers were affected by these
transnational networks and also reveal how they challenged,
subverted, and resisted external influence and control.
The book presents an important and well known but so far not
described episode in the history of banned books in the communist
Poland - the activity of the so-called Tatra climbers. They were
students and scholars from Warsaw, who initiated a risky
cooperation with the centre of Polish political emigration in Paris
- Kultura monthly. Inspired by the Prague Spring they tried to
develop cooperation between the students from Eastern Bloc
countries, smuggled books through the Polish-Slovak border, and
gathered texts critical about communist rulers. After a few months,
their activity was stopped by the Polish political police. The
monograph shows the circumstances and motivations behind this
dangerous activity of young people, traces the police investigation
against them, and describes the mock trial in 1970.
Traditionally, the university or college is thought to be the
ultimate location for the discovery and sharing of knowledge. After
all, on these campuses are some of the great minds across all
fields, as well as students who are not only eager to learn, but
who often contribute to our shared wisdom. For those ideals to be
achieved, however, ideas require access to some kind of virtual
marketplace from which people can sample and consider them, discuss
and debate them. Restricting the expression of those ideas for
whatever reason is the enemy of not only this process, but also of
knowledge discovery. Speech freedom on our college and university
campuses, like everywhere else, is fragile. There are those who
wish to suppress it, more often than not when the words express
ideas, opinions, and even facts that conflict with their beliefs.
Why does an effort so completely at odds with the foundational
values of this country happen? This topic explored in Speech
Freedom on Campus: Past, Present and Future is multi-layered, and
its analysis is best accomplished through multiple perspectives.
Joseph Russomanno's edited collection does precisely that,
utilizing 10 different scholars to examine various aspects and
issues related to speech freedom on campus.
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