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Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Interdisciplinary studies > Cultural studies
Tucked into the files of Iowa State University's Cooperative
Extension Service is a small, innocuous looking pamphlet with the
title Lenders: Working through the Farmer-Lender Crisis.
Cooperative Extension Service intended this publication to improve
bankers' empathy and communication skills, especially when facing
farmers showing "Suicide Warning Signs." After all, they were
working with individuals experiencing extreme economic distress,
and each banker needed to learn to "be a good listener." What was
important, too, was what was left unsaid. Iowa State published this
pamphlet in April of 1986. Just four months earlier, farmer Dale
Burr of Lone Tree, Iowa, had killed his wife, and then walked into
the Hills Bank and Trust company and shot a banker to death in the
lobby before taking shots at neighbors, killing one of them, and
then killing himself. The unwritten subtext of this little pamphlet
was "beware." If bankers failed to adapt to changing circumstances,
the next desperate farmer might be shooting.This was Iowa in the
1980s. The state was at the epicenter of a nationwide agricultural
collapse unmatched since the Great Depression. In When a Dream
Dies, Pamela Riney-Kehrberg examines the lives of ordinary Iowa
farmers during this period, as the Midwest experienced the worst of
the crisis. While farms failed and banks foreclosed, rural and
small-town Iowans watched and suffered, struggling to find
effective ways to cope with the crisis. If families and communities
were to endure, they would have to think about themselves, their
farms, and their futures in new ways. For many Iowan families, this
meant restructuring their lives or moving away from agriculture
completely. This book helps to explain how this disaster changed
children, families, communities, and the development of the
nation's heartland in the late twentieth century. Agricultural
crises are not just events that affect farms. When a Dream Dies
explores the Farm Crisis of the 1980s from the perspective of the
two-thirds of the state's agricultural population seriously
affected by a farm debt crisis that rapidly spiraled out of their
control. Riney-Kehrberg treats the Farm Crisis as a family event
while examining the impact of the crisis on mental health and food
insecurity and discussing the long-term implications of the crisis
for the shape and function of agriculture.
Vacillating between the longue duree and microhistory, between
ideological critique and historical sympathy, between the contrary
formalisms of close and distant reading, literary historians
operate with such disparate senses of what the term "history" means
that the field risks compartmentalization and estrangement. The
Romantic Historicism to Come engages this uncertainty in order to
construct a more robust, more capacious idea of history. Focusing
attention on Romantic conceptions of history's connection to the
future, The Romantic Historicism to Come examines the complications
of not only Romantic historicism, but also our own contemporary
critical methods: what would it mean if the causal assumptions that
underpin our historical judgments do not themselves develop in a
stable, progressive manner? Articulating history's minimum
conditions, Jonathan Crimmins develops a theoretical apparatus that
accounts for the concurrent influence of the various
sociohistorical forces that pressure each moment. He provides a
conception of history as open to radical change without severing
its connection to causality, better addressing the problem of the
future at the heart of questions about the past.
The social connotation of jazz in American popular culture has
shifted dramatically since its emergence in the early twentieth
century. Once considered youthful and even rebellious, jazz music
is now a firmly established American artistic tradition. As jazz in
American life has shifted, so too has the kind of venue in which it
is performed. In Jazz Places, Kimberly Hannon Teal traces the
history of jazz performance from private jazz clubs to public,
high-art venues often associated with charitable institutions. As
live jazz performance has become more closely tied to nonprofit
institutions, the music's heritage has become increasingly
important, serving as a means of defining jazz as a social good
worthy of charitable support. Though different jazz spaces present
jazz and its heritage in various and sometimes conflicting terms,
ties between the music and the past play an important role in
defining the value of present-day music in a diverse range of jazz
venues, from the Village Vanguard in New York to SFJazz on the West
Coast to Preservation Hall in New Orleans.
Magic, Monsters, and Make-Believe Heroes looks at fantasy film,
television, and participative culture as evidence of our ongoing
need for a mythic vision-for stories larger than ourselves into
which we write ourselves and through which we can become the heroes
of our own story. Why do we tell and retell the same stories over
and over when we know they can't possibly be true? Contrary to
popular belief, it's not because pop culture has run out of good
ideas. Rather, it is precisely because these stories are so
fantastic, some resonating so deeply that we elevate them to the
status of religion. Illuminating everything from Buffy the Vampire
Slayer to Dungeons and Dragons, and from Drunken Master to Mad Max,
Douglas E. Cowan offers a modern manifesto for why and how
mythology remains a vital force today.
At least 200,000 people died from hunger or malnutrition-related
diseases in Spain during the 1940s. This book provides a political
explanation for the famine and brings together a broad range of
academics based in Spain, the United Kingdom, the United States and
Australia to achieve this. Topics include the political causes of
the famine, the physical and social consequences, the ways
Spaniards tried to survive, the regime's reluctance to accept
international relief, the politics of cooking at a time of famine,
and the memory of the famine. The volume challenges the silence and
misrepresentation that still surround the famine. It reveals the
reality of how people perished in Spain because the Francoist
authorities instituted a policy of food self-sufficiency (or
autarky): a system of price regulation which placed restrictions on
transport as well as food sales. The contributors trace the massive
decline in food production which followed, the hoarding which took
place on an enormous scale and the vast and deeply iniquitous black
market that subsequently flourished at a time when salaries plunged
to 50% below their levels in 1936: all contributing factors in the
large-scale atrocity explored fully here for the first time.
Caribbean Discourse in Inclusive Education is an edited book series
that aims to give voice to Caribbean scholars, practitioners, and
other professionals working in diverse classrooms. The book series
is intended to provide an ongoing forum for Caribbean researchers,
practitioners, and academics, including those of the Diaspora, to
critically examine issues that influence the education of children
within inclusive settings. The book series is visionary, timely,
authoritative and presents pioneering work in the area of inclusive
education in the Caribbean, as part of the broader South?South
dialogue. It is essential reading for students in undergraduate and
postgraduate programmes, scholars, teachers, researchers and policy
makers at the regional and international level. The first book in
this series entitled Historical and Contemporary Issues will trace
the history and examine the Caribbean's trajectory towards the
development of inclusive education in the 21st Century. The main
premise of the book is that inclusion remains an ideologically
sound goal, which remains elusive in the Caribbean. It will also
provide a wider platform to discuss other factors that influence
the development of inclusive education such as school climate,
culture and ethos, LGBT issues, teacher training and professional
development, pedagogy, pupil perspective, curriculum, policy and
legislation.
Politics of the Many draws inspiration from Percy Bysshe Shelley's
celebrated call to arms: 'Ye are many - they are few!' This idea of
the Many, as a general form of emancipatory subjectivity that
cannot be erased for the sake of the One, is the philosophical and
political assumption shared by contributors to this book. They
raise questions of collective agency, and its crisis in
contemporary capitalism, via new engagements with Marxist
philosophy, psychoanalysis, theories of social reproduction and
value-form, and post-colonial critiques, and drawing on activist
thought and strategies. This book interrogates both established and
emergent formations of the Many (the people, classes, publics,
crowds, masses, multitudes), tracing their genealogies, their
recent failures and victories, and their potentials to change the
world. The book proposes and explores an intense and provoking
series of new or reinvented concepts, figures, and theoretical
constellations, including dividuality, the centaur, unintentional
vanguard, insomnia at work, always-on capitalism, multitude (from
its 'voiding' to a '(non)emergence'), crowds, necropolitics, and
the link between political subjectivity and value-form. The
contributors to Politics of the Many are both acclaimed and
emergent thinkers including Carina Brand, Rebecca Carson, Luhuna
Carvalho, Lorenzo Chiesa, Jodi Dean, Dario Gentili, Benjamin
Halligan, Marc James Leger, Paul Mazzocchi, Alexei Penzin, Stefano
Pippa, Gerald Raunig, and Stevphen Shukaitis.
Specifications: 2-1/2-inch vinyl figure of Hedwig with a button
that plays Hedwig's sounds from the Harry Potter films. Bonus
sticker book: Mini sticker book includes 8 full-colour stickers.
Perfect gift: A unique and keepsake item for all fans of Harry
Potter. Officially licensed: Authentic collectible. Copyright (c)
2023 Warner Bros. Entertainment. WIZARDING WORLD characters, names,
and related indicia are (c) & (TM) Warner Bros. Entertainment
Inc. WB SHIELD: (c) & (TM) WBEI. Publishing Rights (c) JKR.
(s23)
The Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries
Since 1975 is the final volume of the four-volume series of
cultural histories of the avant-garde movements in the Nordic
countries. This volume carries the avant-garde discussion forward
to present-day avant-gardes, challenged by the globalisation of the
entertainment industries and new interactive media such as the
internet. The avant-garde can now be considered a tradition that
has been made more widely available through the opening of
archives, electronic documentation and new research, which has
spurred both re-enactments, revisions and continuations of
historical avant-garde practices, while new cultural contexts,
political, technological and ecological conditions have called for
new strategies.
Agrarian social movements are at a crossroads. Although these
movements have made significant strides in advancing the concept of
food sovereignty, the reality is that many of their members remain
engaged in environmentally degrading forms of agriculture, and the
lands they farm are increasingly unproductive. Whether movement
farmers will be able to remain living on the land, and dedicated to
alternative agricultural practices, is a pressing question. The
Political Ecology of Education examines the opportunities for and
constraints on advancing food sovereignty in the 17 de Abril
settlement, a community born out of a massacre of landless
Brazilian workers in 1996. Based on immersive fieldwork over the
course of seven years, David Meek makes the provocative argument
that critical forms of food systems education are integral to
agrarian social movements' survival. While the need for critical
approaches is especially immediate in the Amazon, Meek's study
speaks to the burgeoning attention to food systems education at
various educational levels worldwide, from primary to postgraduate
programs. His book calls us to rethink the politics of the possible
within these pedagogies.
In her new book, Corine Pelluchon argues that the dichotomy between
nature and culture privileges the latter. She laments that the
political system protects the sovereignty of the human and leaves
them immune to impending environmental disaster. Using the
phenomenological writings of French philosophers like Emmanuel
Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and Paul Ricoeur, Pelluchon contends that
human beings have to recognise humanity's dependence upon the
natural world for survival and adopt a new philosophy of existence
that advocates for animal welfare and ecological preservation. In
an extension of Heidegger's ontology of concern, Pelluchon declares
that this dependence is not negative or a sign of weakness. She
argues instead, that we are nourished by the natural world and that
the very idea of nourishment contains an element of pleasure. This
sustenance comforts humans and gives their lives taste. Pelluchon's
new philosophy claims then, that eating has an affective, social
and cultural dimension, but that most importantly it is a political
act. It solidifies the eternal link between human beings and
animals, and warns that the human consumption of animals and other
natural resources impacts upon humanity's future.
Metropolis, Gotham City, Mega-City One, Panem's Capitol, the
Sprawl, Caprica City-American (and Americanized) urban environments
have always been a part of the fantastic imagination. Fantastic
Cities: American Urban Spaces in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and
Horror focuses on the American city as a fantastic geography
constrained neither by media nor rigid genre boundaries. Fantastic
Cities builds on a mix of theoretical and methodological tools that
are drawn from criticism of the fantastic, media studies, cultural
studies, American studies, and urban studies. Contributors explore
cultural media across many platforms such as Christopher Nolan's
Dark Knight Trilogy, the Arkham Asylum video games, the 1935 movie
serial The Phantom Empire, Kim Stanley Robinson's fiction, Colson
Whitehead's novel Zone One, the vampire films Only Lovers Left
Alive and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Paolo Bacigalupi's
novel The Water Knife, some of Kenny Scharf's videos, and Samuel
Delany's classic Dhalgren. Together, the contributions in Fantastic
Cities demonstrate that the fantastic is able to "real-ize" that
which is normally confined to the abstract, metaphorical, and/or
subjective. Consequently, both utopian aspirations for and
dystopian anxieties about the American city become literalized in
the fantastic city. Contributions by Carl Abbott, Jacob Babb,
Marleen S. Barr, Michael Fuchs, John Glover, Stephen Joyce, Sarah
Lahm, James McAdams, Cynthia J. Miller, Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni
Berns, Chris Pak, Maria Isabel Perez Ramos, Stefan Rabitsch, J.
Jesse Ramirez, A. Bowdoin Van Riper, Andrew Wasserman, Jeffrey
Andrew Weinstock, and Robert Yeates.
In The Anti-Heroine on Contemporary Television: Transgressive
Women, Molly Brost explores the various applications and
definitions of the term anti-heroine, showing that it has been
applied to a wide variety of female characters on television that
have little in common beyond their failure to behave in morally
"correct" and traditionally feminine ways. Rather than dismiss the
term altogether, Brost employs the term to examine what types of
behaviors and characteristics cause female characters to be labeled
anti-heroines, how those qualities and behaviors differ from those
that cause men to be labeled anti-heroes, and how the label
reflects society's attitudes toward and beliefs about women. Using
popular television series such as Jessica Jones, Scandal, and The
Good Place, Brost acknowledges the problematic nature of the term
anti-heroine and uses it as a starting point to study the complex
women on television, analyzing how the broadening spectrum of
character types has allowed more nuanced portrayals of women's
lives on television.
Extractivism has increasingly become the ground on which activists
and scholars in Latin America frame the dynamics of ecological
devastation, accumulation of wealth, and erosion of rights. These
maladies are the direct consequences of long-standing
extraction-oriented economies, and more recently from the expansion
of the extractive frontier and the implementation of new
technologies in the extraction of fossil fuels, mining, and
agriculture. But the fields of sociology, political ecology,
anthropology, and geography have largely ignored the role of art
and cultural practices in studies of extractivism and
post-extractivism. The field of art theory, on the other hand, has
offered a number of texts that put forward insightful analyses of
artwork addressing extraction, environmental devastation, and the
climate crisis. However, an art theory perspective that does not
engage firsthand and in depth with collective action remains
limited and fails to provide an account of the role, processes, and
politics of art in anti- and post-extractivist movements. Creating
Worlds Otherwise examines the narratives that subaltern groups
generate around extractivism, and how they develop, communicate,
and mobilize these narratives through art and cultural practices.
It reports on a six-year project on creative resistance to
extractivism in Argentina and builds on long-term engagement
working on environmental justice projects and campaigns in
Argentina and the UK. It is an innovative contribution to the
fields of Latin American studies, political ecology, cultural
studies, and art theory, and addresses pressing questions regarding
what post-extractivist worlds might look like as well as how such
visions are put into practice.
This book explores commemoration practices and preservation efforts
in modern Britain, focusing on the years from the end of the First
World War until the mid-1960s. The changes wrought by war led
Britain to reconsider major historical episodes that made up its
national narrative. Part of this process was a reassessment of
heritage sites, because such places carry socio-political meaning
as do the memorials that mark them. This book engages the four-way
intersection of commemoration, preservation, tourism, and urban
planning at some of the most notable historic locations in England.
The various actors in this process-from the national government and
regional councils to private organizations and interested
individuals-did nothing less than engineer British national memory.
The author presents case studies of six famous British places,
namely battlefields (Hastings and Bosworth), political sites
(Runnymede and Peterloo), and world's fairgrounds (the Crystal
Palace and Great White City). In all three genres of heritage
sites, one location developed through commemorations and tourism,
while the other 'anti-sites' simultaneously faltered as they were
neither memorialized nor visited by the masses. Ultimately, the
book concludes that the modern social and political environment
resulted in the revival, creation, or erasure of heritage sites in
the service of promoting British national identity. A valuable read
for British historians as well as scholars of memory, public
history, and cultural studies, the book argues that heritage
emerged as a discursive arena in which British identity was
renegotiated through times of transitions, both into a democratic
age and an era of geopolitical decline.
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