When American explorers crossed the Texas Panhandle, they dubbed it part of the ""Great American Desert."" A ""sea of grass,"" the llano appeared empty, flat, and barely habitable. Contemporary developments - cell phone towers, oil rigs, and wind turbines - have only added to this stereotype. Yet in this lyrical ecomemoir, Shelley Armitage charts a unique rediscovery of the largely unknown land, a journey at once deeply personal and far-reaching in its exploration of the connections between memory, spirit, and place. Armitage begins her narrative with the intention to walk the llano from her family farm thirty meandering miles along the Middle Alamosa Creek to the Canadian River. Along the way, she seeks the connection between her father and one of the area's first settlers, Ysabel Gurule, who built his dugout on the banks of the Canadian. Armitage, who grew up nearby in the small town of Vega, finds this act of walking inseparable from the act of listening and writing. ""What does the land say to us?"" she asks as she witnesses human alterations to the landscape - perhaps most catastrophic the continued drainage of the land's most precious resource, the Ogallala Aquifer. Yet the llano's wonders persist: dynamic mesas and canyons, vast flora and fauna, diverse wildlife, rich histories. Armitage recovers the voices of ancient, Native, and Hispano peoples, their stories interwoven with her own: her father's legacy, her mother's decline, a brother's love. The llano holds not only the beauty of ecological surprises but a renewed realization of kinship in a world ever changing. Reminiscent of the work of Terry Tempest Williams and John McPhee, Walking the Llano is both a celebration of an oft-overlooked region and a soaring testimony to the power of the landscape to draw us into greater understanding of ourselves and others by experiencing a deeper connection with the places we inhabit.

Over the last few decades, the refrain for many activists in technology fields around the globe has been "attraction, promotion, and retention." Yet the secret to accomplishing this task has not been found. Despite the wide variety of theories proposed in efforts to frame and understand the issues, to date none have been accepted as a universally accurate framework, nor been applicable across varying cultures and ethnicities. Gender Inequality and the Potential for Change in Technology Fields provides innovative insights into diversity creation through potential solutions, including the attraction of more women to study technology and to enter technology careers, the navigation of suitable promotional pathways, and the retention of women in these industries. This publication examines women in IT professions, artificial intelligence, and social media. It is designed for gender theorists, government officials, policymakers, educators, individual activists and advocates, recruiters, content developers, managers, women and men in technology fields, academicians, researchers, and students.

In recent years, the media has attributed the surge of people eagerly studying family trees to the aging of baby boomers, a sense of mortality, a proliferation of internet genealogy sites, and a growing pride in ethnicity. New genealogy-themed television series and internet-driven genetic ancestry testing services have also flourished, capitalizing on this new popularity and on the mapping of the human genome. But what's really happening here, and what does this mean for sometimes volatile conceptions of race and ethnicity? In Alternate Roots, Christine Scodari engages with genealogical texts and practices, such as the classic television miniseries Roots, DNA testing for genetic ancestry, Ancestry.com, and genealogy-related television series, including those shows hosted by Henry Louis Gates Jr. She lays out how family historians can understand intersections and historical and ongoing relations of power related to the ethnicity, race, class, and/or gender of their ancestors as well as to members of other groups. Perspectives on hybridity and intersectionality make connections not only between and among identities, but also between local findings and broader contexts that might, given only cursory attention, seem tangential to chronicling a family history. Given the genealogy-related media institutions, tools, texts, practices, and technologies currently available, Scodari's study probes the viability of a critical genealogy based upon race, ethnicity, and intersectional identities. She delves into the implications of adoption, orientation, and migration while also investigating her own Italian and Italian American ancestry, examining the racial, ethnic experiences of her forebears and positioning them within larger contexts. Filling gaps in the research on genealogical media in relation to race and ethnicity, Scodari mobilizes cultural studies, media studies, and her own genealogical practices in a critical pursuit to interrogate key issues bound up in the creation of family history.

Since the establishment of the Northern Irish state in 1921, theatre has often captured and reflected the political, social, and cultural changes that the North has experienced. From the mid-twentieth century, theatre has played a particularly important role in documenting women's experiences and in showing how women's social and political status has changed with the transformation of the state. Throughout the North's history, women's dramatic writing and performance have often contradicted mainstream narratives of the sectarian conflict, creating a rich and daring trove of counternarratives that contest the stories promoted by the government and media. Moving beyond the better-known women theatre practitioners of the North such as Marie Jones, Christina Reid, Anne Devlin, and the Charabanc Theatre Company, Coffey recovers the lost history of lesser-known, early playwrightsand highlights a new generation of women writing during peacetime. She examines how Northern women have historically used the theatrical stage as a form of political activism when more traditional avenues were closed off to them. Tracing the development of women's involvement in Northern theatre, Coffey ultimately illuminates how issues such as feminism, gender roles, violence,politics, and sectarianism have shifted over the past century as the North moves from conflict into a developing and fragile peace.

"Since the fall of the Berlin wall there has been a surprising dearth of high quality of scholarship on legal culture in the communist successor states of East Central Europe. In this excellent book Barbara Havelkova engages with the reversal of many of the advances the socialist period made in gender relations, examining the historical roots of the current failure of Czech law to engage with the discriminatory practices that have negatively affected the lives of women. She does this by a forensic excavation of law, discourses and practices of the socialist era revealing the patriarchal assumptions underpinning them that became deeply embedded in Czech legal culture, and that have been carried forward to the present day. The book is a compelling read. It provides answers to many of the questions that have perplexed feminists about the post-soviet transition and at the same time speaks more generally to the debates surrounding the troubling rightward shift in the politics of the communist successor states of Europe." Professor Judith Pallot, President of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies "In Gender Equality in Law: Uncovering the Legacies of Czech State Socialism, Barbara Havelkova offers a sober and sophisticated socio-legal account of gender equality law in Czechia. Tracing gender equality norms from their origins under state socialism, Havelkova shows how the dominant understanding of the differences between women and men as natural and innate combined with a post-socialist understanding of rights as freedom to shape the views of key Czech legal actors and to thwart the transformative potential of EU sex discrimination law. Havelkova's compelling feminist legal genealogy of gender equality in Czechia illuminates the path dependency of gender norms and the antipathy to substantive gender equality that is common among the formerly state-socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Her deft analysis of the relationship between gender and legal norms is especially relevant today as the legitimacy of gender equality laws is increasingly precarious." Professor Judy Fudge, Kent Law School Gender equality law in Czechia, as in other parts of post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe, is facing serious challenges. When obliged to adopt, interpret and apply anti-discrimination law as a condition of membership of the EU, Czech legislators and judges have repeatedly expressed hostility and demonstrated a fundamental lack of understanding of key ideas underpinning it. This important new study explores this scepticism to gender equality law, examining it with reference to legal and socio-legal developments that started in the state-socialist past and that remain relevant today. The book examines legal developments in gender-relevant areas, most importantly in equality and anti-discrimination law. But it goes further, shedding light on the underlying understandings of key concepts such as women, gender, equality, discrimination and rights. In so doing, it shows the fundamental intellectual and conceptual difficulties faced by gender equality law in Czechia. These include an essentialist understanding of differences between men and women, a notion that equality and anti-discrimination law is incompatible with freedom, and a perception that existing laws are objective and neutral, while any new gender-progressive regulation of social relations is an unacceptable interference with the 'natural social order'. Timely and provocative, this book will be required reading for all scholars of equality and gender and the law.