Toni Morrison, the only living American Nobel laureate in literature, published her first novel in 1970. In the ensuing forty plus years, Morrison's work has become synonymous with the most significant literary art and intellectual engagements of our time. The publication of Home (May 2012), as well as her 2011 play Desdemona affirm the range and acuity of Morrison's imagination. Toni Morrison: Forty Years in The Clearing enables audiences/readers, critics, and students to review Morrison's cultural and literary impacts and to consider the import, and influence of her legacies in her multiple roles as writer, editor, publisher, reader, scholar, artist, and teacher over the last four decades. Some of the highlights of the collection include contributions from many of the major scholars of Morrison's canon: as well as art pieces, music, photographs and commentary from poets, Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez; novelist, A.J. Verdelle; playwright, Lydia Diamond; composer, Richard Danielpour; photographer, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders; the first published interview with Morrison's friends from Howard University, Florence Ladd and Mary Wilburn; and commentary from President Barack Obama. What distinguishes this book from the many other publications that engage Morrison's work is that the collection is not exclusively a work of critical interpretation or reference. This is the first publication to contextualize and to consider the interdisciplinary, artistic, and intellectual impacts of Toni Morrison using the formal fluidity and dynamism that characterize her work. This book adopts Morrison's metaphor as articulated in her Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, Beloved. The narrative describes the clearing as "a wide-open place cut deep in the woods nobody knew for what. . . . In the heat of every Saturday afternoon, she sat in the clearing while the people waited among the trees." Morrison's Clearing is a complicated and dynamic space. Like the intricacies of Morrison's intellectual and artistic voyages, the Clearing is both verdant and deadly, a sanctuary and a prison. Morrison's vision invites consideration of these complexities and confronts these most basic human conundrums with courage, resolve and grace. This collection attempts to reproduce the character and spirit of this metaphorical terrain.

In Frontiers of Gender Equality, editor Rebecca Cook enlarges the chorus of voices to introduce new and different discourses about the wrongs of gender discrimination and to explain the multiple dimensions of gender equality. This volume demonstrates that the wrongs of discrimination can best be understood from the perspective of the discriminated, and that gender discrimination persists and grows in new and different contexts, widening the gap between the principle of gender equality and its realization, particularly for subgroups of women and LGBTQ+ peoples. Frontiers of Gender Equality provides retrospective views of the struggles to eliminate gender discrimination in national courts and international human rights treaties. Focusing on gender equality enables comparisons and contrasts among these regimes to better understand how they reinforce gender equality norms. Different regional and international treaties are examined, those in the forefront of advancing gender equality, those that are promising but little known, and those whose focus includes economic, social, and cultural rights, to explore why some struggles were successful and others less so. The book illustrates how gender discrimination continues to be normalized and camouflaged, and how it intersects with other axes of subordination, such as indigeneity, religion, and poverty, to create new forms of intersectional discrimination. With the benefit of hindsight, the book's contributors reconstruct gender equalities in concrete situations. Given the increasingly porous exchanges between domestic and international law, various national, regional, and international decisions and texts are examined to determine how better to breathe life into equality from the perspectives, for instance, of Indigenous and Muslim women, those who were violated sexually and physically, and those needing access to necessary health care, including abortion. The conclusion suggests areas of future research, including how to translate the concept of intersectionality into normative and institutional settings, which will assist in promoting the goals of gender equality.

This book begins with an examination of the numbers of women in physics in English-speaking countries, moving on to examine factors that affect girls and their decision to continue in science, right through to education and on into the problems that women in physics careers face. Looking at all of these topics with one eye on the progress that the field has made in the past few years, and another on those things that we have yet to address, the book surveys the most current research as it tries to identify strategies and topics that have significant impact on issues that women have in the field.

Beverly has been called Poochie by her family that her father occasionally forgets her real name. She grew up in Nairn Centre, Ontario, a small community where everyone knew almost everything going on in everyone else's household. Even so, she still managed to have secrets. In this memoir, she tells the story of her youth, from her childhood through her teenage years.

She shares her wealth of exciting and embarrassing moments from her life as a child, trying to learn how to be herself in a constantly changing world. She was a child obsessively dependent on her mother, to the point of having suicidal thoughts when she believes she has lost her mother's respect.

With an open and honest mind, Poochie shares each childhood turmoil as it gets conquered and turned into a stepping stone for the next adventure in "Poochie's Changing Daze"-a story of the love and strength that a family gets from having each other.

Many believe that religion plays a positive role in men's identity development, with religion promoting good behavior, and morality. In contrast, we often assume that the media is a negative influence for men, teaching them to be rough and violent, and to ignore their emotions. In Does God Make the Man?, Stewart M. Hoover and Curtis D. Coats draw on extensive interviews and participant observation with both Evangelical and non-Evangelical men, including Catholics as well as Protestants, to argue that neither of these assumptions is correct. Dismissing the easy notion that media encourages toxic masculinity and religion is always a positive influence, Hoover and Coats argue that not only are the linkages between religion, media, and masculinity not as strong and substantive as has been assumed, but the ways in which these relations actually play out may contradict received views. Over the course of this fascinating book they examine crises, contradictions, and contestations: crises about the meaning of masculinity and about the lack of direction men experience from their faith communities; contradictions between men's religious lives and media lives, and contestations among men's ideas about what it means to be a man. The book counters common discussions about a "crisis of masculinity," showing that actual men do not see the world the way the "crisis talk" has portrayed it-and interestingly, even Evangelical men often do not see religion as part of the solution.

Women all over the world are still facing numerous challenges and obstacles in the business domain. A gender-equal workplace is still a dream to pursue for a brighter and better future. To change how women are seen, perceived, and treated in the business world, the overall mindset of women in the workplace needs to change. Management education plays a critical role in changing these perceptions of women in business. Gender equal curricula and gender equal teaching materials are a way that universities can begin to challenge those preconceived beliefs that business is a male only domain. More teaching materials discussing and presenting women in the workplace is needed in management education, including women's problems and challenges, their stories of overcoming adversity, and the ways in which they have handled touch situations. This book presents real life stories of women in business, specifically focusing on how they overcame challenges and broke the glass ceiling. These stories will serve as proper teaching materials to be used in different courses of management education and as a means to increasing the awareness of gender quality in business. It will also be of use to lecturers, professors, administrators, librarians, researchers, scholars, practitioners, and students.

Knowing is a process, not an arrival. "The Place of Knowing: A Spiritual Autobiography" celebrates the spiritual-both seen and unseen-through the life of acclaimed writer and devout Mormon Emma Lou Warner Thayne.

In this insightful, eloquently written memoir, Emma Lou-author of thirteen books of poetry, essays, and fiction-shares poignant personal anecdotes that begin with a terrifying near-death experience when, without warning, a six-pound iron rod smashed through a car windshield into her face. As she narrates her journey through her recovery process, she reflects on previous life experiences-from the daily to the sublime. Through both example and insight, she shares adventures while offering a calming presence for those who may fear death, yearn to know how to celebrate life, and crave direction on how to access the wonders of the divine.

For anyone who has wondered about life after death or who desires a better understanding of his or her divine self, "The Place of Knowing" will inspire spiritual seekers everywhere to reach out in friendship to others and to embrace new experiences-ultimately discovering themselves in the process.

I have heard before that you begin aging the minute you are born. Pretty depressing don't you think? Aging definitely has its mysteries but it also has a lot of fun surprises-little unexpected twists and turns-that happen when you least expect them and that is what makes this journey we call "Life" so interesting. There hopefully are a lot of years between birth and the end of life, so my dear friends, I ask that you Enjoy the Journey. Enjoy my journey as I share the wisdom and sense of humor I have been forced to develop in spite of Mother Nature's attempt to try my patience every chance she gets. You will find that we women around the world are all sisters on this trip. Aging is inevitable, so why not make the best of it?

In my particular journey, there are so many things my mother didn't tell me As a result, growing older has at times been an agonizing challenge so I am sharing some common sense secrets to make your journey more fun. I have injected humor throughout. After all, if you can't laugh at yourself, who can and still get away with it?

The past thirty years have seen the emergence of a broad-ranging feminist theological critique of Christology. Speaking out of a range of Christian traditions, feminist theologians have exposed the androcentric character of classical Christology, drawing attention to the fact that women's voices in Scripture and in the history of theology have often gone and continue to go unheard. The theological consequences have been grave: Christ's liberating message of the full humanity of both women and men has been compromised by the patriarchal bias of its interpreters. Feminists have also argued that of all Christian doctrines Christology has been most often turned against women. Christological arguments have been used to reinforce an exclusively male image of God, and thus to legitimate men's superiority over women. Further, the image of Christ on the cross has contributed to women's acceptance of abuses of power, as it has often been interpreted as a model of passive submission to unjust suffering. Some feminists have argued for the total rejection of the doctrine of the cross. Others have concluded that Christianity and feminism are incompatible.
In this book, Arnfriour Guomundsdottir provides a lucid survey and analysis of the full range of such criticisms, as well as her own explicitly feminist retrieval and reconstruction of a theology of the cross. She argues that there is a redemptive message hidden in the cross of Christ that is valuable to women today. Despite its potential for abuse and its well-documented history of misuse against women, a theology of the cross can also affirm Jesus as a divine co-sufferer who brings good news to all who are poor and oppressed. Such a theology, Guomundsdottir contends, offers women meaning and strength from a God who takes human form and enters redemptively into their suffering."

The 19th century witnessed an explosion of writing about unproductivity, with the exploits of various idlers, loafers, and "gentlemen of refinement" capturing the imagination o fa country that was deeply ambivalent about its work ethic. Idle Threats documents this American obsession with unproductivity and its potentials, while offering an explanation of the profound significance of idle practices for literary and cultural production. While this fascination with unproductivity memorably defined literary characters from Rip Van Winkle to Bartleby to George Hurstwood, it also reverberated deeply through the entire culture, both as a seductive ideal and as a potentially corrosive threat to upright, industrious American men. Drawing on an impressive array of archival material and multifaceted literary and cultural sources, Idle Threats connects the question of unproductivity to other discourses concerning manhood, the value of art, the allure of the frontier, the usefulness of knowledge, the meaning of individuality, and the experience of time, space, and history. Andrew Lyndon Knighton offers a new way of thinking about the largely unacknowledged "productivity of the unproductive," revealing the incalculable and sometimes surprising ways in which American modernity transformed the relationship between subjects and that which is most intimate to them: their own activity.

Socialist Women and the Great War: Protest, Revolution and Commemoration, an open access book, is the first transnational study of left-wing women and socialist revolution during the First World War and its aftermath. Through a discussion of the key themes related to women and revolution, such as anti-militarism and violence, democracy and citizenship, and experience and life-writing, this book sheds new and necessary light on the everyday lives of socialist women in the early 20th century. The participants of the 1918-1919 revolutions in Europe, and the accompanying outbreaks of social unrest elsewhere in the world, have typically been portrayed as war-weary soldiers and suited committee delegates-in other words, as men. Exceptions like Rosa Luxemburg exist, but ordinary women are often cast as passive recipients of the vote. This is not true; rather, women were pivotal actors in the making, imagining, and remembering of the social and political upheavals of this time. From wartime strikes, to revolutionary violence, to issues of suffrage, this book reveals how women constructed their own revolutionary selves in order to bring about lasting social change and provides a fresh comparative approach to women's socialist activism. As such, this is a vitally important resource for all postgraduates and advanced undergraduates interested in gender studies, international relations, and the history and legacy of World War I. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollection.com. Open access was funded by Knowledge Unlatched.

Marginalised migrant groups face significant barriers in accessing services and becoming integrated in their communities. Mainstream services are failing to engage many marginalised migrant and refugee women and to respond effectively to their needs, raising serious questions as to how community development might respond and facilitate positive spaces and reduce isolation. Community Work with Migrant and Refugee Women: 'Insiders' and 'Outsiders' in Research and Practice outlines the implications for policy, practice and meaningful research with migrant and refugee women drawing on a three-year case study of a community-based organisation working with marginalised Muslim women in London. Arguing for a bottom-up approach that centres on needs as well as assets, Community Work with Migrant and Refugee Women highlights the importance of cultural relevance of services, and a holistic approach to integration that acknowledges the full range of needs and experiences migrant and refugee women face. Co-written by academic researchers and practitioner-researchers, this volume contributes to both academic and policy debates where there is a need for more research and policy that understands the experiences of migrant and refugee women as well as which interventions are effective.

A Cultural History of The Human Body presents an authoritative survey from ancient times to the present. This set of six volumes covers 2800 years of the human body as a physical, social, spiritual and cultural object. Volume 1: A Cultural History of the Human Body in Antiquity (1300 BCE - 500 CE) Edited by Daniel Garrison, Northwestern University. Volume 2: A Cultural History of the Human Body in The Medieval Age (500 - 1500) Edited by Linda Kalof, Michigan State University Volume 3: A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Renaissance (1400 - 1650) Edited by Linda Kalof, Michigan State University and William Bynum, University College London. Volume 4: A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Enlightenment (1600 - 1800) Edited by Carole Reeves, Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, University College London. Volume 5: A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Age of Empire (1800 - 1920) Edited by Michael Sappol, National Library of Medicine in Washington, DC, and Stephen P. Rice, Ramapo College of New Jersey. Volume 6: A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Modern Age (1900-21st Century) Edited by Ivan Crozier, University of Edinburgh, and Chiara Beccalossi, University of Queensland. Each volume discusses the same themes in its chapters: 1. Birth and Death 2. Health and Disease 3. Sex & Sexuality 4. Medical Knowledge and Technology 5. Popular Beliefs 6. Beauty and Concepts of the Ideal 7. Marked Bodies I: Gender, Race, Class, Age, Disability and Disease 8. Marked Bodies II: the Bestial, the Divine and the Natural 9. Cultural Representations of the Body 10. The Self and Society This means readers can either have a broad overview of a period by reading a volume or follow a theme through history by reading the relevant chapter in each volume. Superbly illustrated, the full six volume set combines to present the most authoritative and comprehensive survey available on the human body through history.