With entries that range from specific works to authors, folklore, and popular culture (including music, film, television, urban legend, and gaming), this book provides a single-volume resource on all things ghostly in the United States and in other countries. The concept of ghosts has been an ongoing and universal element in human culture as far back as recorded history can document. In more modern popular culture and entertainment, ghosts are a popular mainstay—from A Christmas Carol and Casper the Friendly Ghost to The Amityville Horror, Ghostbusters, Poltergeist, The Sixth Sense, and Ghost Whisperer. This book comprehensively examines ghost and spirit phenomena in all its incarnations to provide readers with a holistic perspective on the subject. It presents insightful information about the contribution of a specific work or author to establish or further the evolution of ghost lore, rather than concentrating solely on the film, literature, music, or folklore itself. The book focuses on ghosts in western culture but also provides information about spirit phenomena and lore in international settings, as many of the trends in popular culture dealing with ghosts and spirits are informed by authors and filmmakers from Germany, Japan, Korea, and the United Kingdom. The writers and editors are experts and scholars in the field and enthusiastic fans of ghost lore, ghost films, ghost hunting, and urban legends, resulting in entries that are informative and engaging—and make this the most complete and current resource on ghost and spirit lore available.

The way a society punishes demonstrates its commitment to standards of judgment and justice, its distinctive views of blame and responsibility, and its particular way of responding to evil. Punishment in Popular Culture examines the cultural presuppositions that undergird America’s distinctive approach to punishment and analyzes punishment as a set of images, a spectacle of condemnation. It recognizes that the semiotics of punishment is all around us, not just in the architecture of the prison, or the speech made by a judge as she sends someone to the penal colony, but in both “high� and “popular� culture iconography, in novels, television, and film. This book brings together distinguished scholars of punishment and experts in media studies in an unusual juxtaposition of disciplines and perspectives. Americans continue to lock up more people for longer periods of time than most other nations, to use the death penalty, and to racialize punishment in remarkable ways. How are these facts of American penal life reflected in the portraits of punishment that Americans regularly encounter on television and in film? What are the conventions of genre which help to familiarize those portraits and connect them to broader political and cultural themes? Do television and film help to undermine punishment's moral claims? And how are developments in the boarder political economy reflected in the ways punishment appears in mass culture? Finally, how are images of punishment received by their audiences? It is to these questions that Punishment in Popular Culture is addressed.

This book is the essential guide to understanding the historical influences that have shaped our ideas about infancy and infant care today. It introduces the key theories, themes, and concepts that have shaped the history of infant care and invites readers to explore how events, approaches, traditions, studies and stories have shaped modern day practice. From foundlings to wetnurses, community care and edu-carers, it introduces topics about family life, professional roles, and educational settings. The book includes short vignettes, imagery, and case studies as well as extended reflective questions. Each chapter introduces a different topic including pregnancy, parental relationships, developmental studies, the role of the professional and community services available to infants.

This book, written by leading experts in the field, is intended for thoughtful leaders, advisors, and academics who want to better understand cutting edge thinking and the latest research on leadership in the complex, highly interconnected organization of today. Unlike most books on the subject, it does not purport to provide simple answers to difficult questions. Rather, it seeks to provide new insights and tools that have only recently become apparent through advances in complexity science-like, for example, the intricate dynamics of emergent leadership as simulated through agent-based modeling (ABM). Complex Systems Leadership Theory is a powerful beginning to what promises to be a deeper, more thoughtful investigation of how and why organizations succeed and what leaders can do to make a difference.

Ayetli gadogv—to "stand in the middle"—is at the heart of a Cherokee perspective of the natural world. From this stance, Cherokee Earth Dwellers offers a rich understanding of nature grounded in Cherokee creature names, oral traditional stories, and reflections of knowledge holders. During his lifetime, elder Hastings Shade created booklets with over six hundred Cherokee names for animals and plants. With this foundational collection at its center, and weaving together a chorus of voices, this book emerges from a deep and continuing collaboration between Christopher B. Teuton, Hastings Shade, Loretta Shade, and others. Positioning our responsibilities as humans to our more-than-human relatives, this book presents teachings about the body, mind, spirit, and wellness that have been shared for generations. From clouds to birds, oceans to quarks, this expansive Cherokee view of nature reveals a living, communicative world and humanity's role within it.

Advancing our understanding of one of the most influential 20th-century philosophers, Robert Vinten brings together an international line up of scholars to consider the relevance of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ideas to the cognitive science of religion. Wittgenstein's claims ranged from the rejection of the idea that psychology is a 'young science' in comparison to physics to challenges to scientistic and intellectualist accounts of religion in the work of past anthropologists. Chapters explore whether these remarks about psychology and religion undermine the frameworks and practices of cognitive scientists of religion. Employing philosophical tools as well as drawing on case studies, contributions not only illuminate psychological experiments, anthropological observations and neurophysiological research relevant to understanding religious phenomena, they allow cognitive scientists to either heed or clarify their position in relation to Wittgenstein’s objections. By developing and responding to his criticisms, Wittgenstein and the Cognitive Science of Religion offers novel perspectives on his philosophy in relation to religion, human nature, and the mind.

Robo Sacer engages the digital humanities, critical race theory, border studies, biopolitical theory, and necropolitical theory to interrogate how technology has been used to oppress people of Mexican descent—both within Mexico and in the United States—since the advent of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994. As the book argues, robo-sacer identity emerges as transnational flows of bodies, capital, and technology become an institutionalized state of exception that relegates people from marginalized communities to the periphery. And yet, the same technology can be utilized by the oppressed in the service of resistance. The texts studied here represent speculative stories about this technological empowerment. These texts theorize different means of techno-resistance to key realities that have emerged within Mexican and Chicano/a/x communities under the rise and reign of neoliberalism. The first three chapters deal with dehumanization, the trafficking of death, and unbalanced access to technology. The final two chapters deal with the major forms of violence—feminicide and drug-related violence—that have grown exponentially in Mexico with the rise of neoliberalism. These stories theorize the role of technology both in oppressing and in providing the subaltern with necessary tools for resistance. Robo Sacer builds on the previous studies of Sayak Valencia, Irmgard Emmelhainz, Guy Emerson, Achille Mbembe, and of course Giorgio Agamben, but it differentiates itself from them through its theorization on how technology—and particularly cyborg subjectivity—can amend the reigning biopolitical and necropolitical structures of power in potentially liberatory ways. Robo Sacer shows how the cyborg can denaturalize constructs of zoē by providing an outlet through which the oppressed can tell their stories, thus imbuing the oppressed with the power to combat imperialist forces.

From the seventeenth century into the nineteenth, thousands of Madagascar’s people were brought to American ports as slaves. In Memories of Madagascar and Slavery in the Black Atlantic, Wendy Wilson-Fall shows that the descendants of these Malagasy slaves in the United States maintained an ethnic identity in ways that those from the areas more commonly feeding the Atlantic slave trade did not. Generations later, hundreds, if not thousands, of African Americans maintain strong identities as Malagasy descendants, yet the histories of Malagasy slaves, sailors, and their descendants have been little explored. Wilson-Fall examines how and why the stories that underlie this identity have been handed down through families—and what this says about broader issues of ethnicity and meaning-making for those whose family origins, if documented at all, have been willfully obscured by history. By analyzing contemporary oral histories as well as historical records and examining the conflicts between the two, Wilson-Fall carefully probes the tensions between the official and the personal, the written and the lived. She suggests that historically, the black community has been a melting pot to which generations of immigrants—enslaved and free—have been socially assigned, often in spite of their wish to retain far more complex identities. Innovative in its methodology and poetic in its articulation, this book bridges history and ethnography to take studies of diaspora, ethnicity, and identity into new territory.

Welcomed as liberation and dismissed as exploitation, egg freezing (oocyte cryopreservation) has rapidly become one of the most widely-discussed and influential new reproductive technologies of this century. In Freezing Fertility, Lucy van de Wiel takes us inside the world of fertility preservation—with its egg freezing parties, contested age limits, proactive anticipations and equity investments—and shows how the popularization of egg freezing has profound consequences for the way in which female fertility and reproductive aging are understood, commercialized and politicized. Beyond an individual reproductive choice for people who may want to have children later in life, Freezing Fertility explores how the rise of egg freezing also reveals broader cultural, political and economic negotiations about reproductive politics, gender inequities, age normativities and the financialization of healthcare. Van de Wiel investigates these issues by analyzing a wide range of sources—varying from sparkly online platforms to heart-breaking court cases and intimate autobiographical accounts—that are emblematic of each stage of the egg freezing procedure. By following the egg’s journey, Freezing Fertility examines how contemporary egg freezing practices both reflect broader social, regulatory and economic power asymmetries and repoliticize fertility and aging in ways that affect the public at large. In doing so, the book explores how the possibility of egg freezing shifts our relation to the beginning and end of life.

In Poetics of Deconstruction, Lynn Turner develops an intimate attention to independent films, art and the psychoanalyses by which they might make sense other than under continued license of the subject that calls himself man. Drawing extensively from Jacques Derrida's philosophy in precise dialogue with feminist thought, animal studies and posthumanism, this book explores the vulnerability of the living as rooted in non-oppositional differences. From abjection to mourning, to the speculative and the performative, it reposes concepts and buzzwords seemingly at home in feminist theory, visual culture and the humanities more broadly. Stepping away from the carno-phallogocentric legacies of the signifier and the dialectic, Poetics of Deconstruction asks you to welcome nonpower into politics, always sexual but no longer anchored in sacrifice.

Multiple Hopewellian monumental earthwork sites displaying timber features, mortuary deposits, and unique artifacts are found widely distributed across the North American Eastern Woodlands, from the lower Mississippi Valley north to the Great Lakes. These sites, dating from 200 b.c. to a.d. 500, almost define the Middle Woodland period of the Eastern Woodlands. Joseph Caldwell treated these sites as defining what he termed the ""Hopewell Interaction Sphere,"" which he conceptualized as mediating a set of interacting mortuary-funerary cults linking many different local ethnic communities. In this new book, A. Martin Byers refines Caldwell's work, coining the term ""Hopewell Ceremonial Sphere"" to more precisely characterize this transregional sphere as manifesting multiple autonomous cult sodalities of local communities affiliated into escalating levels of autonomous cult sodality heterarchies. It is these cult sodality heterarchies, regionally and transregionally interacting - and not their autonomous communities to which the sodalities also belonged - that were responsible for the Hopewellian assemblage; and the heterarchies took themselves to be performing, not funerary, but world-renewal ritual ceremonialism mediated by the deceased of their many autonomous Middle Woodland communities. Paired with the cult sodality heterarchy model, Byers proposes and develops the complementary heterarchical community model. This model postulates a type of community that made the formation of the cult sodality heterarchy possible. But Byers insists it was the sodality heterarchies and not the complementary heterarchical communities that generated the Hopewellian ceremonial sphere. Detailed interpretations and explanations of Hopewellian sites and their contents in Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and Georgia empirically anchor his claims. A singular work of unprecedented scope, Reclaiming the Hopewellian Ceremonial Sphere will encourage archaeologists to re-examine their interpretations.

Robo Sacer engages the digital humanities, critical race theory, border studies, biopolitical theory, and necropolitical theory to interrogate how technology has been used to oppress people of Mexican descent—both within Mexico and in the United States—since the advent of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994. As the book argues, robo-sacer identity emerges as transnational flows of bodies, capital, and technology become an institutionalized state of exception that relegates people from marginalized communities to the periphery. And yet, the same technology can be utilized by the oppressed in the service of resistance. The texts studied here represent speculative stories about this technological empowerment. These texts theorize different means of techno-resistance to key realities that have emerged within Mexican and Chicano/a/x communities under the rise and reign of neoliberalism. The first three chapters deal with dehumanization, the trafficking of death, and unbalanced access to technology. The final two chapters deal with the major forms of violence—feminicide and drug-related violence—that have grown exponentially in Mexico with the rise of neoliberalism. These stories theorize the role of technology both in oppressing and in providing the subaltern with necessary tools for resistance. Robo Sacer builds on the previous studies of Sayak Valencia, Irmgard Emmelhainz, Guy Emerson, Achille Mbembe, and of course Giorgio Agamben, but it differentiates itself from them through its theorization on how technology—and particularly cyborg subjectivity—can amend the reigning biopolitical and necropolitical structures of power in potentially liberatory ways. Robo Sacer shows how the cyborg can denaturalize constructs of zoē by providing an outlet through which the oppressed can tell their stories, thus imbuing the oppressed with the power to combat imperialist forces.

Though certainly not untouched by tragedy, the historical period of the Middle Ages was a dynamic and prosperous time for Jewish civilization; for despite the mass expulsions and periodic attacks that the Jews of the time suffered, they also managed prolonged periods of at least civil relations with the Christian and Muslim cultures that surrounded them, periods in which the Jewish culture at large produced great poetry and important philosophical and theological works, and made inspired contributions to mathematics and the sciences. Accessible to the general reader but enlightening also to the scholar, Norman Roth's account of the diverse and diffuse culture of Jewish daily life in the medieval world offers a direct look on this profoundly historical people, who through their unique relationship with the cultures that surrounded them touched obliquely on so much else in the world of the Middle Ages—as well as on that of the present day. For ease of use by students, the work is organized into chapters covering all aspects of daily life: education, marriage and family life, the Jewish community at large, religious customs and observances, work, medicine, literature and the arts, the dangers of being Jewish, and the relationship between Jews and Gentiles. It includes a historical timeline of the critical events in the Jewish experience of the middle ages, a glossary of terms, and a bibliography for further reading. Throughout the work Roth shows the circumstances surrounding and at times invading Jewish life at the time, and paints a picture that is at once intimate and also comprehensive. This work will provide school and public librarians with a resource on Jewish culture that is unique, highly informative, historically accurate, and compelling to a high degree.

Several factors have resulted in increased intra- and inter-state migration. This has led to an increase in the enrollment of students with diverse linguistics backgrounds, placing more academic demands on educators. Linguistic diversity presents both opportunities and challenges for educators across the educational spectrum. Language ideologies profoundly shape and constrain the use of language as a resource for learning in multilingual or linguistically diverse classrooms. While English has become the world language, most communities remain, and are becoming more and more multicultural, multilingual, and diverse. The Handbook of Research on Teaching in Multicultural and Multilingual Contexts moves beyond the constraints of current language ideologies and enables the use of a wide range of resources from local semiotic repertoires. It examines the phenomenon of language use, language teaching, multiculturalism, and multilingualism in different learning areas, giving practitioners a voice to spotlight their efforts in order to keep their teaching afloat in culturally and linguistically diverse situations. Covering topics such as Indigenous languages, multilingual deaf communities, and intercultural competence, this major reference work is an essential resource for educators of both K-12 and higher education, pre-service teachers, educational psychologists, linguists, education administrators and policymakers, government officials, researchers, and academicians.

America is in a moment of crisis. Facing the overlapping traumas of the COVID-19 pandemic, the student debt crisis, the murder of George Floyd, and the insurrection of January 6, we as Americans have been forced to ask ourselves what we owe each other as human beings, a task made only more difficult by entrenched political polarization. In this environment, critical thinking skills are more important than ever to find meaning, make decisions, and rebuild civil discourse. In What We Value, acclaimed bioethicist Lynn Pasquerella examines urgent issues—moral distress, access to resources, and the conflict over whose voices and lives are privileged—issues with which Americans wrestle daily, arguing that liberal education is the best preparation for work, citizenship, and life in a future none of us can predict.Drawing on examples from medical schools and university hospitals across the country, Pasquerella addresses medical ethics and public health in the wake of the pandemic. She then unpacks the current challenges surrounding free speech, equity, and inclusion on American campuses. Finally, she examines the growing racial and economic segregation in higher education, making a forceful case for the value of a liberal education in providing the skills and competencies, alongside the habits of heart and mind, required to address vexing questions about the nature of individual rights versus collective responsibility. This vital book demonstrates how tumultuous current events reveal what we value and the ways in which a liberal education can help us to learn from one another while cultivating the personal and social responsibility necessary for furthering the common good.