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Books > Social sciences > General
While highlighting the prevailing role of television in Western societies, Art vs. TV maps and condenses a comprehensive history of the relationships of art and television. With a particular focus on the link between reality and representation, Francesco Spampinato analyzes video art works, installations, performances, interventions and television programs made by contemporary artists as forms of resistance to and appropriation and parody of mainstream television. The artists discussed belong to different generations: those that emerged in the 1960s in association with art movements such as Pop Art, Fluxus and Happening; and those appearing on the scene in the 1980s, whose work aimed at deconstructing media representation in line with postmodernist theories; to those arriving in the 2000s, an era in which, through reality shows and the Internet, anybody could potentially become a media personality; and finally those active in the 2010s, whose work reflects on how old media like television has definitively vaporized through the electronic highways of cyberspace. These works and phenomena elicit a tension between art and television, exposing an incongruence; an impossibility not only to converge but at the very least to open up a dialogical exchange.
"One tribe's traditional knowledge of plants, presented for the first time" Residents of the Great Plains since the early 1500s, the Apache people were well acquainted with the native flora of the region. In "Plains Apache Ethnobotany," Julia A. Jordan documents more than 110 plant species valued by the Plains Apache and preserves a wealth of detail concerning traditional Apache collection, preparation, and use of these plant species for food, medicine, ritual, and material culture. The traditional Apache economy centered on hunting, gathering, and trading with other tribes. Throughout their long history the Apache lived in or traveled to many different parts of the plains, gaining an intimate knowledge of a wide variety of plant resources. Part of this traditional knowledge, especially that pertaining to plants of Oklahoma, has been captured here by Jordan's fieldwork, conducted with elders of the Apache Tribe of Oklahoma in the mid-1960s, a time when much traditional knowledge was being lost. "Plains Apache Ethnobotany" is the most comprehensive ethnobotanical study of a southern plains tribe. Handsomely illustrated, this book is a valuable resource for ethnobotanists, anthropologists, historians, and anyone interested in American Indian use of native plants.
Discover how to plan effective blended instruction with purpose and intention with help from this definitive, practical guide to lesson design. A global pandemic hit our world and education has forever changed. But have your instructional practices changed? Teachers must now leverage technology to provide students with high-quality teaching and learning experiences that transcend a traditional classroom's walls. This is a historic opportunity to abandon antiquated teaching practices and reimagine instruction in ways that boost learning outcomes and prepare students for living and working in the digital age. This book offers guidance for creating and sustaining rigorous and engaging blended learning solutions. Opening with lessons learned from the pandemic, the book addresses impacts on lesson design and delivery, student engagement, assessment, and teacher training and PD. The following chapters build on and address these experiences, with each chapter featuring strategies and examples of how to implement effective approaches to lesson design for blended and online instruction. This book: Explores seven different blended learning models, with strategies and suggestions for implementing each one. Provides detailed guidance for planning a blended learning curriculum, from establishing a digital infrastructure to integrating students into a learning management system (LMS) to mapping a course scope and sequence. Provides step-by-step design essentials for developing a pacing guide and creating effective blended and virtual lessons. Features downloadable templates, checklists and guided professional learning tasks in every chapter to help design virtual and blended lessons. Includes strategies for implementing authentic, student-led assessments. The book is sure to meet the needs of varying practitioners who are eager to learn about designing successful blended learning courses and understanding what makes each course work. Audience: K-12 teachers and instructional designers; faculty in higher education programs
June Roberts explores the complicated post-colonial infrastructure of Caribbean society and life as an African American through the work of Erna Brodber. Brodber's novels Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home, MYAL, and Louisiana all explore various facets of the Caribbean and African American experiences, and Roberts greatly adds to their value through her commentary and interpretation. While she uses Erna Brodber's books' organizing themes as a home base, Roberts doesn't limit her work to strict criticism and analysis of the novels. Instead, she traces countless issues as varied as the nuances of the Caribbean psyche, the importance of matriarchs, traditional slave dances, obeahs, Santeria and other African-based religious expressions, as well as politics and history, and the perspectives of past and present scholars of the Caribbean and African-American experience. Most importantly, Roberts investigates how the colonial system's exploitation and dehumanization of the black people affected their spirits. This text is broad enough to appeal to all enthusiasts of Caribbean and African-American topics, and it can especially benefit academic courses related to these topics.
The institution of family has been central to the well-being of African societies over the years. African families have undergone significant transformation caused by the interplay of indigenous, Arabic/Islamic, and European/Christian cultures. The juxtaposition of these three cultures in the lives of African peoples captures the triple-heritage image of the continent. At the same time, modernization, urbanization, and migration have played and continue to play significant roles in the transformation of families across the continent. While it is true that the traditional family has changed in many ways and that African families are continuously confronted with new challenges, the renowned contributors to this volume recognize that the African family continues to adapt to emerging structural changes. In the new millennium, a host of issues and challenges has emerged, each with the potential to weaken or threaten the survival of the traditional African family. These include the HIV/AIDS pandemic; a growing elderly population; declining governmental support; and economic decay. How the post-colonial family reacts to these threats and challenges has the potential to either maintain or undermine the family's role as a major organizing principle in Africa. The institution of family has been central to the well-being of African societies over the years. African families have undergone significant transformations caused by the interplay of indigenous, Arabic/Islamic, and European/Christian cultures. The juxtaposition of these three cultures in the lives of African peoples captures the triple-heritage image of the continent. At the same time, modernization, urbanization, and migration have played and continue to play a role in the transformation of families across the continent. While it is true that the traditional family has changed in many ways and that African families are continuously confronted with new challenges, the contributors to this volume recognize that the African family has adapted to the emerging structural changes. In the new millennium, a host of issues and challenges have the potential to weaken or threaten the survival of the traditional African family. These include the HIV/AIDS pandemic, which seems to afflict the young and able-bodied; a growing elderly population; declining governmental support; and economic decay. How the post-colonial family reacts to these threats and challenges has the potential to either maintain or undermine the family's role as a major organizing principle in Africa. Profound transitions have occurred in family structure and processes since the post-colonial period. This work points to some of the documented transformations in African family life, including the changing modes of decision-making due to the establishment of a cash crop economy, nuptial patterns, changing maternal roles, an increasing age at marriage and declining fertility, a growing number of households headed by women, an increase in the rate of marital instability and dissolution, and changing patterns of mate selection and family relations.
Philip K. Dick was one of the most incisive, subversive, and entertaining authors of the last half of the twentieth century, and the increasing levels of respect and interest that his fiction and films have generated since the 1982 release of Blade Runner have made a comprehensive assessment of these films a virtual necessity. Future Imperfect is the only work to examine the cinematic adaptations of Dick's work in their entirety. Not all cinematic adaptations of Dick's work have been equally successful, but they have all at least made a similar effort to capture his evocative, paranoid, and compassionate view of humanity's precarious place in a fallen world--a world where rapidly proliferating technology, stultifying bureaucracy, and widespread political chicanery threaten both our bodies and our minds. Author Jason Vest seeks here to answer the question of how filmmakers as diverse as Ridley Scott, Paul Verhoeven, Steven Spielberg, and Richard Linklater have each, in their turn, expanded, extrapolated, and diverged from Dick's fiction in order to translate Dick's powerful and challenging insights on to the screen in a visual and yet still literary form. Dick's is a singular voice in American literature, and Future Imperfect aims to gauge exactly how well the cinematic adaptations of Dick's work have captured his unique vision of the human future, and how deeply Dick's storytelling abilities have influenced the development of science-fiction films from Blade Runner on. Students and general readers interested in science-fiction literature and film should find this an incredibly valuable work, as should film enthusiasts concerned with the issue of adaptation itself. BLAuthor Jason Vest isan expert in both American literature and the science-fiction genre BLThis marks the first book-length investigation of Dick's influence on the science-fiction genre, and also includes some of the more extended criticism on several seminal science fiction films
It's hard to imagine a day passing without most Americans enjoying some form of entertainment, whether it's going to a football game, watching television at home, or listening to the radio on the way to work. At the start of the 20th century, however, the only form of entertainment was live theater. With the advent of radio, television, and ultimately the internet, entertainment could be found in our homes, quite literally at our fingertips. As American society changed and the economy grew over the 20th century, the entertainment industry evolved from vaudeville theater to big screen movies to DVDs playing in the living room. This book focuses on popular American entertainment that both appeals to and is accessible to the masses. Six forms of entertainment are covered: vaudeville, recorded sound, radio, movies, television, and spectator sports. Some forms of entertainment have changed considerably throughout the years, while others have disappeared all together as technology allowed new ones to take their place, but the desire of people to be entertained has not waned. Concepts, organizations, and individuals such as the jukebox, the Screen Actors Guild, Ted Turner, satellite television, free agents, Charlie Chaplin, made-for-TV movies, iPod, Superbowl commercials, vaudeville circuits, Columbia, FCC, Hollywood, Title IX, Amos and Andy, MTV, and the Palace Theater, among many others, are discussed. Ideal for students and general readers interested in the development and history of one of the largest and most lucrative industries today. Biographies of notable individuals in the entertainment industry and suggestions for further reading are included.
Africa suffers from two main diseases: poor management and a lack of vibrant entrepreneurial activity. The continent has the raw materials, the people, and the potential to be developed, and yet there remain barriers that prevent it from bettering itself. To promote entrepreneurship as an engine of economic development and growth, the author has developed a Quintuple Helix Model which advocates mutual cooperation and information sharing among the five helices and provides valuable guidelines to policymakers on how to build entrepreneurship ecosystems in sub-Saharan Africa. It goes on to examine the roles that government, donors, and public and private sectors play and how Africans themselves might take the development of entrepreneurial societies into their own hands. The book includes seven chapters that emphasize the key role that each of the five components could play in the development of entrepreneurial ecosystems. Entrepreneurship scholars, policy makers, and national and local governments of sub-Saharan Africa will value this insight as they strive to create a more favorable landscape for their citizenry.
An oligopoly (from the Greek, few sellers) is a market that is dominated by a few large and powerful players. As Steve Hannaford documents with numerous examples, virtually every industry today—from medical equipment to airlines, toy retailing to oil—is trending in this direction, in the greatest movement toward industry consolidation since the turn of the 20th century. Charting the course of this trend around the world, Hannaford examines the motivations behind consolidation resulting from mergers, acquisitions, buyouts, and alliances; how companies exert political pressure to their advantage; and how the actions of the most dominant players—such as Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart, Viacom, Dell, ExxonMobil, Citigroup, and others—affect the choices we make at the supermarket, the drugs we are prescribed, and the movies we watch. Everyone who reads the newspapers is aware of the dizzying pace of mergers, acquisitions, buyouts, and alliances, between big companies and small companies in every industry. Such deals, along with the growing social and political clout of the biggest companies, are critical issues for the economy and for our future as consumers. Charting the course of this trend around the world, Hannaford examines the motivations behind consolidation into corporate empires, how companies exert political pressure to their advantage, and how the actions of the most dominant players, such as Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart, Viacom, Dell, ExxonMobil, Citigroup, and others, affect the choices we have at the supermarket, the drugs we are prescribed, and the movies we watch. Considering the implications of industry concentration on competition, technological innovation, business management, strategy, consumer behavior, and politics, Hannaford paints a provocative, but ultimately balanced, picture of big business and its impact on society.
High school and public libraries will find this volume a welcome addition to reference book shelves. Engagingly written, this comprehensive volume gives students an overview of contemporary life in Panama-what religions are practiced, what the cuisine is consumed on a day-to-day basis, and what people wear in urban and rural settings, among many other topics. Modern literature, media outlets, gender issues, education, visual arts, and performing arts are also covered. While the focus is on current customs and contemporary culture, readers will also gain insight into Panama's unique relationship with the United States, which has been turbulent in the past at best. Students studying international politics, anthropology, world culture, and current events will find this to be a useful resource. This volume explores contemporary culture in Panama, a melting pot deep in the heart of Central America. Thanks to the construction of the Panama Canal and the need for laborers, Panama's culture today is teeming with influences from ethnicities from around the world, including American Indian, Chinese, West Indian, Greek, and French. High school and public libraries will find this volume a welcome addition to reference book shelves. Engagingly written, this comprehensive study gives students an overview of contemporary life in Panama-what religions are practiced, what the cuisine is consumed on a day-to-day basis, and what people wear in urban and rural settings, among many other topics. Modern literature, media outlets, gender issues, education, visual arts, and performing arts are also covered. While the focus is on current customs and contemporary culture, readers will also gain insight into Panama's unique relationship with the United States, which has been turbulent in the past at best. Students studying international politics, anthropology, world culture, and current events will find this to be a useful resource.
This in-depth series of literary portraits studies celebrities who died in famous and tragic ways—ways that still resonate as archetypal death scenarios in present day. We know their likes and dislikes, admire their talents, envy them for daring to be what we can't or what we won't. When they are snatched from us, we feel a personal loss and an unwillingness to let go. And so we transform these mere human beings into icons whose stars often shine in death even more brilliantly than in life. Dead Celebrities, Living Icons: Tragedy and Fame in the Age of the Multimedia Superstar explores this phenomenon through a series of essays on 14 men and women who are, arguably, the most famous people of the 20th and early 21st centuries. The book covers the epoch of the celebrity beginning in the 1930s with Howard Hughes and Walt Disney and continues to the present day with the life and death of Michael Jackson. Far more than just a collection of biographies, Dead Celebrities, Living Icons documents the philosophical importance and significance of the contemporary cult of the celebrity and analyzes the tragic consequences of a human life lived in the glare of the media spotlight.
In 1995 Ayman al-Zawahiri, a prominent terrorist figure recently associated with Al Queda and al-Jihad, issued a bounty against Dr. Nasr Abu Zaid, a respected Islamic scholar at Cairo University. What was Zaid's offense? Arguing that Islam's holy texts should be interpreted in the historical and linguistic context of their time, and that new interpretations should account for social change. His controversial claim that the Qur'an be interpreted metaphorically rather than literally further enraged fundamentalists. Labeled an apostate by the Cairo court of appeals, his life was threatened and he was forced to flee to the Netherlands with his wife. A professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at Leiden University in his adopted country, this progressive Islamic scholar insists that change is still possible and that new understandings of Islam can be accepted and advanced. Forgoing claims that Islam is a violent religion, Zaid shows us that, above all, justice and obedience lies at the heart of the Qur'an. At the outset of this book, we find Zaid growing up in Quhafa, a village in northern Egypt. Islam gives meaning and definition to his life. As he matures, we see him sorting through Egypt's various political developments and upheavals. Zaid carefully weaves such developments into the events of his own life--his father's death, raising his younger siblings, attending Cairo University, his study abroad, his marriages, the events leading to his exile, and his visit to Egypt after a seven-year absence. Through it all, we see him advancing in his academic career and applying new skills to his study and interpretation of the Qur'an. He wrestles with subjects such as polygamy, wife beating, inheritance, and the practice of usury in Islamic cultures. He asserts and illustrates that Islam must be separate from the State in order to protect the religion from political manipulation. Zaid's personal story and academic pursuits, reflecting the social reality of the broader culture, offer new perspectives on Islam and provide hope to Muslims who feel their religion has been misrepresented and misunderstood.
This book argues that the traditional image of Feyerabend is erroneous and that, contrary to common belief, he was a great admirer of science. It shows how Feyerabend presented a vision of science that represented how science really works. Besides giving a theoretical framework based on Feyerabend´s philosophy of science, the book offers criteria that can help readers to evaluate and understand research reported in important international science education journals, with respect to Feyerabend’s epistemological anarchism. The book includes an evaluation of general chemistry and physics textbooks. Most science curricula and textbooks provide the following advice to students: Do not allow theories in contradiction with observations, and all scientific theories must be formulated inductively based on experimental facts. Feyerabend questioned this widely prevalent premise of science education in most parts of the world, and in contrast gave the following advice: Scientists can accept a hypothesis despite experimental evidence to the contrary and scientific theories are not always consistent with all the experimental data. No wonder Feyerabend became a controversial philosopher and was considered to be against rationalism and anti-science. Recent research in philosophy of science, however, has shown that most of Feyerabend´s philosophical ideas are in agreement with recent trends in the 21st century. Of the 120 articles from science education journals, evaluated in this book only 9% recognized that Feyerabend was presenting a plurality of perspectives based on how science really works. Furthermore, it has been shown that Feyerabend could even be considered as a perspectival realist. Among other aspects, Feyerabend emphasized that in order to look for breakthroughs in science one does not have to be complacent about the truth of the theories but rather has to look for opportunities to “break rules” or “violate categories.” Mansoor Niaz carefully analyses references to Feyerabend in the literature and displays the importance of Feyerabend’s philosophy in analyzing, historical episodes. Niaz shows through this remarkable book a deep understanding to the essence of science. - Calvin Kalman, Concordia University, Canada In this book Mansoor Niaz explores the antecedents, context and features of Feyerabend’s work and offers a more-nuanced understanding, then reviews and considers its reception in the science education and philosophy of science literature. This is a valuable contribution to scholarship about Feyerabend, with the potential to inform further research as well as science education practice.- David Geelan, Griffith University, Australia
Competition among the national myths of the Pacific War held by the various countries of Northeast Asia and by the US about the Pacific still rages in the international politics, even while accurate understanding of what actually took place in that war has largely faded. Unresolved wartime grievances continue to constrain, distort, and embitter bilateral relationships, erupting over such issues as the Yasukuni Shrine, Japanese history textbooks, the Nanjing Massacre, the comfort women, how to remember the atomic bombs, and the US military bases on Okinawa. The first part of "The Pacific War and Its Political Legacies" recounts as straightforwardly and impartially as possible the trains of events of the Pacific War that continue to vex international relations in Northeast Asia. This summary historical narrative provides the reader with enough backstory to challenge the reader's own assumptions and to judge the veracity and balance of other competing national interpretations of the war. This second part of "The Pacific War and its Political Legacies" explains: the origins of contending interpretations of the war; how those interpretations have led to the positions and policies of postwar governments and societal groups on issues directly related to the war; and how the domestic and international political interests of successive postwar governments and factions have shaped the interpretations that are selected by national elites for inculcation by the national educational, political, and media systems under their control. Dr. Roy teases out the ambivalent roles of national elites as prisoners and inventors of history, constrained to reaffirm received national myths of the Pacific War while dynamically altering them to suit current political purposes.
Social identity - how people define and categorize themselves - is constructed and expressed through cultural practices, cultural production and corporeality. This text takes a theoretical approach in viewing social identity as an intricate "warp and weft" in which "we-identities" are more than mere agglomerations of single threads or collectives of individual "self-identities", such as ethnicity or gender. This is important for medieval Britain prior to the 11th century due to the ways in which aspects of identity have been used as defining criteria in both modern scholarship and in contemporary historical texts.
This authoritative work examines 500 years of interaction between the races in a country that during the apartheid era became a byword for racial disharmony. Nelson Mandela's release from prison in February 1990 was the defining moment in South Africa's transition from apartheid to democracy. But as this fascinating study shows, the racial history of South Africa is much more complex than a simple struggle between black and white. How did South Africa become a crossroads for peoples as diverse as the Zulu, the Xhosa, the Dutch, and the Chinese? Did the end of apartheid really herald a new dawn in race relations, or have the scars of those years yet to truly heal? To answer these questions, this timely volume examines South Africa's ethnic history over 500 years. From the earliest contacts between Europeans and Africans to the country's changing role in the post-apartheid era, this reference work traces the fascinating racial history of South Africa before, during, and after the apartheid years.
After a solid overview of the land, people, and history in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 covers religion. Jordan is still a conservative Muslim state, with a Sunni Muslim majority, that retains good relations with its citizens of other faiths. The discussion of literature and media in Chapter 3 emphasizes the pan-Arabic tradition. In Chapter 4, architecture, art, and traditional crafts in Jordan are shown to be linked to the history of the country and its religious and ethnic diversity. In Chapter 5, the cuisine and culture reveal inspiration from the region of Greater Syria. In the Gender, Marriage, and Family chapter, Shoup looks at the conservative and powerful family and changing women's roles. Highlighted in the Social Customs chapter are the topics of honor, shame, and respect, social clubs, and more on women's roles in the middle class. A final chapter on Music and Dance covers everything from their Bedouin roots to Arab rap.
This edited volume looks at the reproduction and transformation of family norms in contemporary times. Set against a context of far-right politics calling for a return to more conservative identity politics and family norms, and building on late 20th century social movements which challenged essentialist and functionalist understandings of identities and families, it considers a variety of non-traditional family structures. Written by scholars based in Argentina, Ghana, Italy, Portugal, the UK, and the USA, the chapters question what ‘counts’ as a family in contemporary times and considers how the discourses of power which operate in institutional and geographical contexts impact how families are recognized and valued. The book includes analysis of non-traditional and non-heteronormative families such as single-parent families, childless families, families with animal companions, LGBTQ families, families across the Global South, mixed heritage families and families of friends. Drawing on post-structuralist, critical, and feminist theories the contributors discuss how power relationships linked to gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality, dis/ability and other in/equalities intersect and operate in defining what counts as a family.
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