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Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Interdisciplinary studies
In the past few decades, and across disparate geographical
contexts, states have adopted policies and initiatives aimed at
institutionalizing relationships with "their" diasporas. These
practices, which range from creating new ministries to granting
dual citizenship, are aimed at integrating diasporas as part of a
larger "global" nation that is connected to, and has claims on the
institutional structures of the home state. Although links, both
formal and informal, between diasporas and their presumptive
homelands have existed in the past, the recent developments
constitute a far more widespread and qualitatively different
phenomenon.
In this book, Latha Varadarajan theorizes this novel and largely
overlooked trend by introducing the concept of the "domestic
abroad." Varadarajan demonstrates that the remapping of the
imagined boundaries of the nation, the visible surface of the
phenomenon, is intrinsically connected to the political-economic
transformation of the state that is typically characterized as
"neoliberalism." The domestic abroad must therefore be understood
as the product of two simultaneous, on-going processes: the
diasporic re-imagining of the nation and the neoliberal
restructuring of the state.
The argument unfolds through a historically nuanced study of the
production of the domestic abroad in India. The book traces the
complex history and explains the political logic of the remarkable
transition from the Indian state's guarded indifference toward its
diaspora in the period after independence, to its current
celebrations of the "global Indian nation." In doing so, The
Domestic Abroad reveals the manner in which the boundaries of the
nation and the extent of the authority of the state, in India and
elsewhere, are dynamically shaped by the development of capitalist
social relations on both global and national scales.
This book is an introduction to the philosophy of Arthur
Schopenhauer, written in a lively, personal style. Hannan
emphasizes the peculiar inconsistencies and tensions in
Schopenhauer's thought - he was torn between idealism and realism,
and between denial and affirmation of the individual will. In
addition to providing a useful summary of Schopenhauer's main
ideas, Hannan connects Schopenhauer's thought with ongoing debates
in philosophy. According to Hannan, Schopenhauer was struggling
half-consciously to break altogether with Kant and transcendental
idealism; the anti-Kantian features of Schopenhauer's thought
possess the most lasting value. Hannan defends panpsychist
metaphysics of will, comparing it with contemporary views according
to which causal power is metaphysically basic. Hannan also defends
Schopenhauer's ethics of compassion against Kant's ethics of pure
reason, and offers friendly amendments to Schopenhauer's theories
of art, music, and "salvation." She also illuminates the deep
connection between Schopenhauer and the early Wittgenstein, as well
as Schopenhauer's influence on existentialism and psychoanalytic
thought.
Across the world, governments design and implement policies with
the explicit goal of promoting social justice. But can such
institutions change entrenched social norms? And what effects
should we expect from differently designed policies? Francesca R.
Jensenius' Social Justice through Inclusion is an empirically rich
study of one of the most extensive electoral quota systems in the
world: the reserved seats for the Scheduled Castes (SCs, the former
"untouchables") in India's legislative assemblies. Combining
evidence from quantitative datasets from the period 1969-2012,
archival work, and in-depth interviews with politicians, civil
servants, and voters across India, the book explores the long-term
effects of electoral quotas for the political elite and the general
population. It shows that the quota system has played an important
role in reducing caste-based discrimination, particularly at the
elite level. Interestingly, this is not because the system has led
to more group representation - SC politicians working specifically
for SC interests - but because it has made possible the creation
and empowerment of a new SC elite who have gradually become
integrated into mainstream politics. This is a study of India, but
the findings and discussions have broader implications. Policies
such as quotas are usually supported with arguments about various
assumed positive long-term consequences. The nuanced discussions in
this book shed light on how electoral quotas for SCs have shaped
the incentives for politicians, parties, and voters, and indicate
the trade-offs inherent in how such policies of group inclusion are
designed.
Nuclear power has been a contentious issue in Japan since the
1950s, and in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear power plant
disaster, the conflict has only grown. Government agencies and the
nuclear industry continue to push a nuclear agenda, while the
mainstream media adheres to the official line that nuclear power is
Japan's future. Public debate about nuclear energy is strongly
discouraged. Nevertheless, antinuclear activism has swelled into
one of the most popular and passionate movements in Japan, leading
to a powerful wave of protest music. The Revolution Will Not Be
Televised: Protest Music After Fukushima shows that music played a
central role in expressing antinuclear sentiments and mobilizing
political resistance in Japan. Combining musical analysis with
ethnographic participation, author Noriko Manabe offers an
innovative typology of the spaces central to the performance of
protest music-cyberspace, demonstrations, festivals, and
recordings. She argues that these four spaces encourage different
modes of participation and methods of political messaging. The
openness, mobile accessibility, and potential anonymity of
cyberspace have allowed musicians to directly challenge the ethos
of silence that permeated Japanese culture post-Fukushima. Moving
from cyberspace to real space, Manabe shows how the performance and
reception of music played at public demonstrations are shaped by
the urban geographies of Japanese cities. While short on open
public space, urban centers in Japan offer protesters a wide range
of governmental and commercial spaces in which to demonstrate, with
activist musicians tailoring their performances to the particular
landscapes and soundscapes of each. Music festivals are a space
apart from everyday life, encouraging musicians and audience
members to freely engage in political expression through
informative and immersive performances. Conversely, Japanese record
companies and producers discourage major-label musicians from
expressing political views in recordings, forcing antinuclear
musicians to express dissent indirectly: through allegories,
metaphors, and metonyms. The first book on Japan's antinuclear
music, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised provides a compelling
new perspective on the role of music in political movements.
Since the advent of the cinema, Jesus has frequently appeared in
our movie houses and on our television screens. Indeed, it may well
be that more people worldwide know about Jesus and his life story
from the movies than from any other medium. Indeed, Jesus' story
has been adapted dozens of times throughout the history of
commercial cinema, from the 1912 silent From the Manger to the
Cross to Mel Gibson's 2004 The Passion of the Christ. No doubt
there are more to come.
Drawing on a broad range of movies, biblical scholar Adele
Reinhartz traces the way in which Jesus of Nazareth has become
Jesus of Hollywood. She argues that Jesus films both reflect and
influence cultural perceptions of Jesus and the other figures in
his story. She focuses on the cinematic interpretation of Jesus'
relationships with the key people in his life: his family, his
friends, and his foes. She examines how these films address
theological issues, such as Jesus' identity as both human and
divine, political issues, such as the role of the individual in
society and the possibility of freedom under political oppression,
social issues, such as gender roles and hierarchies, and personal
issues, such as the nature of friendship and human sexuality.
Reinhartz's study of Jesus' celluloid incarnations shows how Jesus
movies reshape the past in the image of the present. Despite
society's profound interest in Jesus as a religious and historical
figure, Jesus movies are fascinating not as history but as mirrors
of the concerns, anxieties, and values of our own era. As the story
of Jesus continues to capture the imagination of filmmakers and
moviegoers, he remains as significant a cultural figure today as he
was 2000years ago.
After centuries of neglect, the ethics of food are back with a
vengeance. Justice for food workers and small farmers has joined
the rising tide of concern over the impact of industrial
agriculture on food animals and the broader environment, all while
a global epidemic of obesity-related diseases threatens to
overwhelm modern health systems. An emerging worldwide social
movement has turned to local and organic foods, and struggles to
exploit widespread concern over the next wave of genetic
engineering or nanotechnologies applied to food. Paul B. Thompson's
book applies the rigor of philosophy to key topics in the first
comprehensive study explore interconnections hidden deep within
this welter of issues. Bringing more than thirty years of
experience working closely with farmers, agricultural researchers
and food system activists to the topic, he explores the eclipse of
food ethics during the rise of nutritional science, and examines
the reasons for its sudden re-emergence in the era of diet-based
disease. Thompson discusses social injustice in the food systems of
developed economies and shows how we have missed the key insights
for understanding food ethics in the developing world. His
discussions of animal production and the environmental impact of
agriculture breaks new ground where most philosophers would least
expect it. By emphasizing the integration of these issues, Thompson
not only brings a comprehensive philosophical approach to moral
issues in the production, processing, distribution, and consumption
of food - he introduces a fresh way to think about practical ethics
that will have implications in other areas of applied philosophy.
From the US Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial and the 9/11 Memorial
Museum, classical forms and ideas have been central to an American
nationalist aesthetic. Beginning with an understanding of this
centrality of the classical tradition to the construction of
American national identity and the projection of American power,
Empire of Ruin describes a mode of black classicism that has been
integral to the larger critique of American politics, aesthetics,
and historiography that African American cultural production has
more generally advanced. While the classical tradition has provided
a repository of ideas and images that have allowed white American
elites to conceive of the nation as an ideal Republic and the
vanguard of the idea of civilization, African American writers,
artists, and activists have characterized this dominant mode of
classical appropriation as emblematic of a national commitment to
an economy of enslavement and a geopolitical project of empire. If
the dominant forms of American classicism and monumental culture
have asserted the ascendancy of what Thomas Jefferson called an
"empire for liberty," for African American writers and artists it
has suggested that the nation is nothing exceptional, but rather
another iteration of what the radical abolitionist Henry Highland
Garnet identified as an "empire of slavery," inexorably devolving
into an "empire of ruin."
Defining Deutschtum: Political Ideology, German Identity, and
Music-Critical Discourse in Liberal Vienna offers a nuanced look at
the intersection of music, cultural identity, and political
ideology in late-nineteenth-century Vienna. Drawing on an extensive
selection of writings in the city's political press,
correspondence, archival documents, and a large body of recent
scholarship in late Habsburg cultural and political history, author
David Brodbeck argues that Vienna's music critics were important
agents in the public sphere whose writings gave voice to distinct,
sometimes competing ideological positions. These conflicting
positions are exemplified especially well in their critical
writings about the music of three notable composers of the day who
were Austrian citizens but not ethnic Germans: Carl Goldmark, a Jew
from German West Hungary, and the Czechs Bed?ich Smetana and
Antonin Dvo?ak.
Often at stake in the critical discourse was the question of who
and what could be deemed "German" in the multinational Austrian
state. For critics such as Eduard Hanslick and Ludwig Speidel,
traditional German liberals who came of age in the years around
1848, "Germanness" was an attribute that could be earned by any
ambitious bourgeois-including Jews and those of non-German
nationality-by embracing German cultural values. The more
nationally inflected liberalism evident in the writings of Theodor
Helm, with its particularist rhetoric of German national property
in a time of Czech gains at German expense, was typical of those in
the next generation, educated during the 1860s. The radical student
politics of the 1880s, with its embrace of racialist antisemitism
and irredentist German nationalism, just as surely shaped the
discourse of certain young Wagnerian critics who emerged at the end
of the century. This body of music-critical writing reveals a
continuum of exclusivity, from a conception of Germanness rooted in
social class and cultural elitism to one based in blood.
Brodbeck neatly counters decades of musicological scholarship and
offers a unique insight into the diverse ways in which educated
German Austrians conceived of Germanness in music and understood
their relationship to their non-German fellow citizens. Defining
Deutschtum is sure to be an essential text for scholars of music
history, cultural studies, and late 19th century Central European
culture and society."
Americans often look back on Paris between the world wars as a
charming escape from the enduring inequalities and reactionary
politics of the United States. In this bold and original study,
Brooke Blower shows that nothing could be further from the truth.
She reveals the breadth of American activities in the capital, the
lessons visitors drew from their stay, and the passionate responses
they elicited from others. For many sojourners-not just for the
most famous expatriate artists and writers- Paris served as an
important crossroads, a place where Americans reimagined their
position in the world and grappled with what it meant to be
American in the new century, even as they came up against
conflicting interpretations of American power by others.
Interwar Paris may have been a capital of the arts, notorious for
its pleasures, but it was also smoldering with radical and
reactionary plots, suffused with noise, filth, and chaos, teeming
with immigrants and refugees, communist rioters, fascism admirers,
overzealous police, and obnoxious tourists. Sketching Americans'
place in this evocative landscape, Blower shows how arrivals were
drawn into the capital's battles, both wittingly and unwittingly.
Americans in Paris found themselves on the front lines of an
emerging culture of political engagements-a transatlantic matrix of
causes and connections, which encompassed debates about
"Americanization" and "anti-American" protests during the
Sacco-Vanzetti affair as well as a host of other international
incidents. Blower carefully depicts how these controversies and a
backdrop of polarized European politics honed Americans' political
stances and sense of national distinctiveness.
A model of urban, transnational history, Becoming Americans in
Paris offers a nuanced portrait of how Americans helped to shape
the cultural politics of interwar Paris, and, at the same time, how
Paris helped to shape modern American political culture.
As Oliver Richmond explains, there is a level to peacemaking that
operates in the realm of dialogue, declarations, symbols and
rituals. But after all this pomp and circumstance is where the
reality of security, development, politics, economics, identity,
and culture figure in; conflict, cooperation, and reconciliation
are at their most vivid at the local scale. Thus local peace
operations are crucial to maintaining order on the ground even in
the most violent contexts. However, as Richmond argues, such local
capacity to build peace from the inside is generally left
unrecognized, and it has been largely ignored in the policy and
scholarly literature on peacebuilding. In Peace and Political
Order, Richmond looks at peace processes as they scale up from
local to transnational efforts to consider how to build a lasting
and productive peace. He takes a comparative and expansive look at
peace efforts in conflict situations in countries around the world
to consider what local voices might suggest about the inadequacy of
peace processes engineered at the international level. As well, he
explores how local workers act to modify or resist peace processes
headed by international NGOs, and to what degree local actors have
enjoyed success in the peace process (and how they have affected
the international peace process).
In September of 2010, the Daily Mail Reporter announced
"Anti-immigration party formed from skinhead movement seizes
balance of power in Sweden." A politics of skinhead protest,
expressed through White Power Music and an explicitly nationalistic
subgenre known as Viking Rock, has relied on its music to voice
opposition to immigration and multiculturism. Often labeled
"neo-Nazis" or "right-wing extremists," these actors shook
political establishments throughout Sweden, Denmark, and Norway
during the 1980s and 1990s by rallying around white power music and
skinhead subculture. More recently, however, these groups
methodically revised their presentation in an effort to refashion
themselves as upstanding, intelligent champions of love and human
diversity, and once again using music to do so. In Lions of the
North: Sounds of the New Nordic Radical Nationalism, author
Benjamin Teitelbaum explores this transformation of anti-immigrant,
anti-liberal activism in the Nordic countries as it manifests in
thought and sound. As his fieldwork in Sweden overlapped with
Anders Behring Breivik's attacks in 2011, Teitelbaum observed the
radical nationalist movement at a particularly sensitive moment.
Offering a rare ethnographic glimpse into controversial and
secretive political movements, Lions of the North investigates
changes in the music nationalists make and patronize, reading their
surprising new music styles as attempts to escape stereotypes and
fashion a new image for themselves. Teitelbaum's work reveals
organized opposition to immigration and multiculturalism in
Scandinavia to be a scene in flux, populated by individuals with
diverse understandings of themselves, their cause, and the
significance of music. Ultimately, he uncovers the ways in which
nationalists use music to frame themselves as agents of justice, an
image that is helping to propel these actors to unprecedented
success in societies often considered the most tolerant in the
world. A timely and powerful work of interdisciplinary
ethnomusicology, Lions of the North will appeal to a wide audience,
from scholars in the humanities to those in political science.
This volume of essays explores the long-unstudied relationship
between religion and human security throughout the world. The 1950s
marked the beginning of a period of extraordinary religious
revival, during which religious political-parties and
non-governmental organizations gained power around the globe. Until
now, there has been little systematic study of the impact that this
phenomenon has had on human welfare, except of a relationship
between religious revival to violence. The authors of these essays
show that religion can have positive as well as negative effects on
human wellbeing. They address a number of crucial questions about
the relationship between religion and human security: Under what
circumstances do religiously motivated actors tend to advance human
welfare, and under what circumstances do they tend to threaten it?
Are members of some religious groups more likely to engage in
welfare-enhancing behavior than in others? Do certain state
policies tend to promote security-enhancing behavior among
religious groups while other policies tend to promote
security-threatening ones? In cases where religious actors are
harming the welfare of a population, what responses could eliminate
that threat without replacing it with another? Religion and Human
Security shows that many states tend to underestimate the power of
religious organizations as purveyors of human security. Governments
overlook both the importance of human security to their populations
and the religious groups who could act as allies in securing the
welfare of their people. This volume offers a rich variety of
theoretical perspectives on the nuanced relationship between
religion and human security. Through case studies ranging from
Turkey, Egypt, and Pakistan, to the United States, Northern
Ireland, and Zimbabwe, it provides important suggestions to policy
makers of how to begin factoring the influence of religion into
their evaluation of a population's human security and into programs
designed to improve human security around the globe.
The reality of transnational innovation and dissemination of new
technologies, including digital media, has yet to make a dent in
the deep-seated culturalism that insists on reinscribing a divide
between the West and Japan. The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema
aims to counter this trend toward dichotomizing the West and Japan
and to challenge the pervasive culturalism of today's film and
media studies.
Featuring twenty essays, each authored by a leading researcher in
the field, this volume addresses productive debates about where
Japanese cinema is and where Japanese cinema is going at the period
of crisis of national boundary under globalization. It reevaluates
the position of Japanese cinema within the discipline of cinema and
media studies and beyond, and situates Japanese cinema within the
broader fields of transnational film history. Likewise, it examines
the materiality of Japanese cinema, scrutinizes cinema's
relationship to other media, and identifies the specific practices
of film production and reception. As a whole, the volume fosters a
dialogue between Japanese scholars of Japanese cinema, film
scholars of Japanese cinema based in Anglo-American and European
countries, film scholars of non-Japanese cinema, film archivists,
film critics, and filmmakers familiar with film scholarship.
A comprehensive volume that grasps Japanese cinema under the rubric
of the global and also fills the gap between Japanese and
non-Japanese film studies and between theories and practices, The
Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema challenges and responds to the
major developments underfoot in this rapidly changing field.
Transnational Cooperation: An Issue-Based Approach presents an
analysis of transnational cooperation or collective action that
stresses basic concepts and intuition. Throughout the book, authors
Clint Peinhardt and Todd Sandler identify factors that facilitate
and/or inhibit such cooperation. The first four chapters lay the
analytical foundations for the book, while the next nine chapters
apply the analysis to a host of exigencies and topics of great
import. The authors use elementary game theory as a tool for
illustrating the ideas put forth in the text. Game theory reminds
us that rational actors (for example, countries, firms, or
individuals) must account for the responses by other rational
actors. The book assumes no prior knowledge of game theory; all
game-theoretic concepts and analyses are explained in detail to the
reader. Peinhardt and Sandler also employ paired comparisons in
illustrating the book's concepts. The book is rich in applications
and covers a wide range of topics, including superbugs, civil wars,
money laundering, financial crises, drug trafficking, terrorism,
global health concerns, international trade liberalization, acid
rain, leadership, sovereignty, and many others. Students,
researchers, and policymakers alike have much to gain from
Transnational Cooperation. It is a crossover book for economics,
political science, and public policy.
In 1962, when the Cold War threatened to ignite in the Cuban
Missile Crisis, when more nuclear test bombs were detonated than in
any other year in history, Rachel Carson released her own
bombshell, Silent Spring, to challenge society's use of pesticides.
To counter the use of chemicals-and bombs-the naturalist
articulated a holistic vision. She wrote about a "web of life" that
connected humans to the world around them and argued that actions
taken in one place had consequences elsewhere. Pesticides sprayed
over croplands seep into ground water and move throughout the
ecosystem, harming the environment. Thousands accepted her message,
joined environmental groups, flocked to Earth Day celebrations, and
lobbied for legislative regulation. Carson was not the only
intellectual to offer holistic answers to society's problems. This
book uncovers a holistic sensibility in post-World War II American
culture that both tested the logic of the Cold War and fed some of
the twentieth century's most powerful social movements, from civil
rights to environmentalism to the counterculture. The study
examines six important leaders and institutions that embraced and
put into practice a holistic vision for a peaceful, healthful, and
just world: nature writer Rachel Carson; structural engineer R.
Buckminster Fuller; civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.;
Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin;
humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow; and the Esalen Institute
and its founders, Michael Murphy and Dick Price. Each looked to
whole systems instead of parts and focused on connections,
interdependencies, and integration to create a better world. In the
1960s and 1970s, holistic conceptions and practices infused the
March on Washington, Earth Day, the human potential movement, New
Age spirituality, and alternative medicine. Though dreams of
creating a more perfect world were tempered by economic
inequalities, political corruption, and deep social divisions, this
sensibility influenced American culture in important ways that
continue into the twenty-first century.
Famous for his painstaking attention to detail and for the
craftsmanship and artistry he brought to his work, filmmaker
Stanley Kubrick is by now long established as both the subject of
an entire sub-field of scholarly inquiry, and as the object of all
levels of cinema studies pedagogy. His oeuvre, developed over
nearly 50 years, traverses an immensely broad variety of film
genres and subjects and has long been studied and understood in
terms of its narrative, thematic, and striking visual elements.
However, unique and often startling encounters between music and
the moving image are central trademarks of Kubrick's style; witness
the powerful effects of Strauss's "Also Sprach Zarathustra" in
2001: A Space Odyssey and of Beethoven's 9th Symphony in A
Clockwork Orange, each excerpt hand-picked by Kubrick himself.
We'll Meet Again argues that some of the most compelling and
understudied aspects of Stanley Kubrick's films are musically
conceived. Author Kate McQuiston illustrates that, for Kubrick,
music is neither post-production afterthought nor background nor
incidental, but rather core to films' themes and meanings. The book
is divided into three sections, the first of which identifies the
building blocks in Kubrick's sonic world and illuminates the ways
in which Kubrick uses them to substantiate his characters and to
define character relationships. The second section delves into the
effects of Kubrick's signature musical techniques, including the
use of texture, recurrence, and inscription to render and reinforce
psychological ideas and particular spectator responses. The third
and final section presents case studies in which the history of the
music Kubrick chooses plays a vital and dynamic role. Throughout
the author's arguments, the book locates Kubrick as a force in
music reception history by examining the relationship between his
musical choices and popular culture.
Making Institutions Work places institutions, the processes and
structures of institutionalisation at the centre of constitutional
democracy, state and society. By doing so, it recognises that (a)
institutions are the pillows of a constitutional democracy, (b)
institutions evolve through the action of persons (agency); (c)
institutions as organisations form structures of dynamic shared
social patterns of behaviour through the implementation of a system
of rule of law. The book offers an interdisciplinary critical
commentary by scholars, analysts and experts regarding strategic
thinking, form, structural and functional impediments and
facilitators to institutions and institutionalisation.
The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies introduces and
reviews current thinking in the interdisciplinary field of material
culture studies. Drawing together approaches from archaeology,
anthropology, geography, and Science and Technology Studies,
through twenty-eight specially commissioned essays by leading
international researchers, the volume explores contemporary issues
and debates in a series of themed sections - Disciplinary
Perspectives, Material Practices, Objects and Humans, Landscapes
and the Built Environment, and Studying Particular Things. From
Coca-Cola, chimpanzees, artworks, and ceramics, to museums, cities,
human bodies, and magical objects, the Handbook is an essential
resource for anyone with an interest in materiality and the place
of material objects in human social life, both past and present. A
comprehensive bibliography enhances its usefulness as a research
tool.
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Roland Barthes' Cinema
(Hardcover)
Philip Watts; Edited by Dudley Andrew, Yves Citton, Vincent Debaene, Sam Di Iorio
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R3,736
Discovery Miles 37 360
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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The most famous name in French literary circles from the late 1950s
till his death in 1981, Roland Barthes maintained a contradictory
rapport with the cinema. As a cultural critic, he warned of its
surreptitious ability to lead the enthralled spectator toward an
acceptance of a pre-given world. As a leftist, he understood that
spectacle could be turned against itself and provoke deep
questioning of that pre-given world. And as an extraordinarily
sensitive human being, he relished the beauty of images and the
community they could bring together.
'No' is the first thing I ever said. It was actually the only thing
I said in my first speaking months. Like most children, I was born
with an innate ability to set boundaries for myself. 'No.' 'Mine.'
I intuitively knew how to practise self-care and self-preservation.
Then, at some point, just like my ability to shuffle across the
floor on my butt, I forgot how to say no... Traumatic childhood
sleepovers, stressful social occasions, unrealistic demands at
work, unwanted second dates and endless offers of cake, in her
memoir, award-winning writer Stefanie Preissner leaves no NO
unexplored. From the issue of consent, and what happens when a
whole country comes together to say Yes, Can I Say NO? is one
woman's honest and hilarious take on how re-learning one small word
can pave the way to saying YES to who you really are.
In the "twinkling of an eye" Jesus secretly returns to earth and
gathers to him all believers. As they are taken to heaven, the
world they leave behind is plunged into chaos. Cars and airplanes
crash and people search in vain for loved ones. Plagues, famine,
and suffering follow. The
antichrist emerges to rule the world and to destroy those who
oppose him. Finally, Christ comes again in glory, defeats the
antichrist and reigns over the earth. This apocalyptic scenario is
anticipated by millions of Americans. These millions have made the
Left Behind series--novels that depict the
rapture and apocalypse--perennial bestsellers, with over 40 million
copies now in print. In Rapture Culture, Amy Johnson Frykholm
explores this remarkable phenomenon, seeking to understand why
American evangelicals find the idea of the rapture so compelling.
What is the secret behind the remarkable
popularity of the apocalyptic genre? One answer, she argues, is
that the books provide a sense of identification and communal
belonging that counters the "social atomization" that characterizes
modern life. This also helps explain why they appeal to female
readers, despite the deeply patriarchal
worldview they promote. Tracing the evolution of the genre of
rapture fiction, Frykholm notes that at one time such narratives
expressed a sense of alienation from modern life and protest
against the loss of tradition and the marginalization of
conservative religious views. Now, however,
evangelicalism's renewed popular appeal has rendered such themes
obsolete. Left Behind evinces a new embrace of technology and
consumer goods as tools for God's work, while retaining a protest
against modernity's transformationof traditional family life.
Drawing on extensive interviews with readers
of the novels, Rapture Culture sheds light on a mindset that is
little understood and far more common than many of us suppose.
From an unpromising start as 'the basket-case' to present day
plaudits for its human development achievements, Bangladesh plays
an ideological role in the contemporary world order, offering proof
that the neo-liberal development model works under the most testing
conditions. How were such rapid gains possible in a context of
chronically weak governance? The Aid Lab subjects this so-called
'Bangladesh paradox' to close scrutiny, evaluating public policies
and their outcomes for poverty and development since Bangladesh's
independence in 1971. Countering received wisdom that its gains owe
to an early shift to market-oriented economic reform, it argues
that a binding political settlement, a social contract to protect
against the crises of subsistence and survival, united the elite,
the masses, and their aid donors in the wake of the devastating
famine of 1974. This laid resilient foundations for human
development, fostering a focus on the poorest and most precarious,
and in particular on the concerns of women. In chapters examining
the environmental, political and socioeconomic crisis of the 1970s,
the book shows how the lessons of the famine led to a robustly
pro-poor growth and social policy agenda, empowering the
Bangladeshi state and its non-governmental organizations to protect
and enable its population to thrive in its engagements in the
global economy. Now a middle-income country, Bangladesh's role as
the world's laboratory for aided development has generated lessons
well beyond its borders, and Bangladesh continues to carve a
pioneering pathway through the risks of global economic integration
and climate change.
Moving back through Dewey, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Rousseau, the
lineage of Western music education finds its origins in Plato and
Pythagoras. Yet theories not rooted in the ancient Greek tradition
are all but absent. A Way of Music Education provides a much-needed
intervention, integrating ancient Chinese thought into the canon of
music education in a structured, systematized, and philosophical
way. The book's three central sources - the Yijing (The Book of
Changes), Confucianism, and Daoism - inform author C. Victor Fung's
argument: that the human being exists as an entity at the center of
an organismic world in which all things and events, including music
and music education, are connected. Fung ultimately proposes a new
educational philosophy based on three key ideas in Chinese thought:
change, balance, and liberation. A unique work, A Way of Music
Education offers a universal approach engrained in a specific and
ancient cultural tradition.
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