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Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Interdisciplinary studies
How online affinity networks expand learning and opportunity for
young people Boyband One Direction fanfiction writers, gamers who
solve math problems together, Harry Potter fans who knit for a
cause. Across subcultures and geographies, young fans have found
each other and formed community online, learning from one another
along the way. From these and other in-depth case studies of online
affinity networks, Affinity Online considers how young people have
found new opportunities for expanded learning in the digital age.
These cases reveal the shared characteristics and unique cultures
and practices of different online affinity networks, and how they
support "connected learning"-learning that brings together youth
interests, social activity, and accomplishment in civic, academic,
and career relevant arenas. Although involvement in online
communities is an established fixture of growing up in the
networked age, participation in these spaces show how young people
are actively taking up new media for their own engaged learning and
social development. While providing a wealth of positive examples
for how the online world provides new opportunities for learning,
the book also examines the ways in which these communities still
reproduce inequalities based on gender, race, and socioeconomic
status. The book concludes with a set of concrete suggestions for
how the positive learning opportunities offered by online
communities could be made available to more young people, at school
and at home. Affinity Online explores how online practices and
networks bridge the divide between in-school and out-of-school
learning, finding that online affinity networks are creating new
spaces of opportunity for realizing the ideals of connected
learning.
Systemic and political hostility against the 'left', real and
contrived, has been a key, yet under-recognized aspect of the
history of the modern world for the past two hundred years. By the
1820s, the new, exploitative and destabilizing character of
capitalist industrial production and its accompanying market
liberalizations began creating necessities among the working
classes and their allies for the new, self-protective politics of
'socialism'. But it is evident that, for the new economic system to
sustain itself, such oppositional politics that it necessitated had
to be undermined, if not destroyed, by whatever means necessary.
Through the imperialism of the later 19th century, and with
significant variations, this complex and often highly destructive
dialectical syndrome expanded worldwide. Liberals, conservatives,
extreme nationalists, fascists, racists, and others have all
repeatedly come aggressively and violently into play against
'socialist' oppositions. In this book, Philip Minehan traces the
patterns of such hostility and presents numerous crucial examples
of it: from Britain, France, Germany and the United States; the
British in India; European fascism, the United States and Britain
as they operated in China and Indochina; from Kenya, Algeria and
Iran; and from Central and South America during the Cold War. In
the final chapters, Minehan addresses the post-Cold War, US-led
triumphalist wars in the Middle East, the ensuing refugee crises,
neo-fascism, and anti-environmentalist politics, to show the ways
that the syndrome within which anti-leftist antagonism emerges, in
its neoliberal phase since the 1970s, remains as self-destructive
and dangerous as ever
Unrecognized in the United States and resisted in many wealthy,
industrialized nations, children's rights to participation and
self-determination are easily disregarded in the name of
protection. In literature, the needs of children are often obscured
by protectionist narratives, which redirect attention to parents by
mythologizing the supposed innocence, victimization, and
vulnerability of children rather than potential agency. In Perils
of Protection: Shipwrecks, Orphans, and Children's Rights, author
Susan Honeyman traces how the best of intentions to protect
children can nonetheless hurt them when leaving them unprepared to
act on their own behalf. Honeyman utilizes literary parallels and
discursive analysis to highlight the unchecked protectionism that
has left minors increasingly isolated in dwindling social units and
vulnerable to multiple injustices made possible by eroded or
unrecognized participatory rights. Each chapter centers on a
perilous pattern in a different context: ""women and children
first"" rescue hierarchies, geographic restriction, abandonment,
censorship, and illness. Analysis from adventures real and
fictionalized will offer the reader high jinx and heroism at sea,
the rush of risk, finding new families, resisting censorship
through discovering shared political identity, and breaking the
pretenses of sentimentality.
Vacillating between the longue duree and microhistory, between
ideological critique and historical sympathy, between the contrary
formalisms of close and distant reading, literary historians
operate with such disparate senses of what the term "history" means
that the field risks compartmentalization and estrangement. The
Romantic Historicism to Come engages this uncertainty in order to
construct a more robust, more capacious idea of history. Focusing
attention on Romantic conceptions of history's connection to the
future, The Romantic Historicism to Come examines the complications
of not only Romantic historicism, but also our own contemporary
critical methods: what would it mean if the causal assumptions that
underpin our historical judgments do not themselves develop in a
stable, progressive manner? Articulating history's minimum
conditions, Jonathan Crimmins develops a theoretical apparatus that
accounts for the concurrent influence of the various
sociohistorical forces that pressure each moment. He provides a
conception of history as open to radical change without severing
its connection to causality, better addressing the problem of the
future at the heart of questions about the past.
At least 200,000 people died from hunger or malnutrition-related
diseases in Spain during the 1940s. This book provides a political
explanation for the famine and brings together a broad range of
academics based in Spain, the United Kingdom, the United States and
Australia to achieve this. Topics include the political causes of
the famine, the physical and social consequences, the ways
Spaniards tried to survive, the regime's reluctance to accept
international relief, the politics of cooking at a time of famine,
and the memory of the famine. The volume challenges the silence and
misrepresentation that still surround the famine. It reveals the
reality of how people perished in Spain because the Francoist
authorities instituted a policy of food self-sufficiency (or
autarky): a system of price regulation which placed restrictions on
transport as well as food sales. The contributors trace the massive
decline in food production which followed, the hoarding which took
place on an enormous scale and the vast and deeply iniquitous black
market that subsequently flourished at a time when salaries plunged
to 50% below their levels in 1936: all contributing factors in the
large-scale atrocity explored fully here for the first time.
Politics of the Many draws inspiration from Percy Bysshe Shelley's
celebrated call to arms: 'Ye are many - they are few!' This idea of
the Many, as a general form of emancipatory subjectivity that
cannot be erased for the sake of the One, is the philosophical and
political assumption shared by contributors to this book. They
raise questions of collective agency, and its crisis in
contemporary capitalism, via new engagements with Marxist
philosophy, psychoanalysis, theories of social reproduction and
value-form, and post-colonial critiques, and drawing on activist
thought and strategies. This book interrogates both established and
emergent formations of the Many (the people, classes, publics,
crowds, masses, multitudes), tracing their genealogies, their
recent failures and victories, and their potentials to change the
world. The book proposes and explores an intense and provoking
series of new or reinvented concepts, figures, and theoretical
constellations, including dividuality, the centaur, unintentional
vanguard, insomnia at work, always-on capitalism, multitude (from
its 'voiding' to a '(non)emergence'), crowds, necropolitics, and
the link between political subjectivity and value-form. The
contributors to Politics of the Many are both acclaimed and
emergent thinkers including Carina Brand, Rebecca Carson, Luhuna
Carvalho, Lorenzo Chiesa, Jodi Dean, Dario Gentili, Benjamin
Halligan, Marc James Leger, Paul Mazzocchi, Alexei Penzin, Stefano
Pippa, Gerald Raunig, and Stevphen Shukaitis.
Caribbean Discourse in Inclusive Education is an edited book series
that aims to give voice to Caribbean scholars, practitioners, and
other professionals working in diverse classrooms. The book series
is intended to provide an ongoing forum for Caribbean researchers,
practitioners, and academics, including those of the Diaspora, to
critically examine issues that influence the education of children
within inclusive settings. The book series is visionary, timely,
authoritative and presents pioneering work in the area of inclusive
education in the Caribbean, as part of the broader South?South
dialogue. It is essential reading for students in undergraduate and
postgraduate programmes, scholars, teachers, researchers and policy
makers at the regional and international level. The first book in
this series entitled Historical and Contemporary Issues will trace
the history and examine the Caribbean's trajectory towards the
development of inclusive education in the 21st Century. The main
premise of the book is that inclusion remains an ideologically
sound goal, which remains elusive in the Caribbean. It will also
provide a wider platform to discuss other factors that influence
the development of inclusive education such as school climate,
culture and ethos, LGBT issues, teacher training and professional
development, pedagogy, pupil perspective, curriculum, policy and
legislation.
In her new book, Corine Pelluchon argues that the dichotomy between
nature and culture privileges the latter. She laments that the
political system protects the sovereignty of the human and leaves
them immune to impending environmental disaster. Using the
phenomenological writings of French philosophers like Emmanuel
Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and Paul Ricoeur, Pelluchon contends that
human beings have to recognise humanity's dependence upon the
natural world for survival and adopt a new philosophy of existence
that advocates for animal welfare and ecological preservation. In
an extension of Heidegger's ontology of concern, Pelluchon declares
that this dependence is not negative or a sign of weakness. She
argues instead, that we are nourished by the natural world and that
the very idea of nourishment contains an element of pleasure. This
sustenance comforts humans and gives their lives taste. Pelluchon's
new philosophy claims then, that eating has an affective, social
and cultural dimension, but that most importantly it is a political
act. It solidifies the eternal link between human beings and
animals, and warns that the human consumption of animals and other
natural resources impacts upon humanity's future.
In The Anti-Heroine on Contemporary Television: Transgressive
Women, Molly Brost explores the various applications and
definitions of the term anti-heroine, showing that it has been
applied to a wide variety of female characters on television that
have little in common beyond their failure to behave in morally
"correct" and traditionally feminine ways. Rather than dismiss the
term altogether, Brost employs the term to examine what types of
behaviors and characteristics cause female characters to be labeled
anti-heroines, how those qualities and behaviors differ from those
that cause men to be labeled anti-heroes, and how the label
reflects society's attitudes toward and beliefs about women. Using
popular television series such as Jessica Jones, Scandal, and The
Good Place, Brost acknowledges the problematic nature of the term
anti-heroine and uses it as a starting point to study the complex
women on television, analyzing how the broadening spectrum of
character types has allowed more nuanced portrayals of women's
lives on television.
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