Tucked into the files of Iowa State University's Cooperative Extension Service is a small, innocuous looking pamphlet with the title Lenders: Working through the Farmer-Lender Crisis. Cooperative Extension Service intended this publication to improve bankers' empathy and communication skills, especially when facing farmers showing "Suicide Warning Signs." After all, they were working with individuals experiencing extreme economic distress, and each banker needed to learn to "be a good listener." What was important, too, was what was left unsaid. Iowa State published this pamphlet in April of 1986. Just four months earlier, farmer Dale Burr of Lone Tree, Iowa, had killed his wife, and then walked into the Hills Bank and Trust company and shot a banker to death in the lobby before taking shots at neighbors, killing one of them, and then killing himself. The unwritten subtext of this little pamphlet was "beware." If bankers failed to adapt to changing circumstances, the next desperate farmer might be shooting.This was Iowa in the 1980s. The state was at the epicenter of a nationwide agricultural collapse unmatched since the Great Depression. In When a Dream Dies, Pamela Riney-Kehrberg examines the lives of ordinary Iowa farmers during this period, as the Midwest experienced the worst of the crisis. While farms failed and banks foreclosed, rural and small-town Iowans watched and suffered, struggling to find effective ways to cope with the crisis. If families and communities were to endure, they would have to think about themselves, their farms, and their futures in new ways. For many Iowan families, this meant restructuring their lives or moving away from agriculture completely. This book helps to explain how this disaster changed children, families, communities, and the development of the nation's heartland in the late twentieth century. Agricultural crises are not just events that affect farms. When a Dream Dies explores the Farm Crisis of the 1980s from the perspective of the two-thirds of the state's agricultural population seriously affected by a farm debt crisis that rapidly spiraled out of their control. Riney-Kehrberg treats the Farm Crisis as a family event while examining the impact of the crisis on mental health and food insecurity and discussing the long-term implications of the crisis for the shape and function of agriculture.

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.

Applications have transformed the collaboration environment from a mere document collection into a highly interconnected social space. These systems interoperate within a social and organizational context that drives their everyday use and provides a rich context for understanding the role of nodes that represent both people and abstract concepts. Techno-Social Systems for Modern Economical and Governmental Infrastructures provides emerging research exploring the theoretical and practical aspects of mining technological and social systems for the creation of scalable methods, systems, and applications within economic and government disciplines. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as analysis models, data navigation, and empirical sociology, this book is ideally designed for professionals, researchers, executives, managers, and developers seeking current research on the interconnecting roles of technology and social space.

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.

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.

In the era of globalization, awareness surrounding issues of violence and human rights violations has reached an all-time high. In a world where billions of human beings have the potential to create endless destruction, these same individuals are capable of working cooperatively to create adequate solutions to current global problems. The Handbook of Research on Transitional Justice and Peace Building in Turbulent Regions focuses on current issues facing nations and regions where poverty and conflict are endangering the lives of citizens as well as the socio-economic viability of those regions. Highlighting crucial topics and offering potential solutions to problems relating to domestic and international conflict, societal safety and security, as well as political instability, this comprehensive publication is designed to meet the research needs of economists, social theorists, politicians, policy makers, human rights activists, researchers, and graduate-level students across disciplines.

“In The Russians are Coming Again, Jeremy Kuzmarov and John Marciano present an excellent and well researched effort to remind liberal America of how awful the Cold War was and how it was based on a cynical exaggeration of a largely fictional `Russian threat.’ Their warning against creating a new Cold War with post-communist Russia is well worth considering.”—David N. Gibbs, University of Arizona, author, First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia Karl Marx famously wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon that history repeats itself, “first as tragedy, then as farce.” The Cold War waged between the United States and Soviet Union from 1945 until the latter's dissolution in 1991 was a great tragedy, resulting in millions of civilian deaths in proxy wars, and a destructive arms race that diverted money from social spending and nearly led to nuclear annihilation. The New Cold War between the United States and Russia is playing out as farce – a dangerous one at that. The Russians Are Coming, Again is a red flag to restore our historical consciousness about U.S.-Russian relations, and how denying this consciousness is leading to a repetition of past follies. Kuzmarov and Marciano's book is timely and trenchant. The authors argue that the Democrats’ strategy, backed by the corporate media, of demonizing Russia and Putin in order to challenge Trump is not only dangerous, but also, based on the evidence so far, unjustified, misguided, and a major distraction. Grounding their argument in all-but-forgotten U.S.-Russian history, such as the 1918-20 Allied invasion of Soviet Russia, the book delivers a panoramic narrative of the First Cold War, showing it as an all-too avoidable catastrophe run by the imperatives of class rule and political witch-hunts. The distortion of public memory surrounding the First Cold War has set the groundwork for the New Cold War, which the book explains is a key feature, skewing the nation’s politics yet again. This is an important, necessary book, one that, by including accounts of the wisdom and courage of the First Cold War's victims and dissidents, will inspire a fresh generation of radicals in today's new, dangerously farcical times.

Fifty years after Algerian independence, the legacy of France's Algerian past, and the ongoing complexities of the Franco-Algerian relationship, remain a key preoccupation in both countries. A central role in shaping understanding of their shared past and present is played by visual culture. This study investigates how relations between France and Algeria have been represented and contested through visual means since the outbreak of the Algerian War in 1954. It probes the contours of colonial and postcolonial visual culture in both countries, highlighting the important roles played by still and moving images when Franco-Algerian relations are imagined. Analysing a wide range of images made on both sides of the Mediterranean - from colonial picture postcards of French Algeria to contemporary representations of postcolonial Algiers - this new book is the first to trace the circulation of, and connections between, a diverse range of images and media within this field of visual culture. It shows how the visual representation of Franco-Algerian links informs our understanding both of the lived experience of postcoloniality within Europe and the Maghreb, and of wider contemporary geopolitics.

The Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries Since 1975 is the final volume of the four-volume series of cultural histories of the avant-garde movements in the Nordic countries. This volume carries the avant-garde discussion forward to present-day avant-gardes, challenged by the globalisation of the entertainment industries and new interactive media such as the internet. The avant-garde can now be considered a tradition that has been made more widely available through the opening of archives, electronic documentation and new research, which has spurred both re-enactments, revisions and continuations of historical avant-garde practices, while new cultural contexts, political, technological and ecological conditions have called for new strategies.

Agrarian social movements are at a crossroads. Although these movements have made significant strides in advancing the concept of food sovereignty, the reality is that many of their members remain engaged in environmentally degrading forms of agriculture, and the lands they farm are increasingly unproductive. Whether movement farmers will be able to remain living on the land, and dedicated to alternative agricultural practices, is a pressing question. The Political Ecology of Education examines the opportunities for and constraints on advancing food sovereignty in the 17 de Abril settlement, a community born out of a massacre of landless Brazilian workers in 1996. Based on immersive fieldwork over the course of seven years, David Meek makes the provocative argument that critical forms of food systems education are integral to agrarian social movements' survival. While the need for critical approaches is especially immediate in the Amazon, Meek's study speaks to the burgeoning attention to food systems education at various educational levels worldwide, from primary to postgraduate programs. His book calls us to rethink the politics of the possible within these pedagogies.

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.

Metropolis, Gotham City, Mega-City One, Panem's Capitol, the Sprawl, Caprica City-American (and Americanized) urban environments have always been a part of the fantastic imagination. Fantastic Cities: American Urban Spaces in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror focuses on the American city as a fantastic geography constrained neither by media nor rigid genre boundaries. Fantastic Cities builds on a mix of theoretical and methodological tools that are drawn from criticism of the fantastic, media studies, cultural studies, American studies, and urban studies. Contributors explore cultural media across many platforms such as Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy, the Arkham Asylum video games, the 1935 movie serial The Phantom Empire, Kim Stanley Robinson's fiction, Colson Whitehead's novel Zone One, the vampire films Only Lovers Left Alive and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Paolo Bacigalupi's novel The Water Knife, some of Kenny Scharf's videos, and Samuel Delany's classic Dhalgren. Together, the contributions in Fantastic Cities demonstrate that the fantastic is able to "real-ize" that which is normally confined to the abstract, metaphorical, and/or subjective. Consequently, both utopian aspirations for and dystopian anxieties about the American city become literalized in the fantastic city. Contributions by Carl Abbott, Jacob Babb, Marleen S. Barr, Michael Fuchs, John Glover, Stephen Joyce, Sarah Lahm, James McAdams, Cynthia J. Miller, Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns, Chris Pak, Maria Isabel Perez Ramos, Stefan Rabitsch, J. Jesse Ramirez, A. Bowdoin Van Riper, Andrew Wasserman, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, and Robert Yeates.

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.