Stand-up comedians have a long history of walking a careful line between serious and playful engagement with social issues: Lenny Bruce questioned the symbolic valence of racial slurs, Dick Gregory took time away from the stage to speak alongside Martin Luther King Jr., and-more recently-Tig Notaro challenged popular notions of damaged or abject bodies. Stand-up comedians deploy humor to open up difficult topics for broader examination, which only underscores the social and cultural importance of their work. Taking a Stand: Contemporary US Stand-Up Comedians as Public Intellectuals draws together essays that contribute to the analysis of the stand-up-comedian-as-public intellectual since the 1980s. The chapters explore stand-up comedians as contributors to and shapers of public discourse via their live performances, podcasts, social media presence, and political activism. Each chapter highlights a stand-up comedian and their ongoing discussion of a cultural issue or expression of a political ideology/standpoint: Lisa Lampanelli's use of problematic postracial humor, Aziz Ansari's merging of sociology and technology, or Maria Bamford's emphasis on mental health, to name just a few. Taking a Stand offers a starting point for understanding the work stand-up comedians do as well as its reach beyond the stage. Comedians influence discourse, perspectives, even public policy on myriad issues, and this book sets out to take those jokes seriously. Contributions by Jared N. Champion, Miriam M. Chirico, Thomas Clark, David R. Dewberry, Christopher J. Gilbert, David Gillota, Kathryn Kein, Rob King, Rebecca Krefting, Peter C. Kunze, Linda Mizejewski, Aviva Orenstein, Raul Perez, Philip Scepanski, Susan Seizer, Monique Taylor, Ila Tyagi, and Timothy J. Viator.

For the inaugural book in our Critical Adventures in New Media series, Douglas Kellner elaborates upon his well known theory which explores how media spectacle can be used as a key to interpreting contemporary culture and politics. Grounded in both cultural and communication theory, Kellner argues that politics, war, news and information, media events (like terrorist attacks or royal weddings), and now democratic uprisings, are currently organized around media spectacles, and demonstrates how and why this has occurred. Rooting the discussions within key events of 2011 - including the war in Libya, the Arab Uprisings, the wedding of William Windsor to Kate Middleton, the killing of Osama bin Laden, and the Occupy movements - The Time of the Spectacle makes a highly relevant contribution to the field of media and communication studies. It offers a fresh perspective on the theme of contemporary media spectacle and politics by adopting an approach that is based around critical social and cultural theory. This series gives students a strong critical grounding from which to examine new media.

Hipsters have always used clothing, hairstyle, gesture, and slang to mark their distance from consensus culture, yet it is music that has always been the privileged means of cultural disaffiliation, the royal road to hip. Hipness in postwar America became an indelible part of the nation's intellectual and cultural landscape, and during the past half century, hip sensibility has structured self-understanding and self-representation, thought and art, in various recognizable ways. Although hipness is a famously elusive and changeable quality, what remains recognizable throughout its history in American intellectual life is a particular conception of the individual's alienation from society-alienation due not to any specific political wrong but to something more radical, a clash of perception and consciousness. The dominant culture thus constitutes a system bent on foreclosing the creativity, self-awareness, and self-expression by which people might find satisfaction in their lives. The hipster's project is to imagine this system and define himself against it; his task is to resist being stamped in its uniform, squarish mold. Culture then becomes the primary medium of hip resistance rather than political action as such, and this resistance is manifested in aesthetic creation, be that artworks or the very self. Music has stood consistently at the center of the evolving and alienated hipster's self-structuring: every hip subculture at least tags along with some kind of music (as the musically ungifted Beats did with jazz), and for many subcultures music is their raison d'etre. In Dig, author Phil Ford argues that hipness is in fact wedded to music at an altogether deeper level. In hip culture it is sound itself, and the faculty of hearing, that is the privileged part of the sensory experience. Ford's discussion of songs and albums in context of the social and political world illustrates how hip intellectuals conceived of sound as a way of challenging meaning - that which is cognitive and abstract, timeless and placeless - with experience - that which is embodied, concrete and anchored in place and time. Through Charlie Parker's "Ornithology," Ken Nordine's "Sound Museum," Bob Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man," and a string of other lucid and illuminating examples, Ford shows why and how music became a central facet of hipness and the counterculture. Shedding new light on an elusive and enigmatic culture, Dig is essential reading for students and scholars of popular music and culture, as well as anyone fascinated by the counterculture movement of the mid-twentieth-century.

The volume explores the hitherto uncharted late medieval religious landscape of Northern Germany, from 13th-century Helfta to the 15th-century Luneburg convents. The mystical and devotional writing of Northern Germany is contextualised through chapters on the Netherlands, Scandinavia and East Prussia. The seminal influence of the liturgy on these texts and their transmission is revealed in the creative interplay of Latin and Low German. Through the individual chapters and their appendices, which also contain translations into English, the reader can access a wealth of texts produced by communities of religious and lay women who write learnedly in Latin and fervently in Low German. Together, the chapters and appendices reveal a fascinating regional "mystical culture" which also reverberated across Northern Europe. Contributors include: Jurgen Barsch, Anne Bollmann, Veerle Fraeters, Ulrike Hascher-Burger, Ernst Hellgardt, Tanja Mattern, Balazs Nemes, Sara S. Poor, Eva Schlotheuber, Almut Suerbaum, and Geert Warnar.

The book traces the genesis of Pakistan military's role in the governance of the country. With a focus on the military's political role, the book comprehensively explains the military's intrusion into politics and its implications. Governance in Pakistan is a complicated balancing act between the elected civilian leaders and the military chiefs. Primarily, it is a power-sharing arrangement in which the military has significant influence over security, defence, foreign policy and domestic issues. Delineating on how nuclear programme came under military control, the author states that the military can and will influence the nature and direction of political change even without directly assuming power. Since inception, Pakistan faced several challenges - internal security, law and order problems, financial and industrial constraints, and shortage of arms. The continued political uncertainties and domestic disturbances resulted in the expansion of functions performed by the military. The multi-dimensional role played by the military due to weak civilian institutions, factionalism and external challenges, accelerated its participation in the governance of the country. The early deaths of Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Prime Minister Liaqat Ali Khan created a leadership vacuum. The successive prime ministers' inability in providing stable governments and continued political uncertainties provided opportunities to the military directly to assume power. The military under the leadership of Gen Ayub Khan assumed power in October 1958. The successive military regimes (Gen Zia and Gen Musharraf's regime) employed the same tools in removing the elected civilian leaders. Judiciary strengthened the hands of the military rulers by legitimising their coups through their verdicts, thus playing a crucial role in strengthening and sustaining the Generals. The book delves into the internal dynamics and external factors that increased the influence of the military in Pakistan's polity, economy and society.

Novelist and nature writer Richard Horan embarked on an adventure across America to reveal that farming is still the vibrant beating heart of our nation. Horan went from coast to coast, visiting organic family farms and working the harvests of more than a dozen essential or unusual food crops--from Kansas wheat and Michigan wild rice to Maine potatoes, California walnuts, and Cape Cod cranberries--in search of connections with the farmers, the soil, the seasons, and the lifeblood of America.

Sparkling with lively prose and a winning blend of profound seriousness and delightful humor, Harvest carries the reader on an eyeopening and transformational journey across the length and breadth of this remarkable land, offering a powerful national portrait of challenge and diligence, and an inspiring message of hope.

An analysis of post-communist identity reconstructions under the impact of experiences such as migration and displacement, collective memory and trauma, and cultural self-colonization. The book facilitates a mutually productive dialogue between postcolonialism and post-communism, mapping the rich terrain of contemporary East-Central European creative writing and visual art.

Food Words is a series of provocative essays on some of the most important keywords in the emergent field of food studies, focusing on current controversies and on-going debates. Words like 'choice' and 'convenience' are often used as explanatory terms in understanding consumer behavior but are clearly ideological in the way they reflect particular positions and serve specific interests, while words like 'taste' and 'value' are no less complex and contested. Inspired by Raymond Williams, Food Words traces the multiple meanings of each of our keywords, tracking nuances in different (academic, commercial and policy) contexts. Mapping the dynamic meanings of each term, the book moves forward from critical assessment to active intervention -- an attitude that is reflected in the lively, sometimes combative, style of the essays. Each essay is research-based and fully referenced but accessible to the general reader. With a foreword by eminent food scholar Warren Belasco, Professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland-Baltmore County, and written by an inter-disciplinary team associated with the CONANX research project (Consumer culture in an 'age of anxiety'), Food Words will be essential reading for food scholars across the arts, humanities and social sciences.

This international collection brings together scientists, scholars and artist-researchers to explore the cognition of memory through the performing arts and examine artistic strategies that target cognitive processes of memory. The strongly embodied and highly trained memory systems of performing artists render artistic practice a rich context for understanding how memory is formed, utilized and adapted through interaction with others, instruments and environments. Using experimental, interpretive and Practice-as-Research methods that bridge disciplines, the authors provide overview chapters and case studies of subjects such as: * collectively and environmentally distributed memory in the performing arts; * autobiographical memory triggers in performance creation and reception; * the journey from learning to memory in performance training; * the relationship between memory, awareness and creative spontaneity, and * memorization and embodied or structural analysis of scores and scripts. This volume provides an unprecedented resource for scientists, scholars, artists, teachers and students looking for insight into the cognition of memory in the arts, strategies of learning and performance, and interdisciplinary research methodology.

What did it mean to be a 'go-between' in the early modern world? How were such figures perceived in sixteenth and seventeenth century England? And what effect did their movement between languages, countries, religions and social spaces - whether enforced or voluntary - have on the ways in which people navigated questions of identity and belonging? Lives in Transit in Early Modern England is a work of interdisciplinary scholarship which examines how questions of mobility and transculturality were negotiated in practice in the early modern world. Edited by Nandini Das, the twenty-four essays by Joao Vicente Melo, Tom Roberts, Haig Smith, Emily Stevenson, and Lauren Working cover a wide range of figures from different walks of life and corners of the globe, ranging from ambassadors to Amazons, monarchs to missionaries, translators to theologians. Together, the essays in this volume provide an invaluable resource for readers interested in questions of race, belonging, and human identity.

How was Istanbul, once the capital of the Ottoman Empire and now the financial heart of contemporary Turkey, provisioned in the early 19th century? Tracing how the sovereign's duty to provision the city and protect his subjects from hunger was gradually transferred to the market and became a responsibility of the subjects (later, citizens) alone, Feeding Istanbul makes a compelling case for situating food politics, and politics of urban provisioning in particular, at the centre of the way we think about the relationship between the sovereign and the political community..

This book examines the discourse on 'primitive thinking' in early twentieth century Germany. It explores texts from the social sciences, writings on art and language and - most centrally - literary works by Robert Musil, Walter Benjamin, Gottfried Benn and Robert Muller, focusing on three figurations of alterity prominent in European primitivism: indigenous cultures, children, and the mentally ill.

Since World War II, historians have analysed a phenomenon of "white flight" plaguing the urban areas of the northern United States. One of the most interesting cases of "white flight" occurred in the Chicago neighborhoods of Englewood and Roseland, where seven entire church congregations from one denomination, the Christian Reformed Church, left the city in the 1960s and 1970s and relocated their churches to nearby suburbs. In Shades of White Flight, sociologist Mark T. Mulder investigates the migration of these Chicago church members, revealing how these churches not only failed to inhibit white flight, but actually facilitated the congregations' departure. Using a wealth of both archival and interview data, Mulder sheds light on the forces that shaped these midwestern neighborhoods and shows that, surprisingly, evangelical religion fostered both segregation as well as the decline of urban stability. Indeed, the Roseland and Englewood stories show how religion - often used to foster community and social connectedness - can sometimes help to disintegrate neighborhoods. Mulder describes how the Dutch CRC formed an insular social circle that focused on the local church and Christian school - instead of the local park or square or market - as the center point of the community. Rather than embrace the larger community, the CRC subculture sheltered themselves and their families within these two places. Thus it became relatively easy - when black families moved into the neighborhood - to sell the church and school and relocate in the suburbs. This is especially true because, in these congregations, authority rested at the local church level and in fact they owned the buildings themselves. Revealing how a dominant form of evangelical church polity - congregationalism - functioned within the larger phenomenon of white flight, Shades of White Flight lends new insights into the role of religion and how it can affect social change, not always for the better.

The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction attempts to descry the historical and cultural contours of SF in the wake of technoculture studies. Rather than treating the genre as an isolated aesthetic formation, it examines SF's many lines of cross-pollination with technocultural realities since its inception in the nineteenth century, showing how SF's unique history and subcultural identity has been constructed in ongoing dialogue with popular discourses of science and technology. The volume consists of four broadly themed sections, each divided into eleven chapters. Section I, "Science Fiction as Genre," considers the internal history of SF literature, examining its characteristic aesthetic and ideological modalities, its animating social and commercial institutions, and its relationship to other fantastic genres. Section II, "Science Fiction as Medium," presents a more diverse and ramified understanding of what constitutes the field as a mode of artistic and pop-cultural expression, canvassing extra-literary manifestations of SF ranging from film and television to videogames and hypertext to music and theme parks. Section III, "Science Fiction as Culture," examines the genre in relation to cultural issues and contexts that have influenced it and been influenced by it in turn, the goal being to see how SF has helped to constitute and define important (sub)cultural groupings, social movements, and historical developments during the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Finally, Section IV, "Science Fiction as Worldview," explores SF as a mode of thought and its intersection with other philosophies and large-scale perspectives on the world, from the Enlightenment to the present day.

It is easy to see that the world finds itself too often in tumultuous situations with catastrophic results. An adequate education can instill holistic knowledge, empathy, and the skills necessary for promoting an international coalition of peaceful nations. Promoting Global Peace and Civic Engagement through Education outlines the pedagogical practices necessary to inspire the next generation of peace-bringers by addressing strategies to include topics from human rights and environmental sustainability, to social justice and disarmament in a comprehensive method. Providing perspectives on how to live in a multi-cultural, multi-racial, and multi-religious society, this book is a critical reference source for educators, students of education, government officials, and administration who hope to make a positive change.

This book examines the underlying assumptions and implications of how we conceptualise and investigate poverty. The empirical entry point for such inquiry is a series of research initiatives that have used mixed method, combined qualitative and quantitative, or Q-Squared ( Q(2)) approaches, to poverty analysis. The Q(2) literature highlights the vast range of analytical tools within the social sciences that may be used to understand and explain social phenomena, along with interesting research results. This literature serves as a lens to probe issues about knowledge claims made in poverty debates concerning who are the poor (identification analysis) and why they are poor (causal analysis). Implicitly or explicitly, questions are raised about the reasons for emphasising different dimensions of poverty and favouring different units of knowledge, the basis for distinguishing valid and invalid claims, the meaning of causation, and the nature of causal inference, and so forth. Q(2) provides an entry point to address foundational issues about assumptions underlying approaches to poverty, and applied issues about the strengths and limitations of different research methods and the ways they may be fruitfully combined. Together, the strands of this inquiry make a case for methodological pluralism on the grounds that knowledge is partial, empirical adjudication imperfect, social phenomena complex, and mixed methods add value for understanding and explanation. Ultimately, the goals of understanding and explanation are best served if research questions dictate the choice of methodological approach rather than the other way around.

The Dutch-German Communist Left, represented by the German KAPD-AAUD, the Dutch KAPN and the Bulgarian Communist Workers Party, separated from the Comintern (1921) on questions like electoralism, trade-unionism, united fronts, the one-party state and anti-proletarian violence. It attracted the ire of Lenin, who wrote his Left Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder against the Linkskommunismus, while Herman Gorter wrote a famous response in his pamphlet Reply to Lenin. The present volume provides the most substantial history to date of this tendency in the twentieth-century Communist movement. It covers how the Communist left, with the KAPD-AAU, denounced 'party communism' and 'state capitalism' in Russia; how the German left survived after 1933 in the shape of the Dutch GIK and Paul Mattick's councils movement in the USA; and also how the Dutch Communistenbond Spartacus continued to fight after 1942 for the world power of the workers councils, as theorised by Pannekoek in his book Workers' Councils (1946).

This in-depth exploration of the history and culture of the sometimes illegal activity of BASE jumping provides historical and current information as well as a glimpse into the incredible adrenaline rush of the sport. BASE jumping is an extreme sport that has gained significant popularity. To date, there are over 1,400 jumpers who have earned their "BASE number," which means that they have jumped from a building, an antenna, a span, and a terrestrial point. And at least one BASE jumper is planning to attempt landing from a BASE jump without a parachute. BASE Jumping: The Ultimate Guide examines the history, subculture, and technologies associated with BASE jumping. Additionally, it considers what the relatively new expansion of this activity means within the context of how our society considers danger and risk. After an introduction, its chapters cover BASE culture and ethics, the sport's origins and current developments, techniques and equipment, sites and events, pioneering jumpers and icons of the sport, and future directions. The author-a former skydiver and BASE jumper himself-draws from careful research as well as interviews with current BASE jumpers to both provide historical context and represent the voices of those participating in the activity. A history of early attempts at human flight as well as a chronology of fixed object jumping Illustrations of jumpers, BASE jumping points, and equipment A glossary of key terms such as "burnt object" and "object strike" A resource guide with additional information such as numerous films and websites for BASE organizations

Cosmopolitan Sex Workers is a groundbreaking work that examines the phenomenon of non-trafficked women who migrate from one global city to another to perform paid sexual labor in Southeast Asia. Christine Chin offers an innovative theoretical framework that she terms "3C" (city, creativity and cosmopolitanism) in order to show how factors at the local, state, transnational and individual levels work together to shape women's ability to migrate to perform sex work. Chin's book will show that as neoliberal economic restructuring processes create pathways connecting major cities throughout the world, competition and collaboration between cities creates new avenues for the movement of people, services and goods (the "city" portion of the argument). Loosely organized networks of migrant labor grow in tandem with professional-managerial classes, and sex workers migrate to different parts of cities, depending on the location of the clientele to which they cater. But while global cities create economic opportunities for migrants (and survive on the labor they provide), states also react to the presence of migrants with new forms of securitization and surveillance. Migrants therefore need to negotiate between appropriating and subverting the ideas that inform global economic restructuring to maintain agency (the "creativity"). Chin suggests that migration allows women to develop intercultural skills that help them to make these negotiations (the "cosmopolitanism"). Chin's book stands apart from other literature on migrant sex labor not only in that she focuses on non-trafficked women, but also in that she demonstrates the co-dependence between global economic processes, sex work, and women's economic agency. Through original ethnographic research with sex workers in Kuala Lumpur, she shows that migrant sex work can provide women with the means of earning income for families, for education, and even for their own businesses. It also allows women the means to travel the world - a form of cosmopolitanism "from below."

French Intellectuals at a Crossroads examines a broad array of interrelated subjects: the effect of World War I on France's intellectual community, the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the rise of international communism, calls for pacifism, the creation of an "Intellectuals' International of the Mind," the debate over the myth of the disengaged intellectual, the apolitical group of "intellectuels non-conformistes," and, finally, the challenges of surrealism. Together, these developments reflected the diversity of intellectual commitment in France in the uncertain and troubled 1920s and 1930s. The interwar period also witnessed France's relative decline, as expressed in a move from a mood of immense relief coupled with a feeling of debilitating fatigue to an inward-looking, pessimistic, and defeatist outlook that presaged World War II and national collapse.

For Ukraine, the signing of the Association Agreement and the DCFTA with the European Union in 2014 was an act of strategic geopolitical significance. Emblematic of the struggle to replace the Yanukovych regime at home and to resist attempts by Russia to deny its 'European choice', the Association Agreement is a defiant statement of Ukraine's determination to become an independent democratic state. The purpose of this Handbook is to make the complex political, economic and legal content of the Association Agreement readily understandable. This third edition, published seven years since signature of after entry into force of the Agreement's implementation is substantially new in content, both updating how Ukraine has been implementing the Agreement, and introducing new dimensions (including the Green Deal, the Covid-19 pandemic, cyber security, and gender equality). The Handbook is also up to date in analysing Ukraine's the development of the Zelensky administration, with its unfinished agenda for cutting corruption and reforming the rule of law. Two teams of researchers from leading independent think tanks, CEPS in Brussels and the Institute for Economic Research and Policy Consulting (IER) in Kyiv, collaborated on this project, with the support of the Swedish International Development Agency (Sida). This Handbook is one of a trilogy examining similar Association Agreements made by the EU with Georgia and Moldova.