This book addresses heteronormativism, a concept that is extremely important for understanding visitors' ability to feel welcome in our spaces. It looks at homophobia and queer identities: the lack of a material culture to represent what is unique about sexual identity in society.

This book addresses heteronormativism, a concept that is extremely important for understanding visitors' ability to feel welcome in our spaces. It looks at homophobia and queer identities: the lack of a material culture to represent what is unique about sexual identity in society.

Combining anecdotes with scientific data, this book is a journalistic inquiry into what is currently known about zoos and aquariums as sociocultural intersections of mission, public perception, and on-site meaning making. The authors draw on conservation psychology and other social science research to explore how zoos might develop and deliver more effective learning experiences to promote and nurture conservation values and collective action. While people use zoos with specific priorities and motivations in mind, these are social settings. Indeed, it is because they represent an important, vast, and trusted social enterprise that zoos have such powerful opportunities to change how diverse public audiences view, value, identify, and engage with animals and the broader biophysical environment.

Combining anecdotes with scientific data, this book is a journalistic inquiry into what is currently known about zoos and aquariums as sociocultural intersections of mission, public perception, and on-site meaning making. The authors draw on conservation psychology and other social science research to explore how zoos might develop and deliver more effective learning experiences to promote and nurture conservation values and collective action. While people use zoos with specific priorities and motivations in mind, these are social settings. Indeed, it is because they represent an important, vast, and trusted social enterprise that zoos have such powerful opportunities to change how diverse public audiences view, value, identify, and engage with animals and the broader biophysical environment.

John Fraser explores a major paradox about the USA: that after the Civil War, in a country now officially dedicated to rational, pacific, industrial progress and equality, there was a growing enthusiasm in the North for chivalric values. With a wealth of examples, modern and medieval, he shows how those values had not simply made for high-toned violence and romantic fictions, but, when transposed into college life, crusading reformism, and the radical labor movement, were powerful modifiers of the Gilded Age ethos of unbridled capitalism. The permeation of American fiction, from Twain to The Great Gatsby and beyond, and the whole of popular culture, especially the movies, by the recognition that behaviors, while legal, could be morally unacceptable because dishonorable, is one of the many admirable things about this country. Fraser has written a book that will move its readers as well as instruct, enlighten, and entertain them.

This selection from John Fraser's essays forms a triptych with his Violence in the Arts and America and the Patterns of Chivalry (published by the Press in 1974 and 1982) and, like them, explores conflicting attitudes towards self-affirmation and social order. Important concerns in all three works are ideas of energy, power, and personal plenitude, and the way in which idealism and heroic intensity can sometimes lead to overstrain and collapse. Yet the dominant emphasis is positive. In this volume the author offers some of his finest analyses both of the workings of heroic and pastoral ideals and of the dangers of irony and nihilism in a violent world. The essays range in subject from Shakespeare to Atget's photographs of Paris, by way of American fiction, sadomasochism, literary theory and patterns of rural culture. Their implicit argument is subtle and absorbing.

There are few factual books written about poltergeist phenomena, John's Fraser's Poltergeist! A New Investigation Into Destructive Haunting fills that void, advancing and updating Colin Wilson's work Poltergeist!, this study's namesake from over 38 years ago. Fraser takes readers on a journey from the Borley Rectory to the Isle of Man, and grounds his readers in an historical overview of 'Poltergeist phenomena'. He examines where such events overlap with other paranormal investigations of 'apparitional' ghosts. What do they have in common, what do they differ? To answer this, Fraser looks to new research on paranormal events, never before published in book form. Fraser contends, perhaps controversially, that ghost sightings are and always will be ambiguous and near-impossible to prove, that only Poltergeist phenomena can be empirically verified.

A luckless choirmaster unwittingly causes local rivalries to bubble to the surface when he returns home to his Welsh roots. Accepting the post of choirmaster in the village where he grew up, Geraint Llewellyn (Clifford Evans) returns from London, and sets about planning the choir's latest production, Handel's 'Messiah'. But when it comes to choosing the soloist, Geraint's choice of Mrs. Davies (Betty Cooper) over the seasoned talents of resident leading lady Mrs Lloyd (Rachel Thomas) goes down like a lead balloon, instigating a split not only between the respective families, but between the village itself.

Recent architecture has found itself having to cope with new social and cultural complexities that demand networked systems that are time- based, reconfigurable and evolutionary, and a corresponding model of urbanism defined as an adaptive ecology. It is against this backdrop that the AA's graduate Design Research Lab (DRL) has pursued its recent studio agenda through project-based research focusing on alternative models of housing. Integral to this research is a notion of architecture that looks towards designing systems that seek higher ordered goals emerging through an intimate correlation of material and computational interaction. This book presents the results of this research and with it constructs a generative view of space and structure and the exploration of behaviourbased models of living through patterns found in nature.

The Holy Crow.... How do you change one of Canada's most politically sensitive policies?" Retiring the Crow Rate "is an exacting study in the process of changing an entrenched public policy that many in the West saw as their birthright. It is also a rewarding work of memoir and a tribute to Jean-Luc Pepin's prowess as an engaging politician. Arthur Kroeger's deft narration of the events which led to the end of the "The Crow" in the early 1980s also reveals his character as an exemplary public servant. Political scientists and students, western historians, politically engaged Canadians, and those who fondly remember Arthur Kroeger as Canada's 'dean of deputy ministers' will want "Retiring the Crow Rate "on their bookshelves.