This unique book helps nurses identify and develop the personal qualities that go into "artful" nursing practice. Based on nurse stories that portray the art of nursing, the book guides students to analyse how each personal quality or concept is actualised in the story, understand the challenges to enactment of the concept, and then apply the concept experientially through group and individual exercises. The text illustrates and elaborates onthe forms of knowledge used by nurses and concepts central to the art of nursing such as care, spirituality, presence, compassion, self-care and advocacy.

New, tenure-track women of color endure unique hardships teaching at institutions in which they are not a majority. This edited volume seeks to share, from a communication perspective, the multifaceted experiences of these faculty members in the academy. The experiences captured in this volume engage various theories, methodologies, and frameworks that serve to bridge the chasm that often exists between theory and praxis. The contributors to this book are women of color from an array of ethnic, racial, and religious backgrounds, resulting in a thoughtful and rich discussion about the experiences of tenure-track women of color in the academy.

These plenary lectures from the "Global Reggae" conference convened at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica in 2008 eloquently exemplify the breadth and depth of current scholarship on Jamaican popular music. Radiating from the Jamaican centre, these illuminating essays highlight the "glocalization" of reggae - its global dispersal and adaptation in diverse local contexts of consumption and transformation. The languages of Jamaican popular music, both literal and metaphorical, are first imitated in pursuit of an undeniable "originality". Over time, as the music is indigenized, the Jamaican model loses its authority to varying degrees. The revolutionary ethos of reggae music is translated into local languages that articulate the particular politics of new cultural contexts. Echoes of the Jamaican source gradually fade. But new hybrid sounds return to their Jamaican origins, engendering polyvocal, cross-cultural dialogue. From the inter/disciplinary perspectives of historical sociology, musicology, history, media studies, literature, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, the creative/cultural industries and, above all, the metaphorical "life sciences", the contributors to this definitive volume lucidly articulate a cultural politics that acknowledges the far-reaching creativity of small-islanders with ancestral memories of continents of origin. The globalisation of reggae music and its "wild child" dancehall is, indeed, an affirmation of the unquantifiable potential of the Jamaican people to reclaim identities and establish ties of affiliation that are not circumscribed by the Caribbean Sea: To the world!

The language of Jamaican popular culture-its folklore, idioms, music, poetry, song-even when written is based on a tradition of sound, an orality that has often been denigrated as not worthy of serious study. In Noises in the Blood, Carolyn Cooper critically examines the dismissed discourse of Jamaica's vibrant popular culture and reclaims these cultural forms, both oral and textual, from an undeserved neglect. Cooper's exploration of Jamaican popular culture covers a wide range of topics, including Bob Marley's lyrics, the performance poetry of Louise Bennett, Mikey Smith, and Jean Binta Breeze, Michael Thelwell's novelization of The Harder They Come, the Sistren Theater Collective's Lionheart Gal, and the vitality of the Jamaican DJ culture. Her analysis of this cultural "noise" conveys the powerful and evocative content of these writers and performers and emphasizes their contribution to an undervalued Caribbean identity. Making the connection between this orality, the feminized Jamaican "mother tongue," and the characterization of this culture as low or coarse or vulgar, she incorporates issues of gender into her postcolonial perspective. Cooper powerfully argues that these contemporary vernacular forms must be recognized as genuine expressions of Jamaican culture and as expressions of resistance to marginalization, racism, and sexism. With its focus on the continuum of oral/textual performance in Jamaican culture, Noises in the Blood, vividly and stylishly written, offers a distinctive approach to Caribbean cultural studies.