bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Stop Trying to Fix Policing
Authors: Gaskew Tony
Published: July 2024

In Stop Trying to Fix Policing: Lessons Learned from the Front Lines of Black

Liberation, Tony Gaskew guides readers through the phenomena of police abolition,

using the cultural lens of the Black radical tradition. The author weaves an electrifying

combination of critical race theory, spiritual inheritance, decolonization,

self-determination, and armed resistance, into a critical autoethnographic journey that

illuminates the rituals of revolution required for dismantling the institution of American

policing. Stop Trying to Fix Policing is an essential work for anyone who wants to go

beyond the rhetoric of police reform, to the next step: contributing to the formation of a

world without policing.
Medieval Fare
Authors: Daas Martha M.
Published: July 2024

Unique in its cultural and religious makeup, medieval Iberia represented a crossroads of cultures. This crossroads was reflected in large and small ways. On a grand scale, we see the convergence of intellectual ideas and great innovations in agriculture and science. On a more intimate level, we see an intersection of cultures as reflected in habits of consumption. The acts of producing food, cooking, and eating demonstrate the political realities of the land: at times interdependent, and, at times, at odds.

Food, as an archeological and anthropological tool, can help us understand a particular moment in time. In considering the nature of consumption, we may arrive at the heart of a culture. In Medieval Fare, the author explores food references found in a number of medieval Iberian texts in order to expand our knowledge of daily life in the Middle Ages. By examining the depiction of food and consumption, this pioneering study provides insight into the cultural, religious, and social complexities of medieval Iberia.
Righting Health Policy
Authors: MacDougall D. Robert
Published: July 2024

In Righting Health Policy, D. Robert MacDougall argues that bioethics needs but does not have adequate tools for justifying law and policy. Bioethics’ tools are mostly theories about what we owe each other. But justifying laws and policies requires more; at a minimum, it requires tools for explaining the legitimacy of actions intended to control or influence others. It consequently requires political, rather than moral, philosophy. After showing how bioethicists have consistently failed to use tools suitable for achieving their political aims, MacDougall develops an interpretation of Kant’s political philosophy. On this account, the legitimacy of health laws does not derive from the morality of the behaviors they require but derives instead from their role in securing our equal freedom from each other. MacDougall uses this Kantian account to show the importance of political philosophy for bioethics. First, he shows how evaluating kidney markets in terms of the legitimacy of prohibiting sales rather than the morality of selling kidneys reverses the widely accepted view that Kantian philosophy supports legally prohibiting markets. Second, MacDougall argues that an account of political authority is necessary for settling longstanding bioethics debates about the legal and even moral standards that should govern informed consent.
Plato on the Unity of the Virtues
Authors: Jenks Rod
Published: July 2024

Plato, in the Protagoras, suggests that the virtues are profoundly unified yet also distinct. In Plato on the Unity of the Virtues: A Dialectic Reading, Rod Jenks argues that the way in which virtues are both one and many is finally ineffable. He shows how Plato countenances ineffability throughout his corpus. Jenks’s interpretation of Protagoras accounts for the otherwise-inexplicable inability of both Socrates and Protagoras to identify the bone of contention between them. Not only can the thesis not be argued for; it can’t even be properly stated. In this book, Jenks shows how the long exegesis on the Simonides poem is philosophically relevant. Further, he shows that both the parts-of-the-face analogy and the gold analogy are inadequate, arguing that Plato intends them to be so. Jenks explains why the unity thesis is supported by what most scholars agree are terrible arguments: that the virtues are both one and many. He explains why, despite the unity claim being profoundly elusive, Plato believes it to be crucial that we come to appreciate how virtue, which really does have parts, can also be profoundly one.
Defenses Against the Dark Arts
Authors: Nelson John S.
Published: July 2024

As the publishing sensation of the last half-century, Harry Potter dominates early education in politics. Children, tweens, teens, and adults love it; and most students come to college knowing at least some of it. This dark fantasy analyzes politics in strikingly practical and institutional ways. Like ancient Sophists, modern Machiavellians, and postmodern Nietzscheans, the Potter books treat politics as dark arts and our defenses against them. The Potter saga overflows with drama, humor, and insight into ours as dark times of terrible troubles. These reach from racism, sexism, and specism to fascism, terrorism, autocracy, and worse. Harry and his friends respond with detailed, entertaining takes on many ideologies, movements, and styles of current politics.Defenses Against the Dark Arts argues that Potter performances of magic show us how and why to leap into political action. This includes the high politics of governments and elections, and especially the everyday politics of families, schools, businesses, media, and popular cultures. It explores Potter versions of idealism, realism, feminism, and environmentalism. It clarifies Potter accounts of bureaucracy, nationalism, and patronage. And it analyzes Potter resistance through existentialism and anarchism. The emphasis is on learning to face and defend against dark arts in dark times.
Doing the Math of Mission
Authors: Rendle Gil
Published: July 2024

Over the past ten years, the North American mission field has experienced dramatic changes, which in turn have required congregations, middle judicatories, and denominations to adapt. Among these adaptations is an expectation for clear goals and quantified progress towards those goals. Church leaders who have never needed to measure their goals and progress with metrics may find this change daunting. The use of metrics—denominational and middle judicatory dashboards, and the tracking of congregational trends—has become an uncomfortable and misunderstood practice in this search for accountability.

Doing the Math of Mission offers theory, models, and new tools for using metrics in ministry. This book also shows where metrics and accountability fit into the discernment, goal setting, and strategies of ministry.

While there are resources for research on congregations, tools on congregational studies, and books on program evaluation, there is a gap when it comes to actual tools and resources for church leaders. This book is intended to help fill that gap, giving leaders a toolbox they can use in their own setting to clarify their purpose and guide their steps.

Resource materials that leaders can use in their own setting are available. In order to obtain this material, please contact resourcematerial@rowman.com.
Spiritual Discovery
Authors: Tran Catherine C. , Boyd Sandra Hughes
Published: July 2024

Spiritual Discovery is a practical guide for groups desiring a prayerful approach to decision-making. The discernment method developed by authors Catherine C. Tran and Sandra Hughes Boyd begins with the prayer model—a process for guiding prayer in small groups created by Jane E. Vennard. This model brings elements of silence and spiritual reflection to the entire decision-making proceeding. The prayer is followed by a time of thoughtful exploration and discussion, resulting in decision-making that draws on both the spirit and the intellect.

The Spiritual Discovery Method facilitates thoughtful discernment, encouraging groups and individuals to attend to how they make decisions. This book offers step-by-step guidance for practicing the Spiritual Discovery Method, addressing essentials and challenges, while also providing concrete examples illustrating how groups have successfully used this process to enact spiritual growth and change. Tran and Boyd show how the skills that participants develop as they practice the Spiritual Discovery Method can be put to use in the everyday world, ready to be called upon for decision-making in any arena. The Spiritual Discovery Method has proven to be a powerful instrument for achieving positive change, and this book helps readers implement this process in their own lives and communities.
In Good Company
Authors: Martin SJ James
Published: July 2024

The New York Times has described James Martin as maybe "the only Jesuit priest with a degree from the Wharton School," and in the wake of our current economic crisis, the story of his remarkable journey from corporate America to the Society of Jesus couldn't be more timely. From the halls of General Electric under Jack Welch to his entry into the priesthood, In Good Company tells this seeker's powerful story with humor and grace. The book's gems of wisdom will appeal to anyone seeking meaning in daily life. Fast-paced, compelling, and often humorous, his story offers a fresh, inside look at corporate America, the Jesuit vocation, and the human quest for a life well-lived. This Tenth Anniversary Edition features a new preface by the author.
College Success Guaranteed
Authors: Gauld Malcolm
Published: July 2024

As a lifelong teacher, Malcolm Gauld has watched thousands of kids go off to college. Some return to visit after their first year exuding the vibe of conquering heroes. Others look, well, pretty bummed out. This book offers a plan to help the new college student complete Year #1 as a member of the first group. With anecdotes from current college students and recent graduates, the book presents five simple rules: Rule #1: Go to Class - I've never known a kid who flunked out of college who attended all his or her classes. Rule #2: Study 3 Hours X 5 days per week - How to transition from homework to study. Rule #3: Commit to Something - Don't drown in free time. Here's how to stay afloat. Rule #4: Get a Mentor - How to set up a support system. Rule #5: Procrastination Kills - How to rise above. The book is a short, non-preachy, fun, and tad irreverent primer that can help you get off to a strong start toward the 'best four years of your life.'
Turkish-Qatari Relations
Authors: Pala Özgür , Al-Jaber Khalid
Published: July 2024

This book examines domestic and regional geopolitical dynamics behind Turkish-Qatari relations from the past to the present. Utilizing arguments of practical geopolitical reasoning, Özgür Pala and Khaled Al-Jaber situate their analysis of evolving relations in the contexts of Ottoman-British geopolitical rivalry in the Persian Gulf, the Turkish Republic’s fluctuating relations with the Middle East until the 2000s, the AKP governments’ opening to the region and finally the Arab Spring and its aftermath. Contextualizing the trajectory of Turkish-Qatari relations within the larger Middle East and the Gulf Arab region, the authors argue that material interests and identity politics have generally determined relations until the turn of the millennium. Under Erdogan and Sheikh Hamad’s assertive leadership and ambitious foreign policy, Turkey and Qatar came to witness various foreign policy convergences on critically important regional issues. Pala and Al-Jaber argue that these convergences, coupled with their geopolitical and security goals, facilitated a political alignment between Ankara and Doha throughout the Arab Spring. They argue that despite facing major geopolitical setbacks, Turkey and Qatar were able to chart a much deeper cooperation, which later evolved into a strategic partnership in various areas.
Sociology of Death and the American Indian
Authors: Cox Gerry R.
Published: July 2024

Sociology of Death and the American Indian examines dying, death, disposal, and bereavement practices and applies those concepts to selectAmerican Indian tribes historically and currently, supplemented with oral histories. The focus is that learning about other cultures can enhance the understanding of one’s own culture by comparing traditional and modern societies. Gerry R. Cox addresses the centuries of injustices committed against American Indians that led to a neglect of learning about American Indian cultures and attempts to fill the gaps in knowledge of American Indian practices.
Jesus the Epic Hero
Authors: Sandnes Karl Olav
Published: July 2024

The ancient cento-genre was prone to be used on all kinds of subjects. New texts were created out of the classical epics. Empress Eudocia followed this practice and composed the story of Jesus in lines lifted almost verbatim from Homer’s epics. Jesus and his relevance to her audience is thus presented within the confines of style and vocabulary offered by the Iliad and Odyssey. The lines picked to convey her theology are often clustered around key Homeric motifs or type scenes, such as warfare, homecoming, feast, reconciliation, hospitality. Jesus waging war against all evil and Hades in particular runs throughout this Homeric and simultaneously biblical epic. The story starts in the Old Testament which is conceived as a divine counsel on Mt. Olympus where a plan to save sinful humanity is presented. The narrative then follows the biographic lines of the canonical gospels, with John’s Gospel holding pride of place in the way she renders and interprets the Jesus-story. The story told suspends both the geography and time of Jesus. Eudocia preaches the story she tells. She emerges in this poem as one of the most, if not the most prolific female theologian and preacher in the first Christian centuries.
Moral Injury and a First World War Chaplain
Authors: Nix Dayne Edward
Published: July 2024

Chaplain G.A. Studdert Kennedy has been described as the most popular British chaplain of the First World War. Widely known as "Woodbine Willie" for the cigarettes he distributed to the troops, his wartime poetry and prose communicated the challenges, hardships and hopes of the soldiers he served. As a chaplain, he was subject to the same hardships as his soldiers. This book analyses his experiences through the contemporary understanding of psychological, moral and spiritual impact of war on its survivors and suggests that the chaplain suffered from Combat Stress, Moral Injury, and Spiritual Injury. Through the analysis of his wartime and postwar publications, the author illustrates the continuing impact of war on the life of a veteran of the Great War.
Country Teachers in City Schools
Authors: Parton Chea
Published: July 2024

In Country Teachers in City Schools, Chea Parton uses conversations with teachers who grew up one place and ended up teaching in another to investigate the influence of place on the personal and professional identity building of teachers and their teaching practice.
Confronting the Myth of Soft Power in U.S. Foreign Policy
Authors: Lawniczak Brent A.
Published: July 2024

The concept of soft power has caught the attention of policymakers, scholars, and political pundits for the last thirty years. Soft power studies most often focus on measures of public opinion toward a power-wielder and draw conclusions about a state’s level of soft power from that opinion. This research examines soft power influence by focusing on the elite discourse and the foreign policy decisions of states that are the target of soft power influence. Beginning with Joseph Nye’s conception that soft power is an attractive force that influences state policy decisions and its level of support for another state’s policies, Confronting the Myth of Soft Power in U.S. Foreign Policy examines whether U.S. soft power was part of key policymakers’ decision calculus. Soft power is tested against two plausible alternate explanations—balancing and state identity. Data from the discourse of key foreign policymakers in France and Germany indicate that U.S. soft power does not account for those states’ policy decisions to support U.S.-led policy interventions in Kosovo in 1999, or against ISIS in 2014. The results of this research are suggestive regarding the potential of soft power influence and its implications on scholarship and U.S. foreign policymaking.
The Life of the Sixteenth Karmapa Rangjung Rigpe Dorje
Authors: Wang Meng
Published: July 2024

The Sixteenth Karmapa, Rangjung Rigpe Dorje, was the first Tibetan Buddhist leader to make extensive teaching tours to the West. His three tours to Europe and North America from 1974 to 1980 led to the global expansion of Tibetan Buddhist schools. This book presents the most in-depth analysis of the Karmapa’s contribution to the preservation and transmission of Tibetan Buddhism in exile. It is the first study to combine Tibetan life-writing and biographical materials in English with a thorough examination of the transformation of Tibetan Buddhism in the modern era of globalization. Drawing on a wide range of data from written accounts, collections of photographs, recordings of interviews, and documentaries, the author discusses the life and activity of the Karmapa through the lens of cross-cultural interaction between Buddhism and the West with a particular focus on Asian agency. The study shows that the Karmapa’s transmission strategies emphasized continuity with tradition with some openness for adaptation. His traditionalist approach and his success on the global scale challenge the popular assumption that the transmission of Buddhism is primarily a matter of Westernization, which, in turn, calls for a broader view that recognizes its complex and dynamic nature.
Cherokee Odyssey
Authors: Morris Michael P. , Morris Michael
Published: July 2024

This study examines the period between 1730 to 1790, which saw the Cherokee people travel the path from a sovereign people allied with the British to a dependent nation signed by treaty to the American Civilization program with US government. The author analyzes how, in between, the Cherokees fought two wars—one with the British military and one with the Continental Army. A group of Cherokee peace and military chiefs navigated the journey for the Cherokees in trying to handle both wars. Ultimately, a break-away group of young Cherokees, led by Dragging Canoe, led his Chickamauga Cherokees away from their traditional leaders and into the battlefield with the Americans. Sadly, all Cherokees paid the price for the actions of these young warriors. The Cherokees survived these ordeals and continue on as a people today just like the rivers that continue to flow through their lands.
The Evolution of the Turkish School Textbooks from Atatürk to Erdogan
Authors: Cohen Yanarocak Hay Eytan
Published: July 2024

This book narrates and analyzes a century of the Turkish education system and textbook indoctrination starting from the foundation of the Republic until today. It divides the history of Turkish education into five periods: Single party government (1923–1950), Menderes' Democrat Party government (1950–1960), the 1960 coup generals and their successors' governments (1960–1980), the Turkish-Islam Synthesis oriented Atatürkist governments (1980–2002) and finally the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government (2002–). By using the content analysis method, this book exposes Kemalism's metamorphosis into "Turkish-Islam Synthesis" influenced Atatürkism. For the first time, Cohen Yanarocak analyzes the indoctrination of this post-1980 official ideology through history, religious studies, civics, and national security knowledge textbooks. It goes beyond the Atatürkist period and examines the gradual but drastic Islamization of the whole curriculum and school textbooks at the expense of Atatürkism under the AKP. In this framework, this book highlights the recent penetration of controversial concepts such as Neo-Ottomanism, Jihad, and Pan-Turkism into the current Turkish school textbooks. Certainly, the ramifications of the current textbooks will influence the lives of millions of people. Therefore, this book functions as a crucial manual to understanding the current political environment in Turkey.
Papua New Guinea in the Twenty-First Century
Authors: Lea David
Published: July 2024

Papua New Guinea is a relatively recent independent state engaged in a struggle to develop economically and exercise a degree of sovereignty. This work articulates the challenges that confront the young nation including, security, economic viability, delivery of services, and control of political corruption. While these are matters internal to the functionality of the nation state, the author argues that matters have changed dramatically with China’s growing influence in the region and the ensuing competition between the United States and China. With this increasing geopolitical importance there is the promise of financial benefit, but there are also new challenges as there is the ever-present danger of becoming enmeshed in superpower competition. David Lea argues that lack of economic development and continuing aid dependency may well render island nations such as Papua New Guinea susceptible to political manipulation and further loss of sovereignty, including even a risk of military involvement.
Hyper-Exploitation in the Hacker Movement
Authors: Aliskan Yilmaz
Published: July 2024

In this book, Yılmaz Alışkan discusses the capitalist exploitation of digital media and examines how free time and creativity can be exploited in open source communities, with corporations often benefiting from community-generated knowledge. Focusing on open-source hardware communities, in which hackers give up a considerable amount of free time and creativity to create open technology, Alışkan investigates how free time becomes a “hyper-exploited” commodity from which capital is increasingly accumulated. Whereas paid workers are still often exploited, Alışkan posits that open-source workers are further “hyper-exploited” by technology companies as they receive no compensation for their labour. Ultimately, this book reveals how the time and activity of volunteers in open-source communities are ripe for capitalist exploitation that blurs the line between leisure and work time, often disguised by assertions that such labour is “fun” or in line with volunteers’ personal interests or values. Scholars of communication, digital media, sociology, and labour studies will find this book of particular interest.
Writing Ambition
Authors: Jensen Katharine Ann
Published: July 2024

In Writing Ambition: Literary Engagements between Women in France, Katharine Ann Jensen analyzes the work of three pairs of women writing in French—Genlis and Lafayette, Colette and Annie de Pène, and Nancy Huson and Leïla Sebbar—to assess how their literary ambitions affected their engagements with each other. Focused on the psychological aspects of the women’s relationships, the author combines close textual readings of their works with attention to historical and biographical contexts to consider how and why one or both women in the pair express contradictory or anxious feelings about literary ambition.
Akratic Compatibilism and All Too Human Psychology
Authors: Maloney J. Christopher
Published: July 2024

Do we have free will? How could we have the psychological leeway to choose and act otherwise than we do? The sum of history and the laws of science, including psychology, deterministically imply all events, including each of our actions. Is nature’s iron determination of deliberation compatible with the will’s freedom? The philosophers who answer affirmatively, both classical and current, assume that either the ultimate scientific laws or the grand historical record—or both—are merely contingent. By proceeding to infer the contingency of lawfully determined actions, these compatibilists would secure the leeway presumably requisite for the will’s liberty. Akratic Compatibilism and All Too Human Psychology: Almost Enough Is Free Will Enough argues, however, that they may be dead wrong about the modality of nature’s laws and history’s plasticity. Might the laws be necessary, and history absolutely fixed? Nevertheless, J. Christopher Maloney posits, we would yet be free. For psychology ordains volitional conflict: sometimes we akratically will to be able to act otherwise than we irresistibly do. Being akratic by nature, we asymptotically resist even a necessitating psychology’s governance. That Sisyphean resistance against the laws of cognition almost achieves the will’s liberating leeway. Nevertheless, almost free is free enough for deliberators as weak-willed as we.
Plato and Demosthenes
Authors: Altman William H. F.
Published: July 2024

Universally regarded as Plato’s student in antiquity, it is the eloquent and patriotic orator Demosthenes—not the pro-Macedonian Aristotle who tutored Alexander the Great—who returned to the dangerous Cave of political life, and thus makes it possible to recover the Old Academy. In Plato and Demosthenes: Recovering the Old Academy, William H. F. Altman explores how Demosthenes—along with Phocion, Lycurgus, and Hyperides—add external and historical evidence for the hypothesis that Plato’s brilliant and challenging dialogues constituted the Academy’s original curriculum. Altman rejects the facile view that the eloquent Plato, a master speech-writer as well as the proponent of the transcendent and post-eudaemonist Idea of the Good, was rhetoric’s enemy. He shows how Demosthenes acquired the discipline necessary to become a great orator, first by shouting at the sea and then by summoning the Athenians to self-sacrifice in defense of their waning freedom. Demosthenes thus proved Socrates’ criticism of democracy and the democratic man wrong, just as Plato the Teacher had intended that his best students would, and as he continues to challenge us to do today.
Psychic Mimesis from Bible and Homer to Now
Authors: Szajnberg Nathan M.
Published: July 2024

How did we develop our current views of inner life? Psychic Mimesis From Bible and Homer to the Present: Inner Life Over Time reaches back to Biblical and Homeric times, then sweeps across over two millennia of Western literature to answer this question. We discover that while there are discrete contributions from different eras/cultures about inner life—volition, ego ideal, superego, development as a journey, relatedness, even the fact of innerness—there are also at least three trends that have endured from the beginning of our literature and continue as ostinatos beneath each theme and variation of development. These are emotions and our need to conceal and reveal secrets and attachment that is our ability to explore from a secure base. This book takes us through the journey of discovery to arrive at our twenty-first century sense of self and inner life. We follow Auerbach’s text, Mimesis, as a guide through the literature, but add surprises such as Maimonides’ Guide to the perplexed or Rousseau’s Confessions to arrive at the sense that while there are particularities to eras and cultures, there is also something universal that resonates with us and endures.
Judging Jewish Identity in the United States
Authors: Glauz-Todrank Annalise E.
Published: July 2024

This book focuses on the first Supreme Court case to grant Jewish Americans race-based civil rights and highlights the complexity of White-perceived Jewish racialization in the United States. In 1982, vandals defaced Shaare Tefila Congregation in Silver Spring, Maryland, with Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi images and slogans. Because no religion-based statutes applied to the desecration, the synagogue’s lawyers were required to utilize race-based statutes. In her close study of what became the 1987 case Shaare Tefila Congregation v. Cobb, Annalise Glauz-Todrank offers a nuanced analysis of the ways in which the members of the congregation, their lawyers, and the vandals’ lawyers used the concepts of race and religion to argue their case. Judging Jewish Identity in the United States understands “race” and “religion” as White, Christian categories and illustrates how they have been accepted and internalized in the American environment. Glauz-Todrank examines how the judges went through a process of constructing the legal meaning of Jewish identity. Likewise, she narrates how the congregants responded to the vandalism, were relieved by the cleanup day that incorporated their neighbors, and pursued the case as “religious” Jewish Americans.
The Philosophical Treatise of William H. Ferris
Authors: Curry Tommy J.
Published: July 2024

There exists a very rich, but largely untapped well of African American philosophical thought, in which many Black thinkers were debating the role philosophy played in racial advancement among themselves. One such work that demonstrates this vibrant tradition is William H. Ferris’s The African Abroad or, His Evolution in Western Civilization: Tracing His Development under Caucasian Milieu. In 1913, Ferris composed and published one of the most authoritative encyclopedias of Black (African-American) thought and Black civilization. The African Abroad was well known and widely engaged with in Black debates about philosophy, politics and history through the mid-1900’s, yet has largely disappeared from contemporary scholarship.

The text itself offers readers the first evidence of a Black idealist philosophy of history that seeks to explain the evolution of the Negro race the world over. The African Abroad establishes a system of thought starting from God, the revelation of knowledge God offers humanity through history, and finally the Negro problem. Ferris offers the world a Black philosophical perspective currently unavailable in any collection of Black authors. He is a racial idealist who offers systematic thinking about the world faced by the Negro in the first decade of the 20th century. This edition includes Ferris's Philosophical Treatises from Sections I-III from The African Abroad. Tommy J. Curry includes two comprehensive introductory essays highlighting the significance of Ferris’s text in the study of African American philosophy, and the possible contributions Ferris’s thoughts on ethnological thought, the philosophy of history and the role of race play in the larger field of American philosophy.
In the Marxian Workshops
Authors: Mezzadra Sandro
Published: July 2024

Theorists have often returned to the work of Marx, to interpret and better understand global developments and current political and economic crisis. In the Marxian Workshops: Producing Subjects combines an attempt to develop a specific reading of Marx with a set of interventions on high stakes topics in contemporary critical debates. Sandro Mezzadra offers a close reading of Marx on the ‘production of subjectivity’ as a crucial test for assessment of some of the most important Marxian concepts and of their potential for grasping the present, from the point of view of radical transformation.
Reviewing the Past
Authors: Somhegyi Zoltán
Published: July 2024

Though constantly in decay, ruins continue to fascinate the observer. Their still-standing survival is a loud affirmation of their presence, in which we can admire the struggle against the power of Nature aesthetically manifested during the decay.

This volume takes a thematic approach to examining the aesthetics of ruins. It looks at the general aspects of architectural decay and its classical forms of admiration and then turns towards ruins from both classical and contemporary periods, from both Western and non-Western areas, and with examples from “high art” as well as popular culture. Combining the methodologies of art history, aesthetics and cultural history, this book opens up new ways of looking at the phenomenon of ruins.
American Imaginaries
Authors: Smith Jeremy C.A.
Published: July 2024

American Imaginaries examines the diverse societies and nations of the Western hemisphere as they have emerged across the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Exploring cities, capitalism, nations, nationalism, and politics from both comparative and transnational perspectives, the book develops a unique approach based on the paradigms of civilizational analysis and social imaginaries. In addition to providing a fresh perspective on the Americas, American Imaginaries gives proper analysis of multinational and intra-national regions and, crucially, the civilizational force of resurgent indigenous nations. The book also covers regions often underemphasized in histories of the hemisphere, such as Central America and the Caribbean.

The book will appeal to scholars and students of history, Atlantic studies, comparative and historical sociology, and social theory. In addition, it will gain audiences amongst academics and graduate students who follow debates about modernity, civilizations, historical constellations, and social imaginaries.
Convivencia
Authors: Lundsteen Martin
Published: July 2024

While Convivencia is a specific historical term that has come to represent an idea of peaceful co-existence, Convivencia: Urban Space and Migration in a Small Catalan Town complicates this simplistic vision. Instead, it shows how convivencia has been and is indeed always conflict-ridden by scrutinising the relations between cultural diversity and social conflicts and considering why some social conflicts are said to be inherently cultural. It does this through a multi-scalar extended case study of a small town in Northern Catalonia, Spain. Starting from an ethnography, it sheds light on the multiple local-global processes inherent to the social construction of the “migrant problem” and its solutions.

The book analyzes the simultaneously local-global transformation of migration and societies, connecting the local processes of space- and place-making in Salt with the more extensive processes of migration, economic crisis and social transformation, and finally, the responses to these changes from the local society, institutions, and NGOs.

This work allows for a deeper understanding of the complex web of urban, social, and political transformation in which migration as a phenomenon takes part. Focusing mainly on the interaction between mobility and settlement and the socio-cultural processes at different scales through the vectors of production and reproduction of space, it advances findings on the “new social question in Europe.”
Digital Game Culture in Korea
Authors: Chee Florence M.
Published: July 2024

Digital Game Culture in Korea: The Social at Play is a critical ethnographic investigation of media discourses surrounding online game addiction and the sociocultural roles fulfilled by games in everyday life. Florence M. Chee argues that the casting of online games as singularly problematic or addictive largely ignores the socially generative and, at times, pivotally important means of connection among games, players, and the communities they foster. Through focusing on Korea’s sociohistorical and technocultural context, this work celebrates and recognizes the foundational role of Korean game culture in shaping global games and play. Scholars of game studies, communication, and technoculture will find this book of particular interest.
Defining Hybrid Homeschools in America
Authors: Wearne Eric
Published: July 2024

Defining Hybrid Homeschools in America: Little Platoons explores the idea of hybrid homeschools, where students attend a formal school setting for part of the week and are homeschooled the rest of the week. Eric Wearne observes that school choice in America typically comes in two forms: programs set up for disadvantaged students, and the more common form of choice that wealthy parents can exercise—paying private tuition or moving to a more desirable school district. While disadvantaged families in many places and wealthy families everywhere can exercise choice when it comes to schooling, a sizeable group typically gets left out of those options—the large number of families who are too wealthy to access state or local programs, but not wealthy enough to pay for private schooling or moving expenses. Wearne argues that this is a long-term weakness for school choice in America; the middle class is generally a well-off demographic, but is almost completely unserved when it comes to this large aspect of their children’s lives. However, one low-cost option has arisen to address this niche: hybrid home schools. Wearne cites existing research to argue for this model’s efficacy for the middle class as a strong example of a healthy civil society and examines how policy definitions are breaking down and evolving in education as we challenge the existing definitions of schooling.
Dostoevsky As Suicidologist
Authors: Ronner Amy D.
Published: July 2024

In Dostoevsky as Suicidologist, Amy D. Ronner illustrates how self-homicide in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s fiction prefigures Emile Durkheim’s etiology in Suicide as well as theories of other prominent suicidologists. This book not only fills a lacuna in Dostoevsky scholarship, but provides fresh readings of Dostoevsky’s major works, including Notes from The House of the Dead, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov. Ronner provides an exegesis of how Dostoevsky’s implicit awareness of fatalistic, altruistic, egoistic, and anomic modes of self-destruction helped shape not only his philosophy, but also his craft as a writer. In this study, Ronner contributes to the field of suicidology by anatomizing both self-destructive behavior and suicidal ideation while offering ways to think about prevention. But most expansively, Ronner tackles the formidable task of forging a ligature between artistic creation and the pluripresent social fact of self-annihilation.
The Queer Bookishness of Romanticism
Authors: Robinson Michael E.
Published: July 2024

How did the buying and collecting of books figure in the lives and works of the Romantics, those supposed apostles of spiritualized poetic genius? Why was book collecting controversial during the Romantic period, and what role has book collecting played in the history of homophobia? The Queer Bookishness of Romanticism: Ornamental Community addresses these and more questions about the suppressed bookish dimension of Romanticism, as well as Romanticism’s historical forebears and Victorian inheritors. The analysis ranges widely, addressing the bookish proclivities of the "romantic friends" the Ladies of Llangollen, the camp works about book collecting produced by a subculture calling themselves “ornamental gentlemen,” narratives of prototypically punk collecting and flâneuring by the essayist and collector Charles Lamb, and rare-book forgeries by Thomas J. Wise and Harry Forman, queer bibliographer-scholars responsible for canonizing some of the Romantic poets during the Victorian period. In the process, this book uncovers surprising connections between conceptions of literature and sexuality; literary materiality and queerness; and forgery, sexuality, and authorship.
Ma Yuan
Authors: Gatherer Will
Published: July 2024

A 2023 Choice Reviews Outstanding Academic Title

Ma Yuan: The Chinese Avant-Garde, Metafiction, and Post-Postmodernism in the works of Ma Yuan provides the most comprehensive study to date on one of China’s most influential contemporary authors, Ma Yuan. By engaging in close readings of narratologically complex works of metafiction, the author offers a reappraisal of the role Ma Yuan played within the rise of postmodern fiction within China and offers new interpretive possibilities for the Chinese Avant-Garde movement of the 1980s through demonstrating that rather than being predominantly ‘formalist word games’ or ‘narrative traps’, Ma Yuan’s works of metafiction functioned as Foucauldian ‘heterotopias’ which allowed for the creation of distinctly Post-modern and Post-socialist ‘possible worlds’. This book also analyses Ma Yuan’s recent post-2000 output and in doing so explores the shifting dynamics of literary self-reflexivity and the ‘Post-postmodern’ within the contemporary context of ‘Xi Jinping era modernity’. This book argues that Ma Yuan’s recent works display a distinct movement towards ‘metamodern’ aesthetics alongside a rising anthropocenic awareness and eco-consciousness which offer key insights into the post-postmodern condition within a Chinese context.
Ukrainian Historical Writing in North America During the Cold War
Authors: Kravchenko Volodymyr V.
Published: July 2024

This book is the first comprehensive survey of Ukrainian historical writing in North America during the Cold War. The author describes the development of Ukrainian historical studies in Canada and the United States as an open, sometimes difficult dialogue between the Ukrainian ethnic and academic communities on the one hand and between Ukrainian scholars and Western academic mainstream on the other. He focuses on the institutional and the intellectual issues including various interpretations of major topics related to the Ukrainian national grand narrative, considering them in the evolving academic and political contexts of Slavic, East European, and Soviet studies.
Embodied Idolatry
Authors: Haden Kyle Edward
Published: July 2024

Embodied Idolatry: A Critique of Christian Nationalism is an examination of the effect of Christian nationalism on Christian practice in the United States. Kyle Edward Haden focuses on the mechanisms by which such beliefs become sedimented into the emotional, embodied structures of the church and the individual. Using a variety of disciplines, Haden thus identifies and highlights how such beliefs and practices are, in fact, idolatrous and inhabit an anti-Christian theological and ethical space. This book describes the formative process and mechanisms by which social and cultural values are acquired through imitation, by the individual and within ecclesial communities. As a constructive countermeasure, it investigates Jesus’s practice in his own social, cultural, political, religious, and economic context, and argues that Christian nationalism is a betrayal of Jesus’s teachings in light of his own practice of hospitality and table fellowship. This book thus calls Christians to conversion, putting loyalty to the kingdom of God over that of the nation.
Contained Empowerment and the Liminal Nature of Feminisms and Activisms
Authors: Newsom Victoria A.
Published: July 2024

Contained Empowerment and the Liminal Nature of Feminisms and Activisms examines the processes by which activist successes are limited and outlines a theoretical framing of the liminal and temporal limits to social justice efforts as “contained empowerment.” With a focused lens on the third wave and contemporary forms of feminism, the author investigates feminist activity from the early 1990s through responses and reactions to the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 and contrasts these efforts with anti-feminist, white supremacist, and other structural normalizing efforts designed to limit and repress women's, gendered, and reproductive rights. This book includes analyses of celebrity activism, girl power, transnational feminist NGOs, digital feminisms, and the feminist mimicry applied by practitioners of neo-liberal and anti-feminism. Victoria A. Newsom concludes that the contained nature of feminist empowerment illustrates how activists must engage directly with intersectional challenges and address the multiplicities of structural oppressions in order to breach containment.
Indigenous Knowledge
Authors: Oritsejafor Emmanuel  O.
Published: July 2024

In Indigenous Knowledge: An Alternative for Food Security and Wellness in Africa, Emmanuel O. Oritsejafor argues that Indigenous Knowledge (IK) needs to play a central role in addressing food insecurity because IK methods result in sustainable agricultural practices which improve wellness. The application of IK in global communities demonstrates why it is an invaluable development alternative. For instance, Native Indians in the America’s have survived over several generations using IK for agriculture and wellness purposes.

Oristejafor establishes the severity and breadth of food insecurity on the continent of Africa and critiques the western-led development model which has proven to be inadequate in solving Africa's food security needs. In this regard, Oritsejafor suggests that indigenous knowledge(IK) should serve as one of the central models for addressing food security because it takes into account consideration for the specificities of local conditions and relies on the knowledge and the environment of African communities. Contrarily, he posits that the reliance on modern technologies have not been able to halve hunger and poverty in Africa.
Creating Your Own Space
Authors: Davis María
Published: July 2024

The relationship between women and houses has always been complex. Many influential writers have used the space of the house to portray women's conflicts with the society of their time. On the one hand, houses can represent a place of physical, psychological and moral restrictions, and on the other, they often serve as a metaphor for economic freedom and social acceptance. This usage is particularly pronounced in works written in the nineteenth and twentieth century, when restrictions on women's roles were changing: "anxieties about space sometimes seem to dominate the literature of both nineteenth-century women and their twentieth-century descendants." The Metaphor of the House in Feminist Literature uses a feminist literary criticism approach in order to examine the use of the house as metaphor in nineteenth and twentieth century literature.
Construed Heritage
Authors: Goddard Jennifer
Published: July 2024

Heritage theory places individual experiences in a precarious position. Representational approaches draw attention to socio-political contexts and ethical considerations but largely render the self silent. Affective approaches, on the other hand, develop meaningful components of the emotive and sensed self, but internalized and unmitigated heritage runs the risk of perpetuating oppressive constructs. In Construed Heritage, Jennifer Goddard views heritage experiences as subjective-objective relationships that may be analyzed through discursive and figurative construal level distances. Goddard further contends that memory consumes and retains those heritage experiences as cognitive objects where they are collected and curated into personal narratives.
The Poetry and Music of Joaquín Sabina
Authors: Nappo Daniel J.
Published: July 2024

The Poetry and Music of Joaquín Sabina: An Angel with Black Wings is a thoroughly researched exploration of the life, music, and song lyrics of the celebrated Spanish singer-songwriter Joaquín Sabina. Often called "the Spanish Dylan," Sabina has established his own highly poetic space over the course of his forty-plus years as a recording artist. Using selected song lyrics from his fifteen studio and three major live albums, Daniel J. Nappo analyzes Sabina's use of antithesis, simile, metaphor, synesthesia, rhyme, and other rhetorical and poetic devices. Nappo also devotes a chapter to Sabina's ability as a narrator and concludes the book with a comparison of Sabina's best work with that of the American singer-songwriter and Nobel laureate, Bob Dylan.
FBI Surveillance of Mexicans and Chicanos, 1920-1980
Authors: Gutiérrez José Angel
Published: July 2024

A multi-chapter book, first of its kind, that identifies, describes, and analyzes FBI documents revealing the hidden history of surveillance of Mexicans and Chicanos in the United States of America.