bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
John Dahl and Neo-Noir
Authors: Monaco Paul
Published: February 2025

In John Dahl and Neo-Noir: Examining Auteurism and Genre, Paul Monaco provides a focused inquiry into the first three feature films that director John Dahl made for theatrical release: Kill Me Again (1989), Red Rock West (1993), and The Last Seduction (1994). Subsequent to their releases, these three films became identified in academic film criticism as neo-noir, and Dahl was labeled a 'noir-meister' who made 'a cottage industry of neo-noir.' The importance of these three films, and Monaco's investigation of them, is how they illuminate a modern director's creative process in relation to an emerging genre. Dahl is rightly recognized for his directorial vision and his creative style. His approach to film direction, and his distinctiveness of vision, is thoroughly explored in the book. Using interviews with the professionals with whom Dahl has worked closely, Monaco also explores basic notions about auteurism and how genre is defined. Considering Dahl's extensive directing for television alongside his first three films, John Dahl and Neo-Noir ultimately demonstrates how this groundbreaking director is a prime example of a modern 'director for hire.'
Rethinking Uncle Tom
Authors: Allen William B.
Published: February 2025

Generally critics and interpreters of Uncle Tom have constructed a one-way view of Uncle Tom, albeit offering a few kind words for Uncle Tom along the way. Recovering Uncle Tom requires re-telling his story. This book delivers on that mission, while accomplishing something no other work on Harriet Beecher Stowe has fully attempted: an in-depth statement of her political thought. Heroeuvre, in partnership with that of her husband Calvin, constitutes a demonstration of the permanent necessity of moral and prudential judgment in human affairs. Moreover, it identifies the political conditions that can best guarantee conditions of decency. Her two disciplinesDphilosophy and poetryDilluminate the founding principles of the American republic and remedy defects in their realization that were evident in mid-nineteenth century. While slavery is not the only defect, its persistence and expansion indicate the overall shortcomings. In four of her chief works (Uncle Tom's Cabin,Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands,Dred, andOldtown Folks), Stowe teaches not only how to eliminate the defect of slavery, but also how to realize and maintain a regime founded on the basis of natural rights and Christianity. Further, she identifies the proper vehicle for educating citizens so they might reliably be ruled by decent public opinion. Book one, part one of Rethinking Uncle Tom explains Uncle Tom's Cabin within the context of the Stowes' joint project, an articulation of the conditions of democratic life and the appropriate nature of modern humanism. Book two, parts one and two, analyses how key elements of Calvin's thinking were conveyed by Stowe's works, while distinguishing her thought from his, and examines the importance of her 'political geography' and the breadth of her thinking on cultural, moral, and political matters. Parts three and four investigate the most mature elements of Stowe's political thought, providing a close reading of Sunny MemoriesDrevealing the full political purpose of that work, discerned through mastery of its complex symbolismDand of Oldtown Folks, which completes the development of Stowe's political thought by assessing three alternative regimes and by presenting a vision of anutopia: the ultimate life of decency and order which is proof against false dreams of rationalized life. Rethinking Uncle Tom provides readers both better familiarity with the moral discourse of abolition and nineteenth-century reformism, and, more importantly, a glimpse of an America envisioned as producing that nobility of soul that Uncle Tom represented, the human model of surpassing excellence.
Performance and Activism
Authors: Afary Kamran
Published: February 2025

Much has been written about the Los Angeles riots of 1992, which brought out deep racial tensions throughout the city, exposed by media images of police brutality. This book sheds light on another facet of the events, the birth of a dynamic grassroots activist and community organizing movement that has been little noticed by academics or even by the press. It also focuses on the theatrical production of Twilight: Los Angeles 1992, a performance created by Anna Deavere Smith. Performance and Activism analyzes a rich, eclectic, and ongoing ensemble of local activist struggles in the context of the history and political economy of Los Angeles. Building on the important critical urban studies work of Mike Davis and Edward Soja, it also draws on Dwight Conquergood's writings on performance ethnography to theorize the political work of grassroots formations such as alternative/underground media collectives, gang truce parties/picnics, and women-organized prisoner support and court watch groups, such as Mothers Reclaiming Our Children. The book focuses on these events through the inter-disciplinary approach of performance studies, highlighting 'performance-conscious activisms' that help bridge the enormous class, race, and gender divides of our society.
Almost Madam President
Authors: Gutgold Nichola D.
Published: February 2025

All around the world women are presidents and prime ministers, yet in America, we have yet to elect the first woman president. When Barack Obama accepted the nomination as the Democratic candidate for president in 2008, the media were quick to point out that Hillary Clinton lost. Yet Clinton won almost 18 million votes and was the first front- runner woman candidate. Almost Madam President: Why Hillary Clinton 'Won' in 2008 argues that Hillary Clinton gained more than she lost in her bid for the presidency. This book takes the reader on a rhetorical journey through Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign, focusing on Clinton's sophisticated 'You Tube' style announcement speech, the debates, and the many notable stump speeches and media events on the campaign trail. Along the way Gutgold examines the obstacles and opportunities of women as presidential candidates.
Sorting Letters, Sorting Lives
Authors: Benbow Linda B.
Published: February 2025

Linda Benbow examines the organizational culture and various levels of diversity found in an urban United States Postal Service mail processing facility. She shows how employee perceptions of social differences and their interactions with coworkers contributes to their identity and work life within the organization. Painting detailed portraits of race, social class, and gender in a mail processing facility, Benbow looks at ways employees from different backgrounds relate to one another, identifying the issues and occasions that provoke conflict, the ways that participants view one another, and the forces and strategies that mitigate and conciliate conflicts.
Filling the Hole in the Nuclear Future
Authors: Jacobs Robert
Published: February 2025

From the dawn of the atomic age, art and popular culture have played an essential role interpreting nuclear issues to the public and investigating the implications of nuclear weapons to the future of human civilization. Political and social forces often seemed paralyzed in thinking beyond the advent of nuclear weapons and articulating a creative response to the dilemma posed by this apocalyptic technology. Art and popular culture are uniquely suited to grapple with the implications of the bomb and the disruptions in the continuity of traditional narratives about the human future endemic to the atomic age. Filling the Hole in the Nuclear Future explores the diversity of visions evoked in American and Japanese society by the mushroom cloud hanging over the future of humanity during the last half of the twentieth century. It presents historical scholarship on art and popular culture alongside the work of artists responding to the bomb, as well as artists discussing their own work. From the effect of nuclear testing on sci-fi movies during the mid-fifties in both the U.S. and Japan, to the socially engaged visual discussion about power embodied in Japanese manga, Filling the Hole in the Nuclear Future takes readers into unexpected territory
Young People's Lives and Sexual Relationships in Rural Africa
Authors: Plummer Mary Louisa , Wight Daniel
Published: February 2025

This book examines young African's sexual relationships in the context of village life. It is based on a large in-depth qualitative study in Tanzania, in a region typical of rural sub-Saharan Africa. It describes how dominant community values both discouraged and encouraged adolescent sexual activity. Young people managed these contradictions by concealing their sexual activity, contributing to short-term and/or overlapping relationships. Most adolescents had sex by age 15, but girls were often 5-10 years younger than their partners, and their relationships typically involved more frequent sexual encounters than those of same-aged boys. Motivations to have sex are examined, particularly its importance to masculine identity and its role in meeting young women's basic material needs, such as soap or respectable clothing. By their late teens most young people had experienced three types of sexual relationship: one-time sexual encounters; open-ended relationships involving occasional encounters; and 'main' semi-public partnerships involving frequent sexual contact. Relationships could involve desire, possessiveness, and affection, but romantic idealization of a partner was rare. Many young people expected their partners to be monogamous, but themselves had had concurrent relationships by age 20. Women generally married by age 20 and men by 25, with couples often having met about one month earlier. Marital couples usually spent little time together, and emotional intimacy was not highly valued. About one-third of marriages involved one husband and multiple wives. Extramarital sex, separation and divorce were fairly common. This book details factors shaping young people's sexual health, including access to, and beliefs about, condoms and other contraception. Condoms were rarely used because they were associated with reduced pleasure, infection and promiscuity. Sexually transmitted infections were fairly common, but several factors hindered young people from seeking biomedical treatment for them. Many instead relied on traditional medicine, as they did for contraception, induced abortion, and fertility promotion. Understanding of the biology of HIV/AIDS was very limited, and people with AIDS were sometimes believed to be bewitched with a non-infectious, curable illness. The book concludes by identifying key economic and cultural barriers to reducing sexual risk behavior, as well as factors that potentially facilitate risk reduction.
The Christian Heritage
Authors: Anastaplo George
Published: February 2025

The Christian Heritage: Problems and Prospects delves into the history of the western Christian heritage. Challenges to the Christian heritage, a heritage nourished both by Judaism and by the western classics, have been stimulated by the very success of the way of life that is promoted, a way of life that is somehow responsible for the emergence of modern science with its revolutionary technology. The reader is encouraged to reconsider authors prominent in the religious tradition of the West. Guidance is provided for examinations of the fundamental assumptions and the enduring questions by which Western Civilization has been guided and challenged for millennia. The enduring texts that we in the West repeatedly encounter, especially the most challenging of them, are apt to draw upon, and to illuminate the fundamental assumptions and the enduring questions by which Western Civilization has been guided and challenged for millennia. Vital to Western Civilization has long been the Christian Heritage. That Heritage has been taken for granted in our general education, in something as prosaic as the everyday operations of our legal system, and perhaps even in our economic and other social arrangements.
Caring for Orphaned Children in China
Authors: Xiaoyuan Shang , Fisher Karen  R.
Published: February 2025

International media regularly features horrific stories about Chinese orphanages, especially when debating international adoption and human rights. Much of the popular information is dated and ill-informed about the experiences of most orphans in China today, Chinese government policy, and improvements evident in parts of China. Informal kinship care is the most common support for the orphaned children. The state supports orphans and abandoned children whose parents and relatives cannot be found or contacted.

The book explores concrete examples about the changing experiences and future directions of Chinese child welfare policy. It is about the support to disadvantaged children, including abandoned children in the care of the state, most of whom have disabilities; HIV affected children; and orphans in kinship care. It identifies how many orphans are in China, how they are supported, the extent to which their rights are met, and what efforts are made to improve their rights and welfare provision.

When our research about Chinese orphans started in 2001, these children were almost entirely voiceless. Since then, the Chinese government has committed to improving child welfare. We argue that a mixed welfare system, in which state provision supplements family and community care, is an effective direction to improve support for orphaned children. Government needs to take responsibility to guarantee orphans’ rights as children, and support family networks to provide care so that children can grow up in their own communities.

The book contributes to academic and policy understanding of the steps that have been taken and are still required to achieve the goal of a child welfare system in China that meets the rights of orphans to live and thrive with other children in a family.
Labor, Class Formation, and China's Informationized Policy of Economic Development
Authors: Hong Yu
Published: February 2025

In Labor, Class Formation, and China's Informationized Policy of Economic Development, Yu Hong examines crucial connections between the evolving political economy of information and communications technology (ICT) and the reconstitution of class relations in China. Situating China's ICT development over the last thirty years at the intersection of transnational trends, domestic policies, and institutional arrangements, Hong shows how evolving class relations in the ICT sector are shaped by and shaping the transnational capitalist dynamics and domestic socio-economic transformations. She goes on to argue that the huge and still expanding pool of Chinese ICT workers and their newly attained identities-as wage labor rather than consumers-constitute a missing but important dimension of human experiences of the rise of the 'information society.'
Dred Scott and the Dangers of a Political Court
Authors: Greenberg Ethan
Published: February 2025

The Dred Scott decision of 1857 is widely (and correctly) regarded as the very worst in the long history of the U.S. Supreme Court. The decision held that no African American could ever be a U.S. citizen and declared that the Missouri Compromise of 1820 was unconstitutional and void. The decision thus appeared to promise that slavery would be forever protected in the great American West. Prompting mass outrage, the decision was a crucial step on the road that led to the Civil War. Dred Scott and the Dangers of a Political Court traces the history of the case and tells the story of many of the key people involved, including Dred and Harriet Scott, President James Buchanan, Chief Justice Roger Taney, and Abraham Lincoln. The book also examines in some detail each of the nine separate Opinions written by the Court's Justices, connecting each with the respective Justices' past views on slavery and the law. That examination demonstrates that the majority Justices were willing to embrace virtually any flimsy legal argument they could find at hand in an effort to justify the pro-slavery result they had predetermined. Many modern commentators view the case chiefly in relation to Roe v Wade and related controversies in modern constitutional law: some conservative critics attempt to argue that Dred Scott exemplifies 'aspirationalism' or 'judicial activism' gone wrong; some liberal critics in turn try to argue that Dred Scott instead represents 'originalism' or 'strict constructionism' run amok. Here, Judge Ethan Greenberg demonstrates that none of these modern critiques has much merit. The Dred Scott case was not about constitutional methodology, but chiefly about slavery, and about how very far the Dred Scott Court was willing to go to protect the political interests of the slave-holding South. The decision was wrong because the Court subordinated law and intellectual honesty to politics. The case thus exemplifies the dangers of a political Court.
Tourism in Northeastern Argentina
Authors: Seymoure Penny , Roberg Jeffrey L.
Published: February 2025

Ecotourism is often promoted as a way to visit a unique area of spectacular beauty. While tourists travel to these destinations to view environmental wonders, they seldom consider the effects of their visit on the indigenous people or on the location itself. Tourism in Northeastern Argentina: The Intersection of Human and Indigenous Rights with the Environment, an edited collection by Penny Seymoure and Jeffrey L. Roberg, examines the impact of tourism on indigenous and local populations, and the environment they live in, specifically in several locations in the northeast of Argentina.

Several of the chapters examine the lives and problems of the Mbya Guaraní people, an indigenous culture that has been attempting to survive in the rainforest of Misiones Province. In recent years, the loss of traditional lands, some of which was taken for tourist hotels, has led the Mbya to engage in tourism, with both positive and negative changes to their culture. Most of the tourists who interact with the Mbya come to the area to see the beautiful Iguazu National Park and Waterfalls, and stay in the nearby city of Puerto Iguazu. The waterfalls now draw over one million visitors a year.

The authors of this volume further explore how, while Puerto Iguazu has been engaged in mass tourism for many years, the nearby small town of Colonia Carlos Pelligrini has struggled to keep its younger tourism industry modest due, in part, to its location near pristine wetlands. This town faces a number of challenges that must be addressed soon to protect both the surrounding wetlands and the town itself.

Tourism in Northeastern Argentina explores all of these issues, and more, in the context of human and indigenous rights and the protection of the environment.
Biblical Bethsaida
Authors: Savage Carl E.
Published: February 2025

In his illuminating, well-researched book examining the site of Et-Tell, also known as Bethsaida, Carl E. Savage explores archaeological evidence to offer readers a portrait of the religious beliefs and practices of the community living near the north shore of the Sea of Galilee during the first century CE. In the study of the cultural and social matrix of the first century in the Galilee, scholars have commonly prioritized written sources over archaeological evidence because written sources seem to contribute more directly to an understanding of the religious beliefs and practices of a community. However, there exist many competing views of the landscape during that time due to the varying interpretations of the textual sources. Using archaeological data from Bethsaida itself, Savage investigates the material practices of Bethsaida's ancient inhabitants, describing these practices as significant indicators of their sense of place both ideologically and geographically. He evaluates the historical plausibility of various social reconstructions for the region, and finds that the image that emerges of first-century Bethsaida is one similar to those of other Jewish communities in the Galilee.
Flak-Catchers
Authors: Lupo Lindsey
Published: February 2025

Flak-Catchers explores the ways in which riot commissions-the institutional bodies appointed by an executive in the aftermath of a race riot to determine a riot timeline, investigate causes, and offer prescriptions for change-have dealt with racial violence in the United States over the last century. In studying five riots and their commissions, Chicago 1919, Harlem 1935, Los Angeles 1965, USA 1967, and Los Angeles 1992, this book shows that riot commissions only serve to give the appearance of strong and responsive government action during uncertain times. They primarily benefit the instituting body by focusing on a restoration of law and order while undermining any larger civil rights message. However, this book also challenges the prevalent idea that riot commissions are all the same, by revealing how riot commissions have changed over the last century, shifting in their prominence, content, and focus. After the 1968 Kerner Commission, which studied the 1967 summer riots, it has become increasingly common for the riot commission to fail to answer fundamental questions posed by the crisis.
Defending the Swedish Model
Authors: Bucken-Knapp Gregg
Published: February 2025

Across Europe, the prospect of a rapidly shrinking workforce has put increased labor migration back on the political agenda. However, for many on the left, concerns exist that less restrictive labor migration policies threaten core features of the social democratic project. This is perhaps clearest in Sweden, which in late 2008 adopted a liberal approach to third-country national labor migration, allowing employers to hire freely from outside the European Union. Defending the Swedish Model explores the debate leading up to this reform, focusing on the preferences of the Swedish Social Democratic Party (SAP) and the Swedish Trade Union Confederation (LO). While generally positive to the economic potential of increased labor migration, these allies remained highly skeptical towards calls from employers and bourgeois parties for liberalization. Bucken-Knapp argues that the SAP and LO develop their labor migration policy preferences on the basis of whether specific reform alternatives are perceived as being consistent with, or as undermining, the Swedish model. In the case of third-country nationals, both allies considered liberalization a threat to full employment aims, instead seeking to preserve an influential role for the state labor market board and organized labor. Bucken-Knapp also focuses on the Swedish labor migration debate prior to the 2004 enlargement of the European Union, showing how SAP concerns over potential abuse of the universal welfare state led to its support for transitional arrangements. Defending the Swedish Model illuminates the challenges faced by social democrats and trade unions when considering the need for increased labor migration.
The Dream Fields of Florida
Authors: Schmidt Ella
Published: February 2025

Immigrant workers from indigenous communities who are working in low-wage jobs are often stigmatized for their origins, their status, and their poverty. For them, achieving the American Dream means overcoming the historic biases of contemporary economic, cultural, social, and political systems. The Dream Fields of Florida explores the limits of accessibility to the American Dream for Mexican-American farmworkers. Using ethnographic data from several immigrant communities in Florida, Ella Schmidt studies the intersecting and often contradicting issues of identity, citizenship, and belonging. She unravels the embedded structural inequalities of U.S. society and the ideological discourses that mask them and finds that only through playing by the rules can Mexican farmworkers be selectively granted second-class citizenship-if any at all. This book is a timely and increasingly necessary look at one of the most invisible populations in the United States, one that has been systematically ignored and continuously misrepresented. Contrary to their imposed labels as subservient 'illegal aliens,' Mexican farmworkers are the epitome of agency, embodying the American ideals that are at the basis of the (Mexican-) American Dream.
Truth from a Lie
Authors: Key Margaret
Published: February 2025

Critics typically regard Abe Kobo (1924-93) as writing against realism, due to his avant-garde aesthetics that challenged the Naturalist realism dominating the literary mainstream and the Socialist realism of the orthodox Left in postwar Japan. He considered his work thoroughly realist, however, and starting in the early 1950s in a series of avant-garde art and literary groups, he championed the possibility of a vital, contemporary realism that challenged the reader to question the "reality" represented in the text through increasingly self-conscious writing strategies. Through a reassessment of the texts in which he worked out his theory of realism, this study traces the development of his commitment to making "truth from a lie"—to fiction, drama, and reportage that openly display their artifice. Key argues that the reflexivity of Abe's texts, which lay bare their own processes of artificial construction in order to reflect how our everyday sense of reality is constructed and maintained, created a critical space for metatextual ideas that were not acknowledged by the literary establishment of his time and have yet to be recognized by critics today. Undergirding his theory and practice of realism was a critique of conventional documentary and of the classic detective story. The texts examined here expose the degree to which the documentarian and the detective are active fabricators of meaning rather than neutral observers of fact. By paying close attention to the tension between the documentary and the fictive in Abe's works, Key draws out the ethical implications of his documentary approach, arguing persuasively that the documentary qualities of his writing, such as its valorization of objectivity over psychologism and the realm of "concrete things" over abstraction are strategies for challenging the dominant assumptions about what constitutes good ethics and good art, as well as the relationship between these two spheres.
The Center Must Not Hold
Authors: Yancy George
Published: February 2025

The Center Must Not Hold: White Women Philosophers on the Whiteness of Philosophy functions as a textual site where white women philosophers engage boldly in critical acts of exploring ways of naming and disrupting whiteness in terms of how it has defined the conceptual field of philosophy. Within this text, white women philosophers critique the field of philosophy for its complicity with whiteness as a structure of power, as normative, and as hegemonic. In this way, the authority of whiteness to define what is philosophically worthy is seen as reinforcing forms of philosophical narcissism and hegemony. Challenging the whiteness of philosophy in terms of its hubristic tendencies, white women philosophers within this text assert their alliance with people of color who have been both marginalized within the field of philosophy and have had their philosophical and intellectual concerns and traditions dismissed as particularistic. Aware that feminist praxis does not necessarily lead to anti-racist praxis, the white women philosophers within this text refuse to telescope as a site of critical inquiry one site of hegemony (sexism) over another (racism). As such, the white women philosophers within this text are conscious of the ways in which they are implicated in perpetuating whiteness as a site of power within the domain of philosophy. Framed within a philosophical space that values the multiplicity of philosophical voices, and driven by a feminist framework that valorizes de-centering locations of hegemony, interdisciplinary dialogue, and transformative praxis, The Center Must Not Hold refuses to allow the white center of philosophy to masquerade as universal and given. The text de-centers various epistemic and value orders that are predicated upon maintaining the center of philosophy as white. The white women philosophers who contribute to this text explore ethics, epistemology, aesthetics, taste, the nature of a dilemma, questions of the secularity of philosophy, perception, discipline-based values around how to listen and argue, the crucial role that social location plays in the continued ignorance about the reality of oppression and privilege as these relate to the subtle forms of white valorization and maintenance, and more. Those interested in critical race theory and critical whiteness studies will appreciate how the contributors have linked these areas of critical inquiry within the often abstract domain of philosophy.
Women in Chinese Martial Arts Films of the New Millennium
Authors: Chen Ya-chen
Published: February 2025

Women and Gender in Chinese Martial Arts Films of the New Millennium, by Ya-chen Chen, is an excavation of underexposed gender issues focusing mainly on contradictory and troubled feminism in the film narratives. In the cinematic world of martial arts films, one can easily find representations of women of Ancient China released from the constraints of patriarchal social order to revel in a dreamlike space of their own. They can develop themselves, protect themselves, and even defeat or conquer men. This world not only frees women from the convention of foot-binding, but it also "unbinds" them in terms of education, critical thinking, talent, ambition, opportunities to socialize with different men, and the freedom or right to both choose their spouse and decide their own fate. Chen calls this phenomenon "Chinese cinematic martial arts feminism."

The liberation is never sustaining or complete, however; Chen reveals the presence of a glass ceiling marking the maximal exercise of feminism and women's rights which the patriarchal order is willing to accept. As such, these films are not to be seen as celebrations of feminist liberation, but as enunciations of the patriarchal authority that suffuses "Chinese cinematic martial arts feminism." The film narratives under examination include Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (directed by Ang Lee); Hero (Zhang Yimou); House of the Flying Daggers (Zhang Yimou); Seven Swords (Tsui Hark); The Promise (Chen Kaige); The Banquet (Feng Xiaogang); and Curst of the Golden Flower (Zhang Yimou). Chen also touches upon the plots of two of the earliest award-winning Chinese martial arts films, A Touch of Zen and Legend of the Mountain, both directed by King Hu.
The Geopolitical Power Shift in the Indo-Pacific Region
Authors: Doyle Randall
Published: February 2025

As the twenty-first century progresses, the Indo-Pacific theater is experiencing an unprecedented transformation involving economic development, military build-ups, political reforms, social changes, and technological advancements. The region now reflects a multitude of geopolitical challenges, factors, and complicated realities. Although America is still recognized as the most powerful force in the Indo-Pacific region, the challenge to America’s hegemonic role is quite real and unrelenting.

The ongoing global financial crisis has left a changed world with unanswered questions in its wake. Is America’s post-WWII dominance of the Indo-Pacific region finally coming to an end? Can the United States and China work together to manage the region’s hegemonic responsibilities? In The Geopolitical Power Shift in the Indo-Pacific Region, Randall Doyle provides analysis and insights on the transformational changes and the epochal history unfolding in this part of the world and America’s increasingly precarious political and economic position.
Desert and Virtue
Authors: Kershnar Stephen
Published: February 2025

Desert and Virtue: A Theory of Intrinsic Value presents a comprehensive examination of desert and what makes people deserve things. Stephen Kershnar demonstrates how desert relates to virtue, good deeds, moral responsibility, and personal change and growth through the life process. He persuasively argues that desert is a function that relates well-being, intrinsic value, and a 'ground,' which is defined as a person's character or act. Kershnar also explores whether his theory is consistent with the limited responsibility people have for who they are. Desert and Virtue's insightful analysis will be particularly useful for those interested in philosophy, religion, and other fields that touch on value theory.
The Complex Reality of Religious Peacebuilding
Authors: Hertog Katrien
Published: February 2025

This insightful book focuses on the multifaceted subject of sustainable religious peacebuilding. Katrien Hertog discusses the ways in which religious actors can utilize resources to prevent violent conflict from occurring, reduce conflict when it does happen, and rebuild bridges between sides in after conflict has ceased. She examines the emergence of the field of religious peacebuilding, developing a conceptual framework that outlines how aspects of religious organizations can contribute to effectual peacebuilding and creating a screening model that allows readers to analyze the resources and obstacles to peacebuilding in-depth. Using the Russia and the Orthodox Church as a major case study, Hertog clearly shows what the concrete resources for peace are, how they are applied, what obstacles are hindering their realization, and how these resources can be better utilized and supported. This book tackles the controversial issue of the place of religion and religious organizations in the peace process. While recognizing that no simple answer exists in solving ethnic, religious, and tribal conflict, Hertog presents the ways religion can be used to create lasting, sustainable peace.
Communicative Action
Authors: Buzby Amy L.
Published: February 2025

This volume of interviews from the popular online journal Logo, are organized around the critical and interconnected themes of the decline of politics and culture, neo-liberalism and the rise of American imperialism, the crisis in the Middle East and the need to forge alternative visions and effective modes of resistance in contemporary struggle. These interviews offer key insights and galvanizing challenges to critically thinking scholars and citizens engaged in analyzing and struggling against current injustices. Although the interviews were conducted during the presidency of George W. Bush, they are especially relevant now. These critical insights and demands should not be abandoned because of the ease and relief engendered by the election of Barack Obama. Because of the volume's concern with defending democracy against the incursions of empire, the text emphasizes the need to reinvigorate discourse and rebuild the public sphere. The primary method of accomplishing these ends, frank and honest dialogue, is built into the very structure of the text. The insights and challenges offered in the interviews are crucial for active thinkers looking to respond thoughtfully, effectively and conscientiously to the crises that shape our times.
Godliness and Greed
Authors: Worden Skip
Published: February 2025

Traditional scholarship often points to the Calvinists and Max WeberOs writing on the Protestant ethic as the catalysts to changing Christian attitudes concerning profit-seeking and wealth. Author Skip Worden argues that the seeds of this change occurred centuries earlier. From the beginning of the Commercial Revolution to the fifteenth-century Renaissance, he shows that the predominant Christian thought on economics went through a fundamental shift, becoming favorable toward profit-seeking and wealth-holding. Worden discusses this dramatic change and explains how the general antagonism toward the pursuit of wealth before the Commercial Revolution transformed into Protestant theologians' fighting against the prevailing view of a pro-wealth paradigm during the fifteenth century. Worden contends that the shift away from the Patristic view of wealth occurred well before the addition of the Calvinist spirit of capitalism and the Puritan work ethic into Christian economic vernacular. Drawing on Plato, Cicero, and Augustine, early Protestant theologians unsuccessfully sought to check the rising dominance of the pro-wealth Christian paradigm, which they believed had been pushed too far. These theologians of the sixteenth and seventeenth century felt it was too close to advocating love of gain itself, something too close to the sin of greed. How well the Reformation succeeded can be assessed by WordenOs insightful concluding study of John D. Rockefeller, the ascetic steward of GodOs Gold in the form of monopoly.
Freedom from Our Social Prisons
Authors: Ravlich Anthony George
Published: February 2025

The purpose of this book is to provide a belief system to empower people using the democratic system and human rights law. This author contends that neo-liberalism has created a large underclass and has impinged upon the right to development for those who do not fit into the 'neo-liberal square'. Economic, social, and cultural rights, which have been rising in importance within the United Nations and have been denied to many, can be implemented using the core minimum obligations as defined by the General Comments of the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. This will go a long way toward civilizing neo-liberalism. Core minimum obligations such as ensuring basic shelter and housing and essential primary health care only amount to 'top-down' provisions. This book argues that people are most likely to become aware of their human rights if these rights are taught using a more elementary, 'bottom-up' approach. Consequently human rights education should also be regarded as a core minimum obligation especially given that the people of the world have been deliberately kept ignorant of what constitutes basic human rights. Human rights education will enable people to decide through the democratic process whether they want to see economic, social and cultural rights included in domestic human rights law.
The Burden of Academic Success
Authors: Hurst Allison L.
Published: February 2025

The Burden of Academic Success: Loyalists, Renegades, and Double Agents explores class identity reconstructions among working-class students attending a public university. Rather than focus on working-class failure, this book takes a critical look at the psychological and social costs of academic success. Based on several hours of interviews with a diverse group of working-class students, this book describes how successful students respond to, react to, and manage their academic success. The book does for class what other theorists have done for race, examining the dynamic interplay of class identity and educational success/social mobility. The distinguishing features of the book are rich narrative detail; compelling stories of student success and struggle; intersectional analysis exploring the ways class, race, and gender inform each other in students' understandings and narratives with an interwoven theory throughout; and a new typology for understanding working-class student responses to the burden of academic success. The Burden of Academic Success is ideal for courses on sociology, education, and American studies as well as for use by college educators and administrators.
Economics in a Changed Universe
Authors: Houseman Gerald L.
Published: February 2025

A revolution in economics, politics, and international affairs has been shaped by the new economics of information. For the first time, we are able to look at our world through a lens illuminated by a much more precise understanding of how economies work and how individuals, groups, and corporations react to them. All of the disciplines of the social sciences are affected by this development but the greatest impact we can expect will be upon public policy-making. Joseph E. Stiglitz and his fellow Nobel Prize-winners have demonstrated, with the precision and force of logic, reason, and mathematics, that the folklore of what has been regarded as 'political economy' for the past two hundred and thirty years has misled us with ideological and mystical but useless ideas such as 'free enterprise' and the immutability of market 'givens.' Houseman describes and demonstrates the new resonance, liveliness, and optimism which characterize the economics of information, calling upon his own experience with 'Third World' issues and problems. He also looks at this new (but often ignored) economics as a challenge to the existing literature of the social sciences and to the practices and assumptions of policy-makers, interest groups such as environmentalists, labor, and multinational corporations, 'think tanks,' international organizations such as the IMF and World Bank, and political activists. Effectively arguing that the changed universe of economics requires any of us concerned with world affairs to re-think and adjust our assumptions, Houseman provides us with the necessary insight to apply this new paradigm to real-world problems.
Leon H. Keyserling
Authors: Pickens Donald K.
Published: February 2025

Leon H. Keyserling: A Progressive Economist is the insightful biography of the life and thought of the influential liberal reformer Leon H. Keyserling. By examining Keyserling's life in the context of integrative liberalism, the biography aims to explore the origins of the concept of integrative liberalism and Keyserling's profound and provocative contribution to it. The book follows the political reformer's life from the beginning of his career as a member of Democratic Senator Robert Wagner's staff, at the same time showing how the Progressive Movement, before World War I, was the ideological and institutional origin for integrative liberalism. The Great Depression and subsequent New Deal, to which Keyserling was a significant contributor, allowed integrative liberalism to develop until the movement started losing vitality in the 1960's and came to an end during the Reagan Presidency. In the meantime, the book presents Keyserling as a major sculptor of Truman's economic policies, after which he left the government and began effectively debating public policy on his own. Tracing Keyserling's interactions with each presidency, the biography shows that Keyserling's policies and politics were expressive of integrated liberalism, an often-overlooked philosophy of reform in the second half of the twentieth century. The ideological cornerstone of integrative liberalism was a full employment public policy, expressed as economic growth and developed directly from United States history. The fear driving the policy was that there would be wide swings in the business cycle, resulting in underemployment and economic stagnation. This sentiment and fear has an impact even now in the twenty-first century, making Leon H. Keyserling a timely and profitable study for graduate and undergraduate students of history, economics, political science, and public administration.
Tempered in the Revolutionary Furnace
Authors: Pan Yihong
Published: February 2025

In Tempered in the Revolutionary Furnace, Yihong Pan tells her personal story, and that of her generation of urban middle school graduates sent to the countryside during China's Rustication Movement. Based on interviews, reminiscences, diaries, letters, and newspaper accounts, the work examines the varied, and often perplexing, experiences of the seventeen million Chinese students sent to work in the countryside between 1953 and 1980. Rich in human drama, Pan's book illustrates how life in the countryside transformed the children of Mao from innocent, ignorant, yet often passionate, believers in the Communist Party into independent adults. Those same adults would lead the nationwide protests in the winter of 1978-79 that forced the government to abandon its policy of rustication. Richly textured, this work successfully blends biography with a wealth of historical insight to bring to life the trials of a generation, and to offer Chinese studies scholars a fascinating window into Mao Zedong's China.
The God Biographers
Authors: Witham Larry
Published: February 2025

The God Biographers presents a sweeping narrative of the Western image of God since antiquity, following the theme of how the 'old' biography of God has been challenged by a 'new' biography in the twenty-first century. The new biography has made its case in free will theism, process thought, evolutionary doctrines, relational theology, and 'open theism'_a story of people, ideas, and events that is brought up to the present in this engaging narrative. Readers will meet the God biographers in the old and new camps. On the one side are Job, Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, Aquinas, and Calvin. On the other side is a group that includes the early Unitarian and Wesleyan thinkers, the process thinkers Alfred North Whitehead, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Charles Hartshorne, and finally a new breed of evangelical philosophers. This story looks closely at the cultural and scientific context of each age and how these shaped the images of God. In the twenty-first century, that image is being shaped by new human experiences and the findings of science. Today, the debate between the old biographers and the new is playing out in the forums of modern theology, courtrooms, and social movements. Larry Witham tells that panoramic story in an engaging narrative for specialists and general readers alike.
The Realities of Redistricting
Authors: Winburn Jonathan
Published: February 2025

Allowing legislators to pick the voters that make up their districts is a fundamental conflict of interest and central concern for the popular sovereignty of American elections. In The Realities of Redistricting, Jonathan Winburn examines the extent of this potential problem by focusing on both the incentives and the constraints facing state legislators during the redistricting process. Most research on redistricting tends to examine only the outcomes produced in terms of partisan gains or losses; however, we know much less about what constrains political mapmakers during the process. We know even less about whether constraints built into the process are enough to limit the partisan manipulation of both district boundaries and electoral outcomes. From the beginning stages of redistricting to the resulting outcomes on election day, this book analyzes the constraints and incentives that state legislators face. By examining the entire process, this book investigates who holds the power in the process and improves our understanding of the conditions under which redrawing district boundaries have a significant influence on partisan politics throughout the country. Specifically, reformers, who generally argue for commissions, may find that focusing on the rules rather than the actors is a better path to improving the process. The Realities of Redistricting is an interesting and informative read for anyone concerned with one of the most contentious processes in the American system.
Empiricism and the Problem of Metaphysics
Authors: Studtmann Paul
Published: February 2025

If there is one utterly inescapable problem for the metaphysician, it is this: is metaphysics itself a theoretically legitimate discipline? Is it, in other words, capable of a systematic and well-confirmed set of theoretical results? And if not, why not? From its inception, metaphysics has found itself exercised by the nagging worry that its own inquiries might reveal it to be a subject without an object, or a mode of inquiry without a method. Such concerns were voiced as early as Plato's discussion of the battle between the Gods and Giants. Since then, no era of its history has spared metaphysics some rehearsal of this question. In Empiricism and the Problem of Metaphysics, Paul Studtmann defends an empiricist critique of metaphysical theorizing. At the heart of the critique is an empiricist view of a priori knowledge, according to which all a priori knowledge is empirical knowledge of the results of effective procedures. Such a view of a priori knowledge places severe limits on the scope a priori speculation and indeed places beyond our ken the types of claims that metaphysicians as well as traditional epistemologists and ethicists have typically wanted to make.