bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Pyrrhonism
Authors: Kuzminski Adrian
Published: February 2025

Pyrrhonism is commonly confused with scepticism in Western philosophy. Unlike sceptics, who believe there are no true beliefs, Pyrrhonists suspend judgment about all beliefs, including the belief that there are no true beliefs. Pyrrhonism was developed by a line of ancient Greek philosophers, from its founder Pyrrho of Elis in the fourth century BCE through Sextus Empiricus in the second century CE. Pyrrhonists offer no view, theory, or knowledge about the world, but recommend instead a practice, a distinct way of life, designed to suspend beliefs and ease suffering. Adrian Kuzminski examines Pyrrhonism in terms of its striking similarity to some Eastern non-dogmatic soteriological traditions-particularly Madhyamaka Buddhism. He argues that its origin can plausibly be traced to the contacts between Pyrrho and the sages he encountered in India, where he traveled with Alexander the Great. Although Pyrrhonism has not been practiced in the West since ancient times, its insights have occasionally been independently recovered, most recently in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Kuzminski shows that Pyrrhonism remains relevant perhaps more than ever as an antidote to today's cultures of belief.
What Moroccan Cinema?
Authors: Carter Sandra Gayle
Published: February 2025

From its early focus on documentary film and nation building to its more recent spotlight on contemporary culture and feature filmmaking, Moroccan cinema has undergone tremendous change since the country's independence in 1956. In What Moroccan Cinema? A Historical and Critical Study, 1956-2006, Sandra Gayle Carter chronicles the changes in Moroccan laws, institutions, ancillary influences, individuals active in the field, representative films, and film culture during this fifty-year span. Focusing on Moroccan history and institutions relative to the cinema industry such as television, newspaper criticism, and Berber videomaking, What Moroccan Cinema? is an intriguing study of the ways in which three historical periods shaped the Moroccan cinema industry. Carter provides an insightful and thorough treatment of the cinema institution, discussing exhibition and distribution, censorship, and cinema clubs and caravans. Carter grounds her analysis by exploring representative films of each respective era. The groundbreaking analysis offered in What Moroccan Cinema? will prove especially valuable to those in film and Middle Eastern studies.
Nixon, Kissinger, and Allende
Authors: Qureshi Lubna Z.
Published: February 2025

In the thirty-five years since the violent overthrow of Chilean President Salvador Allende, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has vehemently denied U.S. involvement. Almost with the same breath, Kissinger suggests that the democratically elected Allende represented Soviet aggression in Latin America, therefore posing a threat to the United States' physical security. Newly released documents reveal the Nixon administration's efforts to undermine Allende, while indicating that Nixon and Kissinger did not believe the socialist regime in Santiago endangered the United States or even had close ties to Moscow. The White House feared that the Chilean experiment would encourage other Latin American countries to challenge U.S. hegemony. Nixon, Kissinger, and Allende explores the president's cultural and intellectual prejudices against Latin America and the economic pressures that induced action against Allende.
Together by Accident
Authors: Palmer Stephanie C.
Published: February 2025

This fascinating account of the regional travel accident motif within American local color literature offers a reassessment of the cultural work done by authors writing during the Gilded Age. Stephanie C. Palmer shows how events like broken carriage wheels and missed trains were used by local color authors to bring together bourgeois and lower-class characters, thus giving readers the opportunity to see modernity coming into contact with both rural and urban life. Using the works of Sarah Orne Jewett, Bret Harte, William Dean Howells, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and others, Palmer traces the use of the regional travel accident motif and how local color writers employed it to give critiques on class, society, and modern life. Exploring the themes of regional identity, modernity, and interpersonal relationships, Together by Accident offers an intriguing evaluation of the innovations and inconveniences associated with life during the industrializing Gilded Age in America.
From Realism To 'Realicism'
Authors: Perez-teran mayorga Rosa Mari
Published: February 2025

Charles Sanders Peirce, the founder of Pragmatism, was convinced that metaphysics is not just of primary importance to philosophy, but that it serves as the basis of all sciences. From Realism to 'Realicism' is a unique critical study of Peirce's metaphysics, and his repeated insistence on the realism of the medieval schoolman as the key to understanding his own system. By tracing the problem of universals beginning with its Greek roots, Rosa Maria Perez-Teran Mayorga provides the necessary yet underrepresented background of moderate realism and Peirce's eventual revision of metaphysics. This book examines Peirce's definition of the "real," his synechism, his idealism, and his "pragmaticism," which are all related to his sense of realism. With strong analyses and references to Plato, Aristotle, and John Duns Scotus, a Franciscan monk known as a major proponent of scholastic realism, From Realism to 'Realicism' is an insightful and intriguing book that will stimulate the minds of fellow philosophers and those interested in Charles Sanders Peirce.
Administration and the Other
Authors: Farmbry Kyle
Published: February 2025

Administration and the Other examines the social construction of groups of people and resultant policy impacts in the discourse of the American Republic from before its founding to the present. The book suggests that from pre-revolutionary interactions between early colonialists and Native Americans to recent immigration debates, discourse on The Other has resulted in the development of policies that have led to further marginalization, community division, and harm to scores of innocents within the public sphere. Ultimately,Administration and the Other examines the construction of The Other from a sociological and historical framework to engage students and scholars of political and administrative processes in using the often unspoken history of the field, as part of a larger historical framework, to explore how policy has been shaped in relation to marginalized communities. By presenting elements of history that are frequently not entered into the administrative and political discourse, the book aims to frame a conversation that might lead to the integration of thoughts about the often marginalized Other into discussions of policy-making and policy-implementation processes.
Impacts of Cultural Capital on Student College Choice in China
Authors: Gao Lan
Published: February 2025

Educational researchers have long been concerned about the factors that influence the patterns of attendance in higher education and the extent to which higher education has been accessible to all students regardless of their socioeconomic status. Extensive research has indicated that a variety of class-related factors, such as cultural capital, social capital, and economic capital, exert remarkable impacts on the amount and type of education that one receives. Drawing on cultural capital theory, this study aims at analyzing how students' college choice process varies by social class in China. By exploring different cultural and financial factors that influence different stages of students' college choice process, this study hopes to contribute to identifying the most appropriate policies and practices for raising the representation of students from the lowest social class among college participants.
Food and Gender in Fiji
Authors: Jones Sharyn
Published: February 2025

Food and Gender in Fiji is an ethnoarchaeological investigation of the social relations surrounding foodways on the island of Nayau in Fiji. Writing from the perspective of an archaeologist, Jones answers questions raised by her archaeological research using original ethnographic data and material culture associated women and fishing, the intersection that forms the basis of the subsistence economy on Nayau. She focuses on food procurement on the reef, domestic activities surrounding foodways, and household spatial patterns to explore the meaning of food amongst the Lau Group of Fiji beyond the obvious nutritional and ecological spheres. Jones presents her findings alongside original archaeological data, demonstrating that it is possible to illuminate contemporary food-related social issues through historical homology and comparison with the lifeways of the Lauan people. Offering a comprehensive and rigorous example of ethnoarchaeology at work, this book has major implications for archaeological interpretations of foodways, gender, identity, and social organization in the Pacific Islands and beyond.
The Caliphate Question
Authors: Oliver-Dee Sean
Published: February 2025

The Caliphate Question combines the disciplines of theology, history, and international relations in order to approach the complex and sensitive issue of how Western governments_in this case the British_have historically engaged with foreign policy issues that have centered around questions of theology or faith. The British government's approach to policy-making in the field of Islamic governance from the First World War through to the early Cold War is the case study for this book, both because of the extensive documentation that exists on the period and because of its relevance to the current geo-political world. While the book is not a critique of current British foreign policy, it does seek to furnish policy-makers and commentators with a framework within which such increasingly necessary policy-making can be created.
FDR's Republicans
Authors: Jenner Robert E.
Published: February 2025

FDR's Republicans illuminates the debate over foreign policy that took place in the United States prior to World War II. Robert E. Jenner approaches this issue from the perspective of Republican members of the House and Senate, who eventually came to support the interventionist position of a Democratic president. Unlike other diplomatic histories of this period, FDR's Republicans focuses on domestic components of the foreign policy debate, combining historical analysis and political theory. Jenner recounts the Republican Party's internationalist roots under McKinley, the split of 1912, and the defeat of the League of Nations in deference to its agrarian progressive wing. Taking both a local and national approach, he provides in-depth analysis of the party's reaction to the FDR landslides of 1932 and 1936, the party's resurgence in 1938, FDR's aggressive defense of the New Deal, and the decline of the party's agrarian progressive faction. The result is a broader explanation of the battle that raged between isolationists and interventionists as well as the failure of policy makers to deter fascism at an earlier date.
Rhetorics for Community Action
Authors: Ryder Phyllis Mentzell
Published: February 2025

Rhetorics for Community Action: Public Writing and Writing Publics, by Phyllis Mentzell Ryder, offers theory and pedagogy to introduce public writing as a complex political and creative action. To write public texts, we have to invent the public we wish to address. Such invention is a complex task, with many components to consider: exigency that brings people together; a sense of agency and capacity; a sense of how the world is and what it can become. All these components constantly compete against texts that put forward other public ideals_opposing ideas about who really has power and who really can create change. Teachers of public writing must adopt a generous response to those who venture into this arena. Some scholars believe that to prepare students for public life, university classes should partner with grassroots community organizations, rather than nonprofits that serve food or tutor students. They worry that a service-related focus will create more passive citizens who do not rally and resist or grab the attention of government leaders or corporations. With carefully contextualized study of an after-school arts program, an area soup kitchen, and parks organizations, among others, Ryder shows that many so-called 'service' organizations are not passive places at all, and she argues that the main challenge of public work is precisely that it has to take place among all of these compelling definitions of democracy. Ryder proposes teaching public writing by partnering with multiple community nonprofits. She develops a framework to help students analyze how their community partners inspire people to action, and offers a course design that support them as they convey those public ideals in community texts. But composing public texts is only part of the challenge. Traditional newspapers and magazines, through their business models and writing styles, reinforce a dominant role for citizens as thinking and reading, but not necessarily acting. This civic role is also professed in the university, where students are taught writing that extends inquiry. Phyllis Mentzell Ryder's Rhetorics for Community Action: Public Writing and Writing Publics turns to the rhetorical practices of nondominant American communities and counterpublics, whose resistance to 'good' public speech and 'proper' public behavior reveals alternate modes of composing and acting in democracy.
Innovations in Child and Family Policy
Authors: Douglas Emily M.
Published: February 2025

Innovations in Child and Family Policy tackles many of the common problems and challenges that are considered to be at the heart of child and family policy: family creation, economic support, childrearing, and family care-giving. Innovations begins by defining child and family policy and discussing the history of this growing specialization within the social sciences. The main chapters of Innovations address policy and programmatic solutions to problems that face families by topic area: (1) early childhood and education, (2) government interventions with family violence, children's welfare, and the justice system, and (3) supports for children and families. Specifically, the chapters in Innovations address the availability of child care, family medical leave, special needs children, parent involvement in their children's education, preventing and addressing child abuse and neglect, children who witness partner violence, child support orders, children of incarcerated fathers, and young adults in the justice system. What makes this book unique is that it contains applied research from many program evaluations or assessments of existing state-level legislation. Social scientists from multiple disciplines examine the efficacy such programs and policies to make recommendations for expanded or new child and family policies. For our novice and/or student readers, we hope that Innovations will help them to develop a greater sense of what academics, professionals, and politicians mean when they speak of 'child and family policy' and also an appreciation for how social science research can contribute to policy-making to support children and families. For our more advanced readers, we hope that these chapters make a significant contribution to the conversations regarding how multidisciplinary social science research can inform policy recommendations. For all of our readers, we hope that the use-inspired research presented in Innovations will help to strengthen and support the well-being of children and families through innovative child and family policies.
Beyond Blood Identities
Authors: Hill Jason D.
Published: February 2025

Beyond Blood Identities uncovers the social psychology of those who hold strong blood identities. In this highly original work, Jason D. Hill argues that strong racial, ethnic and national identities, which he refers to as 'tribal identities,' function according to a separatist logic that does irreparable damage to our moral lives. Drawing on scholarship in philosophy, sociology, and cultural anthropology, Hill contends that strong tribalism is a form of pathology. Beyond Blood Identities shows how a particular understanding of culture could lead to a new theoretical approach to enriched human living. Hill develops a new version of cosmopolitanism that he calls post-human cosmopolitanism to solve a number of challenges in contemporary society. From the problem of defining culture, the failure of multiculturalism, the question of who owns native culture, the identification of Jews as post-human people and the problem of their status as 'chosen people' in a modern world, the author applies a cosmopolitan analysis to some of the major problems in our global and interdependent world. He posits a world in which community has been dispensed with and replaced by its successor term sociality_the broad unmarked space in which creative social intercourse takes place. Hill applies a new cosmopolitanism to ideate a new post-humanity for the twenty-first century.
Playwrights and Literary Games in Seventeenth-Century China
Authors: Shen Jing
Published: February 2025

Playwrights and Literary Games in Seventeenth-Century China: Plays by Tang Xianzu, Mei Dingzuo, Wu Bing, Li Yu, and Kong Shangren is a full-length study of chuanqi (romance) drama, a sophisticated form with substantial literary and meta-theatrical value that reigned in Chinese theater from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries and nourished later theatrical traditions including jingju (Beijing Opera). Highly educated dramatists used chuanqi to present in artistic form personal, social, and political concerns of their time. There were six outstanding examples of these trends, considered masterpieces in their time and ever since. This study presents them in their social and cultural context during the long seventeenth century (1580D1700), the period of great experimentation and political transition. The romantic spirit and independent thinking of the late Ming elite stimulated the efflorescence of the chuanqi, and that legacy was inherited and investigated during the second half of the seventeenth-century in early Qing. Jing Shen examinees the texts to demonstrate that the playwrights appropriate, convert, or misinterpret other genres or literary works of enduring influence into their plays to convey subtle and subversive expressions in the fine margins between tradition and innovation, history and theatrical re-presentation. By exploring the components of romance in texts from late Ming to early Qing, Shen reveals creative readings of earlier themes, stories, plays and the changing idea of romanticism for chuanqi drama. This study also shows the engagement of literati playwrights in closed literary circles in which chuanqi plays became a tool by which literati playwrights negotiated their agency and social stature. The five playwrights whose works are analyzed in this book had different experiences pursuing government service as scholar-officials; some failed to achieve high office. But their common concerns and self-conscious literary choices reveal important insights into the culture of the seventeenth century, and into the sociopolitical implications of the chuanqi genre. In addition to classical Chinese commentaries on chuanqi drama, this book uses modern critical theories and terminology on Western drama to enhance the analysis of chuanqi plays.
Literary Mischief
Authors: Dorsey James , Slaymaker Douglas
Published: February 2025

Sakaguchi Ango (1906-1955) was a writer who thrived on iconoclasm and agitation. He remains one of the most creative and stimulating thinkers of twentieth-century Japan. Ango was catapulted into the public consciousness in the months immediately following Japan's surrender to the Allied Forces in 1945. The energy and iconoclasm of his writings were matched by the outrageous and outsized antics of his life. Behind that life, and in the midst of those tumultuous times, Ango spoke with a cutting clarity. The essays and translations included in Literary Mischief probe some of the most volatile issues of culture, ideology, and philosophy of postwar Japan. Represented among the essayists are some of Japan's most important contemporary critics (e.g., Karatani K?jin and Ogino Anna). Many of Ango's works were produced during Japan's wars in China and the Pacific, a context in which words and ideas carried dire consequences for both writers and readers. All of the contributions to this volume consider this dimension of Ango's legacy, and it forms one of the thematic threads tying the volume together. The essays use Ango's writings to situate his accomplishment and contribute to our understanding of the potentials and limitations of radical thought in times of cultural nationalism, war, violence, and repression. This collection of essays and translations takes advantage of current interest in Sakaguchi Ango's work and makes available to the English-reading audience translations and critical work heretofore unavailable. As a result, the reader will come away with a coherent sense of Ango the individual and the writer, a critical apparatus for evaluating Ango, and access to new translations of key texts.
Gadamer's Ethics of Play
Authors: Vilhauer Monica
Published: February 2025

Gadamer's Ethics of Play: Hermeneutics and the Other examines the ethical dimensions of understanding by focusing on Gadamer's concept of 'play' as it is developed in his magnum opus Truth and Method. Monica Vilhauer argues for the global relevance of play in Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics by revealing play as the key concept that depicts the process of all understanding_that is, the dynamic, dialogical, and interpretive process by which interlocutors come to grasp a common subject matter together. Through the lens of dialogue-play, the book focuses on openness toward one's dialogue partner, respect for his differing point of view, and a willingness to learn from him in conversation as crucial ethical conditions of genuine understanding. The book aims to revive the ethical heart of philosophical hermeneutics and reveal the transforming power of the Other in Gadamer's hermeneutics. While Gadamer's Ethics of Play develops his philosophical hermeneutics as an ethical philosophy, in the style of the older tradition of Aristotelian practical philosophy, it is finally critical of the extent to which Gadamer's hermeneutics can be used as a guide to practice. The book points out our need for guidance when we face our most prevalent obstacle to understanding_a closedness to the Other, or unwillingness to engage in conversation_but finds no guidance from Gadamer in scenarios where ethical conditions are lacking. Inspired by Gadamer's discussion of play, the book searches for types of human interaction that might have the power to open or re-open the play of dialogue between those who have become closed to each other, so that true understanding between them can be developed. The book is accessible to an undergraduate audience, while also being relevant to ongoing debates among Gadamer scholars.
Human Communication and the Brain
Authors: Egolf Donald B.
Published: February 2025

Human Communication and the Brain: Building the Foundation for the Field of Neurocommunications, by Donald B. Egolf, provides an introduction to the latest neuroscience research and expands its applications to the study of communication. Egolf explores both methodological and ethical issues that are surfacing as a result of the newest findings, revealing important new questions about the nature of communication and the brain, including: is there a way to communicate directly with the brain? What outside powers should be permitted to access that method of information dissemination?

Egolf’s text has implications for a number of communication subsets, including intrapersonal, interpersonal, political, marketing, and deception, and this new research undoubtedly will provoke debate amongst communication and neuroscience scholars for years to come.
Straussophobia
Authors: Minowitz Peter
Published: February 2025

Leo Strauss and his students have long been accused of mendacity, elitism, and militarism, but the Iraq War has prompted unprecedented levels of caustic and inaccurate denunciations. Inappropriate criticisms have issued from artists (Tim Robbins), politicians (Ron Paul), journalists (Joe Klein), and even highly lauded scholars such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Gordon Wood, Douglas Massey, Stephen Holmes, Anne Norton, Shadia Drury, Sheldon Wolin, John Pocock, John Yolton, Nicholas Xenos, and Brian Leiter. In Straussophobia, Peter Minowitz provides a methodical and detailed critique of the major offenders, especially of Drury, who maintains that Strauss established a 'covert tyranny' that would keep the Western world 'mired in perpetual war.' In replying to such charges_and to various authors who belittle Strauss's contributions as a scholar_Minowitz highlights the imaginative yet meticulous manner in which Strauss interpreted Thucydides, Plato, Xenophon, Farabi, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, and Carl Schmitt. Straussophobia also provides both a comprehensive assessment of Strauss's 1933 letter that commended 'fascist, authoritarian, and imperial' principles, and a compelling account of Strauss's influence, or lack of influence, on neoconservative promoters of the Iraq War (e.g., Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Lewis Libby). The book likewise breaks new ground in employing diversity discourse to explain and combat the bigotry and buffoonery that pervade attacks against Strauss and Straussians_and in drawing on Strauss to illuminate the distortions that mar some widely-used arguments for affirmative action.
Tourism and Cultural Change in Costa Rica
Authors: Stocker Karen
Published: February 2025

This book examines the consequences—positive, negative, and otherwise—of tourism in Costa Rica. Based on ethnographic research and interviews with tourists, tour operators, tourists-turned-settlers, and locals living in tourist destinations, this book brings together these varied perspectives with the aim of presenting forms of tourism beneficial to all parties. To examine both pitfalls and positive outcomes of tourism, it compares modes of tourism in destinations that are locally owned and foreign owned, ecotourism destinations, beach tourism, adventure tourism sites, and agrotourism projects. Furthermore, the author draws from two decades of research in two distinct communities to trace the ways in which the development of tourism in one community provided the springboard for changing gender roles and new opportunities for women, and, in the other, how the promise of tourism has spurred a cultural revitalization and positive change in Indigenous identity.

Interviews with three generations of women in one tourist destination show generational changes in perspectives on tourism, and interviews covering the same time span show how in an Indigenous reservation poised to enter the heritage tourism industry, tourism offers a positive alternative to exploitative forms of labor and the stigma once associated with Indigeneity in that region. Interviews with locals in all four sites reveal the ways in which tourism carried out conscientiously would benefit them. These, juxtaposed with interviews of tourists regarding what they seek through tourism, offer a means of designing a mutually beneficial form of tourism. In sum, this book puts into conversation the varied views of those positioned differently within the realm of tourism in order to inform tourists and foreign land owners as to how they might glean the advantages that such an experience may bring to the traveler, while also playing up the benefits of these endeavors to local communities, and minimizing the potential damage these practices may cause.
Crisis of Transcendence
Authors: Elwell J. Sage
Published: February 2025

From the Internet to the iPhone, digital technology is no mere cultural artifact. It affects how we experience and understand our world and ourselves at the deepest levels-it is a fundamental condition of living. The digitization of modern life constitutes an essential field of religious concern because it impacts our individual and cultural sensibilities so profoundly. Despite this, it has yet to be thematized as the subject of religious or theological reflection. The Crisis of Transcendence remedies this by asking a single significant question: How is digital technology impacting the moral and spiritual depth of culture? How can something as ineffable and nebulous as the depth of culture be known and articulated, let alone critiqued? Author J. Sage Elwell suggests that an answer lies in the arts. The arts have historically acted as a barometer of the depth of culture, reflecting the spiritual impulses and inclinations at the heart of society. He argues that if the arts matter at all, they will illuminate more than themselves. Through an experimental interpretation of digital art, Elwell offers a critical reflection on how digital technology is changing us and the world we live in at a level of religious significance. Employing a theological aesthetic of digital art, this book shows how the advent of digital technology as a revolutionary cultural medium is transforming the ways we think about God, the soul, and morality.
Race and Sex Across the French Atlantic
Authors: Ekotto Frieda
Published: February 2025

Jean Genet's masterpiece Les N_gres was first published in 1958, in the midst of the Algerian war, and first performed at the ThZ%tre de Lut_ce in Paris in October 1959. Yet even though the play is more than 50 years old, it remains a fundamental contribution to critical race theory, as Genet unequivocally posits that no matter what a black person does or doesn't do, simply to be black in our times is itself a tragedy. Placing Genet in the context of Negritude movement, Race and Sex across the French Atlantic equally reveals and examines blackness within the African-American dialogue with a white French author's provocative questions about race: 'Is a black man always black?' and even more fundamentally, 'What is blackness?' Within this framework, to question 'blackness,' therefore, is to set out on an ontological quest, as 'blackness' has become a real, living thing in its own right within European ideology, social theory, and historical consciousness, even as Les N_gres has taken its place as a major text in the francophone and philosophical tradition of writing on race. In essence, this book concentrates on the way in which language-particularly the French language-has shaped ideas about race within transatlantic discourses, and, with its companion, continental philosophy, has also shaped the historical understanding of discourse on race. It navigates between multiple readings of race within the French Atlantic using Lorraine Hansberry's play Les Blancs; Dany Laferri_re's Comment faire l'amour avec un N_gre sans se fatiguer; Genet's dialogue with the Black Panthers; and different conceptions of the so-called N word. Race and Sex across the French Atlantic thus explores how Les N_gres offered a groundbreaking reading of how race functioned-and continues to function-as an all-pervasive discourse that provides a central principle around which society in general is organized. The play stages a deeply self-reflexive and critical examination of the very essence of 'blackness,' which, in Genet's world, is not simply about the color of a person's skin, but constitutes a critical function within socio-political and historical discourse. This book deals with an understanding of the concept of race in terms of alienation, and asks the question: Why, 50 years after the fact, given the long, historical, negative associations of the term Le N_gre in French language, does the title remain unchanged?
Max Stirner's Dialectical Egoism
Authors: Welsh John F.
Published: February 2025

Max Stirner (1806-1856) is recognized in the history of political thought because of his egoist classic The Ego and Its Own. Stirner was a student of Hegel, and a critic of the Young Hegelians and the emerging forms of socialist and communist thought in the 1840s. Max Stirner's Dialectical Egoism: A New Interpretation examines Stirner's thought as a critique of modernity, by which he meant the domination of culture and politics by humanist ideology. In Stirner's view, 'humanity' is the supreme being of modernity and 'humanism' is the prevailing legitimation of social and political domination. Welsh traces Stirner's thought from his early essays to The Ego and Its Own and Stirner's responses to his critics. He also examines how Benjamin Tucker, James L. Walker, and Dora Marsden applied Stirner's dialectical egoism to the analysis of (a) the transformations of capitalism, (b) culture, ethics, and mass psychology, and (c) feminism, socialism, and communism. All three viewed Stirner as a champion of individuality against the collectivizing and homogenizing forces of the modern world. Welsh also takes great care to dissociate Stirner's thought from that of the other great egoist critic of modernity, Friedrich Nietzsche. He argues that the similarities in the dissidence of Stirner and Nietzsche are superficial. The book concludes with an interpretation of Stirner's thought as a form of dialectical egoism that includes (a) a multi-tiered analysis of culture, society, and individuality; (b) the basic principles of Stirner's view of the relationship between individuals and social organization; and (c) the forms of critique he employs. Stirner's critique of modernity is a significant contribution to the growing literature on libertarianism, dialectical analysis, and post-modernism.
British Power and International Relations During The 1950s
Authors: Turner Michael J.
Published: February 2025

This book examines BritainOs role and influence in a pivotal decade. The postwar international order was still taking shape in the 1950s. Much was unsettled, and in these circumstances Britain could realistically expect to remain, and be treated as, one of the 'Big Three' world powers along with the United States and Soviet Union. Some adjustments were required in British priorities and methods, in view of changing pressures and needs at home and abroad, but the continuing desire was to make BritainOs position 'tenable' in those parts of the world that were of special importance to British prestige, power, strategy, prosperity, and security. This book elucidates the motives behind key decisions, discusses their far-reaching consequences, explains why some options were taken and others rejected, and places British policy-making in the appropriate international context. Designed primarily for undergraduate and beginning postgraduate students, the book offers an up-to-date, single volume treatment of major themes in British and international history; historiographical synthesis and comment; detailed narrative; accessible, easy-to-follow analysis; and a clear, evidence-based point of view concerning the survival of British power in challenging times.
Postapocalyptic Fiction and the Social Contract
Authors: Curtis Claire
Published: February 2025

Postapocalyptic Fiction and the Social Contract: "We'll Not Go Home Again" provides a framework for our fascination with the apocalyptic events. The popular appeal of the end of the world genre is clear in movies, novels, and television shows. Even our political debates over global warming, nuclear threats, and pandemic disease reflect a concern about the possibility of such events. This popular fascination is really a fascination with survival: how can we come out alive? And what would we do next? The end of the world is not about species death, but about beginning again.

This book uses postapocalyptic fiction as a terrain for thinking about the state of nature: the hypothetical fiction that is the driving force behind the social contract. The first half of the book examines novels that tell the story of the move from the state of nature to civil society through a Hobbesian, a Lockean, or a Rousseauian lens, including Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank, Malevil by Robert Merle, and Into the Forest by Jean Hegland. The latter half of the book examines Octavia Butler's postapocalyptic Parable series in which a new kind of social contract emerges, one built on the fact of human dependence and vulnerability.
The Rhetoric of Soft Power
Authors: Hayden Craig
Published: February 2025

The Rhetoric of Soft Power: Public Diplomacy in Global Contexts provides a comparative assessment of public diplomacy and strategic communication initiatives, in order to portray how Joseph Nye’s notion of “soft power” has translated into context-specific strategies of international influence. The book examines four cases – Japan, Venezuela, China, and the United States – to illuminate the particular significance of culture, foreign publics, and communication technologies for the foreign policy ambitions of each country.
Reproducing Chinese Culture in Diaspora
Authors: Huang Shu-min
Published: February 2025

Reproducing Chinese Culture in Diaspora discusses how a group of anti-communist Chinese exiles from Yunnan Province have managed to establish a rural livelihood in Thailand's northern hills over the past half century. When faced with the seemingly invincible Communist forces that were sweeping across the Mainland, these nationals retreated in 1949 or shortly thereafter to the Golden Triangle that sits astride the borders of Burma, Laos, and Thailand in voluntary exile. This book mainly concerns their hardships as they have struggled to carve out a new life along with their attempts to find an agricultural identity in the area. Initially gaining power as drug traffickers and narco-kings, the Yunnan exiles have transformed into sustainable farming leaders. Yet, despite their success in establishing themselves in Thailand, their community is facing a steep decline that threatens their long time survival. Part of their rationale in leaving communist China in search of a new settlement in the Golden Triangle, the exiles sought to protect Chinese traditions and ideals in the face of what they felt was Western influence. Yet, in their attempts to maintain their traditions, they've drifted to the opposite extreme, treating those traditions as sacrosanct and adhering to them rigidly. As a result, many of the younger generations are fleeing the communities from this 'cultural petrification,' and those who stay openly challenge the authoritarian old guard in a desire to modernize. This clash of old vs new severely strains a prosperous yet fragile community, clouding its future in uncertainty.
Gay and Lesbian Communities the World Over
Authors: Simon Rita J. , Brooks Alison M.
Published: February 2025

Gay and Lesbian Communities the World Over examines the treatment and status of gays and lesbians in 21 countries around the world. The countries included are Canada, the United States, Argentina, Brazil, Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Israel, Egypt, Iran, Nigeria, South Africa, India, China, Japan, and Australia. The book explores the history of homosexuality dating back to ancient Greece and Rome, as well as attitudes toward gays and lesbians within the world's most prominent religions, the arts, literature, and film. This investigation is unique due to its comprehensive and innovative analysis of a wide range of topics concerning gay and lesbian communities across a large number of countries. The authors report on the rights of gay and lesbian citizens in the countries listed above, as for example the right to marry, adopt, serve in the military, hold certain occupational positions. They also describe the status of gay and lesbian citizens as for example, the legality of homosexuality and sanctioned punishments. When available, public opinion data are reported on how respondents feel about gays and lesbians in their country as well as their opinions on what rights should be afforded to this group. Data are reported on respondents' opinions on allowing gay marriage, civil unions, adoption, and allowing gays to openly serve in the military. The representative sample of countries in this study will help scholars get a better sense of the status of gays and lesbians across the globe.
United City, Divided Memories?
Authors: Verheyen Dirk
Published: February 2025

United City, Divided Memories? focuses on the basic question of how Berlin today deals with three specific Cold War-era legacies: the presence of the four Great Powers, the East German Stasi, and the Berlin Wall. Dirk Verheyen looks at monuments, museums, and memorial sites as illustrations of Berlin's struggle to craft an effective shared identity that ties together its western and eastern halves. Verheyen's comprehensive and critical analysis is considered against the broader background of Germany's efforts at coming to grips with its dual twentieth-century totalitarian past. This book demonstrates that important elements of east-west contrast linger and complicate the city's efforts at crafting a more definitively future-oriented united identity. United City, Divided Memories? will stimulate debate among German studies scholars, as well as among those interested in German history and cultural studies.
John Dewey and the Habits of Ethical Life
Authors: Kosnoski Jason
Published: February 2025

This book uses John Dewey to articulate discursive practices that would help citizens form better intellectual and moral relationships with their fragmented, shifting political environment. These practices do not impart more or better information to citizens, but instead consist in dialog exhibiting rhythms and patterns that increase their interest in inquiring how distant events and communities affect their individual lives. The basis for these practices can be found in Dewey's claim that teachers can lead class discussions with particular 'aesthetic' qualities that encourage students to expand the scale of the realm of events that they deem important to their lives. The ability to forge moral and intellectual links with distant political events becomes all the more necessary in our current environment-not only are individuals' lives increasingly affected by global events, but also such events constantly shift across an increasingly 'liquid' social landscape comprised of decentralized institutions, instantaneous communication and easy transportation. Dewey saw early on how such 'aesthetics' of society, or its spatial and temporal qualities, might undermine citizens' understanding and concern for the larger public. This concern for how the movement and location of elements of the social environment might affect citizen perception ties Dewey to many contemporary geographers, economists and social theorists normally not associated with his work. If Dewey's classrooms were to be reinterpreted as political associations and his teachers as organizers, individuals discussing the origins of their seemingly local issues in such associations could forge passionate moral connections with the contemporary liquid public. Subsequently, they might begin to increasingly care for, participate in global politics and seek solidarity with seemingly distant communities.
Francis Bacon's Inquiry Touching Human Nature
Authors: Minkov Svetozar
Published: February 2025

Francis Bacon's 'Inquiry Touching Human Nature' is a study of Francis Bacon's moral philosophy in its relation to the enlightenment project he helped launch. Since Bacon is one of the founders of technological modernity, the book presents a meditation on the presuppositions and character of modern life. In its distinctiveness, modern life is characterized by a rejection as well as a reinterpretation of the classical and Christian approaches to life and conceptions of virtue. Svetozar Minkov follows closely Bacon's confrontation with the traditional views on courage, moderation, justice, wisdom, love, and ways of dealing with death and general adversity. Bacon had a comprehensive vision of the human situation. He can help us think through the relation between power and wisdom. And because he saw the costs or dangers of modern life as clearly as he predicted, and helped bring about, its advancements and boons, Bacon is a thinker who addresses directly and deeply our own perplexities.
Political Theory, Science Fiction, and Utopian Literature
Authors: Burns Tony
Published: February 2025

Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed is of interest to political theorists partly because of its association with anarchism and partly because it is thought to represent a turning point in the history of utopian/dystopian political thought and literature and of science fiction. Published in 1974, it marked a revival of utopianism after decades of dystopian writing. According to this widely accepted view The Dispossessed represents a new kind of literary utopia, which Tom Moylan calls a 'critical utopia.' The present work challenges this reading of The Dispossessed and its place in the histories of utopian/dystopian literature and science fiction. It explores the difference between traditional literary utopia and novels and suggests that The Dispossessed is not a literary utopia but a novel about utopianism in politics. Le Guin's concerns have more to do with those of the novelists of the 19th century writing in the tradition of European Realism than they do with the science fiction or utopian literature. It also claims that her theory of the novel has an affinity with the ancient Greek tragedy. This implies that there is a conservatism in Le Guin's work as a creative writer, or as a novelist, which fits uneasily with her personal commitment to anarchism.
The Egyptian Press and Coverage of Local and International Events
Authors: El-Bendary Mohamed
Published: February 2025

The Egyptian press has a large readership and potential influence on public opinion in Egypt and the Arab world. The Egyptian Press and Coverage of Local and International Events analyzes this understudied area. Written in Egypt, the book is formed of five chapters and analyzes in qualitative and quantitative methods close to 300 newspaper and magazine articles. It studies the Egyptian press and investigates the challenges it faces to be compatible with that in the west, and evaluates the renowned book Four Theories of the press and whether today's Egyptian press can fit in one of those theories. It also looks at the concepts of framing and discourse analysis adopted later. The author examines how the Egyptian press framed the Sudanese refugees' riot in Cairo in December 2005 by the top thirteen Egyptian national, independent, and party newspapers. It found that independent and party newspapers enjoy more freedom than national ones in criticizing government and the way police tackled the protest. However, independent newspapers were more vigorous in their criticism than party ones. The author observes that the weekly magazines tended to frame their coverage in a somewhat anti-government slant, accusing authorities and ferry owners of failure and corruption. Finally, the book compares coverage of the Israeli War in Lebanon in July 2006 by Egypt's giant semi-official daily newspaper Al-Ahram with that by two prominent, non-Egyptian pan-Arab dailies Al-Hayat and Asharq Al-Awsat. He finds that while Al-Hayat and Asharq Al-Awsat, which are owned by Saudi businessmen, portrayed Hizbullah in an unfavorable manner, Al-Ahram was somewhat favorable in its coverage of the Lebanese resistance group.