Evaluating Methodology in International Studies offers a unique collection of original essays by world-renowned political scientists. The essays address the state of the discipline in regard to the methodology of researching global politics, focusing in particular on formal modeling, quantitative methods, and qualitative approaches in International Studies.
The authors reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of current methodology and suggest ways to advance theory and research in International Studies. This volume is essential reading for methods courses and will be of interest to scholars and students alike.
See table of contents and excerpts.
Frank P. Harvey is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Centre for Foreign Policy Studies at Dalhousie University.
Michael Brecher is the R.B. Angus Professor of Political Science at McGill University and past president of the International Studies Association.
Millennial Reflections on International Studies
This volume is part of the Millennial Reflections on International Studies project in which forty-five prominent scholars engage in self-critical, state-of-the-art reflection on international studies to stimulate debates about successes and failures and to address the larger questions of progress in the discipline.
Other paperbacks from this project:
Realism and Institutionalism in International Studies
Conflict, Security, Foreign Policy, and International Political Economy: Past Paths and Future Directions in International Studies
Critical Perspectives in International Studies
The full collection of essays is available in the handbook Millennial Reflections on International Studies.
Enter the world of an academic trailblazer
Robert W. Funk, professor of New Testament, former Executive Secretary of the Society of Biblical Literature, and founder of Scholars Press and the Jesus Seminar, was one of the most gifted, controversial figures in modern biblical scholarship. The volume includes nineteen of his essays, correspondences, interviews, and administrative papers pertaining to the Society of Biblical Literature and Scholars Press. Colleagues introduce each section with reflections on the life and contributions of Funk.
Features:
Almost everyone would like to see the enactment of sound, practical measures to help disadvantaged people get off welfare and find jobs at decent wages, and over the past quarter-century federal and state governments have struggled to develop just such programs. How do we know whether they are having the hoped-for effect? How do we know whether these vast outlays of money are helping the people they are designed to reach?
All welfare and training programs have been subject to professional evaluations, including social experiments and demonstrations designed to test new ideas. This book reviews what we have discovered from past assessments and suggests how welfare and training programs should be planned for the 1990s. The authors of this volume, each a recognized expert in the evaluation of social programs, do more than summarize what we have learned so far. They clarify why the issue of the proper conduct and interpretation of evaluations has itself been a subject of continuing controversy. In part, the problem is organizational, requiring the integrated efforts of social scientists, public officials, and the professionals who execute evaluations. In addition, there is a dispute about scientific method: should evaluators try to understand the complex social processes that make programs succeed (or fail), or should they focus on inputs and outputs, treating the programs themselves as “black boxes” whose machinery remains hidden?
Evaluating Welfare and Training Programs will be important for policy researchers and evaluation professionals, social scientists concerned with evaluation methods, public officials working in social policy, and students of public policy, economics, and social work.
Explores a crucial question in American national politics: How durable is the close connection between the GOP and the evangelical movement?
Evangelical Identity and Gendered Family Life provides a sociological and historical analysis of gender, family, and work among evangelical Protestants. In this innovative study, Sally Gallagher traces two lines of gender ideals—one of husbands’ authority and leadership, the other of mutuality and partnership in marriage—from the Puritans to the Promise Keepers into the lives of ordinary evangelicals today. Rather than simply reacting against or accommodating themselves to “secular society,” Gallagher argues that both traditional and egalitarian evangelicals draw on longstanding beliefs about gender, human nature, and the person of God.
The author bases her arguments on an analysis of evangelical family advice literature, data from a large national survey and personal interviews with over 300 evangelicals nationwide. No other work in this area draws on such a range of data and methodological resources. Evangelical Identity and Gendered Family Life establishes a standard for future research by locating the sources, strategies, and meaning of gender within evangelical Protestantism.
The New Deal is often said to represent a sea change in American constitutional history, overturning a century of precedent to permit an expanded federal government, increased regulation of the economy, and eroded property protections. John Compton offers a surprising revision of this familiar narrative, showing that nineteenth-century evangelical Protestants, not New Deal reformers, paved the way for the most important constitutional developments of the twentieth century.
Following the great religious revivals of the early 1800s, American evangelicals embarked on a crusade to eradicate immorality from national life by destroying the property that made it possible. Their cause represented a direct challenge to founding-era legal protections of sinful practices such as slavery, lottery gambling, and buying and selling liquor. Although evangelicals urged the judiciary to bend the rules of constitutional adjudication on behalf of moral reform, antebellum judges usually resisted their overtures. But after the Civil War, American jurists increasingly acquiesced in the destruction of property on moral grounds.
In the early twentieth century, Oliver Wendell Holmes and other critics of laissez-faire constitutionalism used the judiciary’s acceptance of evangelical moral values to demonstrate that conceptions of property rights and federalism were fluid, socially constructed, and subject to modification by democratic majorities. The result was a progressive constitutional regime—rooted in evangelical Protestantism—that would hold sway for the rest of the twentieth century.
A new history explores the commercial heart of evangelical Christianity.
American evangelicalism is big business. For decades, the world’s largest media conglomerates have sought out evangelical consumers, and evangelical books have regularly become international best sellers. In the early 2000s, Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life spent ninety weeks on the New York Times Best Sellers list and sold more than thirty million copies. But why have evangelicals achieved such remarkable commercial success?
According to Daniel Vaca, evangelicalism depends upon commercialism. Tracing the once-humble evangelical book industry’s emergence as a lucrative center of the US book trade, Vaca argues that evangelical Christianity became religiously and politically prominent through business activity. Through areas of commerce such as branding, retailing, marketing, and finance, for-profit media companies have capitalized on the expansive potential of evangelicalism for more than a century.
Rather than treat evangelicalism as a type of conservative Protestantism that market forces have commodified and corrupted, Vaca argues that evangelicalism is an expressly commercial religion. Although religious traditions seem to incorporate people who embrace distinct theological ideas and beliefs, Vaca shows, members of contemporary consumer society often participate in religious cultures by engaging commercial products and corporations. By examining the history of companies and corporate conglomerates that have produced and distributed best-selling religious books, bibles, and more, Vaca not only illustrates how evangelical ideas, identities, and alliances have developed through commercial activity but also reveals how the production of evangelical identity became a component of modern capitalism.
The cowboy that emerges from this collection is multifaceted, as the book juxtaposes cowboys spraying longhorns at a car wash to cowboys advertising services on Craigslist and Pepsi-drinking cowboys riding Amtrak trains. There are portraits of the old cowboys, crotchety coffee-swigging men with too many stories about how things were better four decades ago. However, the figure remains one constructed of loyalties—loyalty to work, loyalty to family, loyalty to animals, loyalty to the land.
The image of the cowboy is vivid in our imagination, insperable from Western mythology, a means to connect ourselves with the wild and rugged individuals we dream we used to be. In this age of computers and cubicles we want to touch and preserve that history, but we must allow for shifting traditions. As the thirty-five authors in this collection will remind you, even cowboys carry cell phones.
A surprising and vivid remembrance of gay life in the wake of World War II
It is often difficult to imagine gay gathering places in the decades before the Stonewall riots of the 1960s, and nearly impossible to think of such communities outside the nation’s largest cities. Yet such places did exist, and their histories tell amazing stories of survival and the struggle for acceptance and self-respect.
Kirmser’s was such a place. In the 1940s, this bar in downtown St. Paul was popular with blue-collar customers during the day, then became an unofficial home to working-class gay men and lesbians at night. After Ricardo J. Brown was discharged from the navy for revealing his sexual orientation in 1945, he returned home to Minnesota and discovered in Kirmser’s a space where he could develop his new self-awareness and fulfill his desire to find people like himself.The Evening Crowd at Kirmser’s is Brown’s compelling memoir of his experiences as a young gay man in St. Paul. In an engaging and open writing style, and through stories both humorous and tragic, Brown introduces us to his family, companions, and friends, such as Flaming Youth, a homely, sardonic man who carried the nickname from his youth ironically into middle age; Dale, who suddenly loses his job of six years after an anonymous note informed his employer that he was gay; and Bud York, an attractive and confident man with a fondness for young boys.Despite the suffragist activities of the 1920s and the heightened pressures brought to bear on traditionally “male-only” institutions in American society during the past three decades, many vocations remain sanctuaries of male dominance. One such area is the classical music world; though, as Jan Bell Groh asserts in Evening the Score, inroads into this field have bene made, sometimes at great cost.
At the center of this work is a unique set of newsletters edited and published by Frédérique Petrides, one of America’s first and most influential female conductors. In Petride’s time, most women musicians were forced to ply their trade in all-female orchestras; through the thirty-seven issues of Women in Music published from 1935 to 1940, the achievements of these musicians were championed, and the prejudices, misconceptions, and deliberately discriminatory policies of many of their male counterparts were exposed and condemned.
Evening the Score is an ambitious endeavor that seeks not only to preserve these early documents and explain them within the context of the 1930s music industry but also to garner for Petrides the long-overdue praise to which she is entitled. It is at once a celebration and a source of inspiration.
A touchstone of the Enlightenment dispute between rationality and religious belief, David Hume’s essay “Of Miracles” has elicited much commentary from proponents and critics ever since it was published over 250 years ago. Alexander George’s lucid and sustained interpretation of Hume’s essay provides fresh insights into this provocative, occasionally elusive, and always subtle text. The Everlasting Check will be read with interest by both students new to Hume and seasoned scholars.
George does justice to the letter and spirit of Hume’s essay, explaining the concepts and claims involved, making intelligible the essay’s structure, and clarifying remarks that have long puzzled readers. Properly interpreted, the essay’s central philosophical argument proves to be much hardier than Hume’s detractors suggest. George considers a range of objections to Hume—some recent, some perennial—and shows why most fail, either because they are based on misinterpretations or because the larger body of Hume’s philosophy answers them.
Beyond an analysis and defense of Hume’s essay, George also offers a critique of his own, appealing to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s thoughts on magic and ritual to demonstrate that Hume misconstrues the character of religious belief and its relationship to evidence and confirmation. Raising a host of important questions about the connection between religious and empirically verified beliefs, George discusses why Hume’s master argument can fail to engage with committed religious thought and why philosophical argumentation in general often proves ineffective in shaking people’s deeply held beliefs.
This English translation of Gebser’s major work, Ursprung und Gegenwart (Stuttgart, Deutsche Verlag, 1966), offers certain fundamental insights which should be beneficial to any sensitive scientist and makes it available to the English-speaking world for the recognition it deserves.
“The path which led Gebser to his new and universal perception of the world is, briefly, as follows. In the wake of materialism and social change, man had been described in the early years of our century as the “dead end” of nature. Freud had redefined culture as illness—a result of drive sublimation; Klages had called the spirit (and he was surely speaking of the hypertrophied intellect) the “adversary of the soul,” propounding a return to a life like that of the Pelasgi, the aboriginal inhabitants of Greece; and Spengler had declared the “Demise of the West” during the years following World War I. The consequences of such pessimism continued to proliferate long after its foundations had been superseded.
It was with these foundations—the natural sciences—that Gebser began. As early as Planck it was known that matter was not at all what materialists had believed it to be, and since 1943 Gebser has repeatedly emphasized that the so-called crisis of Western culture was in fact an essential restructuration.…
Gebser has noted two results that are of particular significance: first, the abandonment of materialistic determinism, of a one-sided mechanistic-causal mode of thought; and second, a manifest “urgency of attempts to discover a universal way of observing things, and to overcome the inner division of contemporary man who, as a result of his one-sided rational orientation, thinks only in dualisms.”
Against this background of recent discoveries and conclusions in the natural sciences Gebser discerned the outlines of a potential human universality. He also sensed the necessity to go beyond the confines of this first treatise so as to include the humanities (such as political economics and sociology) as well as the arts in a discussion along similar lines. This was the point of departure of The Ever-Present Origin.
From In memoriam Jean Gebser by Jean Keckeis
A pioneer in the birth control movement both in the United States and abroad, Dr. Clarence J. Gamble began his work as a volunteer in Philadelphia in 1929. Because he was convinced that the health and happiness of women and children and, in fact, entire families depended on adequate spacing of their babies, he helped to establish family planning clinics in a dozen American cities before he was forty years old.
Dr. Gamble's major concern was to provide a safe, reliable, and cheap contraceptive that poor women who had no access to running water or modern conveniences could use. After World War II and the population explosion that followed it, Dr. Gamble expanded his efforts in what he called the Great Cause to help those in the developing nations who wanted their people to be able to choose when to have children and how many to have.
Every Child a Wanted Child is more than the biography of a unique man. It is a record of the ups and downs of the birth control movement in the United States and in Italy, Japan, India, and parts of Asia and Africa.
The surprising story of the movement to create a truly democratic foreign policy by engaging ordinary Americans in world affairs.
No major arena of US governance is more elitist than foreign policy. International relations barely surface in election campaigns, and policymakers take little input from Congress. But not all Americans set out to build a cloistered foreign policy “establishment.” For much of the twentieth century, officials, activists, and academics worked to foster an informed public that would embrace participation in foreign policy as a civic duty.
The first comprehensive history of the movement for “citizen education in world affairs,” Every Citizen a Statesman recounts an abandoned effort to create a democratic foreign policy. Taking the lead alongside the State Department were philanthropic institutions like the Ford and Rockefeller foundations and the Foreign Policy Association, a nonprofit founded in 1918. One of the first international relations think tanks, the association backed local World Affairs Councils, which organized popular discussion groups under the slogan “World Affairs Are Your Affairs.” In cities across the country, hundreds of thousands of Americans gathered in homes and libraries to learn and talk about pressing global issues.
But by the 1960s, officials were convinced that strategy in a nuclear world was beyond ordinary people, and foundation support for outreach withered. The local councils increasingly focused on those who were already engaged in political debate and otherwise decried supposed public apathy, becoming a force for the very elitism they set out to combat. The result, David Allen argues, was a chasm between policymakers and the public that has persisted since the Vietnam War, insulating a critical area of decisionmaking from the will of the people.
When she was only nine, Dayani Baldelomar left her Nicaraguan village with nothing more than a change of clothes. She was among tens of thousands of rural migrants to Managua in the 1980s and 1990s. After years of homelessness, Dayani landed in a shantytown called The Widows, squeezed between a drainage ditch and putrid Lake Managua. Her neighbor, Yadira Castellón, also migrated from the mountains. Driven by hope for a better future for their children, Dayani, Yadira, and their husbands invent jobs in Managua’s spreading markets and dumps, joining the planet’s burgeoning informal economy. But a swelling tide of family crises and environmental calamities threaten to break their toehold in the city.
Dayani’s and Yadira’s struggles reveal one of the world’s biggest challenges: by 2050, almost one-third of all people will likely live in slums without basic services, vulnerable to disasters caused by the convergence of climate change and breakneck urbanization. To tell their stories, Douglas Haynes followed Dayani’s and Yadira’s families for five years, learning firsthand how their lives in the city are a tightrope walk between new opportunities and chronic insecurity. Every Day We Live Is the Future is a gripping, unforgettable account of two women’s herculean efforts to persevere and educate their children. It sounds a powerful call for understanding the growing risks to new urbanites, how to help them prosper, and why their lives matter for us all.
French trade unions played a historical role in the 1930s quite unlike that of any other labor movement. Against a backdrop of social unrest, parliamentary crisis, and impending world war, industrial unionists in the great metal-fabricating plants of the Paris Region carried out a series of street mobilizations, factory occupations, and general strikes that were virtually unique in Western history.
The unionization of the metal industry, following a series of anti-fascist demonstrations and plant seizures, would constitute the defining episode in modern French labor history and one of the great chapters in European social history. Yet little is known of these extraordinary events.
With a style that captures the vivid character of these experiences, Every Factory a Fortress tells the story of the Paris metal workers, who succeeded in organizing the largest Communist union in the Western world, reshaping the parameters of French social relations, and, ultimately, altering the course of French destinies.
Some of the dimmest years in Walt Whitman’s life precede the advent of Leaves of Grass in 1855, when he was working as a journalist and fiction writer. Starting around 1850, what he’d begun writing in his personal notebooks was far more enigmatic than anything he’d done before.
One of Whitman’s most secretive projects during this timeframe was a novel, Life and Adventures of Jack Engle; serialized anonymously in the spring of 1852, and rediscovered and properly published in 2017. The key to the novel’s later discovery were plot notes Whitman had made in one of his private notebooks.
Whitman’s invaluable notebooks have been virtually inaccessible to the public, until now. Maintaining the early notebooks’ wild, syncretic feel and sample illustrations of Whitman’s beautiful and unkempt pages, scholars Zachary Turpin and Matt Miller’s thorough transcriptions have made these notebooks available to all; sharing Whitman’s secret space for developing his poetry, his writing, his philosophy, and himself.
George Orwell has been embraced, adopted, and co-opted by everyone from the far left to the neoconservatives. Each succeeding generation of Anglo-American intellectuals has felt compelled to engage the life, work, and cultural afterlife of Orwell, who is considered by many to have been the foremost political writer of the twentieth century. Every Intellectual's Big Brother explores the ways in which numerous disparate groups, Orwell's intellectual "siblings," have adapted their views of Orwell to fit their own agendas and how in doing so they have changed our perceptions of Orwell himself. By examining the politics of literary reception as a dimension of cultural history, John Rodden gives us a better understanding of Orwell's unique and enduring role in Anglo-American intellectual life.
In Part One, Rodden opens the book with a section titled "Their Orwell, Left and Right," which focuses on Orwell's reception by several important literary circles of the latter half of the twentieth century. Beginning with Orwell's own contemporaries, Rodden addresses the ways various intellectual groups of the 1950s responded to Orwell. Rodden then moves on in Part Two to what he calls the "Orwell Confraternity Today," those contemporary intellectuals who have, in various ways, identified themselves with or reacted against Orwell. The author concludes by examining how Orwell's status as an object of admiration and detraction has complicated the way in which he has been perceived by readers since his death.
Every River on Earth: Writing from Appalachian Ohio includes some of the best regional poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction from forty contemporary writers, both established and up-and-coming. The wide range of material from authors such as David Baker, Don Bogen, Michelle Burke, Richard Hague, Donald Ray Pollock, and others, offers the reader a window into daily life in the region. The people, the landscape, the struggles, and the deepest undercurrents of what it means to be from and of a place are revealed in these original, deeply moving, and sometimes shocking pieces.
The book is divided into four sections: Family & Folks, The Land, The Grind, and Home & Away, each of which explores a different aspect of the place that these authors call home. The sections work together beautifully to capture what it means to live, to love, and to die in this particular slice of Appalachia. The writing is accessible and often emotionally raw; Every River on Earth invites all types of readers and conveys a profound appreciation of the region’s character.
The authors also offer personal statements about their writing, allowing the reader an intimate insight into their processes, aesthetics, and inspirations. What is it to be an Appalachian? What is it to be an Appalachian in Ohio? This book vividly paints that picture.
Every River on Earth
David Lee Garrison
I look out the window and see
through the neighbor’s window
to an Amish buggy
where three children are peeping back,
and in their eyes I see the darkness
of plowed earth hiding seed.
Wind pokes the land in winter,
trying to waken it,
and in the melting snow
I see rainbows and in them
every river on earth. I see all the way
to the ocean, where sand and stones
embrace each falling wave
and reach back to gather it in.
In Every Root an Anchor, writer and arborist R. Bruce Allison celebrates Wisconsin's most significant, unusual, and historic trees. More than one hundred tales introduce us to trees across the state, some remarkable for their size or age, others for their intriguing histories. From magnificent elms to beloved pines to Frank Lloyd Wright's oaks, these trees are woven into our history, contributing to our sense of place. They are anchors for time-honored customs, manifestations of our ideals, and reminders of our lives' most significant events.
For this updated edition, Allison revisits the trees' histories and tells us which of these unique landmarks are still standing. He sets forth an environmental message as well, reminding us to recognize our connectedness to trees and to manage our tree resources wisely. As early Wisconsin conservationist Increase Lapham said, "Tree histories increase our love of home and improve our hearts. They deserve to be told and remembered."
“What I done and what I been accused of covers everything, you put ’em both together.” Wyatt Moore of Caddo Lake exaggerates, but perhaps not very much. During his long life at Caddo Lake, Moore was at various times a boat operator, commercial fisherman, boat builder, farmer, fishing and hunting camp operator, guide, commercial hunter, trapper, raftsman, moonshiner, oil field worker, water well driller, and mechanical jack-of-all-trades. Still, he always found time for his lifelong study of the natural and human history of Caddo Lake. Here, in words as fresh and forceful as the day they were uttered, is his tale.
Moore, who was given the gift of a unique story to tell and great power to tell it, was the historical interpreter of his strange homeland of Caddo Lake. Twenty-three miles long, some forty thousand acres at high water, stretching across two Texas counties and one Louisiana parish, Caddo Lake’s fresh waters merge into a labyrinthine swamp punctuated by inlets, holes, and geological oddities like Goat Island, Whistleberry Slough, Whangdoodle Pass, and the Devil’s Elbow. Here among these lost reminders of steamboats and old bateau men is Moore’s world.
Born in 1901 at Karnack, Texas, Moore grew up in a time when kids wore button shoes and in a place where pigs and chickens roamed the backyard. He drank his first whiskey at age eight, gigged fish, trapped, and hunted for pearls as a boy, and grew up to an easy assurance on the lake that comes only to those long accustomed to its ways. A walking library of the history of Caddo Lake, Moore delved into almost every nook and corner of it, and wherever he went, whatever he did, he sought to learn more about his subect. Sought out by writers and journalists—among them James Michener and Bill Moyers—because of his laconic wit and remarkable command of the region’s story, Moore became known as a resource as precious as the lake itself. Moore’s story is eloquently introduced by Thad Sitton in an opening essay that chronicles the history of Caddo Lake. Striking photographs of Moore at home and at work on the lake beautifully amplify his life story, and an exuberant word-and-picture essay of Moore expertly building the traditional boat of the region, a bateau, reinforces the vivid image we have of this remarkable man.
Women have long needed a book devoted to their unique issues with diabetes. This up-to-date and practical guide advocates simple lifestyle changes that can help women reduce their risk of getting diabetes or, if already diagnosed, prevent the disease’s most serious complications. Every Woman’s Guide to Diabetes translates the latest findings from diabetes research into proven strategies busy women can use to stay healthy and gain control over an often overwhelming disease. The authors discuss the nature of diabetes, helping readers through the complex medical decisions involved in diabetes treatment. They highlight strategies to decrease the emotional stress and social isolation that often accompany diagnosis, and offer everyday techniques for managing blood sugar.
Key features include:
— Unique aspects of diabetes for women throughout the life cycle
— Timetable of recommended tests and check-ups
— Guide to medications with common dosages
— Charts to help organize diabetes-care tasks and supplies
— Time-management tips for better disease regulation
— Guide to contraceptives available to women with diabetes
— Review of issues critical to women before, during, and following pregnancy
— Advice for overcoming barriers to weight loss and exercise
— Plan for intelligent diet trade-offs while still enjoying meals
— Practical tips for planning exercise
— Strategies to avoid diabetes “burn-out”
Written by two physicians (one of whom is a woman living with diabetes) and an experienced medical writer, Every Woman’s Guide to Diabetes recognizes the power that women have in their households to effect lifestyle changes that will benefit themselves and loved ones, including their mothers, daughters, sisters, and partners. This power can reduce the toll of the diabetes epidemic.
Every Wrong Direction recreates and dissects the bitter education of Dan Burt, an American émigré who never found a home in America. It begins in the row homes of Jewish immigrants and working-class Italians on the mean streets of 1950s South Philadelphia. Every Wrong Direction follows the author from the rough, working-class childhood that groomed him to be a butcher or charter boat captain, through America, Britain and Saudi Arabia as student, lawyer, spy, culture warrior, and expatriate, ending with a photo of his college rooms at St John’s College, Cambridge. Between this beginning and end, through a Philadelphia commuter college, to Cambridge, then Yale Law School, across the working to upper classes, three countries, and seven cities over 43 years, it maps his pursuit of, realization, disillusionment with and abandonment of America and the American Dream.
Praise for Dan Burt's previous memoir, You Think It Strange:
“Burt’s early life was indeed a triumph of wit and will. He managed to escape a world filled with violence and a culture that valued street smarts over book smarts, all the while knowing that just about everyone around him thought little of his prospects. That he made it out at all is extraordinary. That he became a successful lawyer and writer is virtually unimaginable.” —Commonweal
“Dan Burt is a fine poet, and this memoir has all the sensitivity and vigilance you might expect from a writer with such a background. But his prose also has a robustness and documentary power that continually startles and engages. As it combines these things, You Think It Strange catches the strangeness of the world and makes it familiar.”
—Sir Andrew Motion, Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, 1999-2009
Have you ever been a fan of a show that was canceled abruptly or that killed off a beloved character unexpectedly? Or perhaps it was rebooted after a long absence and now you’re worried it won’t be as good as the original? Anyone who has ever followed entertainment closely knows firsthand that such transitions can be jarring.
Indeed, for truly loyal fans, the loss can feel very real—even throwing their own identity into question. Examining how fans respond to and cope with transitions, endings, or resurrections in everything from band breakups (R.E.M.) to show cancellations (Hannibal) to closing down popular amusement park rides, this collection brings together an eclectic mix of scholars to analyze the various ways fans respond to change. Essays explore practices such as fan discussion and creating alternative fan fictions, as well as cases where fans abandon their objects of interest completely and move on to new ones. Shedding light on how fans react, both individually and as a community, the contributors also trace the commonalities and differences present in fandoms across a range of media, and they pay close attention to the ways fandom operates across paratexts and transmedia forms including films, comics, and television.
This fascinating approach promises to make an important contribution to the fields of fan, media, and cultural studies, and should appeal widely to students, scholars, and anyone else with a genuine interest in understanding why these transitions can have such a deep impact on fans’ lives.
Contributors: Stuart Bell, Anya Benson, Lucy Bennett, Paul Booth, Joseph Brennan, Kristina Busse, Melissa A. Click, Ruth Deller, Evelyn Deshane, Nichola Dobson, Simone Driessen, Emily Garside, Holly Willson Holladay, Bethan Jones, Nicolle Lamerichs, Kathleen Williams, Rebecca Williams
A witty take on what’s wrong--and right--with cynicism today, now in paperback!
We are now living in the midst of the most cynical era in American history. Disaffection from government institutions is at an all-time high. Ordinary citizens perceive political leaders to be more manipulative and jaded than ever. Skepticism pervades our cultural and social attitudes and interactions, and is prominently featured in the films we see, the books we read, and the media we experience. In this biting and controversial analysis, William Chaloupka scrutinizes the cynicism that is our common condition, examining both its uses in the politics of backlash and resentment and its surprisingly positive aspects.
Everybody Knows traces cynicism from its classical origins but emphasizes its recent emergence in American culture and politics, following a trajectory from H. L. Mencken to Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton to Fargo. Cutting neatly across ideological divisions, Chaloupka discusses the ways in which cynicism is rooted in all democratic politics and analyzes the role of the media-in particular, television news, political ads and speeches, and books such as E. J. Dionne’s Why Americans Hate Politics and William Bennett’s The Book of Virtues-in dissecting and encouraging cynicism.Chaloupka describes mass cynicism, which permeates popular culture; outsider cynicism, capable of cranky, even violent disruption; and the cynicism of those in power. He argues that those who issue broad pleas for civility or a renewal of community spirit usually misunderstand the cynicism they wish to treat. He also discusses the value of a cheeky, subversive “kynicism” to evoke the lively democratic practice American society must foster.Early reviews call Everybody Knows “original and compelling,” “pithy, engaging, and funny,” and “the best book on American politics in quite a while.” Sure to be widely read and debated, this entertaining book will inspire readers to take a new look at the cynicism prevalent in contemporary American society.In the 1990s, a boom in autobiographical novels and memoirs about incest emerged, making incest one of the hottest topics to connect daytime TV talk shows, the self-help industry, and the literary publishing circuit. In Everybody's Family Romance, Gillian Harkins places this proliferation of incest literature at the center of transformations in the political and economic climate of the late twentieth century.
Harkins's interdisciplinary approach reveals how women's narratives about incest were co-opted by-and yet retained resistant strains against-the cultural logics of the neoliberal state. Across chapters examining legal cases on recovered memory, popular journalism, and novels and memoirs by Dorothy Allison, Carolivia Herron, Kathryn Harrison, and Sapphire, Harkins demonstrates that incest narratives look backward into the past. In these accounts, images of incest forge links between U.S. chattel slavery and the distributive impasses of the welfare state and between decades-distant childhoods and emergent memories of the present.
In contrast to recent claims that incest narratives eclipse broader frameworks of political and economic power, Harkins argues that their emergence exposes changing structural relations between the family and the nation and, in doing so, transforms the analyses of American familial sexual violence.
Winner, 2023 NCA Ethnography Division Best Book Award
Wilfredo Alvarez’s Everyday Dirty Work: Invisibility, Communication, and Immigrant Labor is an exploration into co-cultural communication practices within the workplace. Specifically, Alvarez investigates how Latin American immigrant janitors communicate from their marginalized standpoints in a predominantly White academic organization. He examines how custodial workers perceive, interpret, and thematize routine messages regarding race, ethnicity, social class, immigrant status, and occupation, and how those messages and overall communicative experiences affect both their work and personal lives.
A Latin American immigrant himself, Alvarez relates his own experiences to those of the research participants. His positionality informs and enhances his research as he demonstrates how everyday interpersonal encounters create discursive spaces that welcome or disqualify people based on symbolic and social capital. Alvarez offers valuable insights into the lived experiences of critical––but often undervalued and invisible––organizational members. Through theoretical insights and research data, he provides practical recommendations for organizational leaders to improve how they can relate to and support all stakeholders.
Everyday Environmentalism develops a conversation between marxist theories of everyday life and recent work in urban political ecology, arguing for a philosophy of praxis in relation to the politics of urban environments. Grounding its theoretical debate in empirical studies of struggles to obtain water in the informal settlements of Durban, South Africa, as well as in the creative acts of insurgent art activists in London, Alex Loftus builds on the work of key marxist thinkers to redefine “environmental politics.”
A marxist philosophy of praxis—that world-changing ideas emerge from the acts of everyday people—undergirds the book. Our daily reality, writes Loftus, is woven out of the entanglements of social and natural relations, and as such a kind of environmental politics is automatically incorporated into our lives. Nevertheless, one effect of the public recognition of global environmental change, asserts Loftus, has been a resurgence of dualistic understandings of the world: for example, that nature is inflicting revenge on arrogant human societies.
This ambitious work reformulates—with the assistance of such philosophers as Lukács, Gramsci, Lefebvre, and others—a politics of the environment in which everyday subjectivity is at the heart of a revolutionary politics.
A timely new look at coexisting without assimilating in multicultural cities
If city life is a “being together of strangers,” what forms of being together should we strive for in cities with ethnic and racial diversity? Everyday Equalities seeks evidence of progressive political alternatives to racialized inequality that are emerging from everyday encounters in Los Angeles, Melbourne, Sydney, and Toronto—settler colonial cities that, established through efforts to dispossess and eliminate indigenous societies, have been destinations for waves of immigrants from across the globe ever since.
Everyday Equalities finds such alternatives being developed as people encounter one another in the process of making a home, earning a living, moving around the city, and forming collective actions or communities. Here four leading scholars in critical urban geography come together to deliver a powerful and cohesive message about the meaning of equality in contemporary cities. Drawing on both theoretical reflection and urban ethnographic research, they offer the formulation “being together in difference as equals” as a normative frame to reimagine the meaning and pursuit of equality in today’s urban multicultures.
As the examples in Everyday Equalities indicate, much emotional labor, combined with a willingness to learn from each other, negotiate across differences, and agitate for change goes into constructing environments that foster being together in difference as equals. Importantly, the authors argue, a commitment to equality is not only a hope for a future city but also a way of being together in the present.
What might we learn if the study of ethics focused less on hard cases and more on the practices of everyday life? In Everyday Ethics, Michael Lamb and Brian Williams gather some of the world’s leading scholars and practitioners of moral theology (including some GUP authors) to explore that question in dialogue with anthropology and the social sciences. Inspired by the work of Michael Banner, these scholars cross disciplinary boundaries to analyze the ethics of ordinary practices—from eating, learning, and loving thy neighbor to borrowing and spending, using technology, and working in a flexible economy. Along the way, they consider the moral and methodological questions that emerge from this interdisciplinary dialogue and assess the implications for the future of moral theology.
Contributors. Ana María Alonso, Armando Bartra, Marjorie Becker, Barry Carr, Philip Corrigan, Romana Falcón, Gilbert M. Joseph, Alan Knight, Florencia E. Mallon, Daniel Nugent, Elsie Rockwell, William Roseberry, Jan Rus, Derek Sayer, James C. Scott
Exposing the powerful contradictions between empowering rights and legal rites
By investigating the harms routinely experienced by the victims and survivors of domestic violence, both inside and outside of law, Everyday Harm studies the limits of what domestic violence law can--and cannot--accomplish. Combining detailed ethnographic research and theoretical analysis, Mindie Lazarus-Black illustrates the ways persistent cultural norms and ingrained bureaucratic procedures work to unravel laws designed to protect the safety of society’s most vulnerable people.
Lazarus-Black’s fieldwork in Trinidad traces a story with global implications about why and when people gain the right to ask the court for protection from violence, and what happens when they pursue those rights in court. Why is itthat, in spite of laws designed to empower subordinated people, so little results from that legislation? What happens in and around courts that makes it so difficult for people to obtain their legally available rights and protections? In the case of domestic violence law, what can such legislation mean for women’s empowerment, gender equity, and protection? How do cultural norms and practices intercept the law?
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