front cover of Disability Aesthetics
Disability Aesthetics
Tobin Siebers
University of Michigan Press, 2010

"Disability Aesthetics ambitiously redefines both 'disability' and 'aesthetics,' showing us that disability is central not only to modern art but also to the way we apprehend (and interact with) bodies and buildings. Along the way, Tobin Siebers revisits the beautiful and the sublime, 'degenerate' art and 'disqualified' bodies, culture wars and condemned neighborhoods, the art of Marc Quinn and the fiction of Junot Díaz---and much, much more. Disability Aesthetics is a stunning achievement, a must-read for anyone interested in how to understand the world we half create and half perceive."
---Michael Bérubé, Paterno Family Professor in Literature, Pennsylvania State University

"Rich with examples of the disabled body in both historical and modern art, Tobin Siebers's new book explores how disability problematizes commonly accepted ideas about aesthetics and beauty. For Siebers, disability is not a pejorative condition as much as it is a form of embodied difference. He is as comfortable discussing the Venus de Milo as he is discussing Andy Warhol. Disability Aesthetics is a prescient and much-needed contribution to visual & critical studies."
---Joseph Grigely, Professor of Visual and Critical Studies, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Disability Aesthetics is the first attempt to theorize the representation of disability in modern art and visual culture. It claims that the modern in art is perceived as disability, and that disability is evolving into an aesthetic value in itself. It argues that the essential arguments at the heart of the American culture wars in the late twentieth century involved the rejection of disability both by targeting certain artworks as "sick" and by characterizing these artworks as representative of a sick culture. The book also tracks the seminal role of National Socialism in perceiving the powerful connection between modern art and disability. It probes a variety of central aesthetic questions, producing a new understanding of art vandalism, an argument about the centrality of wounded bodies to global communication, and a systematic reading of the use put to aesthetics to justify the oppression of disabled people. In this richly illustrated and accessibly written book, Tobin Siebers masterfully demonstrates the crucial roles that the disabled mind and disabled body have played in the evolution of modern aesthetics, unveiling disability as a unique resource discovered by modern art and then embraced by it as a defining concept.

Tobin Siebers is V. L. Parrington Collegiate Professor of English Language and Literature and Art and Design at the University of Michigan. His many books include Disability Theory and The Subject and Other Subjects: On Ethical, Aesthetic, and Political Identity.

A volume in the series Corporealities: Discourses of Disability

[more]

front cover of Disability and Social Justice in Kenya
Disability and Social Justice in Kenya
Scholars, Policymakers, and Activists in Conversation
Nina Berman and Rebecca Monteleone, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2022

Disability in Africa has received significant attention as a dimension of global development and humanitarian initiatives. Little international attention is given, however, to the ways in which disability is discussed and addressed in specific countries in Africa. Little is known also about the ways in which persons with disabilities have advocated for themselves over the past one hundred years and how their needs were or were not met in locations across the continent. Kenya has been on the forefront of disability activism and disability rights since the middle of the twentieth century. The country was among the first African states to create a legal framework addressing the rights of persons with disabilities, namely the Persons with Disabilities Act of 2003. Kenya, however, has a much longer history of institutions and organizations that are dedicated to addressing the specific needs of persons with disabilities, and substantial developments have occurred since the introduction of the legal framework in 2003.

Disability and Social Justice in Kenya: Scholars, Policymakers, and Activists in Conversation is the first interdisciplinary and multivocal study of its kind to review achievements and challenges related to the situation of persons with disabilities in Kenya today, in light of the country’s longer history of disability and the wide range of local practices and institutions. It brings together scholars, activists, and policymakers who comment on topics including education, the role of activism, the legal framework, culture, the impact of the media, and the importance of families and the community.
[more]

front cover of Disability in Twentieth-Century German Culture
Disability in Twentieth-Century German Culture
Carol Poore
University of Michigan Press, 2010

"Comprehensively researched, abundantly illustrated and written in accessible and engaging prose . . .  With great skill, Poore weaves diverse types of evidence, including historical sources, art, literature, journalism, film, philosophy, and personal narratives into a tapestry which illuminates the cultural, political, and economic processes responsible for the marginalization, stigmatization, even elimination, of disabled people---as well as their recent emancipation."
---Disability Studies Quarterly

"A major, long-awaited book. The chapter on Nazi images is brilliant---certainly the best that has been written in this arena by any scholar."
---Sander L. Gilman, Emory University

"An important and pathbreaking book . . . immensely interesting, it will appeal not only to students of twentieth-century Germany but to all those interested in the growing field of disability studies."
---Robert C. Holub, University of Tennessee

Disability in Twentieth-Century German Culture covers the entire scope of Germany's most tragic and tumultuous century---from the Weimar Republic to the current administration---revealing how central the notion of disability is to modern German cultural history. By examining a wide range of literary and visual depictions of disability, Carol Poore explores the contradictions of a nation renowned for its social services programs yet notorious for its history of compulsory sterilization and eugenic dogma. This comprehensive volume focuses particular attention on the horrors of the Nazi era, when those with disabilities were considered "unworthy of life," but also investigates other previously overlooked topics including the exile community's response to disability, socialism and disability in East Germany, current bioethical debates, and the rise and gains of Germany's disability rights movement.

Richly illustrated, wide-ranging, and accessible, Disability in Twentieth-Century German Culture gives all those interested in disability studies, German studies, visual culture, Nazi history, and bioethics the opportunity to explore controversial questions of individuality, normalcy, citizenship, and morality. The book concludes with a memoir of the author's experiences in Germany as a person with a disability.

Carol Poore is Professor of German Studies at Brown University.

Illustration: "Monument to the Unknown Prostheses" by Heinrich Hoerle © 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

A volume in the series Corporealities: Discourses of Disability

"Insightful and meticulously researched . . . Using disability as a concept, symbol, and lived experience, the author offers valuable new insights into Germany's political, economic, social, and cultural character . . . Demonstrating the significant ‘cultural phenomena' of disability prior to and long after Hitler's reign achieves several important theoretical and practical aims . . . Highly recommended."
---Choice

[more]

front cover of Disability Theory
Disability Theory
Tobin Siebers
University of Michigan Press, 2008

"Disability Theory is just the book we've been waiting for. Clear, cogent, compelling analyses of the tension between the 'social model' of disability and the material details of impairment; of identity politics and unstable identities; of capability rights and human interdependence; of disability and law, disability as masquerade, disability and sexuality, disability and democracy---they're all here, in beautifully crafted and intellectually startling essays. Disability Theory is a field-defining book: and if you're curious about what 'disability' has to do with 'theory,' it's just the book you've been waiting for, too."
---Michael Bérubé, Pennsylvania State University

"Disability Theory is magisterially written, thoroughly researched, and polemically powerful. It will be controversial in a number of areas and will probably ruffle feathers both in disability studies as well as in realms of cultural theory. And that's all to the good."
---Michael Davidson, University of California, San Diego

"Not only is Disability Theory a groundbreaking contribution to disability studies, it is also a bold, ambitious and much needed revision to a number of adjacent and overlapping fields including cultural studies, literary theory, queer theory, and critical race studies. Siebers has written a powerful manifesto that calls theory to account and forces readers to think beyond our comfort zones."
---Helen Deutsch, University of California, Los Angeles

Intelligent, provocative, and challenging, Disability Theory revolutionizes the terrain of theory by providing indisputable evidence of the value and utility that a disability studies perspective can bring to key critical and cultural questions. Tobin Siebers persuasively argues that disability studies transfigures basic assumptions about identity, ideology, language, politics, social oppression, and the body. At the same time, he advances the emerging field of disability studies by putting its core issues into contact with signal thinkers in cultural studies, literary theory, queer theory, gender studies, and critical race theory.

Tobin Siebers is V. L. Parrington Collegiate Professor, Professor of English Language and Literature, and Professor of Art and Design at the University of Michigan.

A volume in the series Corporealities: Discourses of Disability

Illustration: Pattern by Riva Lehrer, acrylic on panel, 18" X 24", 1995

[more]

front cover of The Disabled Child
The Disabled Child
Memoirs of a Normal Future
Amanda Apgar
University of Michigan Press, 2023
When children are born with disabilities or become disabled in childhood, parents often experience bewilderment: they find themselves unexpectedly in another world, without a roadmap, without community, and without narratives to make sense of their experiences. The Disabled Child: Memoirs of a Normal Future tracks the narratives that have emerged from the community of parent-memoirists who, since the 1980s, have written in resistance of their children’s exclusion from culture. Though the disabilities represented in the genre are diverse, the memoirs share a number of remarkable similarities; they are generally written by white, heterosexual, middle or upper-middle class, ablebodied parents, and they depict narratives in which the disabled child overcomes barriers to a normal childhood and adulthood. Apgar demonstrates that in the process of telling these stories, which recuperate their children as productive members of society, parental memoirists write their children into dominant cultural narratives about gender, race, and class.   By reinforcing and buying into these norms, Apgar argues, “special needs” parental memoirs reinforce ableism at the same time that they’re writing against it.
[more]

front cover of Disabled Veterans in History
Disabled Veterans in History
David A. Gerber, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2012
Disabled Veterans in History explores the long-neglected history of those who have sustained lasting injuries or chronic illnesses while serving in uniform. The contributors to this volume cover an impressive range of countries in Europe and North America as well as a wide sweep of chronology from the Ancient World to the present. The essays address the emergence of "veteran" as a political category with unique privileges and entitlements and of disabled veterans as a special project--and indeed one of the original projects--of the modern welfare state.
The introductory essay, "Finding Disabled Veterans in History," offers perhaps the first attempt at synthesizing knowledge about disabled veterans in Western societies. The other essays examine the representation of disabled veterans from Sophocles' Philoctetes to American feature films; the relations of disabled veterans to the state and society in such public policy issues as pensions, medical care, physical rehabilitation, and job retraining; and the disabled veteran's agency and experience in reentering the peacetime world. Other topics include the place of disabled veterans in societies defeated in war; the fate of disabled veterans in societies experiencing frequent changes of political regimes; the emergence of pensions and vocational rehabilitation for disabled veterans; and the abiding problem of alcohol abuse among disabled veterans.
The contributors come from a variety of disciplines, including history, physical rehabilitation, Slavic studies, sociology, communication and media, and museum studies. The book will be of interest especially to researchers in the fields of war and society, the welfare state, and disability studies, as well as those in the medical, rehabilitation, and counseling fields.
David A. Gerber is Professor of History, State University at Buffalo. He is the author or editor of five previous books.
[more]

front cover of Disarmed Democracies
Disarmed Democracies
Domestic Institutions and the Use of Force
David P. Auerswald
University of Michigan Press, 2000
In Disarmed Democracies: Domestic Institutions and the Use of Force, David P. Auerswald examines how the structure of domestic political institutions affects whether democracies use force or make threats during international disputes. Auerswald argues that the behavior of democracies in interstate conflict is shaped as much by domestic political calculations as by geopolitical circumstance. Variations in the structure of a democracy's institutions of governance make some types of democracies more likely to use force than others. To test his theory, Auerswald compares British, French, and U.S. behavior during military conflicts and diplomatic crises from the Cold War era to the present. He discusses how accountability and agenda control vary between parliamentary, presidential, and premier-presidential democracies and shows how this affects the ability of the democracy to signal its intentions, as well as the likelihood that it will engage in military conflict. His findings have implications for the study of domestic politics and the use of force, as well as of U.S. leadership during the next century.
This study will interest social scientists interested in the domestic politics of international security, comparative foreign policy, or the study of domestic institutions. It will interest those concerned with the exercise of U.S. leadership in the next century, the use of force by democracies, and the future behavior of democratizing nations.
David P. Auerswald is Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, George Washington University.
[more]

front cover of Discarded, Discovered, Collected
Discarded, Discovered, Collected
The University of Michigan Papyrus Collection
Arthur Verhoogt
University of Michigan Press, 2017
The first-ever history of Michigan’s celebrated collection of papyri offers nonspecialists an inviting encounter with the ancient world
[more]

front cover of Disciplinary Discourses, Michigan Classics Ed.
Disciplinary Discourses, Michigan Classics Ed.
Social Interactions in Academic Writing
Ken Hyland
University of Michigan Press, 2004
Why do engineers "report" while philosophers "argue" and biologists "describe"? In the Michigan Classics Edition of Disciplinary Discourses: Social Interactions in AcademicWriting, Ken Hyland examines the relationships between the cultures of academic communities and their unique discourses. Drawing on discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, and the voices of professional insiders, Ken Hyland explores how academics use language to organize their professional lives, carry out intellectual tasks, and reach agreement on what will count as knowledge. In addition, Disciplinary Discourses presents a useful framework for understanding the interactions between writers and their readers in published academic writing. From this framework, Hyland provides practical teaching suggestions and points out opportunities for further research within the subject area.

As issues of linguistic and rhetorical expression of disciplinary conventions are becoming more central to teachers, students, and researchers, the careful analysis and straightforward style of Disciplinary Discourses make it a remarkable asset.

The Michigan Classics Edition features a new preface by the author and a new foreword by John M. Swales.
[more]

front cover of Discipline and Desire
Discipline and Desire
Surveillance Technologies in Performance
Elise Morrison
University of Michigan Press, 2016
Discipline and Desire examines how surveillance technologies, when placed within the frames of theater and performance, can be used to critique and reimagine the politics of surveillance in everyday life. The book explores how rapidly proliferating surveillance technologies, including drones, CCTV cameras, GPS tracking systems, medical surveillance equipment, and facial recognition software, can be repurposed through performance to become technologies of ethical witnessing, critique, and action.

While the subject of surveillance continues to provoke fascination and debate in mainstream media and academia, opportunities to critically reflect upon and, more importantly, to imagine alternative, creative responses to living in a rapidly expanding surveillance society have been harder to find. Author Elise Morrison argues that such opportunities are being created through the growing genre of “surveillance art and performance,” defined as works that centrally employ technologies and techniques of surveillance to create theater, installation, and performance art. Introducing readers to a broad range of surveillance art works, including the work of artists and activists such as Surveillance Camera Players, Jill Magid, Steve Mann, Hasan Elahi, Wafaa Bilal, Blast Theory, Electronic Disturbance Theater, George Brant, Janet Cardiff, Mona Hatoum, and Zach Blas, Discipline and Desire provides a practical and analytical framework that can aid the diverse pursuits of new media-arts practitioners, performance scholars, activists, and hobbyists interested in critical and creative uses of surveillance technologies.
[more]

front cover of Discipline and History
Discipline and History
Political Science in the United States
James Farr and Raymond Seidelman, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1993

James Farr and Raymond Seidelman bring new historical reflection to the "state of the discipline" debate in political science. This anthology offers a panorama of views about the state of the discipline that have been sketched by leading political scientists and disciplinary historians from the late nineteenth century to the past.

The essays in this volume explore four distinct periods in the development of the discipline, with special emphasis on the subfields of American politics and political theory, revealing that the identity of the discipline is constituted not so much by agreements over fundamental principles as by the history of debates about the meaning of politics, the methods of science, the theories of behavioralism and the state, and the responsibilities of public professionals and civic educators.

Contributors are Terence Ball, Charles A. Beard, John W. Burgess, Robert A. Dahl, David Easton, John G. Gunnell, Norman Jacobson, Harold D. Lasswell, Francis Lieber, Charles E. Merriam, David M. Ricci, William H. Riker, Dorothy Ross, Helene Silverberg, Leonard D. White, Woodrow Wilson, and W.W. Willoughby.

Its unprecedented treatment of the history of political science makes Discipline and History essential reading for political scientists and their students. Historians of the social sciences will also find much to consider.

[more]


front cover of Discourse, Knowledge, and Power in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses
Discourse, Knowledge, and Power in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses
Evelyn Adkins
University of Michigan Press, 2022

In ancient Rome, where literacy was limited and speech was the main medium used to communicate status and identity face-to-face in daily life, an education in rhetoric was a valuable form of cultural capital and a key signifier of elite male identity. To lose the ability to speak would have caused one to be viewed as no longer elite, no longer a man, and perhaps even no longer human. We see such a fantasy horror story played out in the Metamorphoses  or The Golden Ass, written by Roman North African author, orator, and philosopher Apuleius of Madauros—the only novel in Latin to survive in its entirety from antiquity. In the novel’s first-person narrative as well as its famous inset tales such as the Tale of Cupid and Psyche, the Metamorphoses is invested in questions of power and powerlessness, truth and knowledge, and communication and interpretation within the pluralistic but hierarchical world of the High Roman Empire (ca. 100–200 CE).

Discourse, Knowledge, and Power presents a new approach to the Metamorphoses: it is the first in-depth investigation of the use of speech and discourse as tools of characterization in Apuleius’ novel. It argues that discourse, broadly defined to include speech, silence, written text, and nonverbal communication, is the primary tool for negotiating identity, status, and power in the Metamorphoses. Although it takes as its starting point the role of discourse in the characterization of literary figures, it contends that the process we see in the Metamorphoses reflects the real world of the second century CE Roman Empire. Previous scholarship on Apuleius’ novel has read it as either a literary puzzle or a source-text for social, philosophical, or religious history. In contrast, this book uses a framework of discourse analysis, an umbrella term for various methods of studying the social political functions of discourse, to bring Latin literary studies into dialogue with Roman rhetoric, social and cultural history, religion, and philosophy as well as approaches to language and power from the fields of sociology, linguistics, and linguistic anthropology. Discourse, Knowledge, and Power argues that a fictional account of a man who becomes an animal has much to tell us not only about ancient Roman society and culture, but also about the dynamics of human and gendered communication, the anxieties of the privileged, and their implications for swiftly shifting configurations of status and power whether in the second or twenty-first centuries.

[more]

front cover of Discourses of Sexuality
Discourses of Sexuality
From Aristotle to AIDS
Donna C. Stanton, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 1993
Michael Foucault called sex “the explanation for everything, our master key.” In Discourses of Sexuality, fourteen distinguished scholars, artists, and critics examine sexuality from a fascinating array of perspectives. The book’s opening section reopens the question of “the history of sexuality;” it is followed by “Regimes of Knowledge and Desire,” which explores gender and sexuality in the Elizabethan period, sexual desire and the market economy during the Industrial Revolution, and Freud’s notions of sexuality of “perversion.” The next section, “The Constructed Body,” examines conceptions, representations, and implications of the body through written and visual representation. The last part of the book, “AIDS and the Crisis of Modernity,” looks at the place of AIDS in the study of sexuality, provides an analysis of Nicholas Nixon’s portraits of people with AIDS, and demonstrates the importance of rediscovering values that help us to live with human variety and social diversity.
 
[more]

front cover of Discovering Addiction
Discovering Addiction
The Science and Politics of Substance Abuse Research
Nancy D. Campbell
University of Michigan Press, 2007

Discovering Addiction brings the history of human and animal experimentation in addiction science into the present with a wealth of archival research and dozens of oral-history interviews with addiction researchers. Professor Campbell examines the birth of addiction science---the National Academy of Sciences's project to find a pharmacological fix for narcotics addiction in the late 1930s---and then explores the human and primate experimentation involved in the succeeding studies of the "opium problem," revealing how addiction science became "brain science" by the 1990s.

Psychoactive drugs have always had multiple personalities---some cause social problems; others solve them---and the study of these drugs involves similar contradictions. Discovering Addiction enriches discussions of bioethics by exploring controversial topics, including the federal prison research that took place in the 1970s---a still unresolved debate that continues to divide the research community---and the effect of new rules regarding informed consent and the calculus of risk and benefit. This fascinating volume is both an informative history and a thought-provoking guide that asks whether it is possible to differentiate between ethical and unethical research by looking closely at how science is made.

Nancy D. Campbell is Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the author of Using Women: Gender, Drug Policy, and Social Justice.

"Compelling and original, lively and engaging---Discovering Addiction opens up new ways of thinking about drug policy as well as the historical discourses of addiction."
---Carol Stabile, University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee

Also available:
Student Bodies: The Influence of Student Health Services in American Society and Medicine, by Heather Munro Prescott
Illness and the Limits of Expression, by Kathlyn Conway
White Coat, Clenched Fist: The Political Education of an American Physician, by Fitzhugh Mullan

[more]

front cover of The Discovery of the Fact
The Discovery of the Fact
Clifford Ando and William P. Sullivan, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2020
The Discovery of the Fact draws on expertise from lawyers, historians of philosophy, and scholars of classical studies and ancient history, to take a very modern perspective on an underexplored but essential domain of ancient legal history. Everyone is familiar with courts as adjudicators of facts. But legal institutions also played an essential role in the emergence of the notion of the fact, and contributed in a vital way to commonplace understandings of what is knowable and what is not. These issues have a particular importance in ancient Greece and Rome, the first western societies in which state law and state institutions of dispute resolution visibly play a decisive role in ordinary social and economic relations. The Discovery of the Fact investigates, historically and comparatively, the relationships among the law, legal institutions, and the boundaries of knowledge in classical Greece and Rome. Societies wanted citizens to conform to the law, but how could this be insured? On what foundation did ancient courts and institutions base their decisions, and how did they represent the reasoning behind their decisions when announcing them? Slaves were owned like things, and yet they had minds that ancients conceded were essentially unknowable. What was to be done? And where  has the boundary been drawn between questions of law and questions of fact when designing processes of dispute resolution?
[more]

front cover of Discredited
Discredited
The UNC Scandal and College Athletics' Amateur Ideal
Andy Thomason
University of Michigan Press, 2021

In 2009, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was on top of the world.

Consistently named one of the top universities in the country, it had welcomed a new phenom of a chancellor who promised to lead the public Ivy into the future. In the all-important athletic realm, the Tar Heels were the Coca-Cola of athletic brands. Resting upon the legacy of legendary basketball coach Dean Smith, UNC had carved out a reputation of excellence paired with squeaky-clean adherence to the rules. Supporters had a name for that irresistible ethos: the Carolina Way. The Tar Heels were climbing even higher. That year, they won their fifth national championship in men's basketball and looked poised to climb the ranks in football under a new, high-powered coach.

But within just a few years, it all came crashing down.

The Tar Heels' success, it turned out, was based on a foundation of deceit. Athletes were flocking to a slate of fake classes that advisers deftly used to keep them eligible to play. That revelation and others metastasized into one of the most damaging scandals ever to visit an American college. In Discredited, journalist Andy Thomason provides a gripping and authoritative retelling of the scandal through the eyes of four of its key participants: the secretary who presided over the fake classes, the professor who directed players toward them, the literacy specialist turned whistleblower who sought to expose the system, and the chancellor who found his career suddenly on the line. The heart-stopping narrative reveals the toll of a college's investment in major sports, and the amateurism myth upon which it is based. Based on dozens of original interviews and thousands of pages of documents, Discredited demonstrates just how far a university will go to preserve the athletic status quo: tolerating tarnished careers, ruined reputations, and years of scathing media criticism—all for a shot at competitive glory.

[more]

front cover of Disorienting Politics
Disorienting Politics
Chimerican Media and Transpacific Entanglements
Fan Yang
University of Michigan Press, 2024
Disorienting Politics mines 21st-century media artifacts—including films like The Martian and TV/streaming media shows such as Firefly and House of Cards—to make visible the economic, cultural, political, and ecological entanglements of China and the United States. Describing these transpacific entanglements as “Chimerica”—coined by economic historians to reference the symbiosis of China and America—Yang examines how Chimerican media, originating in the US but traversing national boundaries in their production, circulation, and consumption, co-create the figure of rising China and extend a political imagination beyond the conventional ground of the nation.

Examining how Chimerican media are shaped by and perpetuate uneven power relations, Disorienting Politics argues that the pervasive tendency among wide-ranging cultural producers to depict the Chinese state as a racialized Other in American media life diminishes the possibility of engaging transpacific entanglements as a basis for envisioning new political horizons. Such othering of China not only results in overt racism against people of Asian descent, Yang argues, but also impacts the wellbeing of people of color more generally. This interdisciplinary book demonstrates the ways in which race is embedded in geopolitics even when the subject of discussion is not the people, but the (Chinese) state. Bridging media and cultural studies, Asian and Asian American studies, geography, and globalization studies, Disorienting Politics calls for a relational politics that acknowledges the multifarious interconnectivity between people, places, media, and environment.
[more]

front cover of Dispossession
Dispossession
Plundering German Jewry, 1933-1953
Christoph Kreutzmüller and Jonathan R. Zatlin, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2020
This collection of essays by a range of international, multidisciplinary scholars explores the financial history, social significance, and cultural meanings of the theft, starting in 1933, of assets owned by German Jews. Despite the fraught topic and the ongoing legal discussions, the subject has not received much scholarly attention until now. This volume offers a much needed contribution to our understanding of the history of the period and the acts. The essays examine the confiscatory taxation of Jewish property, the looting of art and confiscation of gold, the role of German freight forwarders in property theft, salesmen and dispossession in the retail world, theft from the elderly, and the complicity of the banking industry, as well as the reach of the practice beyond German borders.
[more]

front cover of Disputable Decisions in Special Education
Disputable Decisions in Special Education
William M. Cruickshank
University of Michigan Press, 1986
Written by William M. Cruickshank, one of the pioneers in special education, this collection of thirteen separate essays approaches significant problems in the field from philosophical, administrative, and semiautobiographical points of view, provoking discussion of some seemingly irreconcilable issues and providing some hard-hitting solutions. Mainstreaming and noncategorical education are particular concerns of Cruickshank, as are such separate issues as human sexuality for the disabled, self-contained classes for the mentally retarded and for gifted children, and the role of the disciplines in special education, as well as the fears, the guilt feelings, and the rejection of the handicapped by "normal" society. The book is filled with issues that should form the basis of much discussion and argument and, hopefully, solutions.
[more]

front cover of Disruptions as Opportunities
Disruptions as Opportunities
Governing Chinese Society with Interactive Authoritarianism
Taiyi Sun
University of Michigan Press, 2023
Disruptions as Opportunities: Governing Chinese Society with Interactive Authoritarianism addresses the long-standing puzzle of why China outlived other one-party authoritarian regimes with particular attention to how the state manages an emerging civil society. Drawing upon over 1,200 survey responses conducted in 126 villages in the Sichuan province, as well as 70 interviews conducted with Civil Society Organization (CSO) leaders and government officials, participant observation, and online research, the book proposes a new theory of interactive authoritarianism to explain how an adaptive authoritarian state manages nascent civil society. Sun argues that when new phenomena and forces are introduced into Chinese society, the Chinese state adopts a three-stage interactive approach toward societal actors: toleration, differentiation, and legalization without institutionalization. Sun looks to three disruptions—earthquakes, internet censorship, and social-media-based guerrilla resistance to the ride-sharing industry—to test his theory about the three-stage interactive authoritarian approach and argues that the Chinese government evolves and consolidates its power in moments of crisis.
[more]

front cover of Dissent in Dangerous Times
Dissent in Dangerous Times
Austin Sarat, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2004
Dissent in Dangerous Times presents essays by six distinguished scholars, who provide their own unique views on the interplay of loyalty, patriotism, and dissent.

While dissent has played a central role in our national history and in the American cultural imagination, it is usually dangerous to those who practice it, and always unpalatable to its targets. War does not encourage the tolerance of opposition at home any more than it does on the front: if the War on Terror is to be a permanent war, then the consequences for American political freedoms cannot be overestimated.

"Dissent in Dangerous Times examines the nature of political repression in liberal societies, and the political and legal implications of living in an environment of fear. This profound, incisive, at times even moving volume calls upon readers to think about, and beyond, September 11, reminding us of both the fragility and enduring power of freedom."
--Nadine Strossen, President, American Civil Liberties Union, and Professor of Law, New York Law School.


Contributors to this volume

Lauren Berlant

Wendy Brown

David Cole

Hugh Gusterson

Nancy L. Rosenblum

Austin Sarat
[more]

front cover of Distinction and Denial
Distinction and Denial
Race, Nation, and the Critical Construction of the African American Artist, 1920-40
Mary Ann Calo
University of Michigan Press, 2007

Distinctionand Denial challenges conventional theories of race and art by examining the role early twentieth-century art critics played in marginalizing African American artists. Mary Ann Calo dispels the myth of a unified African American artistic tradition through an engaging study of the germinal writing of Alain Locke and other significant critics of the era, who argued that African American artists were both a diverse group and a constituent element of America’s cultural center. By documenting the effects of the “Negro aesthetic” on African American artists working in the interwar years, Distinctionand Denial shows that black artistic production existed between the claims of a distinctly African American tradition and full inclusion into American modernist culture—never fully inside or outside the mainstream.

“A major contribution to the scholarship of African American artists in the inter-war period. With scrupulous research and probing analyses, Calo’s study enables scholars, students, and those interested in the Harlem Renaissance to grasp the intellectual debates, institutional support, and art world promotion that advanced an emerging cohort of African American artists.”

—Patricia Hills, Boston University

“A careful, thorough, historically grounded study that builds a new and significant argument challenging conventional histories of African American art. Sure to become indispensable to any scholarly discussion of American art or African American cultural studies.”

—Helen Langa, American University

Mary Ann Calo is Professor of Art History and Director of the Institute for the Creative and Performing Arts at Colgate University. She is author of Bernard Berenson and the Twentieth Century and editor of Critical Issues in American Art: A Book of Readings.

[more]

front cover of The Distinction of Peace
The Distinction of Peace
A Social Analysis of Peacebuilding
Catherine Goetze
University of Michigan Press, 2017
“Peacebuilding” serves as a catch-all term to describe efforts by an array of international organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and agencies of foreign states to restore or construct a peaceful society in the wake—or even in the midst—of conflict. Despite this variety, practitioners consider themselves members of a global profession. In The Distinction of Peace, Catherine Goetze investigates the genesis of peacebuilding as a professional field of expertise since the 1960s, its increasing influence, and the ways it reflects global power structures.

Goetze describes how the peacebuilding field came into being, how it defines who belongs to it and who does not, and what kind of group culture it has generated. Using an innovative methodology, she investigates the motivations of individuals who become peacebuilders, their professional trajectories and networks, and the “good peacebuilder” as an ideal. For many, working in peacebuilding in various ways—as an aid worker on the ground, as a lawyer at the United Nations, or as an academic in a think tank—has become not merely a livelihood, but also a form of participation in world politics. As a field, peacebuilding has developed techniques for incorporating and training new members, yet its internal politics also create the conditions of exclusion that often result in practical failures of the peacebuilding enterprise.

By providing a critical account of the social mechanisms that make up the peacebuilding field, Goetze offers deep insights into the workings of Western domination and global inequalities.

[more]

front cover of Distribution of the Aboriginal Population of Michigan
Distribution of the Aboriginal Population of Michigan
William B. Hinsdale
University of Michigan Press, 1932
The second book in the Museum’s Occasional Contributions series is W. B. Hinsdale’s work on the Native population of Michigan before and during the period of European contact. Hinsdale describes how the location of food sources (animal and plant) influenced Native settlement patterns.
[more]

front cover of Dividing Lines
Dividing Lines
Class Anxiety and Postbellum Black Fiction
Andreá N. Williams
University of Michigan Press, 2013
One of the most extensive studies of class in nineteenth-century African American literature to date, Dividing Lines unveils how black fiction writers represented the uneasy relationship between class differences, racial solidarity, and the quest for civil rights in black communities. By portraying complex, highly stratified communities with a growing black middle class, these authors dispelled notions that black Americans were uniformly poor or uncivilized. The book argues that the signs of class anxiety are embedded in postbellum fiction: from the verbal stammer or prim speech of class-conscious characters to fissures in the fiction's form. Andreá N. Williams delves into the familiar and lesser-known works of Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Charles W. Chesnutt, Sutton Griggs, and Paul Laurence Dunbar, showing how these texts mediate class through discussions of labor, moral respectability, ancestry, spatial boundaries, and skin complexion. Dividing Lines also draws on reader responses—from book reviews, editorials, and letters—to show how the class anxiety expressed in African American fiction directly sparked reader concerns over the status of black Americans in the U.S. social order. Weaving literary history with compelling textual analyses, this study yields new insights about the intersection of race and class in black novels and short stories from the 1880s to 1900s.

[more]

front cover of Dividing the Rulers
Dividing the Rulers
How Majority Cycling Saves Democracy
Yuhui Li
University of Michigan Press, 2019

The election of populist politicians in recent years seems to challenge the commitment to democracy, if not its ideal. This book argues that majority rule is not the problem; rather, the institutions that stabilize majorities are responsible for the suppression of minority interests. Despite the popular notion that social choice instability (or “cycling”) makes it impossible for majorities to make sound legislation, Yuhui Li argues that the best part of democracy is not the large number of people on the winning side; it is that the winners can be easily divided and realigned with the losers in the cycling process. He shows that minorities’ bargaining power depends on their ability to exploit division within the winning coalition and induce its members to defect, an institutionalized uncertainty that is missing in one-party authoritarian systems.

Dividing the Rulers theorizes why such division within the majority is important and what kind of institutional features can help a democratic system maintain such division, which is crucial in preventing the “tyranny of the majority.” These institutional solutions point to a direction of institutional reform that academics, politicians, and voters should collectively pursue.
 

[more]

front cover of Divined Intervention
Divined Intervention
Religious Institutions and Collective Action
Christopher W. Hale
University of Michigan Press, 2020

Divined Intervention provides an innovative institutionalist account for why religion enables political activism in some settings, but not others. Christopher W. Hale argues that decentralized religious institutions facilitate grassroots collective action, and he uses a multimethod approach to test this explanation against several theoretical alternatives. Utilizing nationally representative Mexican survey data, the book’s statistical analyses demonstrate that decentralization by the Catholic Church is positively associated with greater individual political activism across the country. Using case studies centered in the Mexican states of Chiapas, Yucatán, and Morelos, the author shows that religious decentralization encourages reciprocal cooperative interactions at a local level. This then increases the ability of religion to provide goods and services to its local adherents. These processes then prompt the growth of organizational capacities at the grassroots, enabling secular political activism.

Because this theoretical framework is grounded in human behavior, it shows how local institutions politically organize at the grassroots level. Divined Intervention also offers an improved understanding of religion’s relationship with political activism, a topic of ever-increasing significance as religion fuels political engagement across the globe. The book further synthesizes seemingly disparate approaches to the study of collective action into a cohesive framework. Finally, there is some debate as to the impact of ethnic diversity on the provision of public goods, and this study helps us understand how local institutional configurations can enable collective action across ethnic boundaries.

[more]

front cover of The DNA Mystique
The DNA Mystique
The Gene as a Cultural Icon
Dorothy Nelkin and M. Susan Lindee
University of Michigan Press, 2004
"The DNA Mystique is a wake-up call to all who would dismiss America's love affair with 'the gene' as a merely eccentric obsession."
--In These Times

"Nelkin and Lindee are to be warmly congratulated for opening up this intriguing field [of genetics in popular culture] to further study."
--Nature

The DNA Mystique suggests that the gene in popular culture draws on scientific ideas but is not constrained by the technical definition of the gene as a section of DNA that codes for a protein. In highlighting DNA as it appears in soap operas, comic books, advertising, and other expressions of mass culture, the authors propose that these domains provide critical insights into science itself.

With a new introduction and conclusion, this edition will continue to be an engaging, accessible, and provocative text for the sociology, anthropology, and bioethics classroom, as well as stimulating reading for those generally interested in science and culture.
[more]

front cover of Doctoral Dissertations on South Asia, 1966–1970
Doctoral Dissertations on South Asia, 1966–1970
An Annotated Bibliography Covering North America, Europe, and Australia
Frank Joseph Shulman
University of Michigan Press, 1971
This volume gathers the harvest of recent doctoral dissertations on South Asia, principally from North America and Western Europe, but exclusive of theses from universities in South Asia itself. The yield—1305 dissertations based on research carried out during the early and middle nineteen-sixties and brought to completion between 1966 and 1970—is even greater than one would have guessed, eloquent testimony to the expansion of South Asian studies in the West over the last decade.
Doctoral Dissertations on South Asia seeks to be a comprehensive compilation of recently completed theses dealing in whole or in part with the former civilizations and the contemporary affairs of Ceylon, India, Nepal and Pakistan. At the same time, this work provides striking testimony of the dynamic growth of Asian Studies outside the subcontinent and particularly in the United States, Great Britain, Germany and France, where most of the major centers of scholarship are presently found. It is an interdisciplinary work covering the natural sciences as well as the humanities and social sciences.
[more]

front cover of Documents
Documents
Artifacts of Modern Knowledge
Edited by Annelise Riles
University of Michigan Press, 2006
Documents reflects on the new challenges to humanistic social science in a world in which the subjects of research increasingly share the professional passions and problems of the researcher.

Documents are everywhere in modern life, from the sciences to bureaucracy to law; at the same time, fieldworkers document social realities by collecting, producing, and exchanging documents of their own. Capping off a generation of reflection and critique about the promises and pitfalls of ethnographic methods, the contributors explore how ethnographers conceive, grasp, appreciate, and see patterns, demonstrating that the core of the ethnographic method now lies in the way ethnographers respond to, and increasingly share the professional passions and problems of, their subjects.

"Sophisticated and provocative. The original and unique focus of this volume effectively opens up a new arena of critique that will move ethnography and qualitative inquiry forward in a way that few other works do."
—George Marcus, Department of Anthropology, Rice University

"This edited collection asks how an understanding of documentary forms sheds light on the creation and circulation of modern forms of knowledge, expertise, and governance. This is a major intervention in how we understand the everyday practice and techne of the documentary impulse and documentary apparatuses of law, bureaucratic review, and other institutions of modernity, as well as linguistic anthropology, literary theory, and law. The topic of Documents is not just of interest because of epistemological quandaries in the human sciences over textualization and interpretation, but also because the domains to which we increasingly turn our attention are themselves auto-documentary."
—William M. Maurer, Chair and Associate Professor, Anthropology, University of California, Irvine

Contributors: Mario Biagioli, Donald Brenneis, Carol Heimer, Hirokazu Miyazaki, Adam Reed, Annelise Riles, and Marilyn Strathern.

Annelise Riles is Professor of Law and Anthropology at Cornell University.
[more]

front cover of Documents in Medieval Latin
Documents in Medieval Latin
John Thorley
University of Michigan Press, 1998
This handbook of medieval Latin texts is designed for historians of the Middle Ages with some knowledge of Latin who wish to be able to read a wide range of original source material. It broadens the traditional scope of medieval Latin readers by including historical documents such as deeds and charters along with traditional literary samples. Within the context of a running narrative, Thorley starts with texts from the Anglo-Saxon period and then moves through subsequent centuries genre by genre. Each text is accompanied by a grammatical and historical commentary, both of which allow for independent study. In addition, all selections are translated at the back of the book.
Documents in Medieval Latin will be useful to students of medieval history, literature, and philosophy and those interested in reading more about the Middle Ages. Thorley's cheerful approach, the lively and representative selections of tests, and the documentary and epigraphic focus will prove valuable for those wishing to explore these vital original sources.
John Thorley teaches medieval Latin at Lancaster University.
[more]

front cover of Documents on the Rape of Nanking
Documents on the Rape of Nanking
Timothy Brook, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 1999
The Japanese Army's invasion of China in 1937 was the first step toward a hemispheric war that would last until the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. What ended in one atrocity began with another: the savage military takeover of China's capital city, which quickly became known as the Rape of Nanking. The Japanese Army's conduct from December 1937 to February 1938 constitutes one of the most barbarous events not just of the war but of the century. The violence was documented at the time and then redocumented during the war crimes trial in Tokyo after the war. This book brings together materials from both moments to provide the first comprehensive dossier of primary sources on the Rape.
Part 1, "The Records," includes two sources written as the Rape was underway. The first is a long set of documents produced by the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone, a group of foreigners who strove to protect the Chinese residents. The second is a series of letters that American surgeon Dr. Robert Wilson wrote for his family during the same period. These letters are published here for the first time.
The evidence compiled by the International Committee and its members would be decisive for the indictments against Japanese leaders at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo. Part 2, "The Judgments," reprints portions of the tribunal's 1948 judgment dealing with the Rape of Nanking, its judicial consequences, and sections of the dissenting judgment of Justice Radhabinod Pal.
These contemporary records and judgments create an intimate firsthand account of the Rape of Nanking. Together they are intended to stimulate deeper reflection than previously possible on how and why we assess and assign the burden of war guilt.
Timothy Brook is Professor of Chinese History and Associate Director of the Joint Centre for Asia Pacific Studies, University of Toronto, and is coeditor of Nation Work: Asian Elites and National Identities and Cultureand Economy: The Shaping of Capitalism in Eastern Asia, both published by the University of Michigan Press.
[more]

front cover of Does Business Learn?
Does Business Learn?
Tax Breaks, Uncertainty, and Political Strategies
Sandra L. Suarez
University of Michigan Press, 2000
Firms in the United States have many political advantages when compared to other groups in society. They are the best-represented group in our nation's capital; they operate more Political Action Committees; and their lobbyists are among the most experienced political operatives. Yet firms are uncertain about their political power and hence about the effectiveness of their political strategies. This book deals with how firms decide which strategy to pursue among the existing alternatives when it comes to defending policies that play to their interests.
Sandra Suárez looks at the efforts of business to influence government policy in a detailed study of the efforts of major American corporations to protect the tax credit applicable to profits from investments in Puerto Rico. This rare longitudinal case-study explores the abilities of U.S. pharmaceutical and electronics companies to adapt their political strategies to a fluid and uncertain political environment. Drawing on interviews with tax lawyers, corporate lobbyists and government officials, the author follows the behavior of the same group of companies over the past twenty years.
This book advances a learning-based explanation of business political behavior, which argues that past political experience accounts for patterns of political behavior that government structures and salient issues alone cannot explain. Centered on attempts to protect an important tax break for business, the possessions tax battles provide an appropriate case for examining the value of the business learning approach.
Although written with a political science audience in mind, this book addresses issues that will resonate widely with sociologists, management researchers and students alike.
Sandra L. Suárez is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, Temple University.
[more]

front cover of Doing Time on the Outside
Doing Time on the Outside
Incarceration and Family Life in Urban America
Donald Braman
University of Michigan Press, 2004
"Stigma, shame and hardship---this is the lot shared by families whose young men have been swept into prison. Braman reveals the devastating toll mass incarceration takes on the parents, partners, and children left behind."
-Katherine S. Newman

"Doing Time on the Outside brings to life in a compelling way the human drama, and tragedy, of our incarceration policies. Donald Braman documents the profound economic and social consequences of the American policy of massive imprisonment of young African American males. He shows us the link between the broad-scale policy changes of recent decades and the isolation and stigma that these bring to family members who have a loved one in prison. If we want to understand fully the impact of current criminal justice policies, this book should be required reading."
-Mark Mauer, Assistant Director, The Sentencing Project

"Through compelling stories and thoughtful analysis, this book describes how our nation's punishment policies have caused incalculable damage to the fabric of family and community life. Anyone concerned about the future of urban America should read this book."
-Jeremy Travis, The Urban Institute


In the tradition of Elijah Anderson's Code of the Street and Katherine Newman's No Shame in My Game, this startling new ethnography by Donald Braman uncovers the other side of the incarceration saga: the little-told story of the effects of imprisonment on the prisoners' families.

Since 1970 the incarceration rate in the United States has more than tripled, and in many cities-urban centers such as Washington, D.C.-it has increased over five-fold. Today, one out of every ten adult black men in the District is in prison and three out of every four can expect to spend some time behind bars. But the numbers don't reveal what it's like for the children, wives, and parents of prisoners, or the subtle and not-so-subtle effects mass incarceration is having on life in the inner city.

Author Donald Braman shows that those doing time on the inside are having a ripple effect on the outside-reaching deep into the family and community life of urban America. Braman gives us the personal stories of what happens to the families and communities that prisoners are taken from and return to. Carefully documenting the effects of incarceration on the material and emotional lives of families, this groundbreaking ethnography reveals how criminal justice policies are furthering rather than abating the problem of social disorder. Braman also delivers a number of genuinely new arguments.

Among these is the compelling assertion that incarceration is holding offenders unaccountable to victims, communities, and families. The author gives the first detailed account of incarceration's corrosive effect on social capital in the inner city and describes in poignant detail how the stigma of prison pits family and community members against one another. Drawing on a series of powerful family portraits supported by extensive empirical data, Braman shines a light on the darker side of a system that is failing the very families and communities it seeks to protect.

[more]

front cover of Dollar, Dove, and Eagle
Dollar, Dove, and Eagle
One Hundred Years of Palestinian Migration to Honduras
Nancie L. Gonzalez
University of Michigan Press, 1993
Examination of the dynamics of the Palestinian diaspora in Honduras
[more]

logo for University of Michigan Press
A Domestic Cook Book
Containing a Careful Selection of Useful Receipts for the Kitchen
Malinda Russell
University of Michigan Press, 2025
A Domestic Cook Book (1866) by Malinda Russell is the oldest known published cookbook written by an African American woman. This new edition includes a foreword by scholar Rafia Zafar as well as an introduction by food historian Janice Bluestein Longone that contextualize Russell’s cookbook. Born in Tennessee and descended from Virginia freemen, Russell decided to move to Liberia at the age of 19. When her money for the trip was stolen, she ended up stranded in Lynchburg, Virginia, and began working as a cook and companion, traveling with ladies as a nurse. After living there for only four years, her husband died and she moved with her son to Tennessee where she kept a boarding house and then went on to run a pastry shop. After a second dramatic robbery in 1864, Malinda moved to Paw Paw, Michigan, because she had heard it was the “garden of the west” and published a cookbook “with the intention of benefiting the public” as well as supporting herself.

A Domestic Cook Book contains 260 recipes and household tips that draw from Malinda Russell’s twenty years of experience cooking in Southern kitchens, her boarding house, and her pastry shop, and showcase her skills as a pastry chef. Using the only known copy of the original book housed in the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive at the University of Michigan’s Clements Library, this new edition preserves an important part of Michigan and American history and makes it widely available to readers for the first time.
[more]

front cover of Domestic Life in Prehispanic Capitals
Domestic Life in Prehispanic Capitals
A Study of Specialization, Hierarchy, and Ethnicity
Edited by Linda R. Manzanilla and Claude Chapdelaine
University of Michigan Press, 2009
With major differences in size, urban plans, and population density, the capitals of New World states had large heterogeneous societies, sometimes multiethnic and highly specialized, making these cities amazing backdrops for complex interactions.
[more]

front cover of Domitian’s Rome and the Augustan Legacy
Domitian’s Rome and the Augustan Legacy
Edited by Raymond Marks and Marcello Mogetta
University of Michigan Press, 2021

The legacy of the Roman emperor Augustus and the culture of his age was profound and immediately evident after his death in 14 CE. His first four successors based their claims to rule on kinship with him, thus establishing the Julio-Claudian dynasty (14–68 CE), and plied an evolving form of the Principate, the political arrangement Augustus carved out for himself. His building and restoration programs gave the city an “Augustan” appearance that remained relatively unchanged throughout subsequent reigns. And, among literary luminaries of his age, figures such as Horace and Ovid left an indelible mark on the poetic practices of future generations while Virgil insinuated himself still more deeply into the Roman psyche. But it was after the reigns of Augustus’ own descendants, oddly enough, that we witness the most spirited and thoroughgoing engagement with the Augustan past; during the reign of the emperor Domitian, the third and last ruler of the subsequent Flavian dynasty (81–96 CE), there was a veritable Augustan renaissance.

This volume represents the first book-length treatment of the reception of Augustus and his age during the reign of Domitian. Its thirteen chapters, authored by an international group of scholars, offer readers a glimpse into the fascinating history and culture of Domitian’s Rome and its multifaceted engagement with the Augustan past. Combining material and literary cultural approaches and covering a diverse range of topics—art, architecture, literature, history, law—the studies in this volume capture the rich complexity of the Augustan legacy in Domitian’s Rome while also revising our understanding of Domitian’s own legacy. Far from being the cruel tyrant history has made him out to be, Domitian emerges as a studious, thoughtful cultivator of the Augustan past who helped shape an age that not only took inspiration from that past, but managed to rival it.

[more]

front cover of Don't Ask
Don't Ask
Philip Levine
University of Michigan Press, 1981
Interviews with the poet Philip Levine on the subject of his poetry
[more]

front cover of DOOM
DOOM
SCARYDARKFAST
Dan Pinchbeck
University of Michigan Press, 2013

In December 1993, gaming changed forever. id Software's seminal shooter DOOM was released, and it shook the foundations of the medium. Daniel Pinchbeck brings together the complete story of DOOM for the first time.

This book takes a look at the early days of first-person gaming and the video game studio system. It discusses the prototypes and the groundbreaking technology that drove the game forward and offers a detailed analysis of gameplay and level design. Pinchbeck also examines DOOM's contributions to wider gaming culture, such as online multiplay and the modding community, and the first-person gaming genre, focusing on DOOM's status as a foundational title and the development of the genre since 1993. Pinchbeck draws extensively from primary data: from the game itself, from the massive fan culture surrounding the title, and from interviews with the developers who made it. This book is not only the definitive work on DOOM but a snapshot of a period of gaming history, a manifesto for a development ethos, and a celebration of game culture at its best.

[more]

front cover of Doris Lessing
Doris Lessing
The Poetics of Change
Gayle Greene
University of Michigan Press, 1997

Doris Lessing has been a chronicler of our age for nearly half a century, and a study of her writing career does not yield easy generalizations. Difficult though she is to categorize, she is always concerned with change, with a search for "something new" against "the nightmare repetition" of history. The feminist quest she articulated in The Children of Violence and The Golden Notebook entered the culture with the force of a new myth: these books changed lives. The Golden Notebook--together with such works as The Second Sex and The Feminine Mystique--raised the consciousness of a generation of women readers and played a major part in making the second wave of feminism. It is the power of Lessing's novels to change people's lives, the effect she had raising the consciousness of a generation of women and the effect she continues to have on young readers, that is the subject of this book.

Gayle Greene employs an eclectic range of approaches (psychoanalytic, Marxist, biographical, historical, intertextual, formalist, feminist) to shed new light on Lessing's remarkable achievement. She sees Lessing as a feminist writer, not in offering strong female role models who climb top the top of existing social structures, but in envisioning, and indeed helping to bring about, a transformation of those structures. Lessing critiques Western values of individualism, competition, and materialism in terms similar to those developed by feminism; and, in getting us to view our culture from without, in teaching us to read cultural constructs as systems, her novels perform the deconstructing and demystifying work of feminism.

[more]

front cover of Dorothy Richardson
Dorothy Richardson
Caesar R. Blake
University of Michigan Press, 1960
Who was Dorothy Richardson? Dorothy Richardson pioneered the modern psychological novel with her great work Pilgrimage. More than 45 years ago—before Joyce, before Virginia Woolf—she explored the new narrative technique that we know now as stream-of-consciousness writing. Her subject was woman: every facet of what it meant to be a rebelling feminine spirit in Victorian England. With great beauty and aesthetic insight she portrayed the moment-to-moment quality of feminine reality. The effect is dramatic and immediate, making Pilgrimage a landmark in the history of modern literature. Author Warren E. Blake's reading of Pilgrimage explains the exhaustive brilliance of Richardson’s performance and brings to the foreground the conflict resulting when a logical mind denies itself. Now, shortly after her death, a book is needed to supplement the revival of interest in Dorothy Richardson. Blake leads the way with his brilliant study.
[more]

front cover of Double Jeopardy
Double Jeopardy
A Critique of Seven Yüan Courtroom Dramas
Ching-Hsi Perng
University of Michigan Press, 1978
Traditionally, criticism of plays from the Yüan Dynasty (1260–1368) has been dominated by the so-called poetic and socialist schools. Double Jeopardy instead rigorously evaluates a group of plays by aesthetic criteria generated from within the works themselves. It examines seven courtroom plays with special attention to language and the manipulation of dramatic characters—undoubtedly the most reliable indicators of the playwright’s strength and craftsmanship in such a stylized art form as Yüan tsa-chü drama.
The analytical method adopted in Double Jeopardy is textual explication of the conventions of genre and the individual characteristics of each play. The innovation and creative vitality of each playwright emerges through close scrutiny of selected conventional aspects of courtroom dramas: the functions and placement patterns of lyric, verse, and prose as well as the custom of a single singing role and its implication for the presentation of dramatis personae.
Because Yüan drama is driven by conventions, Perng demonstrates a method that can be applied not just to judgment reversal plays but to Yüan dramatic criticism as a whole. In pursuing a method of textual explication, Perng provides a basis on which a larger framework of criticism of Yüan drama may be built.
[more]

front cover of Double Passage
Double Passage
The Lives of Caribbean Migrants Abroad and Back Home
George Gmelch
University of Michigan Press, 1993
Double Passage presents, in their own words, the lives and experiences of thirteen men and women from the island of Barbados who emigrated to North America and Britain and then years later returned home. They tell of their decisions to leave the familiarity and security of home for an uncertain future in cities of the industrial world; they explain what it is like to be black and immigrant in the predominantly white societies they settled in; and they reveal their struggles to find work and decent housing, to develop new relationships, and to save enough money to be able to return home and assume the affluent lifestyle expected of returnees. Double Passage is an extraordinary book that is able both to inform and to entertain.
[more]

front cover of The Double-Crested Cormorant
The Double-Crested Cormorant
Symbol of Ecological Conflict
Dennis Wild
University of Michigan Press, 2012

This is the story of the survival, recovery, astonishing success, and controversial status of the double-crested cormorant. After surviving near extinction driven by DDT and other contaminants from the 1940s through the early 1970s, the cormorant has made an unprecedented comeback from mere dozens to a population in the millions, bringing the bird again into direct conflict with humans. Hated for its colonial nesting behavior; the changes it brings to landscapes;  and especially its competition with commercial and sports fishers, fisheries, and fish farmers throughout the Great Lakes and Mississippi Delta regions, the cormorant continues to be persecuted  by various means, including the shotgun.

In The Double-Crested Cormorant, Dennis Wild brings together the biological, social, legal, and international aspects of the cormorant's world to give a complete and balanced view of one of the Great Lakes' and perhaps North America's most misunderstood species. In addition to taking a detailed look at the complex natural history of the cormorant, the book explores the implications of congressional acts and international treaties, the workings and philosophies of state and federal wildlife agencies, the unrelenting efforts of aquaculture and fishing interests to "cull" cormorant numbers to "acceptable" levels, and the reactions and visions of conservation groups. Wild examines both popular preconceptions about cormorants (what kinds of fish they eat and how much) and the effectiveness of ongoing efforts to control the cormorant population. Finally, the book delves into the question of climate and terrain changes, their consequences for cormorants, the new territories to which the birds must adapt, and the conflicts this species is likely to face going forward.

[more]

front cover of Doubting Conscience
Doubting Conscience
Donne and the Poetry of Moral Argument
Dwight Cathcart
University of Michigan Press, 1975
Solemnly or frivolously, the men and women of Donne's poetry argue the question: What are we to do? Should we weep? Should we make love? They confront a central moral dilemma of the human condition: the contrary demands of the laws of God, nature, or man set against the demands of the unique situation in which the speakers find themselves. Donne's poetry, then, is a poetry of argument—a fact that has been noted by other critics. The brilliance of Cathcart's study lies in its identification and close analysis of the particular kind of argument encountered in the poetry. Donne's speakers, wanting to be in harmony with the general order but stymied because that order is unclear and not reflected in the unique situation, need a particular instrument to reconcile the conflict. That instrument, long familiar to students of moral theology, is casuistry: a method of reasoning and a habit of thought aimed at the resolution of a doubting conscience. By considering Donne's Songs and Sonnets in light of the methods of 16th- and 17th-century casuists, Cathcart demonstrates that, more clearly than any other collection of poems from the Renaissance, these are poems whose motive, subject, structure, setting, tone, and premises are those of moral argument. Not only does this approach relate Donne's thought to the major lines of post-Reformation and post-Tridentine casuistry, it also illuminates the special force of Donne's images and metaphors, the special tone and private ironies embedded in his poetry. Explicating his subject with consistent lucidity and wit, Cathcart has provided an essential work for the study of John Donne and his era.
[more]

logo for University of Michigan Press
Down Syndrome Culture
Life Writing, Documentary, and Fiction Film in Iberian and Latin American Contexts
Benjamin Fraser
University of Michigan Press, 2024
People with Down syndrome possess a culture. They are producers of culture. And in the 21st century, this culture is increasingly visible as a global phenomenon. Down Syndrome Culture examines Down syndrome alongside its social, cultural, and artistic representation. Author Benjamin Fraser draws upon neomaterialist and posthumanist approaches to disability as well as the work of disability theorists such as David Mitchell, Sharon Snyder, Susan Antebi, Tobin Siebers, and Stuart Murray. By particularly focusing on Down syndrome, he showcases the unique place that it holds as an intellectual and developmental disability—one that fits between the social and medical models of disability—within the disability studies field. 

Down Syndrome Culture also pushes the traditionally Anglophone borders of disability studies by examining examples in Spanish, Catalan, and Portuguese-language texts, and incorporating the work of thinkers in Iberian and Latin American studies. Through a close analysis of life writing, documentaries, and fiction films, the book emphasizes the central role of people with Down syndrome in contemporary cultural production. Chapters discuss the autobiography of Andy Trias Trueta, the social actors of the documentary Los niños [The Grown-Ups] (2016), dancers from Danza Mobile, and a variety of fiction films, challenging ableist understandings of disability in nuanced ways. Ultimately, this book reveals the lives, cultural work, and representations of people with trisomy 21 in an international context.
[more]

front cover of Drama in the Language Classroom
Drama in the Language Classroom
What Every ESL Teacher Needs to Know
Carmela Romano Gillette and Deric McNish
University of Michigan Press, 2019
Drama in the Language Classroom weaves together cutting-edge research and practices from the fields of theater and TESOL. After providing an overview of how drama can be used in the language classroom, Carmela Romano Gillette (a TESOL expert) and Deric McNish (an expert in actor training) present a collection of resources teachers need to begin using drama, including practical classroom-tested and evidence-based techniques. They show how theater, performance, and improvisation can help students build confidence, develop a deeper context for speaking, and create authentic opportunities for language use. In addition, they outline the para- and extra-linguistic techniques that can improve expression and meaningful communication. Each section includes sample activities, such as script analysis for improving fluency, and assessment suggestions. Readers do not need to have experience with performance or drama to learn how to incorporate these practices into the ESL classroom. 
[more]

front cover of The Drama of the American Short Story, 1800-1865
The Drama of the American Short Story, 1800-1865
Michael J. Collins
University of Michigan Press, 2016
The Drama of the American Short Story, 18001865 argues that to truly understand the short story form, one must look at how it was shaped by the lively, chaotic, and deeply politicized world of 19th-century transatlantic theater and performance culture. By resurrecting long-neglected theatrical influences on representative works of short fiction, Michael J. Collins demonstrates that it was the unruly culture of the stage that first energized this most significant of American art forms. Whether it was Washington Irving’s first job as theater critic, Melville’s politically controversial love of British drama, Alcott’s thwarted dreams of stage stardom, Poe and Lippard’s dramatizations of peculiarly bloodthirsty fraternity hazings, or Hawthorne’s fascination with automata, theater was a key imaginative site for the major pioneers of the American short story.

The book shows how perspectives from theater studies, anthropology, and performance studies can enrich readings of the short-story form. Moving beyond arbitrary distinctions between performance and text, it suggests that this literature had a social life and was engaged with questions of circumatlantic and transnational culture. It suggests that the short story itself was never conceived as a nationalist literary form, but worked by mobilizing cosmopolitan connections and meanings. In so doing, the book resurrects a neglected history of American Federalism and its connections to British literary forms.
 


[more]

front cover of The Dramaturgy of Senecan Tragedy
The Dramaturgy of Senecan Tragedy
Thomas D. Kohn
University of Michigan Press, 2013

The first-century Roman tragedies of Seneca, like all ancient drama, do not contain the sort of external stage directions that we are accustomed to today; nevertheless, a careful reading of the plays reveals such stage business as entrances, exits, setting, sound effects, emotions of the characters, etc. The Dramaturgy of Senecan Tragedy teases out these dramaturgical elements in Seneca's work and uses them both to aid in the interpretation of the plays and to show the playwright's artistry.

Thomas D. Kohn provides a detailed overview of the corpus, laying the groundwork for appreciating Seneca's techniques in the individual dramas. Each of the chapters explores an individual tragedy in detail, discussing the dramatis personae and examining how the roles would be distributed among a limited number of actors, as well as the identity of the Chorus. The Dramaturgy of Senecan Tragedymakes a compelling argument for Seneca as an artist and a dramaturg in the true sense of the word: "a maker of drama." Regardless of whether Seneca composed his plays for full-blown theatrical staging, a fictive theater of the mind, or something in between, Kohn demonstrates that he displays a consistency and a careful attentiveness to details of performance. While other scholars have applied this type of performance criticism to individual tragedies or scenes, this is the first comprehensive study of all the plays in twenty-five years, and the first ever to consider not just stagecraft, but also metatheatrical issues such as the significant distribution of roles among a limited number of actors, in addition to the emotional states of the characters. Scholars of classics and theater, along with those looking to stage the plays, will find much of interest in this study.

[more]

front cover of Drawing Conclusions on Henry Ford
Drawing Conclusions on Henry Ford
Rudolph Alvarado and Sonya Alvarado
University of Michigan Press, 2001

For years political cartoons have shaped the often unflattering popular view of public figures. One of the most-often-portrayed figures of the twentieth century was the automobile manufacturer Henry Ford. Through editorial drawings, a vivid picture of Ford was presented that became the source of myths that surrounded him and continue even to this day.

Drawing Conclusions on Henry Ford is the first and only collection that brings together in one volume these editorial cartoons. They date back as far as the time Ford introduced the Model T in 1908 and extend forward to the introduction of the Model A and subsequent V8 engines in the 1930s. They illustrate the emergence of many of the popular myths surrounding Henry Ford, as seen and understood by the average citizen during the opening decades of the twentieth century. With 150 illustrations, the reader is able to trace the evolving images of Ford from a time period when caricature images of public figures were a primary source of information about those persons. Sometimes funny, sometimes sharp and critical, these cartoons are entertaining in themselves. Viewed as a whole, they create anew view of the Henry Ford story.

Rudolph V. Alvarado is a freelance writer and museum consultant, as well as the former programs leader for the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village. Sonya Y. Alvarado is an instructor of English, at Eastern Michigan University and a former adjunct faculty member, Wayne State University.

[more]

front cover of Dreams for Dead Bodies
Dreams for Dead Bodies
Blackness, Labor, and the Corpus of American Detective Fiction
M. Michelle Robinson
University of Michigan Press, 2016
Dreams for Dead Bodies: Blackness, Labor, and  the Corpus of American Detective Fiction offers new arguments about the origins of detective fiction in the United States, tracing the lineage of the genre back to unexpected texts and uncovering how authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Pauline Hopkins, and Rudolph Fisher made use of the genre’s puzzle-elements to explore the shifting dynamics of race and labor in America.
 
The author constructs an interracial genealogy of detective fiction to create a nuanced picture of the ways that black and white authors appropriated and cultivated literary conventions that coalesced in a recognizable genre at the turn of the twentieth century. These authors tinkered with detective fiction’s puzzle-elements to address a variety of historical contexts, including the exigencies of chattel slavery, the erosion of working-class solidarities by racial and ethnic competition, and accelerated mass production. Dreams for Dead Bodies demonstrates that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature was broadly engaged with detective fiction, and that authors rehearsed and refined its formal elements in literary works typically relegated to the margins of the genre. By looking at these margins, the book argues, we can better understand the origins and cultural functions of American detective fiction.
 
[more]

front cover of Dripping Dry
Dripping Dry
Literature, Politics and Water in the Desert Southwest
David N. Cassuto
University of Michigan Press, 2001
More than any other single characteristic, aridity defines the American West. Water scarcity and its biologically critical function have also molded the regional literature of the region. Using novels by Barbara Kingsolver, Edward Abbey, John Steinbeck and Mary Austin, Dripping Dry combines literary analysis with environmental criticism to demonstrate how the myths that have pervaded the regional literature of the West have interacted with the myths that have shaped water policy throughout the twentieth century.
The four works selected (Animal Dreams, The Monkey Wrench Gang, The Grapes of Wrath, and The Ford) present a composite portrait of reclamation, which the author argues is one of the most important cultural and ecological phenomena in the nation's history. The tensions and contradictions presented by the novels underscore the compelling need for an ecocritique of the relationship between literature and politics. David N. Cassuto deciphers the myths of reclamation and restoration and presents a third alternative--sustainability--in their stead. The challenge is a large one, because of the size and complexity of the region and because nature continues to evolve and create itself, a process involving language, ideology, and the land.
The book is designed to be an interdisciplinary contribution both to the emerging field of literature and the environment, as well as to environmental studies. It will be welcomed by scholars as well as general readers interested in new approaches to literature and environmental issues, and by those interested in the geography and literature of the western United States.
David N. Cassuto, formerly of the English Department of the University of Missouri-Rolla, is a practicing attorney in San Francisco, specializing in environmental issues.
[more]

front cover of Drones and Support for the Use of Force
Drones and Support for the Use of Force
James Igoe Walsh and Marcus Schulzke
University of Michigan Press, 2018
Combat drones are transforming attitudes about the use of military force. Military casualties and the costs of conflict sap public support for war and for political and military leaders. Combat drones offer an unprecedented ability to reduce these costs by increasing accuracy, reducing the risks to civilians, and protecting military personnel from harm. These advantages should make drone strikes more popular than operations involving ground troops. Yet many critics believe drone warfare will make political leaders too willing to authorize wars, weakening constraints on the use of force. Because combat drones are relatively new, these arguments have been based on anecdotes, a handful of public opinion polls, or theoretical speculation.
 
Drones and Support for the Use of Force uses experimental research to analyze the effects of combat drones on Americans’ support for the use of force. The authors’ findings—that drones have had important but nuanced effects on support for the use of force—have implications for democratic control of military action and civil-military relations and provide insight into how the proliferation of military technologies influences foreign policy.
[more]

front cover of The Dropout
The Dropout
Causes & Cures
Lucius F. Cervantes
University of Michigan Press, 1965
Dropouts appear with the regularity of automobiles rolling off the assembly line. Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz describes them as "the outlaw pack" who are "unemployed today and will be for the rest of their lives at a cost to us of $1,000 a head a year . . . ." Michael Harrington calls them "The New Lost Generation" and James B. Conant's more strikingly descriptive phrase, "social dynamite," is enough to pull every citizen up sharp. J. Edgar Hoover, in a report on the outbreak of violence in nine Northern communities, pointed his finger at the dropout, rather than racists or communists, as Public Enemy Number 1. But, how does the dropout see himself? When given a chance, what does he have to say? Has his failure to obtain a high-school diploma deprived him of full citizenship in our affluent society? Whom does he blame for his failure? If he is unable to find work, how will he live in our automated economy? In this unique and imaginative book the dropout speaks for himself. His views are compared with those of a high-school graduate having the same I.Q. and similar social and economic background. We learn how these young people feel about their families, friends, and teachers. We gain insight into many of their basic emotions and attitudes. This intensely human document lays bare the causes and cures of one of the greatest challenges ever to face our people. Reading this book is an important step toward solving the problem of the dropout. The picture that emerges is authentic, compelling, and fascinating.
[more]

front cover of Dumb Luck
Dumb Luck
A Novel by Vu Trong Phung
Peter Zinoman, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2002
Banned in Vietnam until 1986, Dumb Luck--by the controversial and influential Vietnamese writer Vu Trong Phung--is a bitter satire of the rage for modernization in Vietnam during the late colonial era. First published in Hanoi during 1936, it follows the absurd and unexpected rise within colonial society of a street-smart vagabond named Red-haired Xuan. As it charts Xuan's fantastic social ascent, the novel provides a panoramic view of late colonial urban social order, from the filthy sidewalks of Hanoi's old commercial quarter to the gaudy mansions of the emergent Francophile northern upper classes. The transformation of traditional Vietnamese class and gender relations triggered by the growth of colonial capitalism represents a major theme of the novel.
Dumb Luck is the first translation of a major work by Vu Trong Phung, arguably the greatest Vietnamese writer of the twentieth century. The novel's clever plot, richly drawn characters and humorous tone and its preoccupation with sex, fashion and capitalism will appeal to a wide audience. It will appeal to students and scholars of Vietnam, comparative literature, colonial and postcolonial studies, and Southeast Asian civilization.
Vu Trong Phung died in Hanoi, in 1939 at the age of twenty-seven. He is the author of at least eight novels, seven plays, and several other works of fiction in addition to Dumb Luck.
Peter Zinoman is Associate Professor of Southeast Asian History, University of California, Berkeley. Nguyen Nguyet Cam is Vietnamese Language Instructor, University of California, Berkeley.
[more]

front cover of During the Dissertation
During the Dissertation
A Textual Mentor for Doctoral Students in the Process of Writing
Christine Pearson Casanave
University of Michigan Press, 2020
"A textual mentor like During the Dissertation can fill a void in writers’ lives at a time of solitude, uncertainty, and anxiety. Keep it under your pillow.”
 
This volume is a sequel to Casanave’s popular Before the Dissertation. Like that volume, this book is designed as a companion for doctoral dissertation writers of qualitative or mixed methods work in fields related to language education. It could also benefit those writing master’s theses and those writing in other social science fields. It is meant to be consulted once the writing has begun—once students have settled on a topic, designed the project, or collected the data—because this is the time when they are analyzing, drafting, revising, polishing, and probably fretting, deleting, reconstructing, and even losing sleep. Also, like its predecessor, it is not designed to teach anyone how to write a dissertation as there are plenty of those available elsewhere.
            For most doctoral students, writing will happen at different stages of the project. Strategies for timing of these kinds of writing differ across students, and also across supervisors and advisers. If dissertation writers do not know by the time they start writing which strategies and issues pertain to them, this book can help them craft some approaches to suit their own personalities, preferred practices, and individual goals and visions, as well as help them figure out how dissertation writing might fit into the real-life intrusions of work and family.
          Issues covered in the book are: starting to write, envisioning the project as a whole, relationships with supervisors, perfectionism and other maladies, health, low- and high-IQ days, loneliness and isolation, distractions and interruptions, revising, and knowing when to stop.
 
[more]

front cover of The Dybbuk Century
The Dybbuk Century
The Jewish Play That Possessed the World
Debra Caplan and Rachel Merrill Moss, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2023

A little over 100 years ago, the first production of An-sky’s The Dybbuk, a play about the possession of a young woman by a dislocated spirit, opened in Warsaw. In the century that followed, The Dybbuk became a theatrical conduit for a wide range of discourses about Jews, belonging, and modernity. This timeless Yiddish play about spiritual possession beyond the grave would go on to exert a remarkable and unforgettable impact on modern theater, film, literature, music, and culture. 

The Dybbuk Century collects essays from an interdisciplinary group of scholars who explore the play’s original Yiddish and Hebrew productions and offer critical reflections on the play’s enduring influence. The collection will appeal to scholars, students, and theater practitioners, as well as general readers.

[more]

logo for University of Michigan Press
Dying Inside
The HIV/AIDS Ward at Limestone Prison
Benjamin Fleury-Steiner
University of Michigan Press, 2009

"The HIV+ men incarcerated in Limestone Prison's Dorm 16 were put there to be forgotten. Not only do Benjamin Fleury-Steiner and Carla Crowder bring these men to life, Fleury-Steiner and Crowder also insist on placing these men in the middle of critical conversations about health policy, mass incarceration, and race. Dense with firsthand accounts, Dying Inside is a nimble, far-ranging and unblinking look at the cruelty inherent in our current penal policies."
---Lisa Kung, Director, Southern Center for Human Rights

"The looming prison health crisis, documented here at its extreme, is a shocking stain on American values and a clear opportunity to rethink our carceral approach to security."
---Jonathan Simon, University of California, Berkeley

"Dying Inside is a riveting account of a health crisis in a hidden prison facility."
---Michael Musheno, San Francisco State University, and coauthor of Deployed

"This fresh and original study should prick all of our consciences about the horrific consequences of the massive carceral state the United States has built over the last three decades."
---Marie Gottschalk, University of Pennsylvania, and author of The Prison and the Gallows

"An important, bold, and humanitarian book."
---Alison Liebling, University of Cambridge

"Fleury-Steiner makes a compelling case that inmate health care in America's prisons and jails has reached the point of catastrophe."
---Sharon Dolovich, University of California, Los Angeles

"Fleury-Steiner's persuasive argument not only exposes the sins of commission and omission on prison cellblocks, but also does an excellent job of showing how these problems are the natural result of our nation's shortsighted and punitive criminal justice policy."
---Allen Hornblum, Temple University, and author of Sentenced to Science

Dying Inside brings the reader face-to-face with the nightmarish conditions inside Limestone Prison's Dorm 16---the segregated HIV ward. Here, patients chained to beds share their space with insects and vermin in the filthy, drafty rooms, and contagious diseases spread like wildfire through a population with untreated---or poorly managed at best---HIV.

While Dorm 16 is a particularly horrific human rights tragedy, it is also a symptom of a disease afflicting the entire U.S. prison system. In recent decades, prison populations have exploded as Americans made mass incarceration the solution to crime, drugs, and other social problems even as privatization of prison services, especially health care, resulted in an overcrowded, underfunded system in which the most marginalized members of our society slowly wither from what the author calls "lethal abandonment."

This eye-opening account of one prison's failed health-care standards is a wake-up call, asking us to examine how we treat our forgotten citizens and compelling us to rethink the American prison system in this increasingly punitive age.

[more]

front cover of Dying Inside
Dying Inside
The HIV/AIDS Ward at Limestone Prison
Benjamin Fleury-Steiner
University of Michigan Press, 2008

"The HIV+ men incarcerated in Limestone Prison's Dorm 16 were put there to be forgotten. Not only do Benjamin Fleury-Steiner and Carla Crowder bring these men to life, Fleury-Steiner and Crowder also insist on placing these men in the middle of critical conversations about health policy, mass incarceration, and race. Dense with firsthand accounts, Dying Inside is a nimble, far-ranging and unblinking look at the cruelty inherent in our current penal policies."
---Lisa Kung, Director, Southern Center for Human Rights

"The looming prison health crisis, documented here at its extreme, is a shocking stain on American values and a clear opportunity to rethink our carceral approach to security."
---Jonathan Simon, University of California, Berkeley

"Dying Inside is a riveting account of a health crisis in a hidden prison facility."
---Michael Musheno, San Francisco State University, and coauthor of Deployed

"This fresh and original study should prick all of our consciences about the horrific consequences of the massive carceral state the United States has built over the last three decades."
---Marie Gottschalk, University of Pennsylvania, and author of The Prison and the Gallows

"An important, bold, and humanitarian book."
---Alison Liebling, University of Cambridge

"Fleury-Steiner makes a compelling case that inmate health care in America's prisons and jails has reached the point of catastrophe."
---Sharon Dolovich, University of California, Los Angeles

"Fleury-Steiner's persuasive argument not only exposes the sins of commission and omission on prison cellblocks, but also does an excellent job of showing how these problems are the natural result of our nation's shortsighted and punitive criminal justice policy."
---Allen Hornblum, Temple University, and author of Sentenced to Science

Dying Inside brings the reader face-to-face with the nightmarish conditions inside Limestone Prison's Dorm 16---the segregated HIV ward. Here, patients chained to beds share their space with insects and vermin in the filthy, drafty rooms, and contagious diseases spread like wildfire through a population with untreated---or poorly managed at best---HIV.

While Dorm 16 is a particularly horrific human rights tragedy, it is also a symptom of a disease afflicting the entire U.S. prison system. In recent decades, prison populations have exploded as Americans made mass incarceration the solution to crime, drugs, and other social problems even as privatization of prison services, especially health care, resulted in an overcrowded, underfunded system in which the most marginalized members of our society slowly wither from what the author calls "lethal abandonment."

This eye-opening account of one prison's failed health-care standards is a wake-up call, asking us to examine how we treat our forgotten citizens and compelling us to rethink the American prison system in this increasingly punitive age.

[more]

front cover of Dynamics, Economic Growth, and International Trade
Dynamics, Economic Growth, and International Trade
Bjarne S. Jensen and Kar-yiu Wong, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 1997
While endogenous growth theory has claimed success in modeling various factors of growth and providing an analysis of sustainable economic growth, most of the growth models in published work are for closed economies. The omission of international trade, which is often regarded as the engine of growth, greatly reduces their usefulness. The theory of international trade, on the other hand, is characterized by models that are mainly static. While interest in the dynamics of trade has been growing, there is still little work in this area. The success of the newly industrialized economies that have adopted trade-oriented policies suggests how limited present trade theory is in explaining and analyzing the growth of these economies.
The work collected here serves to bridge the "old" growth theory and "new" growth theory; merge growth and trade theory; suggest new analysis and techniques of economic growth; and provide analysis of new issues related to growth and trade. The first chapter surveys endogenous growth and international trade and critically reviews the endogenous growth theory with a unified framework, covering the work on both closed and open economies. Three chapters examine the dynamics of some basic trade models; two chapters focus on growth and trade with endogenous accumulation of human and public capital; two chapters on economic growth, technological progress, and international trade; and two chapters on growth and international factor movements.
Contributors include Eric W. Bond, Theo S. Eicher, Rolf Färe, Oded Galor, Shawna Grosskopf, Bjarne S. Jensen, Pantelis Kalaitzidakis, Shoukang Lin, Ngo Van Long, Kazuo Nishimura, Koji Shimomura, Kathleen Trask, Stephen J. Turnovsky, Pham Hoang Van, Henry Wan, Jr., Chunyan Wang, and Kar-yiu Wong.
Bjarne S. Jensen is Associate Professor of Economics, Copenhagen Business School. Kar-yiu Wong is Professor of Economics, University of Washington, Seattle.
[more]

front cover of The Dynamics of European Integration
The Dynamics of European Integration
Causes and Consequences of Institutional Choices
Thomas König
University of Michigan Press, 2024
In Europe’s recent history, there have been several challenges to the strength of the European Union—Brexit, COVID, financial crises, and global tensions—bringing an increased need to understand the ways that the European Union (EU) could successfully stay together or fall apart. In examining how the European Union has changed since 1993, important puzzles have emerged, including how national government functions are transferred to the EU without reforming the EU, how increased transparency is announced while decisions are approved in informal meetings, and how the effects of the polarizing rise of Euroscepticism can be managed to still promote the formation of solidarity and trust among Europeans. To understand these puzzles, Thomas König introduces a new theory of (supra)national partyism to help explain the causes and consequences of choices made by political leaders for Europe. He uses a game-theoretical perspective to look at how conditions for leaders change through accessions of new members, shocks, and crises, and separates institutional choices into two different games played by office- and policy-seeking political leaders—the interstate summit game and the national game of party competition. The Dynamics of European Integration reveals how the reorganization of electoral systems can harness dissensus and polarization among diverse national constituencies to enable the promotion of solidarity and trust in the EU.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter