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3 books match the query 'Hitting'

cover of Hitting A Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Race and Gender in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston

Hitting A Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick

Race and Gender in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston

Susan E Meisenhelder

University of Alabama Press, 2001

Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick examines the ways Zora Neale Hurston circumvented the constraints of the white publishing world and a predominantly white readership to critique white culture and its effects on the black community. A number of critics have concluded that Hurston simply capitulated to external demands, writing stories white people wanted to hear. Susan Edwards Meisenhelder, however, argues that Hurston’s response to her situation is much more sophisticated than her detractors recognized. Meisenhelder suggests, in fact, that Hurston’s work, both fictional and anthropological, constitutes an extended critique of the values of white culture and a rejection of white models for black people. Repeatedly, Hurston’s work shows the diverse effects that traditional white values, including class divisions and gender imbalances, have on blacks.
 
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cover of Hitting the Brakes: Engineering Design and the Production of Knowledge

Hitting the Brakes

Engineering Design and the Production of Knowledge

Ann Johnson

Duke University Press, 2009

In Hitting the Brakes, Ann Johnson illuminates the complex social, historical, and cultural dynamics of engineering design, in which knowledge communities come together to produce new products and knowledge. Using the development of antilock braking systems for passenger cars as a case study, Johnson shows that the path to invention is neither linear nor top-down, but highly complicated and unpredictable. Individuals, corporations, university research centers, and government organizations informally coalesce around a design problem that is continually refined and redefined as paths of development are proposed and discarded, participants come and go, and information circulates within the knowledge community. Detours, dead ends, and failures feed back into the developmental process, so that the end design represents the convergence of multiple, diverse streams of knowledge.

The development of antilock braking systems (ABS) provides an ideal case study for examining the process of engineering design because it presented an array of common difficulties faced by engineers in research and development. ABS did not develop predictably. Research and development took place in both the public and private sectors and involved individuals working in different disciplines, languages, institutions, and corporations. Johnson traces ABS development from its first patents in the 1930s to the successful 1978 market introduction of integrated ABS by Daimler and Bosch. She examines how a knowledge community first formed around understanding the phenomenon of skidding, before it turned its attention to building instruments to measure, model, and prevent cars’ wheels from locking up. While corporations’ accounts of ABS development often present a simple linear story, Hitting the Brakes describes the full social and cognitive complexity and context of engineering design.

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cover of Hitting the Right Notes: Film Directors and Composers in Harmony

Hitting the Right Notes

Film Directors and Composers in Harmony

Lester D. Friedman

Rutgers University Press, 2027

Hitting the Right Notes: Film Directors and Composers in Harmony is a unique, multi-disciplinary volume co-authored by scholars from both media studies and music theory. The book features a chronological and systematic approach that concentrates on analyzing representative scenes from a broad spectrum of mainstream movies as exemplars. With a distinctive focus on versatile analytical tools from film studies, music cognition, and music theory, each chapter supplies background on the time period, director, composer, and their working relationship, then a close reading incorporates both visual analysis and musical elements beyond pitch and harmony. Robust yet accessible, Hitting the Right Notes highlights up-to-date ways of understanding film music, directly demonstrates their application across eras and genres, and displays the artistic magic directors and composers create together. It is essential reading for those interested in film and music.

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