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Camera Orientalis
Reflections on Photography of the Middle East
Ali Behdad
University of Chicago Press, 2016
In the decades after its invention in 1839, photography was inextricably linked to the Middle East. Introduced as a crucial tool for Egyptologists and Orientalists who needed to document their archaeological findings, the photograph was easier and faster to produce in intense Middle Eastern light—making the region one of the original sites for the practice of photography. A pioneering study of this intertwined history, Camera Orientalis traces the Middle East’s influences on photography’s evolution, as well as photography’s effect on Europe’s view of “the Orient.”

Considering a range of Western and Middle Eastern archival material from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Ali Behdad offers a rich account of how photography transformed Europe’s distinctly Orientalist vision into what seemed objective fact, a transformation that proved central to the project of European colonialism. At the same time, Orientalism was useful for photographers from both regions, as it gave them a set of conventions by which to frame exotic Middle Eastern cultures for Western audiences. Behdad also shows how Middle Eastern audiences embraced photography as a way to foreground status and patriarchal values while also exoticizing other social classes.

An important examination of previously overlooked European and Middle Eastern photographers and studios, Camera Orientalis demonstrates that, far from being a one-sided European development, Orientalist photography was the product of rich cultural contact between the East and the West.
 
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The Catholic University as Promise and Project
Reflections in a Jesuit Idiom
Michael J. Buckley, SJ
Georgetown University Press, 1998

The remarkable development of the Catholic university in the United States has raised issues about its continued identity, its promise, and its academic constituents. Michael J. Buckley, SJ, explores these questions, especially as they have been experienced in Jesuit history and contemporary commitments.

The fundamental proposition that grounds the Catholic university, Buckley argues, is that the academic and the religious are intrinsically related. Academic inquiry encourages a process of questioning that leads naturally to issues of ultimate significance, while the experience of faith is towards the understanding of itself and of its relationship to every other dimension of human life. This mutual involvement requires a union between faith and culture that defines the purposes of Catholic higher education. In their earliest and normative documents, Jesuit universities have been encouraged to achieve this integration through the central role given to theology.

Buckley explores two commitments that implicate contemporary Catholic universities in controversy: an insistence upon open, free discussion and academic pluralism—to the objections of some in the Church; and an education in the promotion of justice—to the objections of some in the academy.

Finally, to strengthen philosophical and theological studies, Buckley suggests both a "philosophical grammar" that would discover and study the assumptions and methods involved in the various forms of disciplined human inquiry and a set of "theological arts" founded upon the more general liberal arts.

Entering into the contemporary discussion about the Catholic university, this book offers inspiring and thought-provoking ideas for those engaged in Catholic higher education.

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Class Not Dismissed
Reflections on Undergraduate Education and Teaching the Liberal Arts
Anthony Aveni
University Press of Colorado, 2014
In Class Not Dismissed, award-winning professor Anthony Aveni tells the personal story of his six decades in college classrooms and some of the 10,000 students who have filled them. Through anecdotes of his own triumphs and tribulations—some amusing, others heartrending—Aveni reveals his teaching story and thoughts on the future of higher education.

Although in recent years the lecture has come under fire as a pedagogical method, Aveni ardently defends lecturing to students. He shares his secrets on crafting an engaging lecture and creating productive dialogue in class discussions. He lays out his rules on classroom discipline and tells how he promotes the lost art of listening. He is a passionate proponent of the liberal arts and core course requirements as well as a believer in sound teaching promoted by active scholarship.

Aveni is known to his students as a consummate storyteller. In Class Not Dismissed he shares real stories about everyday college life that shed light on serious educational issues. The result is a humorous, reflective, inviting, and powerful inquiry into higher education that will be of interest to anyone invested in the current and future state of college and university education.


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Coming to Life
Reflections on the Art of Psychotherapy
Leston Havens
Harvard University Press, 1993

To penetrate the opaque, to lift the weight and let the self escape its frozen image—this is the essence of psychotherapy, a process described with extraordinary grace and warmth in this book. In remarkably candid portraits of patients at odds with themselves, Leston Havens takes us through the wonders and rigors of psychological healing and shows us what it really means, in immediate, human terms, to come to life.

We are all captives of the images we carry with us—and those we inspire—and therapy seeks to expose the relation of these images to a deeper psychological life, to free the captive from labels and crippling assumptions. Havens views this process through the multiple lenses of literature, art, and psychiatry. In rich clinical portraits, short on jargon and rigid techniques and long on empathy and wisdom, we encounter ordinary people struggling with the trials of their own existence: marriage and divorce, sexual identity and fulfillment, illness and death. We meet a woman imprisoned by eager responses to her beauty and helpfulness, a proud lawyer in thrall to conventional expectations, a dying man becoming more and more alive as he approaches death.

Through these very personal stories, Havens explores the meaning of psychological health—how it can be recognized through the filter of images and ideas, protected from their distorting power, and encouraged to flourish. The result is a revealing and deeply moving explication of the process of self-discovery as it emerges from the life story that therapy can tell.

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Complex Sorrow
Reflections on Cancer and an Abbreviated Life
Marianne Paget
Temple University Press, 1993
"The author's multiple voices--scholar, sociologist, victim--provide an academic, yet personal, professional, yet poignant, story....Readers face...the 'contradictory meanings' that an especially articulate woman brings to the final chapter of her life." --Women and Health In 1988, Marianne Paget published the Unity of Mistakes: A Phenomenological Interpretation of Medical Work (Temple) in which she argued that error is an intrinsic feature in medicine--an experimental and uncertain activity. Her subsequent research focused on medical negligence and on miscommunication and silence a as cause and product of error in medicine. While pursuing her research on negligence, she found out that she was an example of it. Chronic back pain that had been misdiagnosed as muscle spasms turned out to be a symptom of a rare and fatal cancer that claimed Paget's life in December 1989. This collection of her personal and professional writings on the phenomenon of error in medicine chronicles a young scholar's courageous struggle to make sense of a tragic coincidence. Discovering that she was living the charges and painful topic that she had studied so deeply, Paget write poignantly and analytically until the last week of her life about this uncanny parallel. "It is very tricky to come to terms with the reality of death without becoming trapped in that reality," wrote "Tracy" Paget to her friends. In this book, she describes "the odd way my life began to mirror my work"; her search for "life rites" when face with tasks involving wills, last rites, and farewells; and her indomitable and forthright attempt to remain intensely alive in the face of death. A Complex Sorrow, her final project, comprises essays, letters, and a journal recording her last year. Ever critical of the distanced and dispassionate stance taken in much social analysis, Paget had experimented with performance as a form for enlivening social science research. The script for her play, "The Work of Talk," about communication problems between a physician and his cancer patient, is also included. Her compelling life-text speaks to those living with illness and those who care for and about them, as the investigation and representation of lived experience. Excerpt Excerpt available at www.temple.edu/tempress "Strangely, my knowledge of error has helped me deal with the errors in my care. Had I not known about the prevalence of error in medicine I would not have been able to process what has happened to me without bitterness. But I had thought these matters through already, and more than once. I now live out the complex sorrow I have before described." --Marianne A. Paget Reviews "Paget's book is stunning. It's a tribute to the invulnerable human spirit. The woman burned like a flame; obviously she died well, because she lived well; she was loved because she was loving. The book is tremendously sad, but it isn't depressing; somehow, one is left with a sense of human possibility." --Joan Cassell, author of Expected Miracles: Surgeons at Work
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Concepts and Their Role in Knowledge
Reflections on Objectivist Epistemology
Allan Gotthelf
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022

The philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand (1905–1982) is a cultural phenomenon. Her books have sold more than twenty-eight million copies, and countless individuals speak of her writings as having significantly influenced their lives. Despite her popularity, Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism has received little serious attention from academic philosophers.

Concepts and Their Role in Knowledge offers scholarly analysis of key elements of Ayn Rand’s radically new approach to epistemology. The four essays, by contributors intimately familiar with this area of her work, discuss Rand’s theory of concepts—including its new account of abstraction and essence—and its central role in her epistemology; how that view leads to a distinctive conception of the justification of knowledge; her realist account of perceptual awareness and its role in the acquisition of knowledge; and finally, the implications of that theory for understanding the growth of scientific knowledge. The volume concludes with critical commentary on the essays by distinguished philosophers with differing philosophical viewpoints and the author’s responses to those commentaries.

This is the second book published in Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Studies, which was developed in conjunction with the Ayn Rand Society to offer a fuller scholarly understanding of this highly original and influential thinker. The Ayn Rand Society, an affiliated group of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, seeks to foster scholarly study by philosophers of the philosophical thought and writings of Ayn Rand. 

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Contested Terrain
Reflections with Afghan Women Leaders
Sally L Kitch
University of Illinois Press, 2014
Sally L. Kitch explores the crisis in contemporary Afghan women’s lives by focusing on two remarkable Afghan professional women working on behalf of their Afghan sisters. Kitch's compelling narrative follows the stories of Judge Marzia Basel and Jamila Afghani from 2005 through 2013, providing an oft-ignored perspective on the personal and professional lives of Afghanistan's women. Contending with the complex dynamics of a society both undergoing and resisting change, Basel and Afghani speak candidly--and critically--of matters like international intervention and patriarchal Afghan culture, capturing the ways in which immense possibility alternates and vies with utter hopelessness. Strongly rooted in feminist theory and interdisciplinary historical and geopolitical analysis, Contested Terrain sheds new light on the struggle against the powerful forces that affect Afghan women's education, health, political participation, livelihoods, and quality of life. The book also suggests how a new dialogue might be started--in which women from across geopolitical boundaries might find common cause for change and rewrite their collective stories.
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The Critical Calling
Reflections on Moral Dilemmas Since Vatican II
Richard A. McCormick, SJ. Foreword by Lisa Sowle Cahill
Georgetown University Press, 2006

When Richard A. McCormick's The Critical Calling was first published, Andrew M. Greeley commented that "in years to come scholars will look back on Father McCormick's work and say, 'This was a man who knew what he was talking about!'" In this reissue, with a new foreword by Lisa Sowle Cahill, both first-time readers and those opening the pages for a return visit with an honored friend will find Greeley's characterization remains valid.

Father McCormick begins The Critical Calling with his personal affirmation of the work of Vatican II: "I believe the Council was a work of the Spirit—desperately needed, divinely inspired, devotedly and doggedly carried through." Yet, he stresses this was no uncritical endorsement of everything the Council did and said. Part One includes a discussion of fundamental moral theology that looks at the relationship between the church hierarchy and individual moral decision making and several chapters addressing issues precipitated by actions involving Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. Part Two focuses on practical and pastoral questions that touch on contemporary concerns ranging from abortion to AIDS, divorce, homosexuality, and teenage sexuality.

Cahill suggests that "those who lived through the tumultuous 1960s and '70s" as well as "those who came to maturity after the Council" will find this book to be an accurate and evocative reflection of the passions that imbued all those early debates and a helpful explanation why those passions ran so high. All readers will benefit from the wise insights into the controversies of that era and the more recent struggles, challenges, and debates that confront today's church.

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The Critical Librarianship and Pedagogy Symposium
Reflections, Revisions, and New Works
Yvonne Mery
Assoc of College & Research Libraries, 2023
Academic librarianship is due for a major paradigm shift in response to the existential threats facing the library profession and higher education, and library workers are leading this shift with new ideas about community, feminism, education, and social change.
 
The Critical Librarianship and Pedagogy Symposium: Reflections, Revisions, and New Works collects expanded and updated presentations given at the Critical Librarianship and Pedagogy Symposium (CLAPS) held biennially at the University of Arizona Libraries. This anthology provides a toolkit for critical library pedagogy that recognizes how knowledge is created within historical and deeply politicized contexts. Authors working in library or disciplinary teaching fields explore intersections between information literacy and critical pedagogy and provide current thinking, assessment, and reflection on their practices of teaching students how to recognize and critique the oppressive power structures inherent in educational systems. The work done by librarians is analyzed to reveal the socioeconomic frameworks that drive the costs of our labor.
 
Divided into five parts—Critical Pedagogies in the Classroom, Feminist Library Practices, The Labor of Librarianship, Practices of Care, and Community Archives—chapters include explorations of the advent of neoliberalism in higher education, social justice, white fragility, supporting neurodivergence in education, and disability-rights activism. They use lenses such as queer, intersectional, feminist, and critical race theory to examine subjects, and include practices for sustainable teaching, facilitating dialogue in the classroom, and using tools such as user experience or empathic design. The Critical Librarianship and Pedagogy Symposium offers ways to incorporate critical pedagogy theory into your own practices as educators, both within the library and in higher education in general.
 
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The Critical Limits of Embodiment
Reflections on Disability Criticism, Volume 13
Carol A. Breckenridge and Candace Vogler, eds.
Duke University Press
Disability studies, a new field of inquiry in the human sciences, has the potential to unsettle many basic assumptions about the body, citizenship, capital, and beauty. This special issue of Public Culture explores disability criticism, an emergent subfield within disability studies.
The articles in this collection build on recent work in the larger arena of disability studies and address such subjects as the hegemony of the concept of normalcy, the idea of the able body, and the constitutive place of disability in ethics, liberalism, and capitalism. The Critical Limits of Embodiment examines the commonsense foundations of disability studies, which tend to universalize Western norms and assumptions in which the normal is foregrounded and the able body forms the basis for the universal liberal subject. The broad geographic scope of these essays constitutes one of their greatest contributions to the field. In order to query the body-related universalisms of Western thought, the issue seeks to be self-conscious about cultural locations.
The volume examines the figure of the disabled in the cultural imaginaries of a variety of historical, cultural, and disciplinary contexts including literature, anthropology, philosophy, and art history.

Contributors. Renu Addlakha, Carol A. Breckenridge, Veena Das, Faye Ginsburg, Wu Hung, Eva Kittay, Celeste Langan, David Mitchell, Rayna Rapp, Susan Schweik, Sharon Snyder, Candace Vogler, Hank Vogler

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Critique Of Applied Ethics
Reflections and Recommendations
Abraham Edel
Temple University Press, 1994
"Part One is historically rich and analytically sophisticated. It is unquestionably the best treatment of the applied ethics landscape. In Part Two, the authors have an uncanny sense of the issues and a remarkable ability to demythologize the jargon temple of doom, such that controversial philosophical positions are rendered clear.... I look forward to teaching from this book." --John J. McDermott, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Humanities, Professor and Head of Humanities in Medicine, Texas A&M University Over the past two decades, applied ethics has turned increasingly toward theories that explore ethical questions faced by a variety of professions and away from classic moral concerns. Abraham Edel, Elizabeth Flower, and Finbarr O'Connor utilize examples of professional, public policy, and personal decision making to illustrate the strengths and limitations of the application of ethics in a rapidly changing world. They first discuss the emergence of applied ethics and how it functions within a philosophical tradition. They are not concerned, however, with solving the problems they expose, but with employing them as a means to critique applied ethics. Using human rights and health and welfare issues, the authors examine the subsequent ethical stumbling blocks that surround the "moral order" of these social concerns. Through a historical discussion of the abundant ethical theories posited since the Enlightenment, they suggest ways to decide which can serve as intellectual tools for applied ethics and consider how knowledge and experience enter into any moral decision. Turning to the factors pertinent in the analysis and solution of moral problems, they dissect the underlying influences on the practice of ethics, the way in which a moral problem is diagnosed and its relevant contexts established, the ensuing conflicts between the concerns of the individual and of society, and the degree of inventiveness in issues of morality. The authors suggest that, instead of viewing theory as a set consequence derived from prior applications, relating theory to practice will engage a process of mutual aid, from which each element will learn, refining and improving the other.
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A Curious and Ingenious Art
Reflections on Daguerreotypes at Harvard
Melissa Banta
University of Iowa Press, 2000

Around the time Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre perfected his method for fixing images on polished metal plates in 1839, Harvard was emerging as a modern research institution. Accordingly, the college began amassing vast collections for teaching and research. Among these collections in the university's libraries, museums, archives, and academic departments are some of the earliest photographic documents of American life: daguerreotypes.

A Curious and Ingenious Art brings together a representative sampling of Harvard's internationally significant but relatively unknown collection of daguerreotypes. Many of these images were made for, by, and of members of the university's community and have been in its holdings for more than 150 years. The collection includes the work of some of America's pioneering daguerreotypists, such as Mathew Brady, Southworth and Hawes, and John Adams Whipple. Most notably, the Harvard collection preserved for posterity such faces of the era as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry James, James McNeill Whistler, Dorothea Dix, Jenny Lind, and even Tom Thumb.

The university also seized upon photography as a tool of scientific research, stunningly exemplified in one of the first detailed daguerreotypes of the moon taken in 1851 as well as in images capturing the emergence of modern anesthesia. An unfortunate misuse of photography is recalled in the now famous slave daguerreotypes commissioned by natural historian Louis Agassiz, who believed in the theory of separate human species.

The Harvard collection represents the early history of photography and its social meaning. The accompanying essays explore the personal, telling histories behind the images, stories that unveil the reflections of individuals who searched for purpose and promise in the new medium.

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