A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY189 start with D start with D
In the popular imagination, archives are remote, largely obsolete institutions: either antiquated, inevitably dusty libraries or sinister repositories of personal secrets maintained by police states. Yet the archive is now a ubiquitous feature of digital life. Rather than being deleted, e-mails and other computer files are archived. Media software and cloud storage allow for the instantaneous cataloging and preservation of data, from music, photographs, and videos to personal information gathered by social media sites.
In this digital landscape, the archival-oriented media theories of Wolfgang Ernst are particularly relevant. Digital Memory and the Archive, the first English-language collection of the German media theorist’s work, brings together essays that present Ernst’s controversial materialist approach to media theory and history. His insights are central to the emerging field of media archaeology, which uncovers the role of specific technologies and mechanisms, rather than content, in shaping contemporary culture and society.
Ernst’s interrelated ideas on the archive, machine time and microtemporality, and the new regimes of memory offer a new perspective on both current digital culture and the infrastructure of media historical knowledge. For Ernst, different forms of media systems—from library catalogs to sound recordings—have influenced the content and understanding of the archive and other institutions of memory. At the same time, digital archiving has become a contested site that is highly resistant to curation, thus complicating the creation and preservation of cultural memory and history.
Surf the web. Ride the information highway. Log on to the future. Corporate ad campaigns like these have become pervasive in the 1990s. You're either online, or you're falling behind the times-at least, that's what the media tells us.
Ever since the 1990s, when the Internet gained widespread popularity, it has been heralded as one of the best things ever to happen to technology and communications. Commentators expected it to revolutionize how we communicate, do business, and educate our children. Conversely, other pundits have vehemently attacked this technology. Naysayers of "cyberlife" emerged with their warnings of how the Net provides an uncensored, round-the-clock venue for pornography, for inaccurate, simplified information, and is rife with opportunities to violate our right to privacy. In Digital Mythologies, Thomas Valovic hopes to raise the level of discussion by giving a full and balanced picture of how the Net affects our lives.
Digital Mythologies, a collection of Valovic's essays, asks hard questions about where computer and communications technology is taking us. Through anecdotes drawn from his experiences as former editor-in-chief of Telecommunications magazine, the author gives readers an insider's peek behind the scenes of the Internet industry. He explores the underlying social and political implications of the Internet and its associated technologies, based on his contention that the cyberspace experience is far more complex than is commonly assumed. Valovic explores these hidden complexities, and points to fascinating connections between the Internet and our contemporary culture.
"Today there is massive interest in how digital tools and popular culture are transforming learning out of school and lots of dismay at how digitally lost our schools are. Jabari Mahiri works his usual magic and here shows us how to cross this divide in a solidly grounded and beautifully written book."
---James Paul Gee, Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies, Arizona State University
"Digital Tools in Urban Schools is a profoundly sobering yet inspiring depiction of the potential for committed educators to change the lives of urban youth, with the assistance of a new set of technical capabilities."
---Mimi Ito, Professor in Residence and MacArthur Foundation Chair in Digital Media and Learning, Departments of Informatics and Anthropology, University of California, Irvine
"An uplifting book that addresses a critical gap in existing literature by providing rich and important insights into ways teachers, administrators, and members of the wider community can work together with students previously alienated---even excluded---from formal education to enhance classroom learning with appropriate digital tools and achieve inspiring results under challenging circumstances."
---Colin Lankshear, James Cook University, and Michele Knobel, Montclair State University
Digital Tools in Urban Schools demonstrates significant ways in which high school teachers in the complex educational setting of an urban public high school in northern California extended their own professional learning to revitalize learning in their classrooms. Through a novel research collaboration between a university and this public school, these teachers were supported and guided in developing the skills necessary to take greater advantage of new media and new information sources to increase student learning while making connections to their relevant experiences and interests. Jabari Mahiri draws on extensive qualitative data---including blogs, podcasts, and other digital media---to document, describe, and analyze how the learning of both students and teachers was dramatically transformed as they utilized digital media in their classrooms. Digital Tools in Urban Schools will interest instructional leaders and participants in teacher preparation and professional development programs, education and social science researchers and scholars, graduate and undergraduate programs and classes emphasizing literacy and learning, and those focused on urban education issues and conditions.
Locates the deep history of digitality in the development of racial capitalism
Seb Franklin sets out a media theory of racial capitalism to examine digitality’s racial-capitalist foundations. The Digitally Disposed shows how the promises of boundless connection, flexibility, and prosperity that are often associated with digital technologies are grounded in racialized histories of dispossession and exploitation. Reading archival and published material from the cybernetic sciences alongside nineteenth-century accounts of intellectual labor, twentieth-century sociometric experiments, and a range of literary and visual works, The Digitally Disposed locates the deep history of digitality in the development of racial capitalism.
Franklin makes the groundbreaking argument that capital’s apparently spontaneous synthesis of so-called free individuals into productive circuits represents an “informatics of value.” On the one hand, understanding value as an informatic relation helps to explain why capital was able to graft so seamlessly with digitality at a moment in which it required more granular and distributed control over labor—the moment that is often glossed as the age of logistics. On the other hand, because the informatics of value sort populations into positions of higher and lower capacity, value, and status, understanding their relationship to digitality requires that we see the digital as racialized and gendered in pervasive ways.
Ultimately, The Digitally Disposed questions the universalizing assumptions that are maintained, remade, and intensified by today’s dominant digital technologies. Vital and far-reaching, The Digitally Disposed reshapes such fundamental concepts as cybernetics, informatics, and digitality.
A delectable concoction of coevolution and cookery, gut microbiomes and microherbs, and both the chicken and its egg, Dinner with Darwin reveals that our shopping lists, recipe cards, and restaurant menus don’t just contain the ingredients for culinary delight. They also tell a fascinating story about natural selection and its influence on our plates—and palates. Digging deeper, Silvertown’s repast includes entrées into GMOs and hybrids, and looks at the science of our sensory interactions with foods and cooking—the sights, aromas, and tastes we experience in our kitchens and dining rooms. As is the wont of any true chef, Silvertown packs his menu with eclectic components, dishing on everything from Charles Darwin’s intestinal maladies to taste bud anatomy and turducken.
Our evolutionary relationship with food and drink stretches from the days of cooking cave dwellers to contemporary crêperies and beyond, and Dinner with Darwin serves up scintillating insight into the entire, awesome span. This feast of soup, science, and human society is one to savor. With a wit as dry as a fine pinot noir and a cache of evolutionary knowledge as vast as the most discerning connoisseur’s wine cellar, Silvertown whets our appetites—and leaves us hungry for more.
Providing a unique historical perspective on how racial attitudes move from elite discourse into people’s lives, Diploma of Whiteness shows how public schools promoted the idea that whites were inherently fit and those of African or mixed ancestry were necessarily in need of remedial attention. Analyzing primary material—including school system records, teacher journals, photographs, private letters, and unpublished documents—Dávila traces the emergence of racially coded hiring practices and student-tracking policies as well as the development of a social and scientific philosophy of eugenics. He contends that the implementation of the various policies intended to “improve” nonwhites institutionalized subtle barriers to their equitable integration into Brazilian society.
As part of its effort to forge a new secular Jewish nation, the nascent Israeli state tried to limit Jewish religiosity. However, with the steady growth of the ultraorthodox community and the expansion of the settler community, Israeli society is becoming increasingly religious. Although the arrival of religious discourse in Israeli politics has long been noticed, its cultural development has rarely been addressed. Directed by God explores how the country’s popular media, principally film and television, reflect this transformation. In doing so, it examines the changing nature of Zionism and the place of Judaism within it.
Once the purview of secular culture, Israel’s media initially promoted alternatives to traditional religious expression; however, using films such as Kadosh, Waltz with Bashir, and Eyes Wide Open, Yaron Peleg shows how Israel’s contemporary film and television programs have been shaped by new religious trends and how secular Israeli culture has processed and reflected on its religious heritage. He investigates how shifting cinematic visions of Jewish masculinity and gender track transformations in the nation’s religious discourse. Moving beyond the secular/religious divide, Directed by God explores changing film and television representations of different Jewish religious groups, assessing what these representations may mean for the future of Israeli society.
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.
In North America, immigration has never been about immigration. That was true in the early twentieth century when anti-immigrant rhetoric led to draconian crackdowns on the movement of bodies, and it is true today as new measures seek to construct migrants as dangerous and undesirable. This premise forms the crux of Jay Timothy Dolmage’s new book Disabled Upon Arrival: Eugenics, Immigration, and the Construction of Race and Disability, a compelling examination of the spaces, technologies, and discourses of immigration restriction during the peak period of North American immigration in the early twentieth century.
Through careful archival research and consideration of the larger ideologies of racialization and xenophobia, Disabled Upon Arrival links anti-immigration rhetoric to eugenics—the flawed “science” of controlling human population based on racist and ableist ideas about bodily values. Dolmage casts an enlightening perspective on immigration restriction, showing how eugenic ideas about the value of bodies have never really gone away and revealing how such ideas and attitudes continue to cast groups and individuals as disabled upon arrival.
In Disaster Citizenship, Jacob A. C. Remes draws on histories of the Salem and Halifax events to explore the institutions--both formal and informal--that ordinary people relied upon in times of crisis. He explores patterns and traditions of self-help, informal order, and solidarity and details how people adapted these traditions when necessary. Yet, as he shows, these methods--though often quick and effective--remained illegible to reformers. Indeed, soldiers, social workers, and reformers wielding extraordinary emergency powers challenged these grassroots practices to impose progressive "solutions" on what they wrongly imagined to be a fractured social landscape.
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.
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.
The early Cold War (1947–1964) was a time of optimism in America. Flushed with confidence by the Second World War, many heralded the American Century and saw postwar affluence as proof that capitalism would solve want and poverty. Yet this period also filled people with anxiety. Beyond the specter of nuclear annihilation, the consumerism and affluence of capitalism’s success were seen as turning the sons of pioneers into couch potatoes.
In Discipline and Indulgence, Jeffrey Montez de Oca demonstrates how popular culture, especially college football, addressed capitalism’s contradictions by integrating men into the economy of the Cold War as workers, warriors, and consumers. In the dawning television age, college football provided a ritual and spectacle of the American way of life that anyone could participate in from the comfort of his own home. College football formed an ethical space of patriotic pageantry where men could produce themselves as citizens of the Cold War state. Based on a theoretically sophisticated analysis of Cold War media, Discipline and Indulgence assesses the period’s institutional linkage of sport, higher education, media, and militarism and finds the connections of contemporary sport media to today’s War on Terror.
An urgent examination of the threat posed to social media by user disconnection, and the measures websites will take to prevent it
No matter how pervasive and powerful social media websites become, users always have the option of disconnecting—right? Not exactly, as Tero Karppi reveals in this disquieting book. Pointing out that platforms like Facebook see disconnection as an existential threat—and have undertaken wide-ranging efforts to eliminate it—Karppi argues that users’ ability to control their digital lives is gradually dissipating.
Taking a nonhumancentric approach, Karppi explores how modern social media platforms produce and position users within a system of coded relations and mechanisms of power. For Facebook, disconnection is an intense affective force. It is a problem of how to keep users engaged with the platform, but also one of keeping value, attention, and desires within the system. Karppi uses Facebook’s financial documents as a map to navigate how the platform sees its users. Facebook’s plans to connect the entire globe through satellites and drones illustrates the material webs woven to keep us connected. Karppi analyzes how Facebook’s interface limits the opportunity to opt-out—even continuing to engage users after their physical death. Showing how users have fought to take back their digital lives, Karppi chronicles responses like Web2.0 Suicide Machine, an art project dedicated to committing digital suicide.
For Karppi, understanding social media connectivity comes from unbinding the bonds that stop people from leaving these platforms. Disconnection brings us to the limit of user policies, algorithmic control, and platform politics. Ultimately, Karppi’s focus on the difficulty of disconnection, rather than the ease of connection, reveals how social media has come to dominate human relations.
In the Information Age, information is power. Who produces all that information, how does it move around, who uses it, to what ends, and under what constraints? Who gets that power? And what happens to the people who have no access to it?
Disconnected begins with a striking vignette of two men: One is the thriving manager of a company selling personal computers and computer services. The other is just one among thousands of starving laborers. He has no way to find the information that might help him find a job, he cannot afford newspapers, rarely sees television, cannot understand the dialect of local radio broadcasts, will probably never touch a computer. These two men happen to live in Windhoek, Namibia, but this is not a story about Africa––it is a story that could be repeated almost anywhere in the world, even next door.
With vivid anecdotes and data, William Wresch contrasts the opportunities of the information-rich with the limited prospects of the information-poor. Surveying the range of information––personal, public, organizational, commercial––that has become the currency of exchange in today’s world, he shows how each represents a form of power. He analyzes the barriers that keep people information-poor: geography, tyranny, illiteracy, psychological blinders, “noise,” crime. Technology alone, he demonstrates, is not the answer. Even the technology-rich do not always get access to important information––or recognize its value.
Wresch spells out the grim consequences of information inequity for individuals and society. Yet he ends with reasons for optimism and stories of people who are working to pull down the impediments to the flow of information.
Our everyday lives are increasingly being lived through electronic media, which are changing our interactions and our communications in ways that we are only beginning to understand. In Discourse 2.0: Language and New Media, editors Deborah Tannen and Anna Marie Trester team up with top scholars in the field to shed light on the ways language is being used in, and shaped by, these new media contexts.
Topics explored include: how Web 2.0 can be conceptualized and theorized; the role of English on the worldwide web; how use of social media such as Facebook and texting shape communication with family and friends; electronic discourse and assessment in educational and other settings; multimodality and the "participatory spectacle" in Web 2.0; asynchronicity and turn-taking; ways that we engage with technology including reading on-screen and on paper; and how all of these processes interplay with meaning-making.
Students, professionals, and individuals will discover that Discourse 2.0 offers a rich source of insight into these new forms of discourse that are pervasive in our lives.
The contributors (Gianfranco Zaccai, Albert Borgmann, Richard Buchanan, Augusto Morello, Tufan Orel, Nigel Cross, Victor Margolin, Langdon Winner, Carl Mitcham, Tony Fry, and Ezio Manzini) focus on three broad themes that form a sequence of fundamental issues: how to shape design as a subject matter, how to distinguish the activity of designing in the complex world of action, and how to address the basic questions of value and responsibility that persistently arise in the discussion and practice of design. The editors' introduction provides a useful overview of these questions and offers a multidisciplinary framework for design studies. The essays discuss such topics as the relation of aesthetics to technology, the place of design in social action, the role of the consumer in design decisions, and the need for ethical practice in contemporary design. Manzini's concluding essay shows how the issue of ethics should connect responsible behavior to decisions made every day in the manufacture of objects.
For the past four decades, increasing numbers of Americans have started paying greater attention to the food they eat, buying organic vegetables, drinking fine wines, and seeking out exotic cuisines. Yet they are often equally passionate about the items they refuse to eat: processed foods, generic brands, high-carb meals. While they may care deeply about issues like nutrition and sustainable agriculture, these discriminating diners also seek to differentiate themselves from the unrefined eater, the common person who lives on junk food.
Discriminating Taste argues that the rise of gourmet, ethnic, diet, and organic foods must be understood in tandem with the ever-widening income inequality gap. Offering an illuminating historical perspective on our current food trends, S. Margot Finn draws numerous parallels with the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, an era infamous for its class divisions, when gourmet dinners, international cuisines, slimming diets, and pure foods first became fads.
Examining a diverse set of cultural touchstones ranging from Ratatouille to The Biggest Loser, Finn identifies the key ways that “good food” has become conflated with high status. She also considers how these taste hierarchies serve as a distraction, leading middle-class professionals to focus on small acts of glamorous and virtuous consumption while ignoring their class’s larger economic stagnation. A provocative look at the ideology of contemporary food culture, Discriminating Taste teaches us to question the maxim that you are what you eat.
In earlier times, a woman knew she was pregnant when she experienced “quickening”—she felt movement within her. Today a woman relies on what she sees in a test result or a digital sonogram image to confirm her pregnancy. A private experience once mediated by women themselves has become a public experience interpreted and controlled by medical professionals. In Disembodying Women, Barbara Duden takes a closer look at this contemporary transformation of women’s experience of pregnancy. She suggests that advances in technology and parallel changes in public discourse have refrained pregnancy as a managed process, the mother as an ecosystem, and the fetus as an endangered species.
Drawing on extensive historical research, Duden traces the graphic techniques-from anatomists’ drawings to woodcuts to X-rays and ultrasound-used to “flay” the female body and turn it inside out. Emphasizing the iconic power of the visual within twentieth-century culture, Duden follows the process by which the pregnant woman’s flesh has been peeled away to uncover scientific data. Lennart Nilsson’s now-famous photographs of the embryo published in Life magazine in the mid-1960s stand in stark contrast to representations of the invisible unborn in medieval iconography or sixteenth-century painting. Illumination has given way to illustration, ideogram to facsimile, the contemplative intuition of the body to a scientific analysis of its component parts.
New ways of seeing the body produce new ways of experiencing the body. Because technology allows us to penetrate that once secret enclosure of the womb, the image of the fetus, exposed to public gaze, has eclipsed that of woman in the public mind. Society, anxious about the health of the global environment, has focused on protecting “life” in the maternal ecosystem, in effect, pitting fetus against mother.
Duden’s reading of the body lends a unique historical and philosophical perspective to contemporary debate over fetal rights, reproductive technologies, abortion, and the right to privacy. This provocative work should reinvigorate that debate by calling into question contemporary certainties and the policies and programs they serve to justify.
Economists celebrate the market as a device for regulating human interaction without acknowledging that their enthusiasm depends on a set of half-truths: that individuals are autonomous, self-interested, and rational calculators with unlimited wants and that the only community that matters is the nation-state. However, as Stephen A. Marglin argues, market relationships erode community. In the past, for example, when a farm family experienced a setback—say the barn burned down—neighbors pitched in. Now a farmer whose barn burns down turns, not to his neighbors, but to his insurance company. Insurance may be a more efficient way to organize resources than a community barn raising, but the deep social and human ties that are constitutive of community are weakened by the shift from reciprocity to market relations.
Marglin dissects the ways in which the foundational assumptions of economics justify a world in which individuals are isolated from one another and social connections are impoverished as people define themselves in terms of how much they can afford to consume. Over the last four centuries, this economic ideology has become the dominant ideology in much of the world. Marglin presents an account of how this happened and an argument for righting the imbalance in our lives that this ideology has fostered.
Each chapter explores a different facet of the war and masculinity in depth. Joanna Bourke discovers that those who were dismembered and disabled by the war were not viewed as passive or weak, like their civilian counterparts, but were the focus of much government and public sentiment. Those suffering from disease were viewed differently, often finding themselves accused of malingering.
Joanna Bourke argues convincingly that military experiences led to a greater sharing of gender identities between men of different classes and ages. Dismembering the Male concludes that ultimately, attempts to reconstruct a new type of masculinity failed as the threat of another war, and with it the sacrifice of a new generation of men, intensified.
Hurricane Katrina forced the largest and most abrupt displacement in U.S. history. About 1.5 million people evacuated from the Gulf Coast preceding Katrina’s landfall. New Orleans, a city of 500,000, was nearly emptied of life after the hurricane and flooding. Katrina survivors eventually scattered across all fifty states, and tens of thousands still remain displaced. Some are desperate to return to the Gulf Coast but cannot find the means. Others have chosen to make their homes elsewhere. Still others found a way to return home but were unable to stay due to the limited availability of social services, educational opportunities, health care options, and affordable housing.
The contributors to Displaced have been following the lives of Katrina evacuees since 2005. In this illuminating book, they offer the first comprehensive analysis of the experiences of the displaced. Drawing on research in thirteen communities in seven states across the country, the contributors describe the struggles that evacuees have faced in securing life-sustaining resources and rebuilding their lives. They also recount the impact that the displaced have had on communities that initially welcomed them and then later experienced “Katrina fatigue” as the ongoing needs of evacuees strained local resources. Displaced reveals that Katrina took a particularly heavy toll on households headed by low-income African American women who lost the support provided by local networks of family and friends. It also shows the resilience and resourcefulness of Katrina evacuees who have built new networks and partnered with community organizations and religious institutions to create new lives in the diaspora.
While US tenure-track writing center administrators (WCAs) do not make up the majority of those who hold WCA positions in writing centers, they are more likely to be the storytellers of the writing center grand narrative. They publish more, present more conference papers, edit more journals, and participate more in organizational leadership. This collection complicates that narrative by adding marginalized voices and experiences in three thematic categories: structural marginalization, globalization and marginalization, and embodied marginalization.
Disruptive Stories spurs further conversations about ways to improve the review process in writing center scholarship so that it more accurately reflects the growing diversity of its administrators and practitioners.
Musical sound has been central to heteromasculinist productions of nation and homeland, whether Chicano, Tejano, Texan, Mexican, or American. If this assertion holds true, as Deborah R. Vargas suggests, then what are we to make of those singers and musicians whose representations of gender and sexuality are irreconcilable with canonical Chicano/Tejano music or what Vargas refers to as “la onda”? These are the “dissonant divas” Vargas discusses, performers who stimulate our listening for alternative borderlands imaginaries that are inaudible within the limits of “la onda.”
Dissonant Divas in Chicana Music focuses on the Texan monument of the Alamo and its association with Rosita Fernandez; Tejano corrido folklore and its musical antithesis in Chelo Silva; the female accordion-playing bodies of Ventura Alonza and Eva Ybarra as incompatible with the instrumental labor of conjunto music; geography as national border, explored through the multiple national music scales negotiated by Eva Garza; and racialized gender, viewed through Selena’s integration of black diasporic musical sound. Vargas offers a feminist analysis of these figures’ contributions by advancing a notion of musical dissonance—a dissonance that recognizes the complexity of gender, sexuality, and power within Chicana/o culture.
Incorporating ethnographic fieldwork, oral history, and archival research, Vargas’s study demonstrates how these singers work together to explode the limits of Texan, Chicano, Tejano, Mexican, and American identities.
Rice outlines three distinct ways that the rhetoric of publics counteracts development: through injury claims, memory claims, and equivalence claims. In injury claims, rhetors frame themselves as victims in a dispute. Memory claims allow rhetors to anchor themselves to an older, deliberative space, rather than to a newly evolving one. Equivalence claims see the benefits on both sides of an issue, and here rhetors effectively become nonactors.
Rice provides case studies of development disputes that place the reader in the middle of real-life controversies and evidence her theories of claims-based public rhetorics. She finds that these methods comprise the most common (though not exclusive) vernacular surrounding development and shows how each is often counterproductive to its own goals. Rice further demonstrates that these claims create a particular role or public subjectivity grounded in one’s own feelings, which serves to distance publics from each other and the issues at hand.
Rice argues that rhetoricians have a duty to transform current patterns of public development discourse so that all individuals may engage in matters of crisis. She articulates its sustainability as both a goal and future disciplinary challenge of rhetorical studies and offers tools and methodologies toward that end.
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.
Diversity, despite what we say, disturbs us. In the U.S., we debate linguistic rights, the need for an official language, and educational policies for language minority students. On the one hand, we believe in the rights of individuals, including (at least in the academy) the right to one’s own language. On the other hand, we sponsor a single common language, monolingual and standard, for full participation and communication in both the academy and in U.S. society.
In Diverse by Design, Christopher Schroeder reports on an institutional case study conducted at an officially designated Hispanic-Serving Institution. He gives particular attention to a cohort of Latino students in a special admissions program, to document their experience of a program designed to help students surmount the “obstacle” that ethnolinguistic diversity is perceived to be.
Ultimately, Schroeder argues for reframing multilingualism and multiculturalism, not as obstacles, but as intellectual resources to exploit. While diversity might disturb us, we can overcome its challenges by a more expansive sense of social identity. In an increasingly globalized society, literacy ideologies are ever more critical to educational equity, and to human lives.
During the Trump era, connections among white supremacy; environmental destruction; and fossil fuel dependence have become more conspicuous. Many of the same leadership deficiencies that shaped the inadequate response in the United States to the coronavirus pandemic have also thwarted the US response to the climate crisis. The inadequate and ineffective framing of climate change as a narrow, isolated, discrete problem to be “solved” by technical solutions is failing. The dominance of technocratic, white, male perspectives on climate and energy has inhibited investments in social change and social innovations. With new leadership and diverse voices, we can strengthen climate resilience, reduce racial and economic inequities, and promote social justice.
In Diversifying Power, energy expert Jennie Stephens argues that the key to effectively addressing the climate crisis is diversifying leadership so that antiracist, feminist priorities are central. All politics is now climate politics, so all policies, from housing to health, now have to integrate climate resilience and renewable energy.
Stephens takes a closer look at climate and energy leadership related to job creation and economic justice, health and nutrition, housing and transportation. She looks at why we need to resist by investing in bold diverse leadership to curb the “the polluter elite.” We need to reclaim and restructure climate and energy systems so policies are explicitly linked to social, economic, and racial justice.
Inspirational stories of diverse leaders who integrate antiracist, feminist values to build momentum for structural transformative change are woven throughout the book, along with Stephens’ experience as a woman working on climate and energy. The shift from a divided, unequal, extractive, and oppressive society to a just, sustainable, regenerative, and healthy future has already begun.
But structural change needs more bold and ambitious leaders at all levels, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with the Green New Deal, or the Secwepemc women of the Tiny House Warriors resisting the Trans Mountain pipeline.
Diversifying Power offers hope and optimism. Stephens shows how the biggest challenges facing society are linked and anyone can get involved to leverage the power of collective action. By highlighting the creative individuals and organizations making change happen, she provides inspiration and encourages transformative action on climate and energy justice.
Research frequently neglects the important ways that race and gender intersect within the complex structural dynamics of STEM. Diversifying STEM fills this void, bringing together a wide array of perspectives and the voices of a number of multidisciplinary scholars. The essays cover three main areas: the widely-held ideology that science and mathematics are “value-free,” which promotes pedagogies of colorblindness in the classroom as well as an avoidance of discussions around using mathematics and science to promote social justice; how male and female students of color experience the intersection of racist and sexist structures that lead to general underrepresentation and marginalization; and recognizing that although there are no quick fixes, there exists evidence-based research suggesting concrete ways of doing a better job of including individuals of color in STEM. As a whole this volume will allow practitioners, teachers, students, faculty, and professionals to reimagine STEM across a variety of educational paradigms, perspectives, and disciplines, which is critical in finding solutions that broaden the participation of historically underrepresented groups within the STEM disciplines.
What Warikoo uncovers—talking with both white students and students of color at Harvard, Brown, and Oxford—is absolutely illuminating; and some of it is positively shocking. As she shows, many elite white students understand the value of diversity abstractly, but they ignore the real problems that racial inequality causes and that diversity programs are meant to solve. They stand in fear of being labeled a racist, but they are quick to call foul should a diversity program appear at all to hamper their own chances for advancement. The most troubling result of this ambivalence is what she calls the “diversity bargain,” in which white students reluctantly agree with affirmative action as long as it benefits them by providing a diverse learning environment—racial diversity, in this way, is a commodity, a selling point on a brochure. And as Warikoo shows, universities play a big part in creating these situations. The way they talk about race on campus and the kinds of diversity programs they offer have a huge impact on student attitudes, shaping them either toward ambivalence or, in better cases, toward more productive and considerate understandings of racial difference.
Ultimately, this book demonstrates just how slippery the notions of race, merit, and privilege can be. In doing so, it asks important questions not just about college admissions but what the elite students who have succeeded at it—who will be the world’s future leaders—will do with the social inequalities of the wider world.
Hyper-criminalization and the normalization of violence was an integral aspect of Robert Weide’s formative years growing up in Los Angeles in the 1980s and 1990s, where Sureño, Crip, and Blood gangs maintained a precarious coexistence, often punctuated by racialized gang violence. His insider status informs Divide & Conquer, which considers how the capitalist economy, the race concept, and nationalist ideology have made gang members the instruments of their own oppression, resulting in racialized sectarian conflicts spanning generations between African American and Latino gangs in Los Angeles and California’s prisons.
While gang members may fail to appreciate the deeper historical and conceptual foundations of these conflicts, they rarely credit naked bigotry as the root cause. As Weide asserts, they divide themselves according to inherited groupist identities, thereby turning them against one another in protracted blood feuds across gang lines and racial lines.
Weide explores both the historical foundations and the conceptual and cultural boundaries and biases that divide gang members across racial lines, detailing case studies of specific racialized gang conflicts between Sureño, Crip, and Blood gangs. Weide employs mixed-methods research, having spent nearly a decade on ethnographic fieldwork and conducted over one hundred formal interviews with gang members and gang enforcement officers concerning taboo subjects like prison and gang politics, and transracial gang membership.
Divide & Conquer concludes with encouraging developments in recent years, as gang members themselves, on their own volition, have intervened to build solidarity and bring racialized gang conflicts between them to an end.
An illuminating and wide-ranging survey of interrelated collective dreams from both sides of the Iron Curtain, Divided Dreamworlds? has a place on the bookshelf of any modern historian.
States are inherently and fundamentally geographical. Sovereignty is based on control of territory. This book uses Song China to explain how a pre-industrial regime organized itself spatially in order to exercise authority. On more than a thousand occasions, the Song court founded, abolished, promoted, demoted, and reordered jurisdictions in an attempt to maximize the effectiveness of limited resources in a climate of shifting priorities, to placate competing constituencies, and to address military and economic crises. Spatial transformations in the Song field administration changed the geography of commerce, taxation, revenue accumulation, warfare, foreign relations, and social organization, and even determined the terms of debates about imperial power.
The chronology of tenth-century imperial consolidation, eleventh-century political reform, and twelfth-century localism traced in this book is a familiar one. But by detailing the relationship between the court and local administration, this book complicates the received paradigm of Song centralization and decentralization. Song frontier policies formed a coherent imperial approach to administering peripheral regions with inaccessible resources and limited infrastructure. And the well-known events of the Song—wars and reforms—were often responses to long-term spatial and demographic change.
In this close look at the business of religion, McKean traces the ideological and organizational antecedents to the Hindu nationalist movement. The Indian state's increasing patronage of Hindu institutions makes competition for its support greater than ever. Using materials from guru's publications, the press, and extensive field research, McKean examines how participation by upper-caste ruling class groups in the Divine Life Society and other Hindu organizations further legitimates their own authority.
With a remarkable selection of photographs and advertisements showing icons of spirituality used to sell commodities from textiles to cement to comic books, McKean illustrates the pervasive presence of Hindu imagery in India's burgeoning market economy. She shows how gurus popularize Hindu nationalism through imagery such as the goddess, Mother India, and her martyred sons and daughters.
Jazz manouche—a genre known best for its energetic, guitar-centric swing tunes—is among France’s most celebrated musical practices of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It centers on the recorded work of famed guitarist Django Reinhardt and is named for the ethnoracial subgroup of Romanies (also known, often pejoratively, as “Gypsies”) to which Reinhardt belonged. French Manouches are publicly lauded as bearers of this jazz tradition, and many take pleasure and pride in the practice while at the same time facing pervasive discrimination. Jazz manouche uncovers a contradiction at the heart of France’s assimilationist republican ideals: the music is portrayed as quintessentially French even as Manouches themselves endure treatment as racial others.
In this book, Siv B. Lie explores how this music is used to construct divergent ethnoracial and national identities in a context where discussions of race are otherwise censured. Weaving together ethnographic and historical analysis, Lie shows that jazz manouche becomes a source of profound ambivalence as it generates ethnoracial difference and socioeconomic exclusion. As the first full-length ethnographic study of French jazz to be published in English, this book enriches anthropological, ethnomusicological, and historical scholarship on global jazz, race and ethnicity, and citizenship while showing how music can be an important but insufficient tool in struggles for racial and economic justice.
--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.
Every night, somewhere in the world, three or four musicians will climb on stage together. Whether the gig is at a jazz club, a bar, or a bar mitzvah, the performance never begins with a note, but with a question. The trumpet player might turn to the bassist and ask, “Do you know ‘Body and Soul’?”—and from there the subtle craft of playing the jazz repertoire is tested in front of a live audience. These ordinary musicians may never have played together—they may never have met—so how do they smoothly put on a show without getting booed offstage.
In “Do You Know . . . ?” Robert R. Faulkner and Howard S. Becker—both jazz musicians with decades of experience performing—present the view from the bandstand, revealing the array of skills necessary for working musicians to do their jobs. While learning songs from sheet music or by ear helps, the jobbing musician’s lexicon is dauntingly massive: hundreds of thousands of tunes from jazz classics and pop standards to more exotic fare. Since it is impossible for anyone to memorize all of these songs, Faulkner and Becker show that musicians collectively negotiate and improvise their way to a successful performance. Players must explore each others’ areas of expertise, develop an ability to fake their way through unfamiliar territory, and respond to the unpredictable demands of their audience—whether an unexpected gang of polka fanatics or a tipsy father of the bride with an obscure favorite song.
“Do You Know . . . ?” dishes out entertaining stories and sharp insights drawn from the authors’ own experiences and observations as well as interviews with a range of musicians. Faulkner and Becker’s vivid, detailed portrait of the musician at work holds valuable lessons for anyone who has to think on the spot or under a spotlight.
In Documenting the American Student Abroad, Kelly Hankin explores the documentary media cultures that shape these beliefs, drawing our attention to the broad range of stakeholders and documentary modes involved in defining the core values and practices of study abroad. From study abroad video contests and a F.B.I. produced docudrama about student espionage to reality television inspired educational documentaries and docudramas about Amanda Knox, Hankin shows how the institutional values of "global citizenship," "intercultural communication," and "cultural immersion" emerge in contradictory ways through their representation.
By bringing study abroad and media studies into conversation with one another, Documenting the American Student Abroad: The Media Cultures of International Education offers a much needed humanist contribution to the field of international education, as well as a unique approach to the growing scholarship on the intersection of media and institutions. As study abroad practitioners and students increase their engagement with moving images and digital environments, the insights of media scholars are essential for helping the field understand how the mediation of study abroad rhetoric shapes rather than reflects the field's central institutional ideals
In Does Science Need a Global Language?, Scott L. Montgomery seeks to answer this question by investigating the phenomenon of global English in science, how and why it came about, the forms in which it appears, what advantages and disadvantages it brings, and what its future might be. He also examines the consequences of a global tongue, considering especially emerging and developing nations, where research is still at a relatively early stage and English is not yet firmly established.
Throughout the book, he includes important insights from a broad range of perspectives in linguistics, history, education, geopolitics, and more. Each chapter includes striking and revealing anecdotes from the front-line experiences of today’s scientists, some of whom have struggled with the reality of global scientific English. He explores topics such as student mobility, publication trends, world Englishes, language endangerment, and second language learning, among many others. What he uncovers will challenge readers to rethink their assumptions about the direction of contemporary science, as well as its future.
Doing Difference Differently provides an in-depth, nuanced understanding of the multifaceted literate lives of this often-marginalized cultural group, highlighting their diverse aspirations, personas, communities, challenges, and strategies. The book reconceptualizes the linguistic and cultural differences of Chinese international students as active processes of embracing, performing, resisting, negotiating, and redefining the identities that institutions impose on them through everyday literacy practices. Wang offers an analytical heuristic for researchers and educators to better understand these students’ backgrounds and to more effectively and ethically support and advocate for them. This case study critically engages broad and interconnected concepts that are essential to educators’ collective understanding of Generation Z students brought up in cultural and educational contexts outside of the European-American sphere.
This book appeals to scholars, researchers, teachers, and administrators working in North American higher education and English-speaking countries, particularly those in the fields of writing studies, second language studies, applied linguistics, multilingual education, literacy studies, and international education. Educators across disciplines seeking to better understand the growing population of Chinese international students in North America will likewise benefit.
As Nakassis shows, while signs of the global, modern world are everywhere in post-liberalization India, for most of these young people this world is still very distant—a paradox that results in youth’s profound sense of being in between. This in-betweenness manifests itself in the ambivalent quality of style, the ways in which stylish objects are necessarily marked as counterfeit, mixed, or ironical. In order to show how this in-betweenness materializes in particular media, Nakassis explores the entanglements between youth peer groups and the sites where such stylish media objects are produced, arguing that these entanglements deeply condition the production and circulation of the media objects themselves. The result is an important and timely look at the tremendous forces of youth culture, globalization, and mass media as they interact in the vibrancy of a rapidly changing India.
-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.
Franklin combines wide-ranging sources—from historical accounts of sheep-breeding, to scientific representations of cloning by nuclear transfer, to popular media reports of Dolly's creation and birth—as she draws on gender and kinship theory as well as postcolonial and science studies. She argues that there is an urgent need for more nuanced responses to the complex intersections between the social and the biological, intersections which are literally reshaping reproduction and genealogy. In Dolly Mixtures, Franklin uses the renowned sheep as an opportunity to begin developing a critical language to identify and evaluate the reproductive possibilities that post-Dolly biology now faces, and to look back at some of the important historical formations that enabled and prefigured Dollys creation.
The issue of immigration is one of the most hotly debated topics in the national arena, with everyone from right-wing pundits like Sarah Palin to alternative rockers like Zack de la Rocha offering their opinion. The traditional immigrant narrative that gained popularity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries continues to be used today in describing the process of the “Americanization” of immigrants. Yet rather than acting as an accurate representation of immigrant experiences, this common narrative of the “American Dream” attempts to ideologically contain those experiences within a story line that promotes the idea of achieving success through hard work and perseverance.
In Domestic Disturbances, Irene Mata dispels the myth of the “shining city on the hill” and reveals the central truth of hidden exploitation that underlies the great majority of Chicana/Latina immigrant stories. Influenced by the works of Latina cultural producers and the growing interdisciplinary field of scholarship on gender, immigration, and labor, Domestic Disturbances suggests a new framework for looking at these immigrant and migrant stories, not as a continuation of a literary tradition, but instead as a specific Latina genealogy of immigrant narratives that more closely engage with the contemporary conditions of immigration. Through examination of multiple genres including film, theatre, and art, as well as current civil rights movements such as the mobilization around the DREAM Act, Mata illustrates the prevalence of the immigrant narrative in popular culture and the oppositional possibilities of alternative stories.
Enoch explores how three different groups of women workers—teachers, domestic scientists, and World War II factory employees—contended with the physical and ideological space of the home, examining how this everyday yet powerful space thwarted or enabled their financial and familial security as well as their intellectual engagements and work-related opportunities.
Domestic Occupations demonstrates a multimodal and multigenre research method for conducting spatio-rhetorical analysis that serves as a model for new kinds of thinking and new kinds of scholarship. This study adds historical depth and exigency to an important contemporary conversation in the public sphere about how women’s ties to the home inflect their access to work and professional advancement.
The Domesticated Penis challenges long-held assumptions that, in the development of Homo sapiens, form follows function alone. In this fascinating exploration, Loretta A. Cormier and Sharyn R. Jones explain the critical contribution that conscious female selection has made to the attributes of the modern male phallus.
Synthesizing a wealth of robust scholarship from the fields of archaeology, cultural anthropology, evolutionary theory, and primatology, the authors successfully dismantle the orthodox view that each part of the human anatomy has followed a vector of development along which only changes and mutations that increased functional utility were retained and extended. Their research animates our understanding of human morphology with insights about how choices early females made shaped the male reproductive anatomy.
In crisp and droll prose, Cormier’s and Jones’s rigorous scholarship incorporates engaging examples and lore about the human phallus in a variety of foraging, agrarian, and contemporary cultures. By detailing how female selection in mating led directly to a matrix of anatomical attributes in the male, their findings illuminate how the penis also acquired a matrix of attributes of the imagination and mythical powers—powers to be assuaged, channeled, or deployed for building productive societies.
These analyses offer a highly persuasive alternative to moribund biological and behavioral assumptions about prehistoric alpha males as well as the distortions such assumptions give rise to in contemporary popular culture. In this anthropological tour de force, Cormier and Jones transcend reductive gender stereotypes and bring to our concepts of evolutional biomechanics an invigorating new balance and nuance.
This elegantly conceived work devotes particular attention to the practice of burial. Harrison contends that we bury our dead to humanize the lands where we build our present and imagine our future. As long as the dead are interred in graves and tombs, they never truly depart from this world, but remain, if only symbolically, among the living. Spanning a broad range of examples, from the graves of our first human ancestors to the empty tomb of the Gospels to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Harrison also considers the authority of predecessors in both modern and premodern societies. Through inspired readings of major writers and thinkers such as Vico, Virgil, Dante, Pater, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Rilke, he argues that the buried dead form an essential foundation where future generations can retrieve their past, while burial grounds provide an important bedrock where past generations can preserve their legacy for the unborn.
The Dominion of the Dead is a profound meditation on how the thought of death shapes the communion of the living. A work of enormous scope, intellect, and imagination, this book will speak to all who have suffered grief and loss.
Though donkeys have historically been among our most useful domesticated animals—from plowing fields to navigating difficult terrain—they have been much maligned in popular culture and given very little respect. So much so, that their perceived qualities of stupidity and stubbornness have made their way into the language of insult. But in Donkey, Jill Bough champions this humble creature, proving that after 10,000 years of domestication, this incredibly hard-working animal deserves our appreciation.
Bough reveals the animal’s historic significance in Ancient Egypt, where it was once highly regarded—even worshipped. However, this elevated status did not endure in Ancient Greece and Rome, where donkeys were denigrated, ridiculed, and abused. Since that time, donkeys have continued to be associated with the poorest and most marginalized in human societies. All that time and all over the world, donkeys continue to be used for innumerable tasks, and even today, donkeys are considered to be one of the best draught animals in developing nations, where they continue to make a vital contribution. Bough rounds out her account with a look at the variety of social, cultural, and religious meanings that donkeys have embodied, especially in literature and art.
With accounts that are both fascinating and touching, this cultural history of the donkey will inspire a new respect and admiration for this essential creature.
Widely recognized as country music's ranking senior authority, Bill C. Malone explores how the music's defining themes (home and family, religion, rambling, frolic, humor, and politics) have emerged out of the particularities of working people's day-to-day lives. He traces the many contradictory voices and messages of a music that simultaneously extols the virtues of home and the joys of rambling, the assurances of the Christian life and the ecstasies of hedonism, the strength of working-class life and the material lure of middle-class aspirations. The resulting tensions, Malone argues, are a principal source of the music's enduring appeal.
Country musicians have often been people from undistinguished blue-collar backgrounds who have tried to make their way as entertainers in a society that has little respect for the working class. From this ambivalent position, they have voiced the sometimes contradictory values and longings of their culture while also attempting to fulfill the romantic expectations of outsiders.
"For every Garth Brooks," Malone says, "there are a thousand country musicians who perform in local bars, taverns, and American Legion halls and who have never been able to ‘give up their day jobs.' These are musicians whose middle-class dreams are tempered by working-class realities." A powerful and honest expression of the hopes, longings, frailties, and failings of ordinary people, country music increasingly resonates with listeners beyond its core constituency as they struggle with a complex and uncertain world.
An interpretive bricolage that draws on an unlikely archive of 1930s detritus—office memos, scribbled manuscripts, scrapbooks, ruined photographs, newspaper clippings, glass eyes, incinerated stage sets, pulp novels, and junk washed ashore—Down in the Dumps escorts its readers through Reno’s divorce factory of the 1930s, where couples from across the United States came to quickly dissolve matrimonial bonds; Key West’s multilingual salvage economy and its status as the island that became the center of an ideological tug-of-war between the American New Deal government and a politically fraught Caribbean; post-Renaissance Harlem, in the process of memorializing, remembering, grieving, and rewriting a modernity that had already passed; and Studio-era Hollywood, Nathanael West’s “dump of dreams,” in which the introduction of sound in film and shifts in art direction began to transform how Americans understood place-making and even being itself. A coda on Alcatraz and the Pentagon brings the book into the present, exploring how American Depression comes to bear on post-9/11 America.
Down to Earth presents the first comprehensive overview of the geopolitical maneuvers, financial investments, technological innovations, and ideological struggles that take place behind the scenes of the satellite industry. Satellite projects that have not received extensive coverage—microsatellites in China, WorldSpace in South Africa, SiriusXM, the failures of USA 193 and Cosmos 954, and Iridium—are explored. This collection takes readers on a voyage through a truly global industry, from the sites where satellites are launched to the corporate clean rooms where they are designed, and along the orbits and paths that satellites traverse. Combining a practical introduction to the mechanics of the satellite industry, a history of how its practices and technologies have evolved, and a sophisticated theoretical analysis of satellite cultures, Down to Earth opens up a new space for global media studies.
At least 200,000 people have died in Mexico’s so-called drug war, and the worst suffering has been in Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso, Texas. How did it get so bad? After three decades studying that question, Howard Campbell doesn’t believe there is any one answer. Misguided policies, corruption, criminality, and the borderland economy are all factors. But none of these reasons explain how violence in downtown Juárez has become heartbreakingly “normal.”
A rigorous yet moving account, Downtown Juárez is informed by the sex workers, addicts, hustlers, bar owners, human smugglers, migrants, and down-and-out workers struggling to survive in an underworld where horrifying abuses have come to seem like the natural way of things. Even as Juárez’s elite northeast section thrives on the profits of multinational corporations, and law-abiding citizens across the city mobilize against crime and official malfeasance, downtown’s cantinas, barrios, and brothels are tyrannized by misery.
Campbell’s is a chilling perspective, suggesting that, over time, violent acts feed off each other, losing their connection to any specific cause. Downtown Juárez documents this banality of evil—and confronts it—with the stories of those most affected.
Even after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, most Americans may not have been sure what an atomic bomb was or how it worked. But they did sense that it had fundamentally changed the future of the human race. In this book, Robert Jacobs analyzes the early impact of nuclear weapons on American culture and society. He does so by examining a broad range of stories, or "nuclear narratives," that sought to come to grips with the implications of the bomb's unprecedented and almost unimaginable power.
Beginning with what he calls the "primary nuclear narrative," which depicted atomic power as a critical agent of social change that would either destroy the world or transform it for the better, Jacobs explores a variety of common themes and images related to the destructive power of the bomb, the effects of radiation, and ways of surviving nuclear war. He looks at civil defense pamphlets, magazines, novels, and films to recover the stories the U.S. government told its citizens and soldiers as well as those presented in popular culture.
According to Jacobs, this early period of Cold War nuclear culture—from 1945 to the banning of above-ground testing in 1963—was distinctive for two reasons: not only did atmospheric testing make Americans keenly aware of the presence of nuclear weapons in their lives, but radioactive fallout from the tests also made these weapons a serious threat to public health, separate from yet directly linked to the danger of nuclear war.
Representing a decade's worth of research, Dramas of Nationhood makes a case for the importance of studying television to answer larger questions about culture, power, and modern self-fashionings. Abu-Lughod explores the elements of developmentalist ideology and the visions of national progress that once dominated Egyptian television—now experiencing a crisis. She discusses the broadcasts in rich detail, from the generic emotional qualities of TV serials and the depictions of authentic national culture, to the debates inflamed by their deliberate strategies for combating religious extremism.
Drawing the Future: Chicago Architecture on the International Stage, 1900–1925 is an illustrated catalog with companion essays for an exhibition of the same name at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University. Drawing the Future explores the creative ferment among Chicago architects in the early twentieth century, coinciding with similar visions around the world. The essays focus on the highlights of the exhibition. David Van Zanten profiles Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin, Chicago architects who created an influential, prize-winning plan for Canberra, the new capital of Australia. Ashley Dunn looks at the two exhibits at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, one devoted to the Griffins in 1914 and the other to the French architect Tony Garnier in 1925, demonstrating the impact of World War I on city planning and architecture. Leslie Coburn examines Chicago’s Neighborhood Center Competition of 1914–15, which sought to redress gaps in Daniel Burnham’s plan of 1909. The ambition and reach of Chicago architecture in this epoch would have lasting influence on cities of the future.
The dream of “progress” that animated many nineteenth-century artistic and political movements gave way at the turn of the century to a dissatisfaction with the Industrial Civilization and a recurrent pessimism about a future dominated by mechanization. Art Nouveau, which was both a style and a movement, embodied this dissatisfaction, marking the turn-of-the-century period with an aesthetic that consciously set out to revolutionize literature, the arts, and society within the framework of a brutalizing, wildly burgeoning Industrial Civilization. Generally associated with northern European culture, Art Nouveau also had a great impact in the south, particularly in Spain.
A Dream of Arcadia is the first work to explore Spain’s fertile and imaginative Art Nouveau. Through the eyes of four major Spanish writers, Lily Litvak views several different aspects of the turn-of-the-century struggle against the advances of industrialism in Spain. Her interpretation of the early works of Ramón del Valle Inclán, Miguel de Unamuno, José Martínez Ruiz (Azorín), and Pío Baroja exposes a longing for a preindustrial arcadia based on a return to nature, the revival of handicrafts and medieval art, an attraction to rural primitive societies, and a revulsion against the modern city. Set against the European literary and artistic background of the period, her observations place the Spanish manifestations of Art Nouveau within the context of the better-known northern phenomena. Of particular interest is her discussion of the influences of John Ruskin, William Morris, and the Pre-Raphaelites, which demonstrates how the general European mood was articulated in Spain.
Litvak concludes that Valle Inclán, Unamuno, Azorín, and Baroja must be considered as more than simply fin de siècle writers, for they became part of a general movement, generated by Art Nouveau, that spans an entire century. A Dream of Arcadia demonstrates that Art Nouveau was more than a flash on Europe's artistic horizon; it is a philosophy with ramifications that have led to communes, handcrafted articles, and nomadic adolescents in search of truth.
The specter of the Soviet Union lingers in Cuba, yet until now there has been no book-length work on the ways Cubans process their country’s relationship with the Soviet bloc. Dreaming in Russian at last brings into the light the reality that for nearly three decades, the Soviet Union subsidized the island economically, intervened in military matters, and exported distinct pedagogical and cultural models to Cuba. Drawing on interviews with Cuban artists and intellectuals, as well as treasures from cinematographic and bibliographic archives, Jacqueline Loss delivers the first book to show that Cuba remembers and retains many aspects of the Soviet era, far from shedding those cultural facets as relics of the Cold War.
Weaving together intriguing, seldom-seen images, Dreaming in Russian showcases the ways in which Cuba’s relationship to its Soviet benefactors lingered after the disintegration of the U.S.S.R. in 1991. Analyzing numerous literary texts and works of visual art, Loss also incorporates aspects of architecture, popular culture, the space race, and other strands to create a captivating new perspective on Cuban society. Among the luminaries featured are poet Reina María Rodríguez, writer Antonio José Ponte, visual artist Tonel, and novelist Wendy Guerra. A departure from traditional cultural history, Loss’s approach instead presents a kaleidoscopic series of facets, reflecting the hybrid nature of the self-images that emerged in the aftermath of the Soviet aegis. As speculations about Cuba’s future under Fidel Castro’s heir apparent continue, the portrait that emerges in Dreaming in Russian is both timely and mesmerizing.
Based on more than twenty years of collaborative research, Carole Pegg’s long-awaited participatory ethnography explores how Indigenous nomadic peoples of Russia’s southern Siberian republics (Altai, Khakassia, Tyva) sound multiphonies of place in a post-Soviet global world. Inspired by the mountain-steppe ecology and pathways of nomadism, soundscapes created in performative ritual events cross political and multiple-world boundaries in a shamanic-animist universe, enabling human and spirit actor interactions in a series of sensuous worlds. As with the “throat-singing” for which Indigenous Altai-Sayan peoples are famous, senses of place involve sonic relations, rootedness, movement, and plurality. Pegg echoes their drone-partials musical and ontological models in an innovative theoretical entwinement. Three strands form the book’s multivocal drone, the partials of which sound in each chapter: ontological sonicality and musicality that enables emplacement and movement; the importance of shamanism-animism--at the core of Indigenous spiritual practices--for personhood and community; and the agency of sonic performances. Sounding place, Pegg demonstrates, is essential to the identities, ways of life, and very senses of being of Indigenous Altai-Sayan peoples.
The die-hard local skateboarders of Franklin Skatepark—a group of working-class, Latino and white young men in the rural Midwest—are typically classified by schools and society as “struggling,” “at-risk,” “failing,” and “in crisis.” But at the skatepark, they thrive and succeed, not only by landing tricks but also by finding meaning and purpose in their lives.
In Dropping In, Robert Petrone draws from multiple years of ethnographic research to bring readers into this rich environment, exploring how and why these young men engage more with skateboarding and its related cultural communities than with school. For them, it is in these alternative communities and spaces that they meet their intellectual, literate, and learning needs; cultivate meaningful and supportive relationships; and develop a larger understanding of their place in the world. By looking at what these skateboarders can teach us about what is right and working in their lives, Petrone asks educators and others committed to youth development to rethink schooling structures and practices to provide equitable education for all students.
Winner, Southwest Book Award, Border Regional Library Association, 2011
Thousands of people die in drug-related violence every year in Mexico. Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, adjacent to El Paso, Texas, has become the most violent city in the Mexican drug war. Much of the cocaine, marijuana, and methamphetamine consumed in the United States is imported across the Mexican border, making El Paso/Juárez one of the major drug-trafficking venues in the world.
In this anthropological study of drug trafficking and anti-drug law enforcement efforts on the U.S.-Mexico border, Howard Campbell uses an ethnographic perspective to chronicle the recent Mexican drug war, focusing especially on people and events in the El Paso/Juárez area. It is the first social science study of the violent drug war that is tearing Mexico apart.
Based on deep access to the drug-smuggling world, this study presents the drug war through the eyes and lives of direct participants. Half of the book consists of oral histories from drug traffickers, and the other half from law enforcement officials. There is much journalistic coverage of the drug war, but very seldom are the lived experiences of traffickers and "narcs" presented in such vivid detail. In addition to providing an up-close, personal view of the drug-trafficking world, Campbell explains and analyzes the functioning of drug cartels, the corruption that facilitates drug trafficking, the strategies of smugglers and anti-narcotics officials, and the perilous culture of drug trafficking that Campbell refers to as the "Drug War Zone."
To be properly understood, drugs should not be simply examined from a negative point of view, Klein argues. From their centrality in religious rituals to their part in the growth of trade among nation-states, Klein reveals the pivotal role that drugs have played in the advancement of human society. Klein then investigates the modern policies that define certain substances as drugs; the link between drugs, addiction, and crime; and the legal strategies and policies around the world that have largely failed to control global drug trafficking. The book also draws upon studies from the Caribbean, West Africa and Eastern Europe to propose solutions that could reinforce the eroded power of state institutions, law enforcement, and the democratic process in addressing drug trafficking.
A timely and in-depth analysis, Drugs and the World offers an expertly written examination that will be essential for all those concerned with the role of drugs in the modern world.
Afghanistan is the world's largest producer of opium and heroin. This book explores the devastating impact that the drugs trade has had on the Afghan people.
Author David Macdonald has worked as a drugs advisor to the UN. Based on his extensive experience, this book breaks down the myths surrounding the cultivation and consumption of drugs, providing a detailed analysis of the history of drug use within the country. He examines the impact of over 25 years of continuous conflict, and shows how poverty and instability has led to an increase in drugs consumption. He also considers the recent rise in the use of pharmaceutical drugs, resulting in dangerous chemical cocktails and analyses the effect of Afghanistan's drug trade on neighbouring countries.
Exposing local struggles over power and meaning in the making and representation of Dubai, Kanna examines the core questions of what gets built and for whom. His work, unique in its view of the interconnectedness of cultural identity, the built environment, and politics, offers an instructive picture of how different factions—from local and non-Arab residents and expatriate South Asians to the cultural and economic elites of the city—have all participated in the creation and marketing of Dubai. The result is an unparalleled account of the ways in which the built environment shapes and is shaped by the experience of globalization and neoliberalism in a diverse, multinational city.
From the advent of fake news to climate-science denial and Bernie Madoff’s appeal to investors, people can be astonishingly gullible. Some people appear authentic and sincere even when the facts discredit them, and many people fall victim to conspiracy theories and economic scams that should be dismissed as obviously ludicrous. This happens because of a near-universal human tendency to operate within a mindset that can be characterized as a “truth-default.” We uncritically accept most of the messages we receive as “honest.” We all are perceptually blind to deception. We are hardwired to be duped. The question is, can anything be done to militate against our vulnerability to deception without further eroding the trust in people and social institutions that we so desperately need in civil society?
Timothy R. Levine’s Duped: Truth-Default Theory and the Social Science of Lying and Deception recounts a decades-long program of empirical research that culminates in a new theory of deception—truth-default theory. This theory holds that the content of incoming communication is typically and uncritically accepted as true, and most of the time, this is good. Truth-default allows humans to function socially. Further, because most deception is enacted by a few prolific liars, the so called “truth-bias” is not really a bias after all. Passive belief makes us right most of the time, but the catch is that it also makes us vulnerable to occasional deceit.
Levine’s research on lie detection and truth-bias has produced many provocative new findings over the years. He has uncovered what makes some people more believable than others and has discovered several ways to improve lie-detection accuracy. In Duped, Levine details where these ideas came from, how they were tested, and how the findings combine to produce a coherent new understanding of human deception and deception detection.
Schmaus shows how Durkheim sought to make sociology more rigorous by introducing scientific methods of analysis and explanation into the study of society. Durkheim tried to reveal how implicit, commonly held beliefs actually govern people's lives. Through an original interpretation of Durkheim's landmark writings, Schmaus argues that Durkheim, in his empirical studies, refined both the methods of sociology and a theory about society's shared knowledge and practices.
This book opens a new window on the development of Durkheim's thought and demonstrates how a philosophy of science can inspire the rise of a new science.
Schelly portrays a wide range of residential living alternatives utilizing renewable, small-scale, de-centralized technologies. These technologies considerably change how individuals and communities interact with the material world, their natural environment, and one another. Using in depth interviews and compelling ethnographic observations, the book offers an insightful look at different communities’ practices and principles and their successful endeavors in sustainability and self-sufficiency.
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