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La Consentida
Settlement, Subsistence, and Social Organization in an Early Formative Mesoamerican Community
Guy David Hepp
University Press of Colorado, 2019

La Consentida explores Early Formative period transitions in residential mobility, subsistence, and social organization at the site of La Consentida in coastal Oaxaca, Mexico. Examining how this site transformed during one of the most fundamental moments of socioeconomic change in the ancient Americas, the book provides a new way of thinking about the social dynamics of Mesoamerican communities of the period.

Guy David Hepp summarizes the results of several seasons of fieldwork and laboratory analysis under the aegis of the La Consentida Archaeological Project, drawing on various forms of evidence—ground stone tools, earthen architecture, faunal remains, human dental pathologies, isotopic indicators, ceramics, and more— to reveal how transitions in settlement, subsistence, and social organization at La Consentida were intimately linked. While Mesoamerica is too diverse for research at a single site to lay to rest ongoing debates about the Early Formative period, evidence from La Consentida should inform those debates because of the site’s unique ecological setting, its relative lack of disturbance by later occupations, and because it represents the only well-documented Early Formative period village in a 300-mile stretch of Mexico’s Pacific coast.

One of the only studies to closely document multiple lines of evidence of the transition toward a sedentary, agricultural society at an individual settlement in Mesoamerica, La Consentida is a key resource for understanding the transition to settled life and social complexity in Mesoamerican societies.

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La India María
Mexploitation and the Films of María Elena Velasco
By Seraina Rohrer
University of Texas Press, 2017

La India María—a humble and stubborn indigenous Mexican woman—is one of the most popular characters of the Mexican stage, television, and film. Created and portrayed by María Elena Velasco, La India María has delighted audiences since the late 1960s with slapstick humor that slyly critiques discrimination and the powerful. At the same time, however, many critics have derided the iconic figure as a racist depiction of a negative stereotype and dismissed the India María films as exploitation cinema unworthy of serious attention. By contrast, La India María builds a convincing case for María Elena Velasco as an artist whose work as a director and producer—rare for women in Mexican cinema—has been widely and unjustly overlooked.

Drawing on extensive interviews with Velasco, her family, and film industry professionals, as well as on archival research, Seraina Rohrer offers the first full account of Velasco’s life; her portrayal of La India María in vaudeville, television, and sixteen feature film comedies, including Ni de aquí, ni de allá [Neither here, nor there]; and her controversial reception in Mexico and the United States. Rohrer traces the films’ financing, production, and distribution, as well as censorship practices of the period, and compares them to other Mexploitation films produced at the same time. Adding a new chapter to the history of a much-understudied period of Mexican cinema commonly referred to as “la crisis,” this pioneering research enriches our appreciation of Mexploitation films.

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La Verdad
An International Dialogue on Hip Hop Latinidades
Melissa Castillo-Garsow and Jason Nichols
The Ohio State University Press, 2016
From its earliest days, hip hop was more than just music, encapsulating the ideas of community and exchange. Artists like Mellow Man Ace and Kid Frost opened doors by infusing Spanish into their lyrics, calling for racial and social equality; others employed hip hop to comment on the effects of neo-liberalization and global capital. In recent decades, the cultural exchange has expanded—the music traveling from the United States to Latin America and back as visual artists, music producers, MCs, vocalists, and dancers combine their Latin cultures with influences from north of the U.S. border to create new artistic experiences. And while there is an extensive body of work on U.S. hip hop, it continues to evolve in an increasingly multilingual, multiethnic, intergenerational, and global collection of cultural expressions.
 
A truly international effort, La Verdad: An International Dialogue on Hip Hop Latinidades brings together exciting new work about Latino/a hip hop across more than a dozen countries, from scholars and practitioners in the United States and in Latin America, highlighting in new ways the participation of women, indigenous peoples, and Afro-descendants in a reimagined global, hip hop nation. From graffitera crews in Costa Rica and Nicaragua to Mexican hip hop in New York, from Aymara rap in Bolivia to Chicano rap in Taiwan, this volume explodes stereotypes of who and how hip hop is consumed, lived, and performed.  Examining hip hop movements in Spanish, English, Portuguese, Aymara, and Creole, La Verdad demonstrates that Latino hip hop is a multilingual expression of gender, indigeneity, activism, and social justice.
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Labor, Loyalty, and Rebellion
Southwestern Illinois Coal Miners & World War I
Carl R. Weinberg
Southern Illinois University Press, 2005

On April 5, 1918, as American troops fought German forces on the Western Front, German American coal miner Robert Prager was hanged from a tree outside Collinsville, Illinois, having been accused of disloyal utterances about the United States and chased out of town by a mob. In Labor, Loyalty, and Rebellion: Southwestern Illinois Coal Miners and World War I, Carl R. Weinberg offers a new perspective on the Prager lynching and confronts the widely accepted belief among labor historians that workers benefited from demonstrating loyalty to the nation.

The first published study of wartime strikes in southwestern Illinois is a powerful look at a group of people whose labor was essential to the war economy but whose instincts for class solidarity spawned a rebellion against mine owners both during and after the war. At the same time, their patriotism wreaked violent working-class disunity that crested in the brutal murder of an immigrant worker. Weinberg argues that the heightened patriotism of the Prager lynching masked deep class tensions within the mining communities of southwestern Illinois that exploded after the Great War ended.

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The Labor of Care
Filipina Migrants and Transnational Families in the Digital Age
Valerie Francisco-Menchavez
University of Illinois Press, 2018
For generations, migration moved in one direction at a time: migrants to host countries, and money to families left behind. The Labor of Care argues that globalization has changed all that. Valerie Francisco-Menchavez spent five years alongside a group of working migrant mothers. Drawing on interviews and up-close collaboration with these women, Francisco-Menchavez looks at the sacrifices, emotional and material consequences, and recasting of roles that emerge from family separation. She pays particular attention to how technologies like Facebook, Skype, and recorded video open up transformative ways of bridging distances while still supporting traditional family dynamics. As she shows, migrants also build communities of care in their host countries. These chosen families provide an essential form of mutual support. What emerges is a fascinating portrait of today's transnational family—sundered, yet inexorably linked over the distances by timeless emotions and new forms of intimacy.
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Labor of Love
Gestational Surrogacy and the Work of Making Babies
Jacobson, Heather
Rutgers University Press, 2016
While the practice of surrogacy has existed for millennia, new fertility technologies have allowed women to act as gestational surrogates, carrying children that are not genetically their own. While some women volunteer to act as gestational surrogates for friends or family members, others get paid for performing this service. The first ethnographic study of gestational surrogacy in the United States, Labor of Love examines the conflicted attitudes that emerge when the ostensibly priceless act of bringing a child into the world becomes a paid occupation.  
 
Heather Jacobson interviews not only surrogate mothers, but also their family members, the intended parents who employ surrogates, and the various professionals who work to facilitate the process. Seeking to understand how gestational surrogates perceive their vocation, she discovers that many regard surrogacy as a calling, but are reluctant to describe it as a job. In the process, Jacobson dissects the complex set of social attitudes underlying this resistance toward conceiving of pregnancy as a form of employment. 
 
 
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Labor's End
How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work
Jason Resnikoff
University of Illinois Press, 2022
Labor's End traces the discourse around automation from its origins in the factory to its wide-ranging implications in political and social life. As Jason Resnikoff shows, the term automation expressed the conviction that industrial progress meant the inevitable abolition of manual labor from industry. But the real substance of the term reflected industry's desire to hide an intensification of human work--and labor's loss of power and protection--behind magnificent machinery and a starry-eyed faith in technological revolution. The rhetorical power of the automation ideology revealed and perpetuated a belief that the idea of freedom was incompatible with the activity of work. From there, political actors ruled out the workplace as a site of politics while some of labor's staunchest allies dismissed sped-up tasks, expanded workloads, and incipient deindustrialization in the name of technological progress.

A forceful intellectual history, Labor's End challenges entrenched assumptions about automation's transformation of the American workplace.

[more]

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The Labyrinths Of Literacy
Reflections On Literacy Past And Present
Harvey Graff
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995
A compelling collection by one of the pioneers of revisionist approaches to the history of literacy in North America and Europe, The Labyrinths of Literacy offers original and controversial views on the relation of literacy to society, leading the way for scholars and citizens who are willing to question the importance and function of literacy in the development of society today.
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Ladies and Gents
Public Toilets and Gender
edited by Olga Gershenson and Barbara Penner, foreword by Judith Plaskow, afterword by Peter Greenaway
Temple University Press, 2009

Public toilets provide a unique opportunity for interrogating how conventional assumptions about the body, sexuality, privacy, and technology are formed in public spaces and inscribed through design across cultures. This collection of original essays from international scholars is the first to explore the cultural meanings, histories, and ideologies of public toilets as gendered spaces.

Ladies and Gents consists of two sets of essays. The first, "Potty Politics: Toilets, Gender and Identity," establishes the importance of accessible, secure public toilets to the creation of inclusive cities, work, and learning environments. The second set of essays, "Toilet Art: Design and Cultural Representations," discusses public toilets as spaces of representation and representational spaces, with reference to architectural design, humor, film, theater, art, and popular culture. Compelling visual materials and original artwork are included throughout, depicting subjects as varied as female urinals, art installations sited in public restrooms, and the toilet in contemporary art.

Taken together, these seventeen essays demonstrate that public toilets are often sites where gendered bodies compete for resources and recognition—and the stakes are high.

Contributors include: Nathan Abrams, Jami L. Anderson, Johan Andersson, Kathryn H. Anthony, Kathy Battista, Andrew Brown-May, Ben Campkin, Meghan Dufresne, Peg Fraser, Deborah Gans, Clara Greed, Robin Lydenberg, Claudia Mitchell, Alison Moore, Frances Pheasant-Kelly, Bushra Rehman, Alex Schweder, Naomi Stead, and the editors.

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Land, Memory, Reconstruction, and Justice
Perspectives on Land Claims in South Africa
Cherryl Walker
Ohio University Press, 2010

Land is a significant and controversial topic in South Africa. Addressing the land claims of those dispossessed in the past has proved to be a demanding, multidimensional process. In many respects the land restitution program that was launched as part of the county’s transition to democracy in 1994 has failed to meet expectations, with ordinary citizens, policymakers, and analysts questioning not only its progress but also its outcomes and parameters.

Land, Memory, Reconstruction, and Justice brings together a wealth of topical material and case studies by leading experts in the field who present a rich mix of perspectives from politics, sociology, geography, social anthropology, law, history, and agricultural economics. The collection addresses both the material and the symbolic dimensions of land claims, in rural and urban contexts, and explores the complex intersection of issues confronting the restitution program, from the promotion of livelihoods to questions of rights, identity, and transitional justice.

A valuable contribution to the field of land and agrarian studies, both in South Africa and internationally, it is undoubtedly the most comprehensive treatment to date of South Africa’s postapartheid land claims process and will be essential reading for scholars and students of land reform for years to come.

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A Land Not Forgotten
Indigenous Food Security and Land-Based Practices in Northern Ontario
Michael A. Robidoux
University of Manitoba Press, 2017

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A Land of Aching Hearts
The Middle East in the Great War
Leila Tarazi Fawaz
Harvard University Press, 2014

The Great War transformed the Middle East, bringing to an end four hundred years of Ottoman rule in Arab lands while giving rise to the Middle East as we know it today. A century later, the experiences of ordinary men and women during those calamitous years have faded from memory. A Land of Aching Hearts traverses ethnic, class, and national borders to recover the personal stories of the civilians and soldiers who endured this cataclysmic event.

Among those who suffered were the people of Greater Syria—comprising modern Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and Palestine—as well as the people of Turkey, Iraq, and Egypt. Beyond the shifting fortunes of the battlefield, the region was devastated by a British and French naval blockade made worse by Ottoman war measures. Famine, disease, inflation, and an influx of refugees were everyday realities. But the local populations were not passive victims. Fawaz chronicles the initiative and resilience of civilian émigrés, entrepreneurs, draft-dodgers, soldiers, villagers, and townsmen determined to survive the war as best they could. The right mix of ingenuity and practicality often meant the difference between life and death.

The war’s aftermath proved bitter for many survivors. Nationalist aspirations were quashed as Britain and France divided the Middle East along artificial borders that still cause resentment. The misery of the Great War, and a profound sense of huge sacrifices made in vain, would color people’s views of politics and the West for the century to come.

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Land of Necessity
Consumer Culture in the United States–Mexico Borderlands
Alexis McCrossen, ed.
Duke University Press, 2009
Published in cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University.

In Land of Necessity, historians and anthropologists unravel the interplay of the national and transnational and of scarcity and abundance in the region split by the 1,969-mile boundary line dividing Mexico and the United States. This richly illustrated volume, with more than 100 images including maps, photographs, and advertisements, explores the convergence of broad demographic, economic, political, cultural, and transnational developments resulting in various forms of consumer culture in the borderlands. Though its importance is uncontestable, the role of necessity in consumer culture has rarely been explored. Indeed, it has been argued that where necessity reigns, consumer culture is anemic. This volume demonstrates otherwise. In doing so, it sheds new light on the history of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, while also opening up similar terrain for scholarly inquiry into consumer culture.

The volume opens with two chapters that detail the historical trajectories of consumer culture and the borderlands. In the subsequent chapters, contributors take up subjects including smuggling, tourist districts and resorts, purchasing power, and living standards. Others address home décor, housing, urban development, and commercial real estate, while still others consider the circulation of cinematic images, contraband, used cars, and clothing. Several contributors discuss the movement of people across borders, within cities, and in retail spaces. In the two afterwords, scholars reflect on the U.S.-Mexico borderlands as a particular site of trade in labor, land, leisure, and commodities, while also musing about consumer culture as a place of complex political and economic negotiations. Through its focus on the borderlands, this volume provides valuable insight into the historical and contemporary aspects of the big “isms” shaping modern life: capitalism, nationalism, transnationalism, globalism, and, without a doubt, consumerism.

Contributors. Josef Barton, Peter S. Cahn, Howard Campbell, Lawrence Culver, Amy S. Greenberg, Josiah McC. Heyman, Sarah Hill, Alexis McCrossen, Robert Perez, Laura Isabel Serna, Rachel St. John, Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, Evan R. Ward

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The Land of the Dead Is Open for Business
Jacob Strautmann
Four Way Books, 2020
The Land of the Dead Is Open for Business is an extended elegy for Jacob Strautmann’s home state of West Virginia and its generations of inhabitants sold out by the false promise of the American Dream. Throughout the book, voices rise up from the page to describe a landscape eroded and plundered by runaway capitalism—its mountain tops leveled by the extractive industries, its waters polluted by runoff from mines—and the fallout from that waste. Those who remain are consigned to life in a ravaged land denuded of nature where birds die and “Sheep / birth limp two-headed things and some / that speak like men if they speak at all.”
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The Land Was Ours
African American Beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South
Andrew W. Kahrl
Harvard University Press, 2012

Driving along the coasts of the American South, we see miles of luxury condominiums, timeshare resorts, and gated communities. Yet, a century ago, a surprising amount of beachfront property in the Chesapeake, along the Carolina shore, and around the Gulf of Mexico was owned and populated by African Americans. In a pathbreaking combination of social and environmental history, Andrew W. Kahrl shows how the rise and fall of Jim Crow and the growing prosperity of the Sunbelt have transformed both communities and ecosystems along the southern seaboard.

Kahrl traces the history of these dynamic coastlines in all their incarnations, from unimproved marshlands to segregated beaches, from exclusive resorts for the black elite to campgrounds for religious revival. His careful reconstruction of African American life, labor, and leisure in small oceanside communities reveals the variety of ways African Americans pursued freedom and mobility through the land under their feet.

The Land Was Ours makes unexpected connections between two seemingly diverse topics: African Americans' struggles for economic empowerment and the ecology of coastal lands. Kahrl's innovative approach allows him fresh insights into the rise of African American consumers and the widespread campaigns to dispossess blacks of their property. His skillful portrayal of African American landowners and real-estate developers rescues the stories of these architects of the southern landscape from historical neglect. Ultimately, Kahrl offers readers a thoughtful, judicious appraisal of the ambiguous legacy of racial progress in the Sunbelt.

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Landscape and Interaction. The Troodos Archaeological and Environmental Survey Project, Cyprus. Volume 1. Methodology, Analysis and Interpretation
Michael Given
Council for British Research in the Levant, 2013
The Troodos Mountain range in central Cyprus is a region of great physical and cultural diversity. The landscapes range from fertile, cultivated plains to narrow, dry valleys and forested mountain regions and this physical topography is overlain by a rich human cultural landscape of farming, mining, industry, settlement, burial and ritual behaviour. Over six field seasons, a team of specialists and fieldwalkers from the Troodos Archaeological and Environmental Survey Project (TAESP) investigated the northern edge of this region and explored the complex and dynamic relationship between landscape and people over 12,000 years. The results of their integrated and interpretative approach are presented here, in the first of two volumes. Beginning with a considered overview of the context, research aims and methodology of the project, Volume 1 provides detailed accounts of the archaeology, material culture, geography and environmental record of the entire survey area. This wealth of information is then bought together to produce a series of chronological and thematic analyses of the interaction between people and landscape in this region of Cyprus from the Prehistoric through to the Modern period.
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Landscape, Memory and History
Anthropological Perspectives
Edited by Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern
Pluto Press, 2003
How do people perceive the land around them, and how is that perception changed by history? The contributors explore this question from an anthropological angle, assessing the connections between place, space, identity, nationalism, history and memory in a variety of different settings around the world. Taking historical change and memory as key themes, they offer a broad study that will appeal to a readership across the social sciences.

Contributors from North America, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, and Europe explore a wide variety of case studies that includes seascapes in Jamaica; the Solomon Islands; the forests of Madagascar; Aboriginal and European notions of landscape in Australia; place and identity in 19th century maps and the bogs of Ireland; contemporary concerns over changing landscapes in Papua New Guinea; and representations of landscape and history in the poetry of the Scottish Borders.
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Landscapes and Social Transformations on the Northwest Coast
Colonial Encounters in the Fraser Valley
Jeff Oliver
University of Arizona Press, 2010
The Fraser Valley in British Columbia has been viewed historically as a typical setting of Indigenous-white interaction. Jeff Oliver now reexamines the social history of this region from pre-contact to the violent upheavals of nineteenth and early twentieth century colonialism to argue that the dominant discourses of progress and colonialism often mask the real social and physical process of change that occurred here—change that can be more meaningfully tied to transformations in the land.

The Fraser Valley has long been a scene of natural resource appropriation—furs and fish, timber and agriculture—with settlement patterns and land claims centering on the use of these materials. Oliver demonstrates how social change and cultural understanding are tied to the way that people use and remake the landscape. Drawing on ethnographic texts, archaeological evidence, cartography, and historical writing, he has created a deep history of the valley that enables us to view how human entanglements with landscape were creative of a variety of contentious issues. By capturing the multiple dynamics that were operating in the past, Oliver shows us not only how landscape transformations were implicated in constructing different perceptions of place but also how such changes influenced peoples’ understanding of history and identity.

This groundbreaking work examines engagement between people and the environment across a variety of themes, from aboriginal appropriation of nature to colonists’ reworking of physical and conceptual geographies, demonstrating the consequences of these interactions as they permeated various social and cultural spheres. It offers a new lens for viewing a region as it provides fresh insight into such topics as landscape change, perceptions of place, and Indigenous-white relations.
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Landscapes for Sport
Histories of Physical Exercise, Sport, and Health
Sonja Dümpelmann
Harvard University Press

Sport is deeply embedded in human nature and culture, and it is central to human well-being. Outdoor sport and physical exercise have had considerable impact on how we design, live in, and understand landscapes. Landscapes and environments have, in turn, contributed to the formation and development of new sport activities as well as cultures of movement and the body. How have perceptions and politics of the body played a role in the evolution of different landscapes for sport? What do they tell us about their inherent culture and use, and how do landscapes for sport embody constructions of race, gender, and place? What are the interrelationships between more and less agonistic sport and body cultures, their politics, and the sites and spaces that accommodate them?

Landscapes for Sport explores these intersections from multiple perspectives in different parts of the world. They focus on outdoor spaces that have been designed, built, and used for physical exercise and various competitive and non-competitive sports since the early modern period. Frequently overlooked and taken for granted, these landscapes for sport often constitute significant areas of open space in and outside our cities. This volume uncovers their relevance and meanings.

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Landscapes of Activism
Civil Society, HIV and AIDS Care in Northern Mozambique
Reed, Joel Christian
Rutgers University Press, 2018
AIDS activists are often romanticized as extremely noble and selfless. However, the relationships among HIV support group members highlighted in Landscapes of Activism are hardly utopian or ideal. At first, the group has everything it needs, a thriving membership, and support from major donors. Soon, the group undergoes an identity crisis over money and power, eventually fading from the scene. As government and development institutions embraced activist demands—decentralizing AIDS care through policies of health systems strengthening—civil society was increasingly rendered obsolete. Charting this transition—from subjects, to citizens, and back again—reveals the inefficacy of protest, and the importance of community resilience. The product of in-depth ethnography and focused anthropological inquiry, this is the first book on AIDS activists in Mozambique. AIDS activism’s strange decline in southern Africa, rather than a reflection of citizen apathy, is the direct result of targeted state and donor intervention.
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Landscapes of Devils
Tensions of Place and Memory in the Argentinean Chaco
Gastón R. Gordillo
Duke University Press, 2004
Landscapes of Devils is a rich, historically grounded ethnography of the western Toba, an indigenous people in northern Argentina’s Gran Chaco region. In the early twentieth century, the Toba were defeated by the Argentinean army, incorporated into the seasonal labor force of distant sugar plantations, and proselytized by British Anglicans. Gastón R. Gordillo reveals how the Toba’s memory of these processes is embedded in their experience of “the bush” that dominates the Chaco landscape.

As Gordillo explains, the bush is the result of social, cultural, and political processes that intertwine this place with other geographies. Labor exploitation, state violence, encroachment by settlers, and the demands of Anglican missionaries all transformed this land. The Toba’s lives have been torn between alienating work in sugar plantations and relative freedom in the bush, between moments of domination and autonomy, abundance and poverty, terror and healing. Part of this contradictory experience is culturally expressed in devils, evil spirits that acquire different features in different places. The devils are sources of death and disease in the plantations, but in the bush they are entities that connect with humans as providers of bush food and healing power. Enacted through memory, the experiences of the Toba have produced a tense and shifting geography. Combining extensive fieldwork conducted over a decade, historical research, and critical theory, Gordillo offers a nuanced analysis of the Toba’s social memory and a powerful argument that geographic places are not only objective entities but also the subjective outcome of historical forces.

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Language and Ethnicity among the K'ichee' Maya
Sergio Romero
University of Utah Press, 2015

This book explores the articulation between “accent” and ethnic identification in K’ichee’, a Mayan language spoken by more than one million people in the western highlands of Guatemala. Based on years of ethnographic work, it is the first anthropological examination of the social meaning of dialectal difference in any Mayan language. Romero deconstructs essentialist perspectives on ethnicity in Mesoamerica and argues that ethnic identification among the highland Maya is multiple and layered, the result of a diverse linguistic precipitate created by centuries of colonial resistance.

In K’ichee’, dialect stereotypes—accents—act as linguistic markers embodying particular ethnic registers. K’ichee’ speakers use and recombine their linguistic repertoire—colloquial K’ichee’, traditional K’ichee’ discourse, colloquial Spanish, Standard Spanish, and language mixing—in strategic ways to mark status and authority and to revitalize their traditional culture. The book surveys literary genres such as lyric poetry, political graffiti, and radio broadcasts, which express new experiences of Mayan-ness and anticolonial resistance. It also takes a historical perspective in examining oral and written K’ichee’ discourses from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries, including the famous chronicle known as the Popol Vuh, and explores the unbreakable link between language, history, and culture in the Maya highlands. 


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A Language and Power Reader
Representations of Race in a "Post-Racist" Era
Robert Eddy
Utah State University Press, 2014

A Language and Power Reader organizes reading and writing activities for undergraduate students, guiding them in the exploration of racism and cross-racial rhetorics.

Introducing texts written from and about versions of English often disrespected by mainstream Americans, A Language and Power Reader highlights English dialects and discourses to provoke discussions of racialized relations in contemporary America. Thirty selected readings in a range of genres and from writers who work in ?alternative? voices (e.g., Pidgin, African American Language, discourse of international and transnational English speakers) focus on disparate power relations based on varieties of racism in America and how those relations might be displayed, imposed, or resisted across multiple rhetorics. The book also directs student participation and discourse. Each reading is followed by comments and guides to help focus conversation.

Research has long shown that increasing a student?s metalinguistic awareness improves a student?s writing. No other reader available at this time explores the idea of multiple rhetorics or encourages their use, making A Language and Power Reader a welcome addition to writing classrooms.


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Language Choice in Enlightenment Europe
Education, Sociability, and Governance
Edited by Vladislav Rjéoutski and Willem Frijhoff
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
This multinational collection of essays challenges the traditional image of a monolingual Ancient Regime in Enlightenment Europe, both East and West. Its archival research explores the important role played by selective language use in social life and in the educational provisions in the early constitution of modern society. A broad range of case studies show how language was viewed and used symbolically by social groups“ranging from the nobility to the peasantry“to develop, express, and mark their identities.
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A Language for the World
The Standardization of Swahili
Morgan J. Robinson
Ohio University Press, 2022

This intellectual history of Standard Swahili explores the long-term, intertwined processes of standard making and community creation in the historical, political, and cultural contexts of East Africa and beyond.

Morgan J. Robinson argues that the portability of Standard Swahili has contributed to its wide use not only across the African continent but also around the globe. The book pivots on the question of whether standardized versions of African languages have empowered or oppressed. It is inevitable that the selection and promotion of one version of a language as standard—a move typically associated with missionaries and colonial regimes—negatively affected those whose language was suddenly deemed nonstandard. Before reconciling the consequences of codification, however, Robinson argues that one must seek to understand the process itself. The history of Standard Swahili demonstrates how events, people, and ideas move rapidly and sometimes surprisingly between linguistic, political, social, or temporal categories.

Robinson conducted her research in Zanzibar, mainland Tanzania, and the United Kingdom. Organized around periods of conversation, translation, and codification from 1864 to 1964, the book focuses on the intellectual history of Swahili’s standardization. The story begins in mid-nineteenth-century Zanzibar, home of missionaries, formerly enslaved students, and a printing press, and concludes on the mainland in the mid-twentieth century, as nationalist movements added Standard Swahili to their anticolonial and nation-building toolkits. This outcome was not predetermined, however, and Robinson offers a new context for the strong emotions that the language continues to evoke in East Africa.

The history of Standard Swahili is not one story, but rather the connected stories of multiple communities contributing to the production of knowledge. The book reflects this multiplicity by including the narratives of colonial officials and anticolonial nationalists; East African clerks, students, newspaper editors, editorialists, and their readers; and library patrons, academic linguists, formerly enslaved children, and missionary preachers. The book reconstructs these stories on their own terms and reintegrates them into a new composite that demonstrates the central place of language in the history of East Africa and beyond.

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Language, History, and Identity
Ethnolinguistic Studies of the Arizona Tewa
Paul V. Kroskrity
University of Arizona Press, 1993
The Arizona Tewa are a Pueblo Indian group that migrated around 1700 to First Mesa on the Hopi Reservation and who, while speaking Hopi, have also retained their native language. Paul V. Kroskrity examines this curiosity of language and culture, explaining the various ways in which the Tewa use their linguistic resources to successfully adapt to the Hopi and their environment while retaining their native language and the cultural identity it embodies.
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Language Of Experience
Literate Practices And Social Change
Gwen Gorzelsky
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005

The Language of Experience examines the relationship between literacy and change--both personal and social. Gorzelsky studies three cases, two historical and one contemporary, that speak to key issues on the national education agenda.

"Struggle" is a community literacy program for urban teens and parents. It encourages them to reflect on, articulate, and revise their life goals and design and implement strategies for reaching them. To provide historical context for this and other contemporary efforts in using literacy to promote social change, Gorzelsky analyzes two radical religious and political movements of the English Civil Wars and the 1930s unionizing movement in the Pittsburgh region. Charting the similarities and differences in the function of literate practices in each case shows how different situations and contexts can foster very different outcomes.

Gorzelsky's analytic frame is drawn from Gestalt theory, which emphasizes the holistic nature of perception, communication, and learning. Through it she views how discourse and language structures interact with experience and how this interaction changes awareness and perception.

The book is methodologically innovative in its integration of a macro-social view of cultural, social, and discursive structures with a micro-social view of the potential for change embodied in them. Through her analysis and in her use of the voices of the people she studies, Gorzelsky offers a tool for analyzing individual instances of literate practices and their potential for fostering change.

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A Language of Its Own
Sense and Meaning in the Making of Western Art Music
Ruth Katz
University of Chicago Press, 2009

The Western musical tradition has produced not only music, but also countless writings about music that remain in continuous—and enormously influential—dialogue with their subject. With sweeping scope and philosophical depth, A Language of Its Own traces the past millennium of this ongoing exchange.

Ruth Katz argues that the indispensible relationship between intellectual production and musical creation gave rise to the Western conception of music. This evolving and sometimes conflicted process, in turn, shaped the art form itself. As ideas entered music from the contexts in which it existed, its internal language developed in tandem with shifts in intellectual and social history. Katz explores how this infrastructure allowed music to explain itself from within, creating a self-referential and rational foundation that has begun to erode in recent years.

A magisterial exploration of a frequently overlooked intersection of Western art and philosophy, A Language of Its Own restores music to its rightful place in the history of ideas.  

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Language of the Gun
Youth, Crime, and Public Policy
Bernard E. Harcourt
University of Chicago Press, 2006
Legal and public policies concerning youth gun violence tend to rely heavily on crime reports, survey data, and statistical methods. Rarely is attention given to the young voices belonging to those who carry high-powered semiautomatic handguns. In Language of the Gun, Bernard E. Harcourt recounts in-depth interviews with youths detained at an all-malecorrectional facility, exploring how they talk about guns and what meanings they ascribe to them in a broader attempt to understand some of the assumptions implicit in current handgun policies. In the process, Harcourt redraws the relationships among empirical research, law, and public policy.

Home to over 150 repeat offenders ranging in age from twelve to seventeen, the Catalina Mountain School is made up of a particular stratum of boys—those who have committed the most offenses but will still be released upon reaching adulthood. In an effort to understand the symbolic and emotional language of guns and gun carrying, Harcourt interviewed dozens of these incarcerated Catalina boys. What do these youths see in guns? What draws them to handguns? Why do some of them carry and others not? For Harcourt, their often surprising answers unveil many of the presuppositions that influence our laws and policies.
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The Language of War
Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II
James Dawes
Harvard University Press, 2005

The Language of War examines the relationship between language and violence, focusing on American literature from the Civil War, World War I, and World War II. James Dawes proceeds by developing two primary questions: How does the strategic violence of war affect literary, legal, and philosophical representations? And, in turn, how do such representations affect the reception and initiation of violence itself? Authors and texts of central importance in this far-reaching study range from Louisa May Alcott and William James to William Faulkner, the Geneva Conventions, and contemporary American organizational sociology and language theory.

The consensus approach in literary studies over the past twenty years has been to treat language as an extension of violence. The idea that there might be an inverse relation between language and violence, says Dawes, has all too rarely influenced the dominant voices in literary studies today. This is an ambitious project that not only makes a serious contribution to American literary history, but also challenges some of the leading theoretical assumptions of our day.

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Language, Resistance and Revival
Republican Prisoners and the Irish Language in the North of Ireland
Feargal Mac Ionnrachtaigh
Pluto Press, 2013

Language, Resistance and Revival tells the untold story of the truly groundbreaking linguistic and educational developments that took place among Republican prisoners in Long Kesh prison from 1972-2000.

During a period of bitter struggle between Republican prisoners and the British state, the Irish language was taught and spoken as a form of resistance during incarceration. The book unearths this story for the first time and analyses the rejuvenating impact it had on the cultural revival in the nationalist community beyond the prison walls.

Based on unprecedented interviews, Feargal Mac Ionnrachtaigh explores a key period in Irish history through the original and 'insider' accounts of key protagonists in the contemporary Irish language revival.

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Language Use and Language Change in Brunei Darussalam
Mis Sea#100
Peter W. Martin
Ohio University Press, 1996

The oil-rich sultanate of Brunei Darussalam is located on the northern coast of Borneo between the two Malaysian states of Sarawak and Sabah. Though the country is small in size and in population, the variety of language use there provides a veritable laboratory for linguists in the fields of Austronesian linguistics, bilingual studies, and sociolinguistic studies, particularly those dealing with language shift.

This useful reference is divided into three sections: one on varieties of the Malay language used in the country, one on other indigenous languages, and one on the role and form of the English used there. Contributors to the collection include Bruneian scholars as well as established experts in the fields of Austronesian linguistics, sociolinguistics studies, and the description of new varieties of English.

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Language Variety in the South Revisited
Cynthia Bernstein
University of Alabama Press, 1994

Top linguists from diverse fields address language varieties in the South.

 
Language Variety in the South Revisited is a comprehensive collection of new research on southern United States English by foremost scholars of regional language variation. Like its predecessor, Language Variety in the South: Perspectives in Black and White (The University of Alabama Press, 1986), this book includes current research into African American vernacular English, but it greatly expands the scope of investigation and offers an extensive assessment of the field. The volume encompasses studies of contact involving African and European languages; analysis of discourse, pragmatic, lexical, phonological, and syntactic features; and evaluations of methods of collecting and examining data. The 38 essays not only offer a wealth of information about southern language varieties but also serve as models for regional linguistic investigation.
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Languages in Africa
Multilingualism, Language Policy, and Education
Elizabeth C. Zsiga, One Tlale Boyer, and Ruth Kramer, Editors
Georgetown University Press, 2014

People in many African communities live within a series of concentric circles when it comes to language. In a small group, a speaker uses an often unwritten and endangered mother tongue that is rarely used in school. A national indigenous language—written, widespread, sometimes used in school—surrounds it. An international language like French or English, a vestige of colonialism, carries prestige, is used in higher education, and promises mobility—and yet it will not be well known by its users.

The essays in Languages in Africa explore the layers of African multilingualism as they affect language policy and education. Through case studies ranging across the continent, the contributors consider multilingualism in the classroom as well as in domains ranging from music and film to politics and figurative language. The contributors report on the widespread devaluing and even death of indigenous languages. They also investigate how poor teacher training leads to language-related failures in education. At the same time, they demonstrate that education in a mother tongue can work, linguists can use their expertise to provoke changes in language policies, and linguistic creativity thrives in these multilingual communities.

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The Last Dinosaur Book
The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon
W. J. T. Mitchell
University of Chicago Press, 1998
For animals that have been dead millions of years, dinosaurs are extraordinarily pervasive in our everyday lives. Appearing in ads, books, movies, museums, television, toy stores, and novels, they continually fascinate both adults and children. How did they move from natural extinction to pop culture resurrection? What is the source of their powerful appeal? Until now, no one has addressed this question in a comprehensive way. In this lively and engrossing exploration of the animal's place in our lives, W.J.T. Mitchell shows why we are so attached to the myth and the reality of the "terrible lizards."

Mitchell aims to trace the cultural family tree of the dinosaur, and what he discovers is a creature of striking flexibility, linked to dragons and mammoths, skyscrapers and steam engines, cowboys and Indians. In the vast territory between the cunning predators of Jurassic Park and the mawkishly sweet Barney, from political leviathans to corporate icons, from paleontology to Barnum and Bailey, Mitchell finds a cultural symbol whose plurality of meaning and often contradictory nature is emblematic of modern society itself. As a scientific entity, the dinosaur endured a near-eclipse for over a century, but as an image it is enjoying its widest circulation. And it endures, according to Mitchell, because it is uniquely malleable, a figure of both innovation and obsolescence, massive power and pathetic failure—the totem animal of modernity.

Drawing unforeseen and unusual connections at every turn between dinosaurs real and imagined, The Last Dinosaur Book is the first to delve so deeply, so insightfully, and so enjoyably into our modern dino-obsession.



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Last Outpost on the Zulu Frontiers
Fort Napier and the British Imperial Garrison
Graham Dominy
University of Illinois Press, 2016
Small and isolated in the Colony of Natal, Fort Napier was long treated like a temporary outpost of the expanding British Empire. Yet British troops manned this South African garrison for over seventy years. Tasked with protecting colonists, the fort became even more significant as an influence on, and reference point for, settler society. Graham Dominy's Last Outpost on the Zulu Frontier reveals the unexamined but pivotal role of Fort Napier in the peacetime public dramas of the colony. Its triumphalist colonial-themed pageantry belied colonists's worries about their own vulnerability. As Dominy shows, the cultural, political, and economic methods used by the garrison compensated for this perceived weakness. Settler elites married their daughters to soldiers to create and preserve an English-speaking oligarchy. At the same time, garrison troops formed the backbone of a consumer market that allowed colonists to form banking and property interests that consolidated their control.
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A Latin American Music Reader
Views from the South
Javier F Leon
University of Illinois Press, 2016
Javier F. León and Helena Simonett curate a collection of essential writings from the last twenty-five years of Latin American music studies. Chosen as representative, outstanding, and influential in the field, each article appears in English translation. A detailed new introduction by León and Simonett both surveys and contextualizes the history of Latin American ethnomusicology, opening the door for readers energized by the musical forms brought and nurtured by immigrants from throughout Latin America.

Contributors include Marina Alonso Bolaños, Gonzalo Camacho Díaz, José Jorge de Carvalho, Claudio F. Díaz, Rodrigo Cantos Savelli Gomes, Juan Pablo González, Rubén López-Cano, Angela Lühning, Jorge Martínez Ulloa, Maria Ignêz Cruz Mello, Julio Mendívil, Carlos Miñana Blasco, Raúl R. Romero, Iñigo Sánchez Fuarros, Carlos Sandroni, Carolina Santamaría-Delgado, Rodrigo Torres Alvarado, and Alejandro Vera.

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Latina/os and World War II
Mobility, Agency, and Ideology
Edited by Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez and B.V. Olguín
University of Texas Press, 2014

The first book-length study of Latina/o experiences in World War II over a wide spectrum of identities and ancestries—from Cuban American, Spanish American, and Mexican American segments to the under-studied Afro-Latino experience—Latina/os and World War II probes the controversial aspects of Latina/o soldiering and citizenship in the war, the repercussions of which defined the West during the twentieth century. The editors also offer a revised, more accurate tabulation of the number of Latina/os who served in the war.

Spanning imaginative productions, such as vaudeville and the masculinity of the soldado razo theatrical performances; military segregation and the postwar lives of veterans; Tejanas on the homefront; journalism and youth activism; and other underreported aspects of the wartime experience, the essays collected in this volume showcase rarely seen recollections. Whether living in Florida in a transformed community or deployed far from home (including Mexican Americans who were forced to endure the Bataan Death March), the men and women depicted in this collection yield a multidisciplinary, metacritical inquiry. The result is a study that challenges celebratory accounts and deepens the level of scholarly inquiry into the realm of ideological mobility for a unique cultural crossroads. Taking this complex history beyond the realm of war narratives, Latina/os and World War II situates these chapters within the broader themes of identity and social change that continue to reverberate in postcolonial lives.

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Latino Mayors
Political Change in the Postindustrial City
Marion Orr
Temple University Press, 2018

As recently as the early 1960s, Latinos were almost totally excluded from city politics. This makes the rise of Latino mayors in the past three decades a remarkable American story—one that explains ethnic succession, changing urban demography, and political contexts. The vibrant collection Latino Mayors features case studies of eleven Latino mayors in six American cities: San Antonio, Los Angeles, Denver, Hartford, Miami, and Providence.

The editors and contributors analyze Latino mayors for their governing styles and policies. They describe how candidates shaped race, class, and economic issues—particularly in deracialized campaigns. Latino Mayors also addresses coalition politics, political incorporation, and how community groups operate, as well as the challenges these pioneers have faced in office from political tensions and governance issues that sometimes even harm Latinos. 

Ultimately, Latino Mayors charts the performances, successes, and failures of these elected officials to represent their constituents in a changing economic and urban environment.

Contributors include: Stefanie Chambers, Carlos E. Cuéllar, Emily M. Farris, Maria Ilcheva, Robert Preuhs, Heywood T. Sanders, Ellen Shiau, and the editors.

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Latino Placemaking and Planning
Cultural Resilience and Strategies for Reurbanization
Jesus J. Lara
University of Arizona Press, 2018
Latinos are currently the second-largest ethnic group demographically within the United States. By the year 2050 they are projected to number nearly 133 million, or approximately one third of the country’s total population. As the urban component of this population increases, the need for resources to support it will generate new cultural and economic stresses.
 
Latino Placemaking and Planning offers a pathway to define, analyze, and evaluate the role that placemaking can have with respect to Latino communities in the context of contemporary urban planning, policy, and design practices. Using strategically selected case studies, Jesus J. Lara examines how Latinos contribute to the phenomenon of urban revitalization through the (re)appropriation of physical space for their own use and the consequent transformation of what were previously economically downtrodden areas into vibrant commercial and residential centers.
 
The book examines the formation of urban cultures and reurbanization strategies from the perspective of Latino urbanism and is divided into four key sections, which address (1) emerging new urban geographies; (2) the power of place and neighborhood selection; (3) Latino urbanism case studies; and (4) lessons and recommendations for “reurbanizing” the city. Latino Placemaking and Planning illustrates the importance of placemaking for Latino communities and provides accessible strategies for planners, students, and activists to sustainable urban revitalization.
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The Latinx Guide to Graduate School
Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales and Magdalena L. Barrera
Duke University Press, 2023
In The Latinx Guide to Graduate School Genevieve Negrón-Gonzales and Magdalena L. Barrera provide prospective and current Latinx graduate students in the humanities and social sciences fields with a roadmap for surviving and thriving in advanced-degree programs. They document the unwritten rules of graduate education that impact Latinx students, demystifying and clarifying the essential requirements for navigating graduate school that Latinx students may not know because they are often the first in their families to walk that path. Topics range from identifying the purpose of graduate research, finding the right program, and putting together a strong application to developing a graduate student identity, cultivating professional and personal relationships, and mapping out a post--graduate school career. The book also includes resources for undocumented students. Equal parts how-to guide, personal reflection, manifesto, and academic musing, this book gives a culturally resonant perspective that speaks to the unique Latinx graduate student experience.
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Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics
Frederick Luis Aldama; Foreword by John Jennings; Afterword by Javier Hernandez
University of Arizona Press, 2017
Winner of the 2018 Eisner Award Winner for Best Scholarly/Academic Work

Whether good or evil, beautiful or ugly, smart or downright silly, able-bodied or differently abled, gay or straight, male or female, young or old, Latinx superheroes in mainstream comic book stories are few and far between. It is as if finding the Latinx presence in the DC and Marvel worlds requires activation of superheroic powers.

Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics blasts open barriers with a swift kick. It explores deeply and systematically the storyworld spaces inhabited by brown superheroes in mainstream comic book storyworlds: print comic books, animation, TV, and film. It makes visible and lets loose the otherwise occluded and shackled. Leaving nothing to chance, it sheds light on how creators (authors, artists, animators, and directors) make storyworlds that feature Latinos/as, distinguishing between those that we can and should evaluate as well done and those we can and should evaluate as not well done.

The foremost expert on Latinx comics, Frederick Luis Aldama guides us through the full archive of all the Latinx superheros in comics since the 1940s. Aldama takes us where the superheroes live—the barrios, the hospitals, the school rooms, the farm fields—and he not only shows us a view to the Latinx content, sometimes deeply embedded, but also provokes critical inquiry into the way storytelling formats distill and reconstruct real Latinos/as.

Thoroughly entertaining but seriously undertaken, Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics allows us to truly see how superhero comic book storyworlds are willfully created in ways that make new our perception, thoughts, and feelings.
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Law and Mourning
Austin Sarat
University of Massachusetts Press, 2017
Law and Mourning brings together a distinguished group of scholars to explore the many and complex ways that law both regulates and gives meaning to our experience of loss. The essays in this volume illuminate how law helps us to absorb and contend with loss and its reverberations, channeling the powerful emotions associated with death and protecting those vulnerable to them. At the same time, law creates a regulatory framework for death as it establishes the necessity for a clear demarcation of the boundary between life and death, defines what we can and cannot do with the remains of the dead, and creates both privileges and disabilities for survivors. The contributors to the volume also explore how mourning generates critiques of existing legal and political orders which seem compelled by calls from the dead, unleashing an indifference to legal consequences in survivors that can undermine or destroy law.

In addition to the editors, the contributors include Andrea Brady, Catherine Kellogg, Shai Lavi, Ray Madoff, Ann Pelligrini, and Mark Sanders.
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Law by Night
Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller
Duke University Press, 2023
In Law by Night Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller asks what we can learn about modern law and its authority by understanding how it operates in the dark of night. He outlines how the social experience and cultural meanings of night promote racialized and gender violence, but also make possible freedom of movement for marginalized groups that might be otherwise unavailable during the day. Examining nighttime racial violence, curfews, gun ownership, the right to sleep, and “take back the night” rallies, Goldberg-Hiller demonstrates that liberal legal doctrine lacks a theory of the night that accounts for a nocturnal politics that has historically allowed violence to persist. By locating the law’s nocturnal limits, Goldberg-Hiller enriches understandings of how the law reinforces hierarchies of race and gender and foregrounds the night’s potential to enliven a more egalitarian social life.
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The Laws of Cool
Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information
Alan Liu
University of Chicago Press, 2004
Knowledge work is now the reigning business paradigm and affects even the world of higher education. But what perspective can the knowledge of the humanities and arts contribute to a world of knowledge work whose primary mission is business? And what is the role of information technology as both the servant of the knowledge economy and the medium of a new technological cool? In The Laws of Cool, Alan Liu reflects on these questions as he considers the emergence of new information technologies and their profound influence on the forms and practices of knowledge.
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A Leaf of Voices
Stories of the American Civil War in the Words of Those Who Lived and Died, 1861-65
Jennifer McSpadden
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2014
During the American Civil the Wabash Intelligencer and the Wabash Plain Dealer frequently printed letters from Wabash County men serving in the Union army. The letter writers are a remarkable cast of characters: young and old, soldiers, doctors, ministers, officers, enlisted men, newspaper men, and a fifteen-year-old printers’ devil who enlisted as a drummer boy. These are not stories of generals or battle strategies; they are the stories of the ordinary soldiers and their everyday lives. They describe long tiring marches across state after state, crossing almost impossible terrain, facing shortages of rations and supplies, enduring extremes of weather where they froze one day and sweltered the next, and encountering guerrillas that harried the wagon trains. The correspondents wrote of walking over the bodies of fallen comrades and foes alike, of mules and their wagons sinking into muddy roads that became like quicksand, of shipwrecks, and of former slaves.
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Leaning Into The Wind
A Memoir Of Midwest Weather
Susan Allen Toth
University of Minnesota Press, 2006
Midwesterners love to talk about the weather, approaching the vagaries and challenges of extreme temperatures, deep snow, and oppressive humidity with good-natured complaining, peculiar pride, and communal spirit. Such a temperamental climate can at once terrify and disturb, yet offer unparalleled solace and peace.Leaning into the Wind is a series of ten intimate essays in which Susan Allen Toth, who has spent most of her life in Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, reveals the ways in which weather has challenged and changed her perceptions about herself and the world around her. She describes her ever-growing awareness of and appreciation for how the weather marks the major milestones of her life. Toth explores issues as large as weather and spirituality in “Who Speaks in the Pillar of Cloud?” and topics as small as a mosquito in “Things That Go Buzz in the Night.” In “Storms,” a severe thunderstorm becomes a continuing metaphor for the author’s troubled first marriage. Two essays, one from the perspective of childhood and one from late middle age, ponder how the weather seems different at various stages of life but always provides unexpected opportunities for self-discovery, change, and renewal. The perfect entertainment for anyone who loved Toth’s previous books on travel and memoir, Leaning into the Wind offers engaging and personal insights on the delights and difficulties of Midwest weather. Susan Allen Toth is the author of several books, including Blooming: A Small-Town Girlhood (1981), My Love Affair with England (1992), England As You Like It (1995), and England for All Seasons (1997). She has contributed to the New York Times, the Washington Post, Harper’s, and Vogue. She lives in Minneapolis.
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Learned Patriots
Debating Science, State, and Society in the Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Empire
M. Alper Yalçinkaya
University of Chicago Press, 2015
The nineteenth century was, for many societies, a period of coming to grips with the growing, and seemingly unstoppable, domination of the world by the “Great Powers” of Europe. The Ottoman Empire was no exception: Ottomans from all walks of life—elite and non-elite, Muslim and non-Muslim—debated the reasons for what they considered to be the Ottoman decline and European ascendance. One of the most popular explanations was deceptively simple: science. If the Ottomans would adopt the new sciences of the Europeans, it was frequently argued, the glory days of the empire could be revived.
           
In Learned Patriots, M. Alper Yalçinkaya examines what it meant for nineteenth-century Ottoman elites themselves to have a debate about science. Yalçinkaya finds that for anxious nineteenth-century Ottoman politicians, intellectuals, and litterateurs, the chief question was not about the meaning, merits, or dangers of science. Rather, what mattered were the qualities of the new “men of science.” Would young, ambitious men with scientific education be loyal to the state? Were they “proper” members of the community? Science, Yalçinkaya shows, became a topic that could hardly be discussed without reference to identity and morality.
           
Approaching science in culture, Learned Patriots contributes to the growing literature on how science travels, representations and public perception of science, science and religion, and science and morality. Additionally, it will appeal to students of the intellectual history of the Middle East and Turkish politics.
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Learning from Bogotá
Pedagogical Urbanism and the Reshaping of Public Space
By Rachel Berney
University of Texas Press, 2017

Once known as a “drug capital” and associated with kidnappings, violence, and excess, Bogotá, Colombia, has undergone a transformation that some have termed “the miracle of Bogotá.” Beginning in the late 1980s, the city emerged from a long period of political and social instability to become an unexpected model of urban development through the redesign and revitalization of the public realm—parks, transportation, and derelict spaces—under the leadership of two “public space mayors,” Antanas Mockus and Enrique Peñalosa (the latter reelected in 2015). In Learning from Bogotá, Rachel Berney analyzes how these mayors worked to reconfigure the troubled city into a pedagogical one whose public spaces and urban policy have helped shape a more tolerant and aware citizenry.

Berney examines the contributions of Mockus and Peñalosa through the lenses of both spatial/urban design and the city’s history. She shows how, through the careful intertwining of new public space and transportation projects, the reclamation of privatized public space, and the refurbishment of dilapidated open spaces, the mayors enacted an ambitious urban vision for Bogotá without resorting to the failed method of the top-down city master plan. Illuminating the complex interplay between formal politics, urban planning, and improvised social strategies, as well as the negative consequences that accompanied Bogotá’s metamorphosis, Learning from Bogotá offers significant lessons about the possibility for positive and lasting change in cities around the world.

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Learning to Be Latino
How Colleges Shape Identity Politics
Reyes, Daisy Verduzco
Rutgers University Press, 2018
In Learning to Be Latino, sociologist Daisy Verduzco Reyes paints a vivid picture of Latino student life at a liberal arts college, a research university, and a regional public university, outlining students’ interactions with one another, with non-Latino peers, and with faculty, administrators, and the outside community. Reyes identifies the normative institutional arrangements that shape the social relationships relevant to Latino students’ lives, including school size, the demographic profile of the student body, residential arrangements, the relationship between students and administrators, and how well diversity programs integrate students through cultural centers and retention centers. Together these characteristics create an environment for Latino students that influences how they interact, identify, and come to understand their place on campus.
 
Drawing on extensive ethnographic observations, Reyes shows how college campuses shape much more than students’ academic and occupational trajectories; they mold students’ ideas about inequality and opportunity in America, their identities, and even how they intend to practice politics.  
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Learning to Become Turkmen
Literacy, Language, and Power, 1914-2014
Victoria Clement
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018
Learning to Become Turkmen examines the ways in which the iconography of everyday life—in dramatically different alphabets, multiple languages, and shifting education policies—reflects the evolution of Turkmen society in Central Asia over the past century. As Victoria Clement shows, the formal structures of the Russian imperial state did not affect Turkmen cultural formations nearly as much as Russian language and Cyrillic script. Their departure was also as transformative to Turkmen politics and society as their arrival.

Complemented by extensive fieldwork, Learning to Become Turkmen is the first book in a Western language to draw on Turkmen archives, as it explores how Eurasia has been shaped historically. Revealing particular ways that Central Asians relate to the rest of the world, this study traces how Turkmen consciously used language and pedagogy to position themselves within global communities such as the Russian/Soviet Empire, the Turkic cultural continuum, and the greater Muslim world.
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Learning To Divide The World
Education at Empire’s End
John Willinsky
University of Minnesota Press, 2000

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Learning to Glow
A Nuclear Reader
John Bradley
University of Arizona Press, 2000
Atomic energy is not only invisible, it has been cloaked in secrecy by government, industry, and the military. Yet for many Americans the effects of radiation have been less than secret. Just ask the radium workers in Ottawa, Illinois, the "downwinders" of Utah, or unsuspecting veterans of the Gulf War. When told from the perspective of ordinary people, nuclear history takes on a much different tone from that of the tranquil voices of authority who always told us we had nothing to fear.

In Learning to Glow, twenty-four essays testify to many of the unsuspected human and environmental costs of atomic science. They show that Americans have paid a terrible price for supposedly "winning" the Cold War--for although the nuclear nightmare may be over, we are still living with nuclear threats every day. Writers such as Scott Russell Sanders, Terry Tempest Williams, and Barbara Kingsolver reveal the psychic and emotional fallout of the Cold War and of subsequent developments in nuclear science. The essays include personal testimonies of what it was like to grow up with family members in nuclear-related jobs; hard-hitting journalism on the health and environmental costs of our nuclear policies and practices; and poignant stories of coming to terms with nuclear power, including contributions by writers who revisit Hiroshima in an attempt to heal the wounds left by the Bomb.

These essays offer an alternative to the official version of nuclear history as told to us by school textbooks, government authorities, and nuclear industry officials. They are stories of and by ordinary people who have suffered the consequences of the decisions made by those in power-stories that have been largely ignored, dismissed, or suppressed. They will challenge readers to re-examine their preconceptions about the way we deal with issues of nuclear arms and radioactive waste because they show that nuclear history does not belong to experts but to us all.

Contributors:
Marilou Awiakta
John Bradley
Jim Carrier
Alison Hawthorne Deming
Mary Dickson
Edward Dougherty
Ray Gonzalez
Karl Grossman
Sonya Huber
Barbara Kingsolver
Valerie Kuletz
Mary Laufer
Kay Mack
Craig McGrath
Bill Mesler
Richard H. Minear
Randy Morris
Mayumi Oda
Catherine Quigg
Richard Rawles
Kenneth Robbins
Scott Russell Sanders
David Seaborg
Terry Tempest Williams
Bill Witherup
Phil Woods

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Leave Me Alone and I'll Make You Rich
How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey and Art Carden
University of Chicago Press, 2020
The economist and historian Deirdre Nansen McCloskey has been best known recently for her Bourgeois Era trilogy, a vigorous defense, unrivaled in scope, of commercially tested betterment.  Its massive volumes, The Bourgeois Virtues, Bourgeois Dignity, and Bourgeois Equality, solve Adam Smith’s puzzle of the nature and causes of the wealth of nations, and of the moral sentiments of modernity.   The world got rich, she argues, not chiefly by material causes but by an idea and a sentiment, a new admiration for the middle class and its egalitarian liberalism.  

For readers looking for a distillation of McCloskey’s magisterial work, Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich is what you’ve been waiting for. In this lively volume, McCloskey and the economist and journalist Carden bring together the trilogy’s key ideas and its most provocative arguments. The rise of the west, and now the rest, is the story of the rise of ordinary people to a dignity and liberty inspiring them to have a go. The outcome was an explosion of innovation after 1800, and a rise of real income by an astounding 3,000 percent.  The Great Enrichment, well beyond the conventional Industrial Revolution, did not, McCloskey and Carden show, come from the usual suspects, capital accumulation or class struggle.  It came from the idea of economic liberty in Holland and the Anglosphere, then Sweden and Japan, then Italy and  Israel and China and India, an idea that bids fair in the next few generations to raise up the wretched of the earth.  The original shift to liberalism arose from 1517 to 1789 from theological and political revolutions in northwest Europe, upending ancient hierarchies.  McCloskey and Carden contend further that liberalism and “innovism” made us better humans as well as richer ones.  Not matter but ideas.  Not corruption but improvement.

Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich draws in entertaining fashion on history, economics, literature, philosophy, and popular culture, from growth theory to the Simpsons. It is the perfect introduction for a broad audience to McCloskey’s influential explanation of how we got rich.  At a time when confidence in the economic system is under challenge, the book mounts an optimistic and persuasive defense of liberal innovism, and of the modern world it has wrought.
 
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Left of Hollywood
Cinema, Modernism, and the Emergence of U.S. Radical Film Culture
By Chris Robé
University of Texas Press, 2010

In the 1930s as the capitalist system faltered, many in the United States turned to the political Left. Hollywood, so deeply embedded in capitalism, was not immune to this shift. Left of Hollywood offers the first book-length study of Depression-era Left film theory and criticism in the United States. Robé studies the development of this theory and criticism over the course of the 1930s, as artists and intellectuals formed alliances in order to establish an engaged political film movement that aspired toward a popular cinema of social change. Combining extensive archival research with careful close analysis of films, Robé explores the origins of this radical social formation of U.S. Left film culture.

Grounding his arguments in the surrounding contexts and aesthetics of a few films in particular—Sergei Eisenstein's Que Viva Mexico!, Fritz Lang's Fury, William Dieterle's Juarez, and Jean Renoir's La Marseillaise—Robé focuses on how film theorists and critics sought to foster audiences who might push both film culture and larger social practices in more progressive directions. Turning at one point to anti-lynching films, Robé discusses how these movies united black and white film critics, forging an alliance of writers who championed not only critical spectatorship but also the public support of racial equality. Yet, despite a stated interest in forging more egalitarian social relations, gender bias was endemic in Left criticism of the era, and female-centered films were regularly discounted. Thus Robé provides an in-depth examination of this overlooked shortcoming of U.S. Left film criticism and theory.

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Legal Lessons
Popularizing Laws in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–1989
Jennifer Altehenger
Harvard University Press, 2018

The popularization of basic legal knowledge is an important and contested technique of state governance in China today. Its roots reach back to the early years of Chinese Communist Party rule. Legal Lessons tells the story of how the party-state attempted to mobilize ordinary citizens to learn laws during the early years of the Mao period (1949–1976) and in the decade after Mao’s death.

Examining case studies such as the dissemination of the 1950 Marriage Law and successive constitutions since 1954 in Beijing and Shanghai, Jennifer Altehenger traces the dissemination of legal knowledge at different levels of state and society. Archival records, internal publications, periodicals, advice manuals, memoirs, and colorful propaganda materials reveal how official attempts to determine and promote “correct” understandings of laws intersected with people’s interpretations of written laws and with their experiences of laws in practice. They also show how diverse groups—including party-state leadership, legal experts, publishers, writers, artists, and local officials, along with ordinary people—helped to define the meaning of laws in China’s socialist society. Placing mass legal education and law propaganda at the center of analysis, Legal Lessons offers a new perspective on the sociocultural and political history of law in socialist China.

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Legal Spectatorship
Slavery and the Visual Culture of Domestic Violence
Kelli Moore
Duke University Press, 2022
In Legal Spectatorship Kelli Moore traces the political origins of the concept of domestic violence through visual culture in the United States. Tracing its appearance in Article IV of the Constitution, slave narratives, police notation, cybernetic theories of affect, criminal trials, and the “look” of the battered woman, Moore contends that domestic violence refers to more than violence between intimate partners—it denotes the mechanisms of racial hierarchy and oppression that undergird republican government in the United States. Moore connects the use of photographic evidence of domestic violence in courtrooms, which often stands in for women’s testimony, to slaves’ silent experience and witnessing of domestic abuse. Drawing on Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, abolitionist print culture, courtroom witness testimony, and the work of Hortense Spillers, Moore shows how the logic of slavery and antiblack racism also dictates the silencing techniques of the contemporary domestic violence courtroom. By positioning testimony on contemporary domestic violence prosecution within the archive of slavery, Moore demonstrates that domestic violence and its image are haunted by black bodies, black flesh, and black freedom.

Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient
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Legible Sovereignties
Rhetoric, Representations, and Native American Museums
Lisa King
Oregon State University Press, 2017
An interdisciplinary work that draws on the fields of rhetorical studies, Native American and Indigenous studies, and museum studies, Legible Sovereignties considers the creation, critical reception, and adaptation of Indigenous self-representation in three diverse Indigenously oriented or owned institutions.
 
King tracks the exhibit spaces at the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe of Michigan’s Ziibiwing Center, Haskell Indian Nation University’s Cultural Center and Museum, and the Smithsonian’s Washington, DC branch of the National Museum of the American Indian over their first ten years, from their opening until the summer of 2014. Far from formulaic, each site has developed its own rhetorical approaches to reaching its public, revealing multiple challenges and successes in making Native self-representation legible and accessible.
 
Through documentation and analysis of the inaugural exhibits and recent installations, interviews with curators and staff, and investigation into audience reception of these spaces, Legible Sovereignties argues that there can be no single blanket solution for effective Indigenous self-representation. Instead, Legible Sovereignties demonstrates the nuanced ways in which each site must balance its rhetorical goals and its audience's needs, as well as its material constraints and opportunities, in order to reach its visitors and have Indigenous voices heard.
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Legitimating Life
Adoption in the Age of Globalization and Biotechnology
van Wichelen, Sonja
Rutgers University Press, 2019
The phenomenon of transnational adoption is changing in the age of globalization and biotechnology. In Legitimating Life, Sonja van Wichelen boldly describes how contemporary justifications of cross-border adoption navigate between child welfare, humanitarianism, family making, capitalism, science, and health. Focusing on contemporary institutional practices of adoption in the United States and the Netherlands, she traces how professionals, bureaucrats, lawyers, politicians, social workers, and experts legitimate a practice that became progressively controversial. Throughout the past few decades transnational adoption transformed from a humanitarian response to a means of making family. In this new manifestation, life becomes necessarily economized. While push and pull factors, demand and supply dynamics, and competition between agencies set the stage for the globalization of adoption, international conventions, scientific knowledge, and the language of human rights universalized the phenomenon. Van Wichelen argues that such technoscientific legitimations of a globalizing practice are rearticulating colonial logics of race and civilization. Yet, she also lets us see beyond the biopolitical project and into alternative ways of making kin. 

 
 
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Leisure and Death
An Anthropological Tour of Risk, Death, and Dying
Adam Kaul
University Press of Colorado, 2018

This anthropological study examines the relationship between leisure and death, specifically how leisure practices are used to meditate upon—and mediate—life. Considering travelers who seek enjoyment but encounter death and dying, tourists who accidentally face their own mortality while vacationing, those who intentionally seek out pleasure activities that pertain to mortality and risk, and those who use everyday leisure practices like social media or dogwalking to cope with death, Leisure and Death delves into one of the most provocative subsets of contemporary cultural anthropology.

These nuanced and well-developed ethnographic case studies deal with different and distinct examples of the intertwining of leisure and death. They challenge established conceptions of leisure and rethink the associations attached to the prospect of death. Chapters testify to encounters with death on a personal and scholarly level, exploring, for example, the Cliffs of Moher as not only one of the most popular tourist destinations in Ireland but one of the most well-known suicide destinations as well, and the estimated 30 million active posthumous Facebook profiles being repurposed through proxy users and transformed by continued engagement with the living. From the respectful to the fascinated, from the macabre to the morbid, contributors consider how people deliberately, or unexpectedly, negotiate the borderlands of the living.

An engaging, timely book that explores how spaces of death can be transformed into spaces of leisure, Leisure and Death makes a significant contribution to the burgeoning interdisciplinary literature on leisure studies and dark tourism. This book will appeal to students, scholars, and laypeople interested in tourism studies, death studies, cultural studies, heritage studies, anthropology, sociology, and marketing.

Contributors: Kathleen M. Adams, Michael Arnold, Jane Desmond, Keith Egan, Maribeth Erb, James Fernandez, Martin Gibbs, Rachel Horner-Brackett, Shingo Iitaka, Tamara Kohn, Patrick Laviolette, Ruth McManus, James Meese, Bjorn Nansen, Stravoula Pipyrou, Hannah Rumble, Cyril Schafer

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Leisure Settings
Bourgeois Culture, Medicine, and the Spa in Modern France
Douglas P. Mackaman
University of Chicago Press, 1998
The artful use of one's free time was a discipline perfected by the French in the nineteenth century. Casinos, alpine hiking, hotel dinners, romantic gardens, and lavish parks were all part of France's growing desire for the ideal vacation. Perhaps the most intriguing vacation, however, was the ever popular health resort, and this is the main topic of Douglas Mackaman's fascinating study.

Taking us into the vibrant social world of France's great spas, Mackaman explores the links between class identity and vacationing. Mackaman shows how, after 1800, physicians and entrepreneurs zealously tried to break their milieu's strong association with aristocratic excess and indecency by promoting spas as a rational, ordered equivalent to the busy lives of the bourgeoisie. Rather than seeing leisure time as slothful, Mackaman argues, the bourgeoisie willingly became patients at spas and viewed this therapeutic vacation as a sensible, even productive, way of spending time. Mackaman analyzes this transformation, and ultimately shows how the premier vacation of an era made and was made by the bourgeoisie.




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Lend Me Your Ear
Brenda Jo Brueggemann
Gallaudet University Press, 1999
The tradition of rhetoric established 2,500 years ago emphasizes the imperative of speech as a defining characteristic of reason. But in her new book Lend Me Your Ear, Brenda Jo Brueggemann exposes this tradition’s effect of disallowing deaf people human identity because of their natural silence.

     Brueggemann’s assault upon this long-standing rhetorical conceit is both erudite and personal; she writes both as a scholar and as a hard-of-hearing woman. In this broadly based study, she presents a profound analysis and understanding of this rhetorical tradition’s descendent disciplines (e.g., audiology, speech/language pathology) that continue to limit deaf people. Next to this even-handed scholarship, she juxtaposes a volatile emotional counterpoint achieved through interviews with Deaf individuals who have faced rhetorically constructed restrictions, and interludes of her own poetry and memoirs.

     The energized structure of Lend Me Your Ear galvanizes new thought on the rhetoric surrounding Deaf people by posing basic questions from a rhetorical context: How is deafness constructed as a disability, pathology, or culture through the institutions of literacy education and science/technology, and how do these constructions fit with those of deaf people themselves? The rhetoric of deafness as pathology is associated with the conventional medical and scientific establishments, and literacy education fosters deafness as disability, both dependent upon the premise that speech drives communication. This kinetic study demands consideration of deafness in terms of the rhetoric of Deaf culture, American Sign Language (ASL), and the political activism of Deaf people. Brueggemann argues strenuously and successfully for a reevaluation of the speech model of rhetoric in light of the singular qualities of ASL poetry, a genre that adds the dimension of space and is not disembodied. Ironically, without a word being spoken or printed, ASL poetry returns to the fading, prized oral tradition of poets such as Homer. The speech imperative in traditional rhetoric also fails to present rhetorical forms for listening, or a rhetoric of silence. These and other break-out concepts introduced in Lend Me Your Ear that will stimulate scholars and students of rhetoric, language, and Deaf studies to return to this intriguing work again and again.
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Letting Stories Breathe
A Socio-Narratology
Arthur W. Frank
University of Chicago Press, 2010

Stories accompany us through life from birth to death. But they do not merely entertain, inform, or distress us—they show us what counts as right or wrong and teach us who we are and who we can imagine being. Stories connect people, but they can also disconnect, creating boundaries between people and justifying violence. In Letting Stories Breathe, Arthur W. Frank grapples with this fundamental aspect of our lives, offering both a theory of how stories shape us and a useful method for analyzing them. Along the way he also tells stories: from folktales to research interviews to remembrances.

Frank’s unique approach uses literary concepts to ask social scientific questions: how do stories make life good and when do they endanger it? Going beyond theory, he presents a thorough introduction to dialogical narrative analysis, analyzing modes of interpretation, providing specific questions to start analysis, and describing different forms analysis can take. Building on his renowned work exploring the relationship between narrative and illness, Letting Stories Breathe expands Frank’s horizons further, offering a compelling perspective on how stories affect human lives.

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Liberating Language
Sites of Rhetorical Education in Nineteenth-Century Black America
Shirley Wilson Logan
Southern Illinois University Press, 2008

Liberating Language identifies experiences of nineteenth-century African Americans—categorized as sites of rhetorical education—that provided opportunities to develop effective communication and critical text-interpretation skills. Author Shirley Wilson Logan considers how nontraditional sites, which seldom involved formal training in rhetorical instruction, proved to be effective resources for African American advancement.

Logan traces the ways that African Americans learned lessons in rhetoric through language-based activities associated with black survival in nineteenth-century America, such as working in political organizations, reading and publishing newspapers, maintaining diaries, and participating in literary societies. According to Logan, rhetorical training was manifested through places of worship and military camps, self-education in oratory and elocution, literary societies, and the black press. She draws on the experiences of various black rhetors of the era, such as

Frederick Douglass, Frances Harper, Fanny Coppin, Charles Chesnutt, Ida B. Wells, and the lesser-known Oberlin-educated Mary Virginia Montgomery, Virginia slave preacher "Uncle Jack," and former slave "Mrs. Lee."

Liberating Language addresses free-floating literacy, a term coined by scholar and writer Ralph Ellison, which captures the many settings where literacy and rhetorical skills were acquired and developed, including slave missions, religious gatherings, war camps, and even cigar factories. In Civil War camp- sites, for instance, black soldiers learned to read and write, corresponded with the editors of black newspapers, edited their own camp-based papers, and formed literary associations.

Liberating Language outlines nontraditional means of acquiring rhetorical skills and demonstrates how African Americans, faced with the lingering consequences of enslavement and continuing oppression, acquired rhetorical competence during the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century.

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Liberation and Development
Black Consciousness Community Programs in South Africa
Leslie Anne Hadfield
Michigan State University Press, 2016
Liberation and Development: Black Consciousness Community Programs in South Africa is an account of the community development programs of the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa. It covers the emergence of the movement’s ideas and practices in the context of the late 1960s and early 1970s, then analyzes how activists refined their practices, mobilized resources, and influenced people through their work. The book examines this history primarily through the Black Community Programs organization and its three major projects: the yearbook Black Review, the Zanempilo Community Health Center, and the Njwaxa leatherwork factory. As opposed to better-known studies of antipolitical, macroeconomic initiatives, this book shows that people from the so-called global South led development in innovative ways that promised to increase social and political participation. It particularly explores the power that youth, women, and churches had in leading change in a hostile political environment. With this new perspective on a major liberation movement, Hadfield not only causes us to rethink aspects of African history but also offers lessons from the past for African societies still dealing with developmental challenges similar to those faced during apartheid.
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Liberty and Justice for All?
Rethinking Politics in Cold War America
Kathleen G. Donohue
University of Massachusetts Press, 2012
From the congressional debate over the "fall of China" to the drama of the Army–McCarthy hearings to the kitchen faceoff between Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev, the political history of the early Cold War was long dominated by studies of presidential administrations, anticommunism, and foreign policy. In Liberty and Justice for All? a group of distinguished historians representing a variety of disciplinary perspectives—social history, cultural history, intellectual history, labor history, urban history, women's history, African American studies, and media studies—expand on the political history of the early Cold War by rethinking the relationship between politics and culture. How, for example, did folk music help to keep movement culture alive throughout the 1950s? How did the new medium of television change fundamental assumptions about politics and the electorate? How did American experiences with religion in the 1950s strengthen the separation of church and state? How did race, class, and gender influence the relationship between citizens and the state? These are just some of the questions addressed in this wide-ranging set of essays.

In addition to volume editor Kathleen G. Donohue, contributors include Howard Brick, Kari Frederickson, Andrea Friedman, David Greenberg, Grace Elizabeth Hale, Jennifer Klein, Laura McEnaney, Kevin M. Schultz, Jason Scott Smith, Landon R. Y. Storrs, and Jessica Weiss.
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Life and Research
A Survival Guide for Early-Career Biomedical Scientists
Paris H. Grey and David G. Oppenheimer
University of Chicago Press, 2022
Life in a research lab can be daunting, especially for early-career scientists. Personal and professional hurdles abound in bench research, and this book by two seasoned lab professionals is here to help graduate students, postdocs, and staff scientists recognize stumbling blocks and avoid common pitfalls.
 
Building and maintaining a mentoring network, practicing self-care and having a life outside of the lab, understanding that what works perfectly for a labmate might not work for you—these are just a few of the strategies that lab manager and molecular biologist Paris H. Grey and PI and geneticist David G. Oppenheimer wished they had implemented far sooner in their careers. They also offer practical advice on managing research projects, sharing your work on social media, and attending conferences. Above all, they coach early-career scientists to avoid burnout and make the most of every lab experience to grow and learn.  
 
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Life beyond Medicine
The Joys and Challenges of Physician Retirement
Sharon Romm
Dartmouth College Press, 2018
Physicians retire at all ages—older doctors forsake medical practice when tired of it or when forced to do so by age or illness; younger practitioners leave because of burnout, disillusionment with the medical system, or a desire to engage in new activities. But research and literature about physician retirement is scanty. Given the limited resources available, many physicians who want to retire from medicine remain mired in indecision, wondering how their life might be different if they left medicine. Sharon Romm has written the definitive guide to help health care professionals of all ages prepare for the joys and challenges ahead.
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Life beyond the Boundaries
Constructing Identity in Edge Regions of the North American Southwest
Karen Harry
University Press of Colorado, 2018

Life beyond the Boundaries explores identity formation on the edges of the ancient Southwest. Focusing on some of the more poorly understood regions, including the Jornada Mogollon, the Gallina, and the Pimería Alta, the authors use methods drawn from material culture science, anthropology, and history to investigate themes related to the construction of social identity along the perimeters of the American Southwest.

Through an archaeological lens, the volume examines the social experiences of people who lived in edge regions. Through mobility and the development of extensive social networks, people living in these areas were introduced to the ideas and practices of other cultural groups. As their spatial distances from core areas increased, the degree to which they participated in the economic, social, political, and ritual practices of ancestral core areas increasingly varied. As a result, the social identities of people living in edge zones were often—though not always—fluid and situational.

Drawing on an increase of available information and bringing new attention to understudied areas, the book will be of interest to scholars of Southwestern archaeology and other researchers interested in the archaeology of low-populated and decentralized regions and identity formation. Life beyond the Boundaries considers the various roles that edge regions played in local and regional trajectories of the prehistoric and protohistoric Southwest and how place influenced the development of social identity. 

ContributorsLewis Borck, Dale S. Brenneman, Jeffery J. Clark, Severin Fowles, Patricia A. Gilman, Lauren E. Jelinek, Myles R. Miller, Barbara J. Mills, Matthew A. Peeples, Kellam Throgmorton, James T. Watson

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Life Breaks In
A Mood Almanack
Mary Cappello
University of Chicago Press, 2016
 
Some books start at point A, take you by the hand, and carefully walk you to point B, and on and on.
 
This is not one of those books. This book is about mood, and how it works in and with us as complicated, imperfectly self-knowing beings existing in a world that impinges and infringes on us, but also regularly suffuses us with beauty and joy and wonder. You don’t write that book as a linear progression—you write it as a living, breathing, richly associative, and, crucially, active, investigation. Or at least you do if you’re as smart and inventive as Mary Cappello.
 
What is a mood? How do we think about and understand and describe moods and their endless shadings? What do they do to and for us, and how can we actively generate or alter them? These are all questions Cappello takes up as she explores mood in all its manifestations: we travel with her from the childhood tables of “arts and crafts” to mood rooms and reading rooms, forgotten natural history museums and 3-D View-Master fairytale tableaux; from the shifting palette of clouds and weather to the music that defines us and the voices that carry us.  The result is a book as brilliantly unclassifiable as mood itself, blue and green and bright and beautiful, funny and sympathetic, as powerfully investigative as it is richly contemplative.
 
“I’m one of those people who mistrusts a really good mood,” Cappello writes early on. If that made you nod in recognition, well, maybe you’re one of Mary Cappello’s people; you owe it to yourself to crack Life Breaks In and see for sure.
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Life by Algorithms
How Roboprocesses Are Remaking Our World
Edited by Catherine Besteman and Hugh Gusterson
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Computerized processes are everywhere in our society. They are the automated phone messaging systems that businesses use to screen calls; the link between student standardized test scores and public schools’ access to resources; the algorithms that regulate patient diagnoses and reimbursements to doctors. The storage, sorting, and analysis of massive amounts of information have enabled the automation of decision-making at an unprecedented level. Meanwhile, computers have offered a model of cognition that increasingly shapes our approach to the world. The proliferation of “roboprocesses” is the result, as editors Catherine Besteman and Hugh Gusterson observe in this rich and wide-ranging volume, which features contributions from a distinguished cast of scholars in anthropology, communications, international studies, and political science.
 
Although automatic processes are designed to be engines of rational systems, the stories in Life by Algorithms reveal how they can in fact produce absurd, inflexible, or even dangerous outcomes. Joining the call for “algorithmic transparency,” the contributors bring exceptional sensitivity to everyday sociality into their critique to better understand how the perils of modern technology affect finance, medicine, education, housing, the workplace, food production, public space, and emotions—not as separate problems but as linked manifestations of a deeper defect in the fundamental ordering of our society.

Contributors
Catherine Besteman, Alex Blanchette, Robert W. Gehl, Hugh Gusterson, Catherine Lutz, Ann Lutz Fernandez, Joseph Masco, Sally Engle Merry, Keesha M. Middlemass, Noelle Stout, Susan J. Terrio
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A Life for New Music
Selected Papers of Paul Fromm
David Gable
Harvard University Press, 1988

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Life in a Northern Town
Cooking, Eating, and Other Adventures along Lake Superior
Mary Dougherty
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2017
"Generations of men and women have stood on these beaches, listened to water rushing over these basalt rocks, and picked wild blueberries here well before I sailed into the Bayfield harbor. The families of those men and women are still here, tethered to a place where they can slip behind their ancestor’s eyes and take in essentially the same view."
—from the Introduction
In 2007, Mary Dougherty and her family moved from St. Paul to the tiny Bayfield Peninsula, surrounded by the waters of Lake Superior and Chequamegon Bay in far northwestern Wisconsin. There they set out to live their lives against a backdrop of waterfalls, beaches, farm stands, and a quintessential small town of 487 people. Through recipes, stories, and photos, this book explores what it means to nourish a family and a community. As Mary Dougherty incorporates what is grown and raised in northern Wisconsin into her family’s favorite dishes, she continues a cultural tradition begun by immigrants hundreds of years ago. The result is a one-of-a-kind collection of globally and regionally inspired recipes featuring local cheeses, meats, and produce from the farmers in and around Bayfield—pho made with beef bones from a farm in Mellen, Indian meatballs with curry powder made in Washburn, chowder with corn and potatoes from a farm stand in Ashland. As she knits herself into the Bayfield community, Dougherty comes to more fully grasp the intricate relationship between food and community.
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Life in Oil
Cofán Survival in the Petroleum Fields of Amazonia
By Michael L. Cepek, Photographs by Bear Guerra
University of Texas Press, 2018

Oil is one of the world’s most important commodities, but few people know how its extraction affects the residents of petroleum-producing regions. In the 1960s, the Texaco corporation discovered crude in the territory of Ecuador’s indigenous Cofán nation. Within a decade, Ecuador had become a member of OPEC, and the Cofán watched as their forests fell, their rivers ran black, and their bodies succumbed to new illnesses. In 1993, they became plaintiffs in a multibillion-dollar lawsuit that aims to compensate them for the losses they have suffered. Yet even in the midst of a tragic toxic disaster, the Cofán have refused to be destroyed. While seeking reparations for oil’s assault on their lives, they remain committed to the survival of their language, culture, and rainforest homeland.

Life in Oil presents the compelling, nuanced story of how the Cofán manage to endure at the center of Ecuadorian petroleum extraction. Michael L. Cepek has lived and worked with Cofán people for more than twenty years. In this highly accessible book, he goes well beyond popular and academic accounts of their suffering to share the largely unknown stories that Cofán people themselves create—the ones they tell in their own language, in their own communities, and to one another and the few outsiders they know and trust. Their words reveal that life in oil is a form of slow, confusing violence for some of the earth’s most marginalized, yet resilient, inhabitants.

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The Life of Music in North India
The Organization of an Artistic Tradition
Daniel M. Neuman
University of Chicago Press, 1990
Daniel M. Neuman offers an account of North Indian Hindustani music culture and the changing social context of which it is part, as expressed in the thoughts and actions of its professional musicians.

Drawing primarily from fieldwork performed in Delhi in 1969-71—from interviewing musicians, learning and performing on the Indian fiddle, and speaking with music connoisseurs—Neuman examines the cultural and social matrix in which Hindustani music is nurtured, listened and attended to, cultivated, and consumed in contemporary India. Through his interpretation of the impact that modern media, educational institutions, and public performances exert on the music and musicians, Neuman highlights the drama of a great musical tradition engaging a changing world, and presents the adaptive strategies its practitioners employ to practice their art. His work has gained the distinction of introducing a new approach to research on Indian music, and appears in this edition with a new preface by the author.
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The Life of Our Language
Kaqchikel Maya Maintenance, Shift, and Revitalization
By Susan Garzon, R. McKenna Brown, Julia Becker Richards, and Wuqu’ Ajpub’
University of Texas Press, 1998

The native Maya peoples of Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and Belize have been remarkably successful in maintaining their cultural identity during centuries of contact with and domination by outside groups. Yet change is occurring in all Mayan communities as contact with Spanish-speaking Ladino society increases. This book explores change and continuity in one of the most vital areas of Mayan culture—language use.

The authors look specifically at Kaqchikel, one of the most commonly spoken Mayan languages. Following an examination of language contact situations among indigenous groups in the Americas, the authors proceed to a historical overview of the use of Kaqchikel in the Guatemalan Highlands. They then present case studies of three highland communities in which the balance is shifting between Kaqchikel and Spanish. Wuqu' Ajpub', a native Kaqchikel speaker, gives a personal account of growing up negotiating between the two languages and the different world views they encode. The authors conclude with a look at the Mayan language revitalization movement and offer a scenario in which Kaqchikel and other Mayan languages can continue to thrive.

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Life with AIDS
Weitz, Rose
Rutgers University Press, 1991
Rose Weitz presents a holistic picture of the experiences of people with HIV disease, using their own words and focusing on the issues that they consider important. Her information comes from in-depth interviews with women and men who have HIV disease--from those who are asymptomatic but infected to those who have full-blown AIDS--and from interviews with doctors who treat persons with HIV disease.

Weitz describes how these people are affected by and respond to the changes in their bodies and their social relationships, from the time when they realize that they are at risk of infection to the time when death approaches. It covers such issues as how individuals obtain diagnoses, develop their initial ideas about what the future will bring, and come to terms with their impending deaths. To put this into a broader context, she also explores the moral status of illness in general and looks at why some illnesses, including HIV disease, have become especially stigmatized.

The author also explores how doctors are affected by and cope with the unique pressures of treating persons with HIV disease. The concluding chapter theorizes about how changes in the social construction, demographic distribution, and treatment of HIV disease are changing the lives of people with AIDS.

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The Limits of Familiarity
Authorship and Romantic Readers
Lindsey Eckert
Bucknell University Press, 2022
What did Wordsworth wear, and where did he walk? Who was Byron’s new mistress, and how did his marriage fare? Answers—sometimes accurate, sometimes not—were tantalizingly at the ready in the Romantic era, when confessional poetry, romans à clef, personal essays, and gossip columns offered readers exceptional access to well-known authors. But at what point did familiarity become overfamiliarity? Widely recognized as a social virtue, familiarity—a feeling of emotional closeness or comforting predictability—could also be dangerous, vulgar, or boring. In The Limits of Familiarity, Eckert persuasively argues that such concerns shaped literary production in the Romantic period. Bringing together reception studies, celebrity studies, and literary history to reveal how anxieties about familiarity shaped both Romanticism and conceptions of authorship, this book encourages us to reflect in our own fraught historical moment on the distinction between telling all and telling all too much.
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Limits of the Numerical
The Abuses and Uses of Quantification
Edited by Christopher Newfield, Anna Alexandrova, and Stephen John
University of Chicago Press, 2022
This collection examines the uses of quantification in climate science, higher education, and health.
 
Numbers are both controlling and fragile. They drive public policy, figuring into everything from college rankings to vaccine efficacy rates. At the same time, they are frequent objects of obfuscation, manipulation, or outright denial. This timely collection by a diverse group of humanists and social scientists challenges undue reverence or skepticism toward quantification and offers new ideas about how to harmonize quantitative with qualitative forms of knowledge.   

Limits of the Numerical focuses on quantification in several contexts: climate change; university teaching and research; and health, medicine, and well-being more broadly. This volume shows the many ways that qualitative and quantitative approaches can productively interact—how the limits of the numerical can be overcome through equitable partnerships with historical, institutional, and philosophical analysis. The authors show that we can use numbers to hold the powerful to account, but only when those numbers are themselves democratically accountable.
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Limits to Culture
Urban Regeneration vs. Dissident Art
Malcolm Miles
Pluto Press, 2015
Limits to Culture outlines the cultural turn in urban policy from the 1980s to the 2000s, in which new art museums and cultural or heritage quarters lent a creative mask to urban redevelopment. Malcolm Miles challenges the notions of a creative class and a creative city, aligning them to gentrification, while exploring the history of cultural urban policy and its relationship to the real culture of dissent. As Miles shows, in the 1960s, creativity was identified with revolt, yet beginning in the 1980s it was subsumed by consumerism, as evidenced in the 1990s culture of cool. But in the wake of the 2008 crash, the money has run out and the illusory creative city has given way to urban clearances, ripe for a new kind of artistic regeneration.
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Lincoln and Reconstruction
John C. Rodrigue
Southern Illinois University Press, 2013

Although Abraham Lincoln dominates the literature on the American Civil War, he remains less commonly associated with reconstruction. Previous scholarly works touch on Lincoln and reconstruction, but they tend either to speculate on what Lincoln might have done after the war had he not been assassinated or to approach his reconstruction plans merely as a means of winning the war. In this thought-provoking study, John C. Rodrigue offers a succinct but significant survey of Lincoln’s wartime reconstruction initiatives while providing a fresh interpretation of the president’s plans for postwar America. 

Revealing that Lincoln concerned himself with reconstruction from the earliest days of his presidency, Rodrigue details how Lincoln’s initiatives unfolded, especially in the southern states where they were attempted. He explores Lincoln’s approach to various issues relevant to reconstruction, including slavery, race, citizenship, and democracy; his dealings with Congressional Republicans, especially the Radicals; his support for and eventual abandonment of colonization; his dealings with the border states; his handling of the calls for negotiations with the Confederacy as a way of reconstructing the Union; and his move toward emancipation and its implications for his approach to reconstruction.

As the Civil War progressed, Rodrigue shows, Lincoln’s definition of reconstruction transformed from the mere restoration of the seceded states to a more fundamental social, economic, and political reordering of southern society and of the Union itself. Based on Lincoln’s own words and writings as well as an extensive array of secondary literature, Rodrigue traces the evolution of Lincoln’s thinking on reconstruction, providing new insight into a downplayed aspect of his presidency.

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Lineages Embedded in Temple Networks
Daoism and Local Society in Ming China
Richard G. Wang
Harvard University Press, 2022

Lineages Embedded in Temple Networks explores the key role played by elite Daoists in social and cultural life in Ming China, notably by mediating between local networks—biological lineages, territorial communities, temples, and festivals—and the state. They did this through their organization in clerical lineages—their own empire-wide networks for channeling knowledge, patronage, and resources—and by controlling central temples that were nodes of local social structures.

In this book, the only comprehensive social history of local Daoism during the Ming largely based on literary sources and fieldwork, Richard G. Wang delineates the interface between local organizations (such as lineages and temple networks) and central state institutions. The first part provides the framework for viewing Daoism as a social institution in regard to both its religious lineages and its service to the state in the bureaucratic apparatus to implement state orthodoxy. The second part follows four cases to reveal the connections between clerical lineages and local networks. Wang illustrates how Daoism claimed a universal ideology and civilizing force that mediated between local organizations and central state institutions, which in turn brought meaning and legitimacy to both local society and the state.

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Listed
Dispatches from America’s Endangered Species Act
Joe Roman
Harvard University Press, 2011

The first listed species to make headlines after the Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973 was the snail darter, a three-inch fish that stood in the way of a massive dam on the Little Tennessee River. When the Supreme Court sided with the darter, Congress changed the rules. The dam was built, the river stopped flowing, and the snail darter went extinct on the Little Tennessee, though it survived in other waterways. A young Al Gore voted for the dam; freshman congressman Newt Gingrich voted for the fish.

A lot has changed since the 1970s, and Joe Roman helps us understand why we should all be happy that this sweeping law is alive and well today. More than a general history of endangered species protection, Listed is a tale of threatened species in the wild—from the whooping crane and North Atlantic right whale to the purple bankclimber, a freshwater mussel tangled up in a water war with Atlanta—and the people working to save them.

Employing methods from the new field of ecological economics, Roman challenges the widely held belief that protecting biodiversity is too costly. And with engaging directness, he explains how preserving biodiversity can help economies and communities thrive. Above all, he shows why the extinction of species matters to us personally—to our health and safety, our prosperity, and our joy in nature.

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Listening in the Afterlife of Data
Aesthetics, Pragmatics, and Incommunication
David Cecchetto
Duke University Press, 2022
In Listening in the Afterlife of Data, David Cecchetto theorizes sound, communication, and data by analyzing them in the contexts of the practical workings of specific technologies, situations, and artworks. In a time he calls the afterlife of data—the cultural context in which data’s hegemony persists even in the absence of any belief in its validity—Cecchetto shows how data is repositioned as the latest in a long line of concepts that are at once constitutive of communication and suggestive of its limits. Cecchetto points to the failures and excesses of communication by focusing on the power of listening—whether through wearable technology, internet-based artwork, or the ways in which computers process sound—to pragmatically comprehend the representational excesses that data produces. Writing at a cultural moment in which data has never been more ubiquitous or less convincing, Cecchetto elucidates the paradoxes that are constitutive of computation and communication more broadly, demonstrating that data is never quite what it seems.
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Listening Myths
Applying Second Language Research to Classroom Teaching
Steven Brown
University of Michigan Press, 2011

This volume was conceived as a "best practices" resource for teachers of ESL listening courses in the way that Vocabulary Myths by Keith S. Folse (and Writing Myths by Joy Reid) is one for reading and vocabulary teachers. It was written to help ensure that teachers of listening are not perpetuating the myths of teaching listening.

Both the research and pedagogy in this book are based on the newest research in the field of second language acquisition. Steven Brown is the author of the Active Listening textbook series and is a teacher trainer.

The myths debunked in this book are:

§  Listening is the same as reading.

§  Listening is passive.

§  Listening equals comprehension.

§  Because L1 language ability is effortlessly acquired, L2 listening ability is too.

§  Listening means listening to conversations.

§  Listening is an individual, inside-the-head process.

§  Students should only listen to authentic materials.

§  Listening can’t be taught.

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Listening to Images
Tina M. Campt
Duke University Press, 2017
In Listening to Images Tina M. Campt explores a way of listening closely to photography, engaging with lost archives of historically dismissed photographs of black subjects taken throughout the black diaspora. Engaging with photographs through sound, Campt looks beyond what one usually sees and attunes her senses to the other affective frequencies through which these photographs register. She hears in these photos—which range from late nineteenth-century ethnographic photographs of rural African women and photographs taken in an early twentieth-century Cape Town prison to postwar passport photographs in Birmingham, England and 1960s mug shots of the Freedom Riders—a quiet intensity and quotidian practices of refusal. Originally intended to dehumanize, police, and restrict their subjects, these photographs convey the softly buzzing tension of colonialism, the low hum of resistance and subversion, and the anticipation and performance of a future that has yet to happen. Engaging with discourses of fugitivity, black futurity, and black feminist theory, Campt takes these tools of colonialism and repurposes them, hearing and sharing their moments of refusal, rupture, and imagination.
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Litcomix
Literary Theory and the Graphic Novel
Adam Geczy
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Critical studies of the graphic novel have often employed methodologies taken from film theory and art criticism. Yet, as graphic novels from Maus to Watchmen have entered the literary canon, perhaps the time has come to develop theories for interpreting and evaluating graphic novels that are drawn from classic models of literary theory and criticism. 
 
Using the methodology of Georg Lukács and his detailed defense of literary realism as a socially embedded practice, Litcomix tackles difficult questions about reading graphic novels as literature. What critical standards should we use to measure the quality of a graphic novel? How does the genre contribute to our understanding of ourselves and the world? What qualities distinguish it from other forms of literature? 
 
LitComix hones its theoretical approach through case studies taken from across the diverse world of comics, from Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s groundbreaking manga to the Hernandez Brothers’ influential alt-comix. Whether looking at graphic novel adaptations of Proust or considering how Jack Kirby’s use of intertextuality makes him the Balzac of comics, this study offers fresh perspectives on how we might appreciate graphic novels as literature. 
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Literacy and Deaf People
Cultural and Contextual Perspectives
Brenda Jo Brueggemann
Gallaudet University Press, 2004

This compelling collection advocates for an alternative view of deaf people’s literacy, one that emphasizes recent shifts in Deaf cultural identity rather than a student’s past educational context as determined by the dominant hearing society. Divided into two parts, the book opens with four chapters by leading scholars Tom Humphries, Claire Ramsey, Susan Burch, and volume editor Brenda Jo Brueggemann. These scholars use diverse disciplines to reveal how schools where deaf children are taught are the product of ideologies about teaching, about how deaf children learn, and about the relationship of ASL and English.

Part Two features works by Elizabeth Engen and Trygg Engen; Tane Akamatsu and Ester Cole; Lillian Buffalo Tompkins; Sherman Wilcox and BoMee Corwin; and Kathleen M. Wood. The five chapters contributed by these noteworthy researchers offer various views on multicultural and bilingual literacy instruction for deaf students. Subjects range from a study of literacy in Norway, where Norwegian Sign Language recently became the first language of instruction for deaf pupils, to the difficulties faced by deaf immigrant and refugee children who confront institutional and cultural clashes. Other topics include the experiences of deaf adults who became bilingual in ASL and English, and the interaction of the pathological versus the cultural view of deafness. The final study examines literacy among Deaf college undergraduates as a way of determining how the current social institution of literacy translates for Deaf adults and how literacy can be extended to deaf people beyond the age of 20.

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Literacy and Historical Development
A Reader
Edited by Harvey J. Graff
Southern Illinois University Press, 2007

Representing three decades of research, Literacy and Historical Development: A Reader presents some of the most important historical scholarship on literacy in Europe and the United States. The approaches, research, and conclusions reflected in this collection of fifteen essays has changed how historians and many others conceptualize literacy and represents a body of scholarship that is transforming both contemporary and historical literacy theories.

In this revised and expanded edition of the groundbreaking volume Literacy and Social Development in the West, editor Harvey J. Graff provides a new introduction and nine new essays by nationally and internationally renowned contributors from a range of disciplines. Replacing an unquestioned certainty that literacy’s powers are universal, independent, and determinative, Graff brings together studies that support new concepts, contending that the importance and influences of literacy depend on specific social and historical contexts, the impacts of literacy are mediated and restricted, the effects of literacy are social and particular, and the role of literacy must be understood within the burgeoning array of communication technologies.

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Literacy as Conversation
Learning Networks in Urban and Rural Communities
Eli Goldblatt and David Jolliffe
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022
In Literacy as Conversation, the authors tell stories of successful literacy learning outside of schools and inside communities, both within urban neighborhoods of Philadelphia and rural and semi-rural towns of Arkansas. They define literacy not as a basic skill but as a rich, broadly interactive human behavior: the ability to engage in a conversation carried on, framed by, or enriched through written symbols. Eli Goldblatt takes us to after-school literacy programs, community arts centers, and urban farms in the city of Philadelphia, while David Jolliffe explores learning in a Latinx youth theater troupe, a performance based on the words of men on death row, and long-term cooperation with a rural health care provider in Arkansas. As different as urban and rural settings can be—and as beset as they both are with the challenges of historical racism and economic discrimination—the authors see much to encourage both geographical communities to fight for positive change.
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Literacy, Economy, and Power
Writing and Research after "Literacy in American Lives"
Edited by John Duffy, Julie Nelson Christoph, Eli Goldblatt, Nelson Graff, Rebecca S. Nowacek, Bryan Trabold
Southern Illinois University Press, 2014

Following on the groundbreaking contributions of Deborah Brandt’s Literacy in American Lives—a literacy ethnography exploring how ordinary Americans have been affected by changes in literacy, public education, and structures of power—Literacy, Economy, and Power expands Brandt’s vision, exploring the relevance of her theoretical framework as it relates to literacy practices in a variety of current and historical contexts, as well as in literacy’s expanding and global future. Bringing together scholars from rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies, the book offers thirteen engrossing essays that extend and challenge Brandt’s commentary on the dynamics between literacy and power.

The essays cover many topics, including the editor of the first Native American newspaper, the role of a native Hawaiian in bringing literacy to his home islands, the influence of convents and academies on nineteenth-century literacy, and the future of globalized digital literacies. Contributors include Julie Nelson Christoph, Ellen Cushman, Kim Donehower, Anne Ruggles Gere, Eli Goldblatt, Harvey J. Graff, Gail E. Hawisher, Bruce Horner, David A. Jolliffe, Rhea Estelle Lathan, Min-Zhan Lu, Robyn Lyons-Robinson, Carol Mattingly, Beverly J. Moss, Paul Prior, Cynthia L. Selfe, Michael W. Smith, and Morris Young. Literacy, Economy, and Power also features an introduction exploring the scholarly impact of Brandt’s work, written by editors John Duffy, Julie Nelson Christoph, Eli Goldblatt, Nelson Graff, Rebecca Nowacek, and Bryan Trabold. An invaluable tool for literacy studies at the graduate or professional level, Literacy, Economy, and Power provides readers with a wide-ranging view of the work being done in literacy studies today and points to ways researchers might approach the study of literacy in the future.

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Literacy, Sexuality, Pedagogy
Theory and Practice for Composition Studies
Jonathan Alexander
Utah State University Press, 2008
Despite its centrality to much of contemporary personal and public discourse, sexuality remains infrequently discussed in most composition courses, and in our discipline at large. Moreover, its complicated relationship to discourse, to the very languages we use to describe and define our worlds, is woefully understudied in our discipline. Discourse about sexuality, and the discourse of sexuality, surround us—circulating in the news media, on the Web, in conversations, and in the very languages we use to articulate our interactions with others and our understanding of ourselves. It forms a core set of complex discourses through which we approach, make sense of, and construct a variety of meanings, politics, and identities.
 
In Literacy, Sexuality, Pedagogy, Jonathan Alexander argues for the development of students' "sexual literacy." Such a literacy is not just concerned with developing fluency with sexuality as a "hot" topic, but with understanding the intimate interconnectedness of sexuality and literacy in Western culture. Using the work of scholars in queer theory, sexuality studies, and the New Literacy Studies, Alexander unpacks what he sees as a crucial--if often overlooked--dimension of literacy: the fundamental ways in which sexuality has become a key component of contemporary literate practice, of the stories we tell about ourselves, our communities, and our political investments.
 
Alexander then demonstrates through a series of composition exercises and writing assignments how we might develop students' understanding of sexual literacy. Examining discourses of gender, heterosexuality, and marriage allows students (and instructors) a critical opportunity to see how the languages we use to describe ourselves and our communities are saturated with ideologies of sexuality. Understanding how sexuality is constructed and deployed as a way to "make meaning" in our culture gives us a critical tool both to understand some of the fundamental ways in which we know ourselves and to challenge some of the norms that govern our lives. In the process, we become more fluent with the stories that we tell about ourselves and discover how normative notions of sexuality enable (and constrain) narrations of identity, culture, and politics. Such develops not only our understanding of sexuality, but of literacy, as we explore how sexuality is a vital, if vexing, part of the story of who we are.
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Little Italy in the Great War
Philadelphia's Italians on the Battlefield and Home Front
Richard N. Juliani
Temple University Press, 2020

The Great War challenged all who were touched by it. Italian immigrants, torn between their country of origin and country of relocation, confronted political allegiances that forced them to consider the meaning and relevance of Americanization. In his engrossing study, Little Italy in the Great War, Richard Juliani focuses on Philadelphia’s Italian community to understand how this vibrant immigrant population reacted to the war as they were adjusting to life in an American city that was ambivalent toward them. 

Juliani explores the impact of the Great War on many immigrant soldiers who were called to duty as reservists and returned to Italy, while other draftees served in the U.S. Army on the Western Front. He also studies the impact of journalists and newspapers reporting the war in English and Italian, and reactions from civilians who defended the nation in industrial and civic roles on the home front. 

Within the broader context of the American experience, Little Italy in the Great War examines how the war affected the identity and cohesion of Italians as a population still passing through the assimilation process.

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Lively Capital
Biotechnologies, Ethics, and Governance in Global Markets
Kaushik Sunder Rajan, ed.
Duke University Press, 2012
Lively Capital is an urgent and important collection of essays addressing the reconfigured relations between the life sciences and the market. Exploring the ground where social and cultural anthropology intersect with science and technology studies, prominent scholars investigate the relationship of biotechnology to ethics, governance, and markets, as well as the new legal, social, cultural, and institutional mechanisms emerging to regulate biotechnology. The contributors examine genomics, pharmaceutical marketing, intellectual property, environmental science, clinical trials, patient advocacy, and other such matters as they are playing out in North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Lively Capital is not only about the commercialization of the life sciences, but their institutional histories, epistemic formations, and systems of valuation. It is also about the lively affects—the emotions and desires—involved when technologies and research impinge on experiences of embodiment, kinship, identity, disability, citizenship, accumulation, and dispossession. At stake in the commodification of the life sciences are opportunities to intervene in and adjudicate matters of health, life, and death.

Contributors. Timothy Choy, Joseph Dumit, Michael M. J. Fischer, Kim Fortun, Mike Fortun, Donna Haraway, Sheila Jasanoff, Wen-Hua Kuo, Andrew Lakoff, Kristin Peterson, Chloe Silverman, Elta Smith, Kaushik Sunder Rajan, Travis J. Tanner

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Lives in Science
How Institutions Affect Academic Careers
Joseph C. Hermanowicz
University of Chicago Press, 2009

What can we learn when we follow people over the years and across the course of their professional lives? Joseph C. Hermanowicz asks this question specifically about scientists and answers it here by tracking fifty-five physicists through different stages of their careers at a variety of universities across the country. He explores these scientists’ shifting perceptions of their jobs to uncover the meanings they invest in their work, when and where they find satisfaction, how they succeed and fail, and how the rhythms of their work change as they age. His candid interviews with his subjects, meanwhile, shed light on the ways career goals are and are not met, on the frustrations of the academic profession, and on how one deals with the boredom and stagnation that can set in once one is established.

An in-depth study of American higher education professionals eloquently told through their own words, Hermanowicz’s keen analysis of how institutions shape careers will appeal to anyone interested in life in academia.

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Lives in the Law
Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas, and Martha Merrill Umphrey, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2002
The essays look at the consequences that legal practice has on the lives of its practitioners as well as on the individual legal subject and on the shape of shared identities. These essays challenge liberal and communitarian notions of what it means to live the law.

In the first of the essays, Pnina Lahav presents a study of the Chicago Seven Trial to paint a picture of the law's power to serve as a site for the definition of a collective group identity. In contrast, Sarah Gordon focuses on the experience of an individual legal subject, namely, the defendant in the Hester Vaughn trial, a notorious nineteenth-century case of infanticide. Frank Munger looks at how law constructs the identity of women and explores the strategies by which poor women resist the law's construction of their dependency. In the fourth essay, Vicki Schultz offers a moral vision of equality that straddles the liberal and communitarian positions with her articulation of the concept of a "life's work." Lastly, Annette Wieviorka examines the recent trial of Maurice Papon for complicity in crimes against humanity to reveal how the very identity of a nation--in this case, France--can be defined through juridical and legal acts.
Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science and Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought, Amherst College. Lawrence Douglas is Associate Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought, Amherst College. Martha Umphrey is Assistant Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought, Amherst College.
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The Lives of Machines
The Industrial Imaginary in Victorian Literature and Culture
Tamara Ketabgian
University of Michigan Press, 2011

"The Lives of Machines is intelligent, closely argued, and persuasive, and puts forth a contention that will unsettle the current consensus about Victorian attitudes toward the machine."
---Jay Clayton, Vanderbilt University

Today we commonly describe ourselves as machines that "let off steam" or feel "under pressure." The Lives of Machines investigates how Victorian technoculture came to shape this language of human emotion so pervasively and irrevocably and argues that nothing is more intensely human and affecting than the nonhuman. Tamara Ketabgian explores the emergence of a modern and more mechanical view of human nature in Victorian literature and culture.

Treating British literature from the 1830s to the 1870s, this study examines forms of feeling and community that combine the vital and the mechanical, the human and the nonhuman, in surprisingly hybrid and productive alliances. Challenging accounts of industrial alienation that still persist, the author defines mechanical character and feeling not as erasures or negations of self, but as robust and nuanced entities in their own right. The Lives of Machines thus offers an alternate cultural history that traces sympathies between humans, animals, and machines in novels and nonfiction about factory work as well as in other unexpected literary sites and genres, whether domestic, scientific, musical, or philosophical. Ketabgian historicizes a model of affect and community that continues to inform recent theories of technology, psychology, and the posthuman.

The Lives of Machines will be of interest to students of British literature and history, history of science and of technology, novel studies, psychoanalysis, and postmodern cultural studies.

Cover image: "Power Loom Factory of Thomas Robinson," from Andrew Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures (London: Charles Knight, 1835), frontispiece.

DIGITALCULTUREBOOKS: a collaborative imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the University of Michigan Library

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The Lives of Stone Tools
Crafting the Status, Skill, and Identity of Flintknappers
Kathryn Weedman Arthur
University of Arizona Press, 2018
The Lives of Stone Tools gives voice to the Indigenous Gamo lithic practitioners of southern Ethiopia. For the Gamo, their stone tools are alive, and their work in flintknapping is interwoven with status, skill, and the life histories of their stone tools.

Anthropologist Kathryn Weedman Arthur offers insights from her more than twenty years working with the Gamo. She deftly addresses historical and present-day experiences and practices, privileging the Gamo’s perspectives. Providing a rich, detailed look into the world of lithic technology, Arthur urges us to follow her into a world that recognizes Indigenous theories of material culture as valid alternatives to academic theories. In so doing, she subverts long-held Western perspectives concerning gender, skill, and lifeless status of inorganic matter.

The book offers the perspectives that, contrary to long-held Western views, stone tools are living beings with a life course, and lithic technology is a reproductive process that should ideally include both male and female participation. Only individuals of particular lineages knowledgeable in the lives of stones may work with stone technology. Knappers acquire skill and status through incremental guided instruction corresponding to their own phases of maturation. The tools’ lives parallel those of their knappers from birth (procurement), circumcision (knapping), maturation (use), seclusion (storage), and death (discardment).

Given current expectations that the Gamo’s lithic technology may disappear with the next generation, The Lives of Stone Tools is a work of vital importance and possibly one of the last contemporaneous books about a population that engages with the craft daily.
 
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Livestock in a Changing Landscape, Volume 1
Drivers, Consequences, and Responses
Edited by Henning Steinfeld, Harold A. Mooney, Fritz Schneider, and Laurie E. Neville
Island Press, 2010
The rapidly changing nature of animal production systems, especially increasing intensification and globalization, is playing out in complex ways around the world. Over the last century, livestock keeping evolved from a means of harnessing marginal resources to produce items for local consumption to a key component of global food chains. Livestock in a Changing Landscape offers a comprehensive examination of these important and far-reaching trends.

The books are an outgrowth of a collaborative effort involving international nongovernmental organizations including the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (UN FAO), the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), the Swiss College of Agriculture (SHL), the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development (CIRAD), and the Scientific Committee for Problems of the Environment (SCOPE).

Volume 1 examines the forces shaping change in livestock production and management; the resulting impacts on landscapes, land use, and social systems; and potential policy and management responses.

Volume 2 explores needs and draws experience from region-specific contexts and detailed case studies. The case studies describe how drivers and consequences of change play out in specific geographical areas, and how public and private responses are shaped and implemented.

Together, the volumes present new, sustainable approaches to the challenges created by fundamental shifts in livestock management and production, and represent an essential resource for policy makers, industry managers, and academics involved with this issue.
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Livestock in a Changing Landscape, Volume 2
Experiences and Regional Perspectives
Edited by Pierre Gerber, Harold A. Mooney, Jeroen Dijkman, Shirley Tarawali, and Cees de Haan
Island Press, 2010
The rapidly changing nature of animal production systems, especially increasing intensification and globalization, is playing out in complex ways around the world. Over the last century, livestock keeping evolved from a means of harnessing marginal resources to produce items for local consumption to a key component of global food chains. Livestock in a Changing Landscape offers a comprehensive examination of these important and far-reaching trends.

The books are an outgrowth of a collaborative effort involving international nongovernmental organizations including the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (UN FAO), the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), the Swiss College of Agriculture (SHL), the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development (CIRAD), and the Scientific Committee for Problems of the Environment (SCOPE).

Volume 1 examines the forces shaping change in livestock production and management; the resulting impacts on landscapes, land use, and social systems; and potential policy and management responses.

Volume 2 explores needs and draws experience from region-specific contexts and detailed case studies. The case studies describe how drivers and consequences of change play out in specific geographical areas, and how public and private responses are shaped and implemented.

Together, the volumes present new, sustainable approaches to the challenges created by fundamental shifts in livestock management and production, and represent an essential resource for policy makers, industry managers, and academics involved with this issue
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