front cover of Childfree and Happy
Childfree and Happy
Transforming the Rhetoric of Women's Reproductive Choices
Courtney Adams Wooten
Utah State University Press, 2023
Childfree and Happy examines how millennia of reproductive beliefs (or doxa) have positioned women who choose not to have children as deviant or outside the norm. Considering affect and emotion alongside the lived experiences of women who have chosen not to have children, Courtney Adams Wooten offers a new theoretical lens to feminist rhetorical scholars’ examinations of reproductive rhetorics and how they circulate through women’s lives by paying attention not just to spoken or written beliefs but also to affectual circulations of reproductive doxa.
 
Through interviews with thirty-four childfree women and analysis of childfree rhetorics circulating in historical and contemporary texts and events, this book demonstrates how childfree women individually and collectively try to speak back to common beliefs about their reproductive experiences, even as they struggle to make their identities legible in a sociocultural context that centers motherhood. Childfree and Happy theorizes how affect and rhetoric work together to circulate reproductive doxa by using Sara Ahmed’s theories of gendered happiness scripts to analyze what reproductive doxa is embedded in those scripts and how they influence rhetoric by, about, and around childfree women.
 
Delving into how childfree women position their decision not to have children and the different types of interactions they have with others about this choice, including family members, friends, colleagues, and medical professionals, Childfree and Happy also explores how communities that make space for alternative happiness scripts form between childfree women and those who support them. It will be of interest to scholars in the fields of the rhetoric of motherhood/mothering, as well as feminist rhetorical studies.
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A Civil Economy
Transforming the Marketplace in the Twenty-First Century
Severyn T. Bruyn
University of Michigan Press, 2000
A civil society is one in which a democratic government and a market economy operate together. The idea of the civil economy--encompassing a democratic government and a market economy--presumes that people can solve social problems within the market itself. This book explores the relationship between the two, examining the civil underpinnings of capitalism and investigating the way a civil economy evolves in history and is developed for the future by careful planning.
Severyn T. Bruyn describes how people in three sectors--government, business, and the Third Sector (nonprofits and civil groups)--can develop an accountable, self-regulating, profitable, humane, and competitive system of markets that could be described as a civil economy. He examines how government officials can organize markets to reduce government costs; how local leaders deal with global corporations that would unfairly exploit their community resources; and how employees can become coparticipants in the development of human values in markets.
A Civil Economy is oriented to interdiciplinary studies of the economy, assisting scholars in diverse fields, such as business management, sociology, political science, and economics, in developing a common language to examine civic problems in the marketplace.
As an undergraduate text, it evokes a mode of thought about the development of a self-accountable system of markets. Students learn to understand how the market economy becomes socially accountable and self-reliant, while remaining productive, competitive, and profitable.
Sveryn T. Bruyn is Professor of Sociology, Boston College.
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The New Counterinsurgency Era
Transforming the U.S. Military for Modern Wars
David H. Ucko
Georgetown University Press, 2009

Confronting insurgent violence in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military has recognized the need to “re-learn” counterinsurgency. But how has the Department of Defense with its mixed efforts responded to this new strategic environment? Has it learned anything from past failures?

In The New Counterinsurgency Era, David Ucko examines DoD’s institutional obstacles and initially slow response to a changing strategic reality. Ucko also suggests how the military can better prepare for the unique challenges of modern warfare, where it is charged with everything from providing security to supporting reconstruction to establishing basic governance—all while stabilizing conquered territory and engaging with local populations. After briefly surveying the history of American counterinsurgency operations, Ucko focuses on measures the military has taken since 2001 to relearn old lessons about counterinsurgency, to improve its ability to conduct stability operations, to change the institutional bias against counterinsurgency, and to account for successes gained from the learning process.

Given the effectiveness of insurgent tactics, the frequency of operations aimed at building local capacity, and the danger of ungoverned spaces acting as havens for hostile groups, the military must acquire new skills to confront irregular threats in future wars. Ucko clearly shows that the opportunity to come to grips with counterinsurgency is matched in magnitude only by the cost of failing to do so.

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Transforming a Business School
Entrepreneurial Leadership in an Era of Disruption
Porat, M. Moshe
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Publication cancelled.
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Transforming the Academy
Faculty Perspectives on Diversity and Pedagogy
Willie-LeBreton, Sarah
Rutgers University Press, 2016
In recent decades, American universities have begun to tout the “diversity” of their faculty and student bodies. But what kinds of diversity are being championed in their admissions and hiring practices, and what kinds are being neglected? Is diversity enough to solve the structural inequalities that plague our universities? And how might we articulate the value of diversity in the first place? 
 
Transforming the Academy begins to answer these questions by bringing together a mix of faculty—male and female, cisgender and queer, immigrant and native-born, tenured and contingent, white, black, multiracial, and other—from public and private universities across the United States. Whether describing contentious power dynamics within their classrooms or recounting protests that occurred on their campuses, the book’s contributors offer bracingly honest inside accounts of both the conflicts and the learning experiences that can emerge from being a representative of diversity. 
 
The collection’s authors are united by their commitment to an ideal of the American university as an inclusive and transformative space, one where students from all backgrounds can simultaneously feel intellectually challenged and personally supported. Yet Transforming the Academy also offers a wide range of perspectives on how to best achieve these goals, a diversity of opinion that is sure to inspire lively debate. 
 
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Transforming the Authority of the Archive
Undergraduate Pedagogy and Critical Digital Archives
Andi Gustavson and Charlotte Nunes, Editors
Lever Press, 2023
Featuring a wide array of perspectives, Transforming the Authority of the Archive details new roles for archives in undergraduate pedagogy and new roles for undergraduates in archives. While there has long been a place for archival exploration in undergraduate education (especially primary source analysis of items curated by archivists and educators), the models offered here engage students not only in analyzing collections, but also in the manifold challenges of building, stewarding, and communicating about collections. In transforming what archives are to undergraduate education, the projects detailed in this book transform the authority of the archive, as students and community partners claim powers to curate and create history.
 
Contributions to this volume represent a range of institutions including small liberal arts colleges, HBCUs, Ivy Leagues, large research institutions, and community-based collections. The assignments, projects, and initiatives described across this volume are fundamentally concerned with the challenge to model digital archival collections so as to center individual and community voices that are historically under-engaged in the archives. To address this challenge, contributors describe various approaches to substantively, often radically, redistribute archival resources and authority. The chapters within Transforming the Authority of the Archive offer thoughtful and creative pedagogical approaches to counter the presumed neutrality of the archive and advocate a shared understanding of the contingency of archival collections. This book is a must-read for liberal arts faculty, graduate students, archivists (both community- and institutionally-affiliated), information-studies professionals, librarians, and other professionals working and teaching in archives, museums, libraries, and other cultural heritage institutions.
 
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Transforming the Dead
Culturally Modified Bone in the Prehistoric Midwest
Eve A. Hargrave
University of Alabama Press, 2015
Transforming the Dead is a collection of essays that examines culturally modified human bones and their roles as “cultural and ritual objects” among prehistoric Eastern Woodland cultures. Previous scholarship has explored the role of human body parts in Native American cultures as trophies of war and revered ancestors. This collection discusses new evidence that human elements were also important components of daily and ritual activities across the Eastern Woodlands. The contributors to this volume discuss each case study within the unique regional and temporal contexts of the material, rather than seeking universal answers to how these objects were used.
 
Most research addressing modified human bone has focused on cut marks and trauma associated with warfare, trophy taking, and burial practices. The editors and contributors of Transforming the Dead document the varied and often overlooked ways that human bone was intentionally modified through drilling, incising, cutting, and polishing for utilitarian, ornamental, spiritual, or ritual use. Examples include bracelets and gorgets to be worn, as well as musical rasps, pipe stems, masks, and protective talismans. The form and function of these objects are not unusual; their construction from the remains of “another” sets them apart.
 
Through a flexible but systematic analysis of the archaeological record, the contributors bring into focus how the careful selection, modification, and retention of particular bones or body parts of an individual after death offer insights into concepts of personhood, the body, life, and death among the prehistoric Native Americans in the Midwest.
 

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Transforming the Frontier
Peace Parks and the Politics of Neoliberal Conservation in Southern Africa
Bram Büscher
Duke University Press, 2013
International peace parks—transnational conservation areas established and managed by two or more countries—have become a popular way of protecting biodiversity while promoting international cooperation and regional development. In Transforming the Frontier, Bram Büscher shows how cross-border conservation neatly reflects the neoliberal political economy in which it developed.

Based on extensive research in southern Africa with the Maloti-Drakensberg Transfrontier Conservation and Development Project, Büscher explains how the successful promotion of transfrontier conservation as a "win-win" solution happens not only in spite of troubling contradictions and problems, but indeed because of them. This is what he refers to as the "politics of neoliberal conservation," which receives its strength from effectively combining strategies of consensus, antipolitics, and marketing. Drawing on long-term, multilevel ethnographic research, Büscher argues that transfrontier conservation projects are not as concerned with on-the-ground development as they are purported to be. Instead, they are reframing environmental protection and sustainable development to fit an increasingly contradictory world order.

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front cover of Transforming the Grid Towards Fully Renewable Energy
Transforming the Grid Towards Fully Renewable Energy
Oliver Probst
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2020
The need for a deep decarbonization of the energy sector and the associated opportunities are now increasingly recognized, with fossil fuel projects simultaneously becoming more risky business propositions. With large-scale wind and solar generation now being the cheapest options in many parts of the world, a deeply renewable electricity sector is predestined to become the main driver of this transition. Yet, misconceptions abound. In part, this can be traced back to the complexity of the electricity sector and the processes involved in its transformation, located at the intersection between grid design and operation, markets and regulations.
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front cover of Transforming the Personal, Political, Historical and Sacred in Theory and Practice
Transforming the Personal, Political, Historical and Sacred in Theory and Practice
Personal, Political, Historical, and Sacred
Manfred Halpern
University of Scranton Press, 2009
The eminent political scientist Manfred Halpern (1924–2001) viewed politics as belonging to each of us, as part of the nature of being human. In A Comprehensive Philosophy of Transformation, his magnum opus, Halpern elucidates the interconnected “four faces of our being”: the political, personal, historical, and sacred. This momentous volume identifies several modes of political activity, warns against the dangers of leaving politics to professional politicians, and urges us to build networks of compassion that include everyone in a just society. Overall, Halpern calls for a transformative politics achieved through enhanced participation and understanding.
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Transforming the Public Sphere
The Dutch National Exhibition of Women’s Labor in 1898
Maria Grever and Berteke Waaldijk
Duke University Press, 2004
In 1898, the year Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands was inaugurated, five hundred women organized an enormous public exhibition showcasing women’s contributions to Dutch society as workers in a strikingly broad array of professions. The National Exhibition of Women’s Labor, held in The Hague, was attended by more than ninety thousand visitors. Maria Grever and Berteke Waaldijk consider the exhibition in the international contexts of women’s history, visual culture, and imperialism.

A comprehensive social history, Transforming the Public Sphere describes the planning and construction of the Exhibition of Women’s Labor and the event itself—the sights, the sounds, and the smells—as well as the role of exhibitions in late-nineteenth-century public culture. The authors discuss how the 1898 exhibition displayed the range and variety of women’s economic, intellectual, and artistic roles in Dutch culture, including their participation in such traditionally male professions as engineering, diamond-cutting, and printing and publishing. They examine how people and goods from the Dutch colonies were represented, most notably in an extensive open-air replica of a “Javanese village.” Grever and Waaldijk reveal the tensions the exhibition highlighted: between women of different economic classes; between the goal of equal rights for women and the display of imperial subjects and spoils; and between socialists and feminists, who competed fiercely with one another for working women’s support. Transforming the Public Sphere explores an event that served as the dress rehearsal for advances in women’s public participation during the twentieth century.

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