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8812 books match the query 'Political Science' and 421 start with m

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Mundus Imaginalis

Hamid Dabashi

Duke University Press, 2027

In Mundus Imaginalis, Hamid Dabashi exposes the Eurocentric worldview underlying the concept of World Literature and maps an alternative vision grounded in a centerless, pluralist world. Drawing on comparisons to the Persian literary tradition, Dabashi shows how imperial pasts cast a long and distorting shadow on cultural presents. Imperial imaginations outlast empires themselves, leaving “phantom empires” that perpetuate particular geographies of the world and arbitrate the literary. The Eurocentric idea of World Literature domesticates and provincializes alternative ideas and conceptions, casting them as national allegories precisely at a time when Europe itself has been exposed for its own provinciality. Drawing on the classical Persian notion of the “imaginal world,” or mundus imaginalis, Dabashi retrieves a metaphysical foregrounding of worldly literature, charting a trajectory of thinkers whose literary imagination does not align with political desires for conquest, calculation, and consumption. Mundus Imaginalis shows how this imaginal world, which gives root to all aesthetic acts, maps an entirely distinct world of creative imagination.

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Museum Politics

Power Plays At The Exhibition

Timothy W. Luke

University of Minnesota Press, 2002

The first sustained critique of the ways museum exhibits shape cultural assumptions and political values

Each year the more than seven thousand museums in the United States attract more attendees than either movies or sports. Yet until recently, museums have escaped serious political analysis. The past decade, however, has witnessed a series of unusually acrimonious debates about the social, political, and moral implications of museum exhibitions as varied as the Enola Gay display at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum and the Sensation exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

In this important volume, Timothy W. Luke explores museums’s power to shape collective values and social understandings, and argues persuasively that museum exhibitions have a profound effect on the body politic. Through discussions of topics ranging from how the National Holocaust Museum and the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles have interpreted the Holocaust to the ways in which the American Museum of Natural History, the Missouri Botanical Gardens, and Tucson’s Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum have depicted the natural world, Luke exposes the processes through which museums challenge but more often affirm key cultural and social realities.

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Muslim National Communism in the Soviet Union

A Revolutionary Strategy for the Colonial World

Alexandre A. Bennigsen and S. Enders Wimbush

University of Chicago Press, 1978

In this study, Bennigsen and Wimbush trace the development of the doctrine of national communism in Central Asia and the Caucasus. At the heart of this doctrine—as elaborated by the Volga Tatar, Mir-Said Sultan Galiev—was the concept of "proletarian nations," as opposed to the traditional notion of a working class. With such ideological innovations, Sultan Galiev and his contemporaries were able to reconcile Marxist nationalisms and Islam and devise an "Eastern strategy" whereby the national revolution was to be spread.

The authors show that the ideas of Muslim national communism persist in the land of their birth and have spread to such developing societies as China, Algeria, and Indonesia. This doctrine is an important factor in the ideological split and increasing tensions between industrial and nonindustrial nations, East and West, and now North and South, which grip the world communist movement.

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Muslim Women in Postcolonial Kenya

Leadership, Representation, and Social Change

Ousseina D. Alidou

University of Wisconsin Press, 2013

In education, journalism, legislative politics, social justice, health, law, and other arenas, Muslim women across Kenya are emerging as leaders in local, national, and international contexts, advancing reforms through their activism. Muslim Women in Postcolonial Kenya draws on extensive interviews with six such women, revealing how their religious and moral beliefs shape reform movements that bridge ethnic divides and foster alliances in service of creating a just, multicultural, multiethnic, and multireligious democratic citizenship.

Mwalim Azara Mudira opened a school of theology for Muslim women. Nazlin Omar Rajput of The Nur magazine was a pioneer in reporting on HIV/AIDS in the Muslim community. Amina Abubakar, host of a women's radio show, has publicly addressed the sensitive subject of sexual crimes against Muslim women. Two women who are members of parliament are creating new socioeconomic and political opportunities for girls and women, within a framework that still embraces traditional values of marriage and motherhood.

Examining the interplay of gender, agency, and autonomy, Ousseina D. Alidou shows how these Muslim women have effected change in the home, the school, the mosque, the media, and more—and she illuminates their determination as actors to challenge the oppressive influences of male-dominated power structures. In looking at differences as opportunities rather than obstacles, these women reflect a new sensibility among Muslim women and an effort to redefine the meaning of women's citizenship within their own community of faith and within the nation.

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Muslims Talking Politics

Framing Islam, Democracy, and Law in Northern Nigeria

Brandon Kendhammer

University of Chicago Press, 2016

For generations Islamic and Western intellectuals and policymakers have debated Islam’s compatibility with democratic government, usually with few solid conclusions. But where—Brandon Kendhammer asks in this book—have the voices of ordinary, working-class Muslims been in this conversation? Doesn’t the fate of democracy rest in their hands? Visiting with community members in northern Nigeria, he tells the complex story of the stunning return of democracy to a country that has also embraced Shariah law and endured the radical religious terrorism of Boko Haram.

Kendhammer argues that despite Nigeria’s struggles with jihadist insurgency, its recent history is really one of tenuous and fragile reconciliation between mass democratic aspirations and concerted popular efforts to preserve Islamic values in government and law. Combining an innovative analysis of Nigeria’s Islamic and political history with visits to the living rooms of working families, he sketches how this reconciliation has been constructed in the conversations, debates, and everyday experiences of Nigerian Muslims. In doing so, he uncovers valuable new lessons—ones rooted in the real politics of ordinary life—for how democracy might work alongside the legal recognition of Islamic values, a question that extends far beyond Nigeria and into the Muslim world at large.

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Muslims in a Post-9/11 America

A Survey of Attitudes and Beliefs and Their Implications for U.S. National Security Policy

Rachel M. Gillum

University of Michigan Press, 2018

Muslims in a Post-9/11 America examines how public fears about Muslims in the United States compare with the reality of American Muslims’ attitudes on a range of relevant issues. While most research on Muslim Americans focuses on Arab Muslims, a quarter of the Muslim American population, Rachel Gillum includes perspectives of Muslims from various ethnic and national communities—from African Americans to those of Pakistani, Iranian, or Eastern European descent. Using interviews and one of the largest nationwide surveys of Muslim Americans to date, Gillum examines more than three generations of Muslim American immigrants to assess how segments of the Muslim American community are integrating into the U.S. social fabric, and how they respond to post-9/11 policy changes. Gillum’s findings challenge perceptions of Muslims as a homogeneous, isolated, un-American, and potentially violent segment of the U.S. population.

Despite these realities, negative political rhetoric around Muslim Americans persists. The findings suggest that the policies designed to keep America safe from terrorist attacks may have eroded one of law enforcement’s greatest assets in the fight against violent extremism—a relationship of trust and goodwill between the Muslim American community and the U.S. government. Gillum argues for policies and law enforcement tactics that will bring nuanced understandings of this diverse category of Americans and build trust, rather than alienate Muslim communities.

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Muslims of Metropolis

The Stories of Three Immigrant Families in the West

Rajagopalan, Kavitha

Rutgers University Press, 2008

Finalist in the Non Fiction category of the 2009 Twelfth Annual Asian America Literary Award

The Muslim population globally is comprised of hundreds of ethnic, linguistic, and religious sub-communities. Yet, more often than not, the public conflates these diverse and unrelated communities, branding Muslim immigrants as a single, suspicious, and culturally antagonistic group of people. Generalizations like these have compromised many Muslim immigrants' sense of belonging and acceptance in places where they have lived, in some cases, for three or four generations.

In Muslims of Metropolis, Kavitha Rajagopalan takes a much needed step in personalizing and humanizing our understanding of the Muslim diaspora. Tracing the stories of three very different families-a Palestinian family moving to London, a Kurdish family moving to Berlin, and a Bangladeshi family moving to New York-she reveals a level of complexity and nuance that is seldom considered. Through their voices and in their words, Rajagopalan describes what prompted these families to leave home, what challenges they faced in adjusting to their new lives, and how they came to view their place in society. Interviews with community leaders, social justice organizations, and with academics and political experts in each of the countries add additional layers of insight to how broad political issues, like nationalist conflict, immigration reform, and antiterrorism strategies affect the lives of Muslims who have migrated in search of economic stability and personal happiness.

Although recent thinking about immigration policy in the United States and Europe emphasizes the importance of long-term integration, a global attitude that continues to sensationalize divisions between Muslim and other communities thwarts this possibility. Integration cannot occur with policy solutions alone-people must feel that they belong to a larger society. Whether read as simple stories or broader narratives, the voices in this revealing book are among the many speaking against generalization, prejudice, and fear that has so far surrounded Muslims living in the West.

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Mutant Ecologies

Manufacturing Life in the Age of Genomic Capital

Erica Borg

Pluto Press, 2022

How capitalism is reconfiguring the very texture of life

Mutant Ecologies traces the spinning of new synthetic threads into the web of life. It is a critical cartography of the shifting landscapes of capital accumulation conjured by recent developments in genomic science, genome editing, and the biotech industry.

CRISPR crops, fast-growing salmons, heat-resistant Slick™ cows, Friendly™ Mosquitoes, humanized mice, pigs growing human organs – these are but a few of the dazzling new life-forms that have recently emerged from corporate and university laboratories around the world, all promising to lubricate the circuits of capital accumulation in distinct ways. The deliberate induction of genetic mutations is increasingly central to business operations in a number of sectors, from agriculture to pharmaceuticals.

While the Nobel Committee recently proclaimed the life sciences to have entered 'a new epoch', the authors show how these technological innovations continue to operate within a socio-historical context defined by the iron rules of capitalist competition and exploitation. Capital no longer contents itself by simply appropriating the living bodies of plants and animals. It purposefully designs its internal metabolism, and in that way, it redesigns the countless living vectors that constitute the global biosphere. It is driving a biological revolution, which will ripple through the everyday lives of people everywhere.

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Muting Israeli Democracy

How Media and Cultural Policy Undermine Free Expression

Amit M. Schejter

University of Illinois Press, 2009

The result of years of critical analysis of Israeli media law, this book argues that the laws governing Israeli electronic media are structured to limit the boundaries of public discourse. Amit M. Schejter posits the theory of a "mute democracy," one in which the media are designed to provide a platform for some voices to be heard over others. While Israel's institutions may be democratic, and while the effect of these policies may be limited, this book contends that free speech in Israel is institutionally muted to ensure the continued domination of the Jewish majority and its preferred interpretation of what Israel means as a Jewish-democratic state. Analyzing a wide range of legal documents recorded in Israel from 1961 to 2007, Muting Israeli Democracy demonstrates in scrupulous detail how law and policy are used to promote the hegemonic national culture through the constraints and obligations set on electronic media.

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Mutual Integration in Immigration Society

An Epistemic Argument

Bodi Wang

Campus Verlag, 2023

A compelling argument for adopting the concept of “mutual integration” to overcome injustice and enhance social solidarity.

The public culture of the receiving society and the dominant understanding of belonging and political membership can influence the social participation of immigrants as much as immigration law. However, current discussions of integration focus primarily on the distribution of rights and neglect the role of tacit knowledge. Through a systematical and philosophical analysis of identity’s role in policymaking, governance, and social practice, Bodi Wang shows how a one-sided understanding of integration resembles “assimilation” and why integration should be expected from locals as well. This argument weaves together extensive findings in sociology, history, critical race theory, and Chinese philosophy with ethics and migration studies.

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My Brother's Keeper

George McGovern and Progressive Christianity

Mark A. Lempke

University of Massachusetts Press, 2017

George McGovern is chiefly remembered for his landslide loss to Richard Nixon in 1972. Yet at the time, his candidacy raised eyebrows by invoking the prophetic tradition, an element of his legacy that is little studied. In My Brother's Keeper, Mark A. Lempke explores the influence of McGovern's evangelical childhood, Social Gospel worldview, and conscientious Methodism on a campaign that brought antiwar activism into the mainstream.

McGovern's candidacy signified a passing of the torch within Christian social justice. He initially allied with the ecumenical movement and the mainline Protestant churches during a time when these institutions worked easily with liberal statesmen. But the senator also galvanized a dynamic movement of evangelicals rooted in the New Left, who would dominate subsequent progressive religious activism as the mainline entered a period of decline. My Brother's Keeper argues for the influential, and often unwitting, role McGovern played in fomenting a “Religious Left” in 1970s America, a movement that continues to this day. It joins a growing body of scholarship that complicates the dominant narrative of that era's conservative Christianity.

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My Father Said Yes

A White Pastor in Little Rock School Integration

Dunbar H. Ogden

Vanderbilt University Press, 2008

On September 4, 1957, the group of African American high school students who became known as the Little Rock Nine walked up to the front of Central High to enroll in school. They were turned away by the National Guard, who had been called out by Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus. "Blood will run in the streets," said Faubus, "if Negro pupils should attempt to enter Central High School." A mob seethed out front. The man who led the Nine up to the lines of the National Guard on that fateful morning was the author's father, a white Presbyterian pastor.

My Father Said Yes is the untold story of the Reverend Dunbar Ogden, who became the pro-integration leader in Little Rock's white community. He responded to a call for support from Daisy Bates, co-owner of the town's black newspaper. Both faced fierce opposition from within as well as from outside. Reverend Ogden lost his church and Daisy Bates lost her newspaper.

This memoir is also a moving father-son story. In this frank account, the author discusses the depression his father battled for most of his life, as well as the family tragedy of his brother's suicide.

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My Father Was a Freedom Fighter

Gaza's Untold Story

Ramzy Baroud

Pluto Press, 2010

Gaza is the frontline in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians and rarely out of the news, this book explores the daily lives of the people in the region, giving us an insight into what is at risk in each round of violence.

Ramzy Baroud tells his father's fascinating story. Driven out of his village to a refugee camp, he took up arms and fought the occupation at the same time raising a family and trying to do the best for his children. Baroud's vivid and honest account reveals the complex human beings; revolutionaries, great moms and dads, lovers, and comedians that make Gaza so much more than just a disputed territory.

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My Life as a Spy

Investigations in a Secret Police File

Katherine Verdery

Duke University Press, 2018

As Katherine Verdery observes, "There's nothing like reading your secret police file to make you wonder who you really are." In 1973 Verdery began her doctoral fieldwork in the Transylvanian region of Romania, ruled at the time by communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. She returned several times over the next twenty-five years, during which time the secret police—the Securitate—compiled a massive surveillance file on her. Reading through its 2,781 pages, she learned that she was "actually" a spy, a CIA agent, a Hungarian agitator, and a friend of dissidents: in short, an enemy of Romania. In My Life as a Spy she analyzes her file alongside her original field notes and conversations with Securitate officers. Verdery also talks with some of the informers who were close friends, learning the complex circumstances that led them to report on her, and considers how fieldwork and spying can be easily confused. Part memoir, part detective story, part anthropological analysis, My Life as a Spy offers a personal account of how government surveillance worked during the Cold War and how Verdery experienced living under it.

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My Odyssey Through the Underground Press

Michael Kindman

Michigan State University Press, 2011

In 1963, Michigan State University, the nation’s first land grant college, attracted a record number of National Merit Scholars by offering competitive scholarships. One of these exceptional students was Michael Kindman. After the beginning of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, Kindman, in line to be editor-in-chief of the official MSU student newspaper, felt compelled to seek a more radical forum of intellectual debate. In 1965, he dropped out of school and founded The Paper, one of the first five members of Underground Press Syndicate. This gripping autobiography follows Kindman’s inspiring journey of self-discovery, from MSU to Boston, where he joined the staff of Avatar, unaware that the large commune that controlled the paper was a charismatic cult. Five years later, he fled the commune’s outpost in Kansas and headed to San Francisco, where he came out as a gay man, changed his name to Mica, and continued his work as an activist and visionary.

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My Sister's Mother

A Memoir of War, Exile, and Stalin’s Siberia

Donna Solecka Urbikas

University of Wisconsin Press, 2019

Donna Solecka Urbikas grew up in the Midwest during the golden years of the American century. But her Polish-born mother and half sister had endured dehumanizing conditions during World War II, as slave laborers in Siberia. War and exile created a profound bond between mother and older daughter, one that Donna would struggle to find with either of them.
In 1940, Janina Ślarzynska and her five-year-old daughter Mira were taken by Soviet secret police (NKVD) from their small family farm in eastern Poland and sent to Siberia with hundreds of thousands of others. So began their odyssey of hunger, disease, cunning survival, desperate escape across a continent, and new love amidst terrible circumstances.
But in the 1950s, baby boomer Donna yearns for a “normal” American family while Janina and Mira are haunted by the past. In this unforgettable memoir, Donna recounts her family history and her own survivor’s story, finally understanding the damaged mother who had saved her sister.

Finalist, Best Traditional Non-Fiction Book, Chicago Writers Association

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Myanmar's Education Reforms

A pathway to social justice?

Marie Lall

University College London, 2020

Myanmar’s Education Reforms reviews the changing state of education in Myanmar as the country has dealt with a profound transformation over the past decade and a half. Education has served as a litmus test for judging the level of openness of any Myanmar government, especially those in place for the past seven decades. Marie Lall situates education within the context of the wider reforms and the process of making peace that began in 2012, using it as a case study on how these reforms have progressed and continue to progress. Drawing on data collected over fifteen years in the field, Lall argues that despite controlling the majority of the civilian government, the National League for Democracy is not delivering on its promise of social justice.

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Mysore Modern

Rethinking the Region under Princely Rule

Janaki Nair

University of Minnesota Press, 2011

Mysore Modern reconceptualizes modernity in India using the history of the Princely State of Mysore. In this forcefully argued work, Janaki Nair critiques earlier notions of the native states of India as spaces that were either defined entirely by the dominant narratives of colonial/national modernity or were relatively untouched by them.

Grounded in political history, and deriving insights from a wide range of visual, social, and legal texts and issues, Mysore Modern reperiodizes the modern by connecting these apparently discrepant registers to build up a case for a specifically regional, “monarchical modern” moment in Indian history. Nair examines mural and portraiture traditions, as well as forms of memorialization and nationalization of art and architectural practices. The volume also considers bureaucratic efforts centered on the use of law and development as instruments of modernity.

As Nair demonstrates, the resolution of struggles about the significance of the past in the present, the control of women’s sexuality and labor, and the role of the bureaucracy in Mysore reveal the imperatives of taking the region as the inaugural site for writing a history of Indian modernity.

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México Between Feast and Famine

Food, Corporate Power, and Inequality

Enrique C. Ochoa

University of Arizona Press, 2025

As the birthplace of maize and a celebrated culinary destination, Mexico stands at the crossroads of gastronomic richness and stark social disparities. In México Between Feast and Famine Enrique C. Ochoa unveils the historical and contemporary forces behind Mexico’s polarized food systems.

México Between Feast and Famine provides one of the first comprehensive analyses of Mexico’s food systems and how they reflect the contradictions and inequalities at the heart of Mexico. Ochoa examines the historical roots and contemporary manifestations of neoliberal policies that have reshaped food production, distribution, and consumption in Mexico. Ochoa analyzes the histories of Mexico’s mega food companies, including GRUMA, Bimbo, Oxxo, Aurrera/Walmex, and reveals how corporations have captured the food system at the same time that diet-related diseases have soared. The author not only examines the economic and political dimensions of food production but also interrogates the social and cultural impacts.

As debates around food sovereignty, globalization, and sustainable development intensify globally, México Between Feast and Famine provides a timely analysis that counters conventional narratives about Mexican cuisine. Even as it looks back, this work looks to the future, where more equitable and sustainable food systems prioritize social justice and community well-being.

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