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155 books match the query 'Toward' and 10 start with r

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REMEX

By Amy Sara Carroll

University of Texas Press, 2017

REMEX presents the first comprehensive examination of artistic responses and contributions to an era defined by the North American Free Trade Agreement (1994–2008). Marshaling over a decade’s worth of archival research, interviews, and participant observation in Mexico City and the Mexico–US borderlands, Amy Sara Carroll considers individual and collective art practices, recasting NAFTA as the most fantastical inter-American allegory of the turn of the millennium. Carroll organizes her interpretations of performance, installation, documentary film, built environment, and body, conceptual, and Internet art around three key coordinates—City, Woman, and Border. She links the rise of 1990s Mexico City art in the global market to the period’s consolidation of Mexico–US border art as a genre. She then interrupts this transnational art history with a sustained analysis of chilanga and Chicana artists’ remapping of the figure of Mexico as Woman.

A tour de force that depicts a feedback loop of art and public policy—what Carroll terms the “allegorical performative”—REMEX adds context to the long-term effects of the post-1968 intersection of D.F. performance and conceptualism, centralizes women artists’ embodied critiques of national and global master narratives, and tracks post-1984 border art’s “undocumentation” of racialized and sexualized reconfigurations of North American labor pools. The book’s featured artwork becomes the lens through which Carroll rereads a range of events and phenomenon from California’s Proposition 187 to Zapatismo, US immigration policy, 9/11 (1973/2001), femicide in Ciudad Juárez, and Mexico’s war on drugs.

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Racing Translingualism in Composition

Toward a Race-Conscious Translingualism

edited by Tom Do and Karen Rowan

Utah State University Press, 2022

Racing Translingualism provides both theoretical and pedagogical reconsiderations of the translingual approach to language diversity by addressing the intersections of race and translingualism.

This collection extends the disciplinary conversations about translingualism by foregrounding the role race and racism play in the construction and maintenance of language differences. In doing so, the contributors examine the co-naturalization of race and language in order to theorize a race-conscious translingual praxis. The book begins by offering generative critiques of translingualism, centering on the ways in which the approach’s democratic orientation to language avoids issues of race, language, and power and appeals to colorblind racist tropes of equal opportunity. Following these critiques, contributors demonstrate the important intersections of race and translingualism by drawing upon voices typically marginalized by monolingual language ideologies and pedagogies. Finally, Racing Translingualism concludes by attending to the pedagogical implications of a race-conscious translingual praxis in writing and literacy education.

Making the case for race-conscious, rather than colorblind, theories and pedagogies, Racing Translingualism offers a unique take on how translingualism is theorized and practiced and moves the field forward through its direct consideration of the links between language, race, and racism.

Contributors: Lindsey Albracht, Steven Alvarez, Bethany Davila, Tom Do, Jaclyn Hilberg, Bruce Horner, Aja Martinez, Esther Milu, Stephanie Mosher, Yasmine Romero, Karen Rowan, Rachael Shapiro, Shawanda Stewart, Brian Stone, Victor Villanueva, Missy Watson

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Rascuache Lawyer

Toward a Theory of Ordinary Litigation

Alfredo Mirandé

University of Arizona Press, 2011

Alfredo Mirandé, a sociology professor, Stanford Law graduate, and part-time pro bono attorney, represents clients who are rascuache—a Spanish word for “poor” or even “wretched”—and on the margins of society. For Mirandé, however, rascuache means to be “down but not out,” an underdog who is still holding its ground. Rascuache Lawyer offers a unique perspective on providing legal services to poor, usually minority, folks who are often just one short step from jail. Not only a passionate argument for rascuache lawyering, it is also a thoughtful, practical attempt to apply and test critical race theory—particularly Latino critical race theory—in day-to-day legal practice.

Every chapter presents an actual case from Mirandé’s experience (only the names and places have been changed). His clients have been charged with everything from carrying a concealed weapon, indecent exposure, and trespassing to attempted murder, domestic violence, and child abuse. Among them are recent Mexican immigrants, drug addicts, gang members, and the homeless. All of them are destitute, and many are victims of racial profiling. Some “pay” Mirandé with bartered services such as painting, home repairs, or mechanical work on his car. And Mirandé doesn’t always win their cases. But, as he recounts, he certainly works tirelessly to pursue all legal remedies.

Each case is presented as a letter to a fascinating (fictional) “Super Chicana” named Fermina Gabriel, who we are told is an accomplished lawyer, author, and singer. This narrative device allows the author to present his cases as if he were recounting them to a friend, drawing in the reader as a friend as well.

Bookending the individual cases, Mirandé’s introductions and conclusions offer a compelling vision of progressive legal practice grounded in rascuache lawyering.

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Raveling the Brain

Toward a Transdisciplinary Neurorhetoric

Jordynn Jack

The Ohio State University Press, 2019

Humans have always been fascinated by the workings of the mind and now, more than ever, neuroscience has become a popular area of inquiry. While neuroscience advertises itself as an interdisciplinary field, drawing on biology, physics, engineering, and psychology, to date it has engaged less often with the humanities. In this transdisciplinary work, Jordynn Jack aims to show how the humanities—and in particular, rhetoric—have much to add to the neurosciences, offering rich insights into the ways in which the brain is enmeshed in the body, in culture, and in discourse.
Jack first looks at the problem of “neurohype”—exaggerated or oversimplified claims that essentialize brains and make them “uncritically real”—questioning some of the fundamental assumptions about the brain that experimental protocols and psychological concepts rely on. Then, through examples of research on sex and gender, political orientation, and affect, Jack demonstrates how a rhetorical-material approach can help to generate alternative approaches to studying the brain that might mitigate the problem of neurohype. By raveling out the roots of neurohype and raveling back its use through time, Raveling the Brain shows how rhetoric and neuroscience might be raveled together, or intertwined, to create a stronger transdisciplinary approach that might enrich our understanding of those issues of interest to neuroscientists and humanists alike.

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Reading Machines

Toward and Algorithmic Criticism

Stephen Ramsay

University of Illinois Press, 2011

Besides familiar and now-commonplace tasks that computers do all the time, what else are they capable of? Stephen Ramsay's intriguing study of computational text analysis examines how computers can be used as "reading machines" to open up entirely new possibilities for literary critics. Computer-based text analysis has been employed for the past several decades as a way of searching, collating, and indexing texts. Despite this, the digital revolution has not penetrated the core activity of literary studies: interpretive analysis of written texts.

Computers can handle vast amounts of data, allowing for the comparison of texts in ways that were previously too overwhelming for individuals, but they may also assist in enhancing the entirely necessary role of subjectivity in critical interpretation. Reading Machines discusses the importance of this new form of text analysis conducted with the assistance of computers. Ramsay suggests that the rigidity of computation can be enlisted in the project of intuition, subjectivity, and play.

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Reading for the Planet

Toward a Geomethodology

Christian Moraru

University of Michigan Press, 2015

In his new book, Christian Moraru argues that post-Cold War culture in general and, in particular, the literature, philosophy, and theory produced since 9/11 foreground an emergent “planetary” imaginary—a “planetarism”—binding in unprecedented ways the world’s peoples, traditions, and aesthetic practices. This imaginary, Moraru further contends, speaks to a world condition (“planetarity”) increasingly exhibited by human expression worldwide. Grappling with the symptoms of planetarity in the arts and the human sciences, the author insists, is a major challenge for today’s scholars—a challenge Reading for the Planet means to address. Thus, Moraru takes decisive steps toward a critical methodology—a “geomethodology”—for dealing with planetarism’s aesthetic and philosophical projections. Here, Moraru analyzes novels by Joseph O’Neill, Mircea Cartarescu, Sorj Chalandon, Zadie Smith, Orhan Pamuk, and Dai Sijie, among others, as demonstration of his paradigm.

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Realignment in American Politics

Toward a Theory

Edited by Bruce A. Campbell and Richard J. Trilling

University of Texas Press, 1980

To have a voice in shaping government policy has been a goal of the American people since the nation's founding. Yet, government seems even less accessible now than in the past. An increasing rate of incumbency in Congress, the unwieldy committee system that controls legislation, and the decline of political parties have all weakened representation and alienated Americans from the seat of power. The one remaining way to produce major and coherent change in national policy is through partisan realignment—a sharp, enduring shift in voter support of the two major parties. This book is about the phenomenon of realignment in American politics. It not only brings together and assesses previous work in the area but also breaks new ground in the analysis of the effects of realignment on political elites and public policy. In addition, it is the first study to present an integrated theory of realignment that can be applied to the understanding of mass, elite, and policy change in times of social crisis. Contributors include Lawrence McMichael, David Nexon, Louis Seagull, Robert Lehnen, Philip Converse, Gregory Markus, Lester Seligman, Michael King, David Brady, Kenneth Meier, Kenneth Kramer, David Adamany, Charles Stewart, Susan Hansen, and the editors.Bruce A. Campbell taught political science at the University of Georgia. He is the author of The American Electorate.

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Redescriptions

Toward a New Comparative Religion

Russell T. McCutcheon

Rutgers University Press, 2027

Although religion has long occupied the attention of scholars it has uniformly been assumed by them to be a special case, either to be nurtured and curated or explained away by developing theories specifically suited to it. This bracketing of our object of study has isolated the field and made it difficult for many to understand: Is religion a theological enterprise? Is it suited to the public university? Does it offend against some people’s sensibilities? Redescriptions: Toward a New Comparative Religion proposes a model for how to address this ambiguity by averring that the things scholars call religion are simply routine human doings that are therefore comparable to any other aspect of culture. The book offers a series of controlled experiments in which some novel conclusions about seemingly religious items—from myths of origins to memorials for the dead—are reached by placing them into some unexpected relationships of comparison.

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Regimes of Violence

Toward a Political Anthropology

John Protevi

University of Minnesota Press, 2025

A wide-ranging examination of the roots—and possible future—of violence in human societies

Is aggression inevitable among humans? In Regimes of Violence, John Protevi explores how human violence originates and exists in our societies. Taking humans as biocultural (that is, our social practices shape our bodies and minds), he shows how aggression does not arrive from any purely biological predisposition but rather occurs only in social regimes of violence that, by manipulating the ways in which culture can shape our biological inheritance of rage and aggression, condition the forms of violence able to be expressed at any one time.

Offering detailed insights into human aggression throughout history, Protevi’s analysis ranges from evolutionary psychology to affective ideology and finally to an alternate politics of joy. He examines a wide range of seemingly disparate topics, such as cooperation between early nomadic foragers, organized sports, berserkers and blackout rages, the experiences of maroons escaping slavery, the January 6 invasion of the United States Capitol building, and responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. As he entwines the philosophical with the anthropological, he asks readers to consider why humans’ capacity for cooperation and sharing is so persistently overlooked by stories that focus on aggression and warfare.

Regimes of Violence is an important contribution to studies of Deleuze and Guattari, uniquely combining cutting-edge investigations in psychology, history, evolutionary theory, cultural anthropology, and philosophy to examine the “political philosophy of the mind.” Presenting to readers a refreshingly optimistic perspective, Protevi demonstrates that we are not doomed to war and argues that humans can build a world based on antifascism, joy, and mutual empowerment.

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