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66 books match the query 'Challenges' and 5 start with s

cover of Science Unlimited?: The Challenges of Scientism

Science Unlimited?

The Challenges of Scientism

Edited by Maarten Boudry and Massimo Pigliucci

University of Chicago Press, 2017

All too often in contemporary discourse, we hear about science overstepping its proper limits—about its brazenness, arrogance, and intellectual imperialism. The problem, critics say, is scientism: the privileging of science over all other ways of knowing. Science, they warn, cannot do or explain everything, no matter what some enthusiasts believe. In Science Unlimited?, noted philosophers of science Maarten Boudry and Massimo Pigliucci gather a diverse group of scientists, science communicators, and philosophers of science to explore the limits of science and this alleged threat of scientism.

In this wide-ranging collection, contributors ask whether the term scientism in fact (or in belief) captures an interesting and important intellectual stance, and whether it is something that should alarm us. Is scientism a well-developed position about the superiority of science over all other modes of human inquiry? Or is it more a form of excessive confidence, an uncritical attitude of glowing admiration? What, if any, are its dangers? Are fears that science will marginalize the humanities and eradicate the human subject—that it will explain away emotion, free will, consciousness, and the mystery of existence—justified? Does science need to be reined in before it drives out all other disciplines and ways of knowing? Both rigorous and balanced, Science Unlimited? interrogates our use of a term that is now all but ubiquitous in a wide variety of contexts and debates. Bringing together scientists and philosophers, both friends and foes of scientism, it is a conversation long overdue.
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cover of Screening the Transition: Spanish Cinema and the Challenges of Democracy

Screening the Transition

Spanish Cinema and the Challenges of Democracy

Federico Bonaddio

Intellect Books, 2026

A timely study of Spanish cinema during the country’s transition to democracy, including how popular and auteur films grappled with the authoritarian past. 

Screening the Transition examines how Spanish cinema produced in the years immediately following Francisco Franco’s death articulated—through its narratives and characterizations—the social and cultural challenges encountered during the country’s transition to democracy. These films reflect emergent post-dictatorship realities, including increased openness toward sexuality and nudity; the erosion of traditional family structures; persistent attachments to, and reckonings with, the Francoist past; the development of political plurality and expanded freedom of expression; and various forms of marginalization, whether economic or based on gender and sexuality. In doing so, the analysis conceptualizes Spain’s transition not solely in political terms, as is commonly the case, but as a profoundly personal and affective process.

Federico Bonaddio demonstrates the limitations of cinema in this period, which at times revealed an inability to transcend deep-seated prejudices and forms of reticence cultivated over nearly four decades of authoritarian rule. These limitations surface in the prurient treatment of female nudity and sexual violence; in the deployment of comedy to belittle or trivialize democratic change; in a preference for metaphor and allegory over direct political engagement; and in the restricted investigative ambitions of historical dramas.

Considering both popular and auteur cinema, the book is primarily concerned with how filmmaking registered the difficulties of consigning the dictatorship fully to the past, despite the so-called pact of forgetting promoted by political elites to facilitate national reconciliation.

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cover of Shakespearean Cultures: Latin America and the Challenges of Mimesis in Non-Hegemonic Circumstances

Shakespearean Cultures

Latin America and the Challenges of Mimesis in Non-Hegemonic Circumstances

João Cezar de Castro Rocha

Michigan State University Press, 2019

In Shakespearean Cultures, René Girard’s ideas on violence and the sacred inform an innovative analysis of contemporary Latin America. Castro Rocha proposes a new theoretical framework based upon the “poetics of emulation” and offers a groundbreaking approach to understanding the asymmetries of the modern world. Shakespearean cultures are those whose self-perception originates in the gaze of a hegemonic Other. The poetics of emulation is a strategy developed in situations of asymmetrical power relations. This strategy encompasses an array of procedures employed by artists, intellectuals, and writers situated at the less-favored side of such exchanges, whether they be cultural, political, or economic in nature. The framework developed in this book yields thought-provoking readings of canonical authors such as William Shakespeare, Gustave Flaubert, and Joseph Conrad. At the same time, it favors the insertion of Latin American authors into the comparative scope of world literature, and stages an unprecedented dialogue among European, North American, and Latin American readers of René Girard’s work. 
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cover of Southern Illinois University at 150 Years: Growth, Accomplishments, and Challenges

Southern Illinois University at 150 Years

Growth, Accomplishments, and Challenges

Edited by John S. Jackson with a Foreword by Carlo Montemagno and Contributions by Steve Buhman and Vanessa A. Sneed

Southern Illinois University Press, 2019

Chartered in 1869, Southern Illinois University has been a stalwart presence on the southern Illinois landscape for a century and a half. This book celebrates the 150th anniversary of the university’s founding by exploring in depth its history since 1969, when the last book to celebrate a major anniversary was published.

Chapters reflect on SIU’s successful athletics program, the various colleges and departments within the university, the diverse holdings and collections of the library, the unique innovative research enterprises, and special programs such as the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute and Touch of Nature Environmental Center.

Although SIU may be a typical large public university in many ways, its unique location, history, and culture have made it a distinct institution of higher education. Located close to the Shawnee National Forest and Giant City State Park, the landscape is an indelible part of SIU, contributing to both the beauty of the university grounds and the campus culture.

The university’s sesquicentennial provides a wonderful opportunity to revisit all that makes SIU amazing. Illustrated with 306 photographs of theater and music performances, art, sports, past and present students, faculty, staff, administration, politicians, community members, successful alums, distinguished visitors, and patrons of the university buildings, and landscapes, Southern Illinois University at 150 Years captures the university’s story in all its vivid color.
 
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cover of Subverting Colonial Authority: Challenges to Spanish Rule in Eighteenth-Century Southern Andes

Subverting Colonial Authority

Challenges to Spanish Rule in Eighteenth-Century Southern Andes

Sergio Serulnikov

Duke University Press, 2003

This innovative political history provides a new perspective on the enduring question of the origins and nature of the Indian revolts against the Spanish that exploded in the southern Andean highlands in the 1780s. Subverting Colonial Authority focuses on one of the main—but least studied—centers of rebel activity during the age of the Túpac Amaru revolution: the overwhelmingly indigenous Northern Potosí region of present-day Bolivia. Tracing how routine political conflict developed into large-scale violent upheaval, Sergio Serulnikov explores the changing forms of colonial domination and peasant politics in the area from the 1740s (the starting point of large political and economic transformations) through the early 1780s, when a massive insurrection of the highland communities shook the foundations of Spanish rule.

Drawing on court records, government papers, personal letters, census documents, and other testimonies from Bolivian and Argentine archives, Subverting Colonial Authority addresses issues that illuminate key aspects of indigenous rebellion, European colonialism, and Andean cultural history. Serulnikov analyzes long-term patterns of social conflict rooted in local political cultures and regionally based power relations. He examines the day-to-day operations of the colonial system of justice within the rural villages as well as the sharp ideological and political strife among colonial ruling groups. Highlighting the emergence of radical modes of anticolonial thought and ethnic cooperation, he argues that Andean peasants were able to overcome entrenched tendencies toward internal dissension and fragmentation in the very process of marshaling both law and force to assert their rights and hold colonial authorities accountable. Along the way, Serulnikov shows, they not only widened the scope of their collective identities but also contradicted colonial ideas of indigenous societies as either secluded cultures or pliant objects of European rule.

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