22279 books match the query 'Social Science' and 1635 start with s

cover of Shamans and Robots: On Ritual, the Placebo Effect, and Artificial Consciousness

Shamans and Robots

On Ritual, the Placebo Effect, and Artificial Consciousness

Roger Bartra

University of Minnesota Press, 2024

A profound exploration of the external influences that shape human consciousness, from healing rituals to digital devices

In this voyage through thousands of years of psychosomatic healing, distinguished anthropologist and sociologist Roger Bartra examines the placebo effect as a key to our understanding of human consciousness. Shamans and Robots demonstrates how biology and technology become intertwined within human culture by using the various histories of ritual and symbolic healing to speculate about future developments in artificial intelligence.

Charting the extensive history of the placebo effect through medieval healing, shamanism, and early psychoanalytic practices, Bartra posits that consciousness is not simply the province of the mind but something equally shaped by external systems and objects. He finds evidence of this “exocerebrum”—the extension of our brains outside the body—in the shamanistic concept of the placebo, in which external objects heal our bodies, and in modern technical devices like prostheses or robots, whose development of a mechanical consciousness would have to mimic, and in turn elucidate, the processes involved in the creation of consciousness in humans. Through this radical concept, he analyzes digital media’s relationship to the functions of the human brain and probes the possibility of artificial consciousness.

Both a look at the human body’s potential to restore itself and a profound reflection on the curative power of symbolic structures, Shamans and Robots explores how our technologies increasingly serve as extensions of our cognitive selves.

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cover of Shamans of the Foye Tree: Gender, Power, and Healing among Chilean Mapuche

Shamans of the Foye Tree

Gender, Power, and Healing among Chilean Mapuche

By Ana Mariella Bacigalupo

University of Texas Press, 2007

Drawing on anthropologist Ana Mariella Bacigalupo's fifteen years of field research, Shamans of the Foye Tree: Gender, Power, and Healing among Chilean Mapuche is the first study to follow shamans' gender identities and performance in a variety of ritual, social, sexual, and political contexts.

To Mapuche shamans, or machi, the foye tree is of special importance, not only for its medicinal qualities but also because of its hermaphroditic flowers, which reflect the gender-shifting components of machi healing practices. Framed by the cultural constructions of gender and identity, Bacigalupo's fascinating findings span the ways in which the Chilean state stigmatizes the machi as witches and sexual deviants; how shamans use paradoxical discourses about gender to legitimatize themselves as healers and, at the same time, as modern men and women; the tree's political use as a symbol of resistance to national ideologies; and other components of these rich traditions.

The first comprehensive study on Mapuche shamans' gendered practices, Shamans of the Foye Tree offers new perspectives on this crucial intersection of spiritual, social, and political power.

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cover of Shame: A Brief History

Shame

A Brief History

Peter Stearns

University of Illinois Press, 2017

Shame varies as an individual experience and in its manifestations across time and cultures. Groups establish identity and enforce social behaviors through shame and shaming, while attempts at shaming often provoke a social or political backlash. Yet historians often neglect shame’s power to complicate individual, international, cultural, and political relationships.

Peter N. Stearns draws on his long career as a historian of emotions to provide the foundational text on shame’s history and how this history contributes to contemporary issues around the emotion. Summarizing current research, Stearns unpacks the major debates that surround this complex emotion. He also surveys the changing role of shame in the United States from the nineteenth century to today, including shame’s revival as a force in the 1960s and its place in today’s social media. Looking ahead, he maps the abundant opportunities for future historical research and historically informed interdisciplinary scholarship.

Written for interested readers and scholars alike, Shame combines significant new research with a wider synthesis.

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cover of Shameful Victory: The Los Angeles Dodgers, the Red Scare, and the Hidden History of Chavez Ravine

Shameful Victory

The Los Angeles Dodgers, the Red Scare, and the Hidden History of Chavez Ravine

John H. M. Laslett

University of Arizona Press, 2015

On May 8, 1959, the evening news shocked Los Angeles residents, who saw LA County sheriffs carrying a Mexican American woman from her home in Chavez Ravine not far from downtown. Immediately afterward, the house was bulldozed to the ground. This violent act was the last step in the forced eviction of 3,500 families from the unique hilltop barrio that in 1962 became the home of the Los Angeles Dodgers.

John H. M. Laslett offers a new interpretation of the Chavez Ravine tragedy, paying special attention to the early history of the barrio, the reform of Los Angeles's destructive urban renewal policies, and the influence of the evictions on the collective memory of the Mexican American community.

In addition to examining the political decisions made by power brokers at city hall, Shameful Victory argues that the tragedy exerted a much greater influence on the history of the Los Angeles civil rights movement than has hitherto been appreciated. The author also sheds fresh light on how the community grew, on the experience of individual home owners who were evicted from the barrio, and on the influence that the event had on the development of recent Chicano/a popular music, drama, and literature.
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cover of Shamewreck: Essays

Shamewreck

Essays

Peggy Shinner

The Ohio State University Press, 2027

For readers of Eula Biss and Cathy Park Hong, essays that knit cultural criticism, social history, and personal experience to excavate the entanglements of shame, power, language, and identity.

In Shamewreck, Peggy Shinner interrogates the entanglement of shame and language, casting shame as a moral force, a conscience-beast, an umpire, the fellow who awaits when you come home. She grapples with the nuclear bombing of Bikini Atoll and the emergence, four days later, of the bikini in Paris; the link between property and personhood and what it means to die without possessions; the mutability of language and how shamefaced once meant “modest and bashful,” before morphing into “abashed and ashamed”; how talkative women were thought to be sloppy women, like Eve (loose of mouth and morals ); how occupation once meant “heterosexual intercourse” and now means “military invasion.” Parsing the dark undercurrents of popular culture alongside her own experiences as a queer woman, Shinner exhorts us to abandon willful unseeing and consider the legacies of language. Take a look, she urges, you can buy a new car in twenty-first-century America and for your money get two masters and a slave key. Shamewreck complicates our notions of shame and shamelessness and rescues them from the refuse pile, reclaiming shame as a potent moral adjudicator.
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cover of Shaming into Brown: Somatic Transactions of Race in Latina/o Literature

Shaming into Brown

Somatic Transactions of Race in Latina/o Literature

Stephanie Fetta

The Ohio State University Press, 2018

Winner of the 2019 MLA Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies

In Shaming into Brown: Somatic Transactions of Race in Latina/o Literature, Stephanie Fetta asserts that our bodies are fundamental to how we live and how we make meaning. Anchored by two psychoanalytic theories, bioenergetic analysis developed by Alexander Lowen and affect theory put forth by Silvan Tomkins, Fetta examines Latinx fiction to draw attention to the cultural role of the intelligent, emotional, and communicative body—the soma—in relation to shame. She argues that we bring the soma—the physical, emotive, and social register of our subjectivity—to the text as we do to our lives,proposing that the power of racialization operates at the level of somatic expression and reception through habituated, socially cued behaviors that are not readily subject to intentional control.

Fetta examines shame beyond individual experiences, looking at literary renderings of the cultural practice of racial shaming that are deeply embedded into our laws, hiring practices, marketing strategies, and more. Grounding her analysis in the works of Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, Shaming into Brown focuses on exposing the underpinnings of racialized shame and does so through analyzing “scenes of racialization” in prominent works by authors such as Junot Díaz, Sandra Cisneros, and Oscar Zeta Acosta.
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cover of Shanghai Nightscapes: A Nocturnal Biography of a Global City

Shanghai Nightscapes

A Nocturnal Biography of a Global City

James Farrer and Andrew David Field

University of Chicago Press, 2015

The pulsing beat of its nightlife has long drawn travelers to the streets of Shanghai, where the night scene is a crucial component of the city’s image as a global metropolis. In Shanghai Nightscapes, sociologist James Farrer and historian Andrew David Field examine the cosmopolitan nightlife culture that first arose in Shanghai in the 1920s and that has been experiencing a revival since the 1980s. Drawing on over twenty years of fieldwork and hundreds of interviews, the authors spotlight a largely hidden world of nighttime pleasures—the dancing, drinking, and socializing going on in dance clubs and bars that have flourished in Shanghai over the last century.

The book begins by examining the history of the jazz-age dance scenes that arose in the ballrooms and nightclubs of Shanghai’s foreign settlements. During its heyday in the 1930s, Shanghai was known worldwide for its jazz cabarets that fused Chinese and Western cultures. The 1990s have seen the proliferation of a drinking, music, and sexual culture collectively constructed to create new contact zones between the local and tourist populations. Today’s Shanghai night scenes are simultaneously spaces of inequality and friction, where men and women from many different walks of life compete for status and attention, and spaces of sociability, in which intercultural communities are formed. Shanghai Nightscapes highlights the continuities in the city’s nightlife across a turbulent century, as well as the importance of the multicultural agents of nightlife in shaping cosmopolitan urban culture in China’s greatest global city.

To listen to an audio diary of a night out in Shanghai with Farrer and Field, click here: http://n.pr/1VsIKAw.
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cover of Shanghai Rising: State Power and Local Transformations in a Global Megacity

Shanghai Rising

State Power and Local Transformations in a Global Megacity

Xiangming Chen

University of Minnesota Press, 2009

Analyzing a Chinese city’s dazzling rise to global megacity status

Until around 1990, Shanghai was China’s premier but sluggish industrial center. Now at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the joint impact of global forces and state power has turned Shanghai into a dynamic megacity. Shanghai’s remarkable growth in economy, infrastructure, and global presence has prompted questions about the Shanghai “miracle.” This collection places the city’s unprecedented rise in a rare comparative examination of U.S. cities, as well as with Asian megacities Singapore and Hong Kong, providing a nuanced account of how Shanghai’s politics, economy, society, and space have been transformed by macro- and micro-level forces.

Contributors: Stephen W. K. Chiu, Chinese U of Hong Kong; K. C. Ho, National U of Singapore; John D. Kasarda, U of North Carolina; Hanlong Lu, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences; Tai-lok Lui, Chinese U of Hong Kong; Ann R. Markusen, U of Minnesota; Anthony M. Orum, U of Illinois, Chicago; Yuan Ren, Fudan U Shanghai; Saskia Sassen, Columbia U; Jiaming Sun, Texas A&M U, Commerce; Fulong Wu, Cardiff U; Pingkang Yu, George Washington U; Tingwei Zhang, U of Illinois, Chicago; Zhenhua Zhou, Development Research Center, Shanghai Municipal Government.
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cover of Shanghai and the Edges of Empires

Shanghai and the Edges of Empires

Meng Yue

University of Minnesota Press, 2006

Even before the romanticized golden era of Shanghai in the 1930s, the famed Asian city was remarkable for its uniqueness and East-meets-West cosmopolitanism. Meng Yue analyzes a century-long shift of urbanity from China’s heartland to its shore. During the period between the decline of Jiangnan cities such as Suzhou and Yangzhou and Shanghai’s early twentieth-century rise, the overlapping cultural edges of a failing Chinese royal order and the encroachment of Western imperialists converged. Simultaneously appropriating and resisting imposing forces, Shanghai opened itself to unruly, subversive practices, becoming a crucible of creativity and modernism. 

Calling into question conventional ways of conceptualizing modernity, colonialism, and intercultural relations, Meng Yue examines such cultural practices as the work of the commercial press, street theater, and literary arts, and shows that what appear to be minor cultural changes often signal the presence of larger political and economic developments. Engaging theories of modernity and postcolonial and global cultural studies, Meng Yue reveals the paradoxical interdependence between imperial and imperialist histories and the retranslation of culture that characterized the most notable result of China’s urban relocation—the emergence of the international city of Shanghai. 

Meng Yue is assistant professor of East Asian languages and literature at the University of California, Irvine.
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cover of Shanghai: A Novel by Yokomitsu Riichi

Shanghai

A Novel by Yokomitsu Riichi

Yokomitsu Riichi; Translated with a Postscript by Dennis Washburn

University of Michigan Press, 2001

Published serially between 1928 and 1931, Shanghai tells the story of a group of Japanese expatriates living in the International Settlement at the time of the May 30th Incident of 1925. The personal lives and desires of the main characters play out against a historical backdrop of labor unrest, factional intrigue, colonialist ambitions, and racial politics.
The author, Yokomitsu Riichi (1898–1947), was an essayist, writer, and critical theorist who became one of the most powerful and influential literary figures in Japan during the 1920s and 1930s. In 1924 Yokomitsu joined with Kataoka Teppei and Kawabata Yasunari to found the Shinkankaku-ha (New Sensation School), artists who looked to contemporary avant-garde movements in Europe—Dadaism, futurism, surrealism, expressionism—for inspiration in their effort to explode the conventions of literary language and to break free of what they saw as the prisonhouse of modern culture. A key feature of the school’s experiments was the use of jarring imagery that originated in the visual effects of cinema.
Yokomitsu incorporated the striking visuality of his early experimental style into a realistic mode that presents a disturbing picture of a city in turmoil. The result is a brilliant evocation of Shanghai as a gritty ideological battleground where dreams of sexual and economic domination are nurtured.
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cover of Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship

Shapeshifters

Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship

Aimee Meredith Cox

Duke University Press, 2015

In Shapeshifters Aimee Meredith Cox explores how young Black women in a Detroit homeless shelter contest stereotypes, critique their status as partial citizens, and negotiate poverty, racism, and gender violence to create and imagine lives for themselves. Based on eight years of fieldwork at the Fresh Start shelter, Cox shows how the shelter's residents—who range in age from fifteen to twenty-two—employ strategic methods she characterizes as choreography to disrupt the social hierarchies and prescriptive narratives that work to marginalize them. Among these are dance and poetry, which residents learn in shelter workshops. These outlets for performance and self-expression, Cox shows, are key to the residents exercising their agency, while their creation of alternative family structures demands a rethinking of notions of care, protection, and love. Cox also uses these young women's experiences to tell larger stories: of Detroit's history, the Great Migration, deindustrialization, the politics of respectability, and the construction of Black girls and women as social problems. With Shapeshifters Cox gives a voice to young Black women who find creative and non-normative solutions to the problems that come with being young, Black, and female in America.
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cover of Shapeshifting Subjects: Gloria Anzaldua's Naguala and Border Arte

Shapeshifting Subjects

Gloria Anzaldua's Naguala and Border Arte

Kelli D. Zaytoun

University of Illinois Press, 2022

Kelli D. Zaytoun draws on Gloria Anzaldúa's thought to present a radically inclusive and expansive approach to selfhood, creativity, scholarship, healing, coalition-building, and activism. Zaytoun focuses on Anzaldúa's naguala/ shapeshifter, a concept of nagualismo. This groundbreaking theory of subjectivity details a dynamic relationship between “inner work” and "public acts" that strengthens individuals' roles in social and transformative justice work. Zaytoun's detailed emphasis on la naguala, and Nahua metaphysics specifically, brings much needed attention to Anzaldúa's long-overlooked contribution to the study of subjectivity. The result is a women and queer of color, feminist-focused work aimed at scholars in many disciplines and intended to overcome barriers separating the academy from everyday life and community.

An original and moving analysis, Shapeshifting Subjects draws on unpublished archival material to apply Anzaldúa's ideas to new areas of thought and action.

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cover of Shaping Ceremony: Monumental Steps and Greek Architecture

Shaping Ceremony

Monumental Steps and Greek Architecture

Mary B. Hollinshead

University of Wisconsin Press, 2014

Offering a fresh approach to ancient Greek architecture, Shaping Ceremony focuses on the overlooked subject of monumental steps. Written in a clear and readable style, the book presents three complementary ways of studying steps: examining how the human body works on steps; theoretical perspectives on the relationship between architecture and human behavior; and the socio-political effects of steps' presence. Although broad steps are usually associated with emperors and political dominance, Mary B. Hollinshead argues that earlier, in Greek sanctuaries, they expressed and reinforced communal authority. From this alternate perspective, she expands the traditional intellectual framework for studying Greek architecture.
            The heart of the study is a close reading of thirty-eight sites with monumental steps from the sixth through second centuries B.C. Organized by century, the book tracks the development of built pathways and grandstands for crowds of worshippers as evidence of the Greeks' increasing awareness of the power of architecture to shape behavior and concentrate social energy. With photographs and illustrations of plans, Shaping Ceremony offers a clear account of how Greeks' adaptation of terrain for human use promoted social cohesion and integrated architectural compositions.
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cover of Shaping Citizenship through Talk Radio: Listening to the 2024 UK Election

Shaping Citizenship through Talk Radio

Listening to the 2024 UK Election

Stephen Coleman

Intellect Books, 2026

Can the mass media contribute to meaningful public debate in the run-up to an election?

Talk radio in the United States is said to have contributed to a political atmosphere in which the loudest, crudest, and simplest arguments prevail. Is there a different model of public talk that can contribute to a kinder, wiser, more empathetic democracy? In the run-up to the 2024 UK general election, Stephen Coleman listened to callers to the BBC’s daily phone-in show in the hope of finding answers to these questions. In this year-long study, we see the public expressing its mood, telling its stories, and testing its arguments.

Shaping Citizenship through Talk Radio argues that even in a time of democratic anxiety and rising division, people are still finding ways to talk, listen, and act together. It explains why democracies need reliable public spaces that help citizens connect and communicate across their differences. Reporting on what he found, Coleman also proposes a way forward for a more empathetic democratic discourse.

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cover of Shaping Global Cultures through Screenwriting: Women Who Write Our Worlds

Shaping Global Cultures through Screenwriting

Women Who Write Our Worlds

Edited by Rose Ferrell and Rosanne Welch

Intellect Books, 2025

The voices of women changing the world one script at a time speak to how screenwriting is more than a craft—it’s activism, education, and revolution.

Shaping Global Culture through Screenwriting is a powerful testament to the undeniable impact of an international collection of female screenwriters. Spanning film, television, virtual reality, games, and digital media, these case studies showcase instances when women filmmakers used screenwriting to challenge injustice and give voice to communities around the world.

Divided into sections that seek to overcome global disparities in wealth and power, the book views screenwriting as activism, shifting attitudes, and altering lived experiences. Whether about gender and race or war and colonization, each chapter exposes the deep connections between storytelling and social change. More than just a study of the craft, this book is a celebration of the women writers who use their artistic lens to educate and empower others. Geared toward readers interested in screenwriting, media studies, sociology, women’s studies, and a wide range of humanities subjects, including history and population studies, Shaping Global Culture through Screenwriting brings long-overdue attention to the vital role women take in shaping the global cultural landscape.
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cover of Shaping Science: Organizations, Decisions, and Culture on NASA’s Teams

Shaping Science

Organizations, Decisions, and Culture on NASA’s Teams

Janet Vertesi

University of Chicago Press, 2020

Drawing on a decade of immersive ethnography with NASA’s robotic spacecraft teams to create a comparative account of two great space missions of the early 2000s, Janet Vertesi uncovers how the social organization of a scientific team affects their scientific practices and results.

In Shaping Science, Janet Vertesi draws on a decade of immersive ethnography with NASA’s robotic spacecraft teams to create a comparative account of two great space missions of the early 2000s. Although these missions featured robotic explorers on the frontiers of the solar system bravely investigating new worlds, their commands were issued from millions of miles away by a very human team. By examining the two teams’ formal structures, decision-making techniques, and informal work practices in the day-to-day process of mission planning, Vertesi shows just how deeply entangled a team’s local organizational context is with the knowledge they produce about other worlds.
 
Using extensive, embedded experiences on two NASA spacecraft teams, this is the first book to apply organizational studies of work to the laboratory environment in order to analyze the production of scientific knowledge itself. Engaging and deeply researched, Shaping Science demonstrates the significant influence that the social organization of a scientific team can have on the practices of that team and the results they yield.
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cover of Shaping Society through Dance: Mestizo Ritual Performance in the Peruvian Andes

Shaping Society through Dance

Mestizo Ritual Performance in the Peruvian Andes

Zoila S. Mendoza

University of Chicago Press, 2000

During the patron saint fiesta in the Andean town of San Jerónimo, Peru, crowds gather at sunset in the town square, eagerly awaiting the entrance of the colorful dance troupes, or comparsas. With their masks, music, and surprising interpretations of contemporary events, the comparsas of the Cusco region are the focus of this multifaceted work. At the crossroads of folklore and ritual, mass media and local preferences, and regional and national identity, the comparsas—recorded here on VHS, DVD, and compact disc—have become a powerful way for the local people to make sense of their place in Peru and in the world. As Zoila Mendoza shows, they do more than reflect societal changes, they actively transform society.

In this fluid world, she argues, racial and ethnic identities are shaped more by notions of what is decent, elegant, and modern rather than by skin color or status. As the different troupes vie for the townspeople's recognition as the most "authentic" group, these notions are challenged and reworked. A fascinating look at a rich tradition, this innovative work is also a compelling example of the critical anthropology of performance.
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cover of Shaping Tradition: Women's Roles in Ceremonial Rituals of the Agwagune

Shaping Tradition

Women's Roles in Ceremonial Rituals of the Agwagune

David Uru Iyam

University of Wisconsin Press, 2021

Agwagune women in southeastern Nigeria contribute to the cultural construction of their societies in deep and systematic ways. This reality is often concealed, misrepresented, or unexamined in studies that do not consciously set out to address female agency and authority. Most recently women have reshaped traditional male-centered village practices behind the scenes, such as when they updated the premarital ritual of fattening prospective brides, and when they ended female circumcision. Women use their status to direct and influence male leadership on matters of war, finance, education, and political stability.

Using this community as a case study, David Uru Iyam asserts that these women are not stereotypically submissive, oppressed, or passive. Agwagune women participate in male ceremonies by pretending to be unaware of them, concealing their authority under a veneer of secrecy. Instead of focusing on obvious male political power, Iyam highlights the overlooked domestic and public contributions of women that uphold—and change—entire social systems.
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cover of Shaping Urban Futures in Mongolia: Ulaanbaatar, Dynamic Ownership and Economic Flux

Shaping Urban Futures in Mongolia

Ulaanbaatar, Dynamic Ownership and Economic Flux

Rebekah Plueckhahn

University College London, 2019

Shaping Urban Futures in Mongolia discusses the lived experience of urban development, redevelopment, and change in Ulaanbaatar. The fast rates of urbanization occurring in many parts of the world are often buoyed by increased investment of capital and ensuing construction, giving rise to other less visible effects among those living in cities—including diverse economic practices, politics, and ethics. Construction becomes a solution to the provision of housing but also simultaneously becomes a problem when economic processes fail to work as they should, or people are dispossessed of land to make way for further urban change.   
Rebekah Plueckhahn explores the inherent contradiction between solution and problem-making as experienced by residents of Ulaanbaatar during a tumultuous period in Mongolia’s economic history. She examines the ways residents attempt to own forms of real estate and, in turn, physically shape the city and its politics and urban economic forms from within. This book interlinks the intimate space of the home with ideologies of the national economy, urban development and disrepair and the types of politics and ethics that arise as a result.
 
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cover of Shaping the Discourse on Space: Charity and Its Wards in Nineteenth-Century San Juan, Puerto Rico

Shaping the Discourse on Space

Charity and Its Wards in Nineteenth-Century San Juan, Puerto Rico

By Teresita Martínez-Vergne

University of Texas Press, 1999

As an inchoate middle class emerged in Puerto Rico in the early nineteenth century, its members sought to control not only public space, but also the people, activities, and even attitudes that filled it. Their instruments were the San Juan town council and the Casa de Beneficencia, a state-run charitable establishment charged with responsibility for the poor.

In this book, Teresita Martínez-Vergne explores how municipal officials and the Casa de Beneficencia shaped the discourse on public and private space and thereby marginalized the worthy poor and vagrants, "liberated" Africans, indigent and unruly women, and destitute children. Drawing on extensive and innovative archival research, she shows that the men who comprised the San Juan ayuntamiento and the board of charity regulated the public discourse on topics such as education, religious orthodoxy, hygiene, and family life, thereby establishing norms for "correct" social behavior and chastising the "deviant" lifestyles of the working poor.

This research clarifies the ways in which San Juan's middle class defined itself in the midst of rapid social and economic change. It also offers new insights into notions of citizenship and the process of nation-building in the Caribbean.

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cover of Shaping the Future of African American Film: Color-Coded Economics and the Story Behind the Numbers

Shaping the Future of African American Film

Color-Coded Economics and the Story Behind the Numbers

Monica White Ndounou

Rutgers University Press, 2014

Received the Distinction Honor for the 2016 C. Calvin Smith Book Award from the Southern Conference on African American Studies, Inc. 

In Hollywood, we hear, it’s all about the money. It’s a ready explanation for why so few black films get made—no crossover appeal, no promise of a big payoff.  But what if the money itself is color-coded?  What if the economics that governs film production is so skewed that no film by, about, or for people of color will ever look like a worthy investment unless it follows specific racial or gender patterns?  This, Monica Ndounou shows us, is precisely the case.  In a work as revealing about the culture of filmmaking as it is about the distorted economics of African American film, Ndounou clearly traces the insidious connections between history, content, and cash in black films.

How does history come into it?  Hollywood’s reliance on past performance as a measure of potential success virtually guarantees that historically underrepresented, underfunded, and undersold African American films devalue the future prospects of black films.  So the cycle continues as it has for nearly a century.  Behind the scenes, the numbers are far from neutral.  Analyzing the onscreen narratives and off-screen circumstances behind nearly two thousand films featuring African Americans in leading and supporting roles, including such recent productions as Bamboozled, Beloved, and Tyler Perry’s Diary of a Mad Black Woman, Ndounou exposes the cultural and racial constraints that limit not just the production but also the expression and creative freedom of black films. Her wide-ranging analysis reaches into questions of literature, language, speech and dialect, film images and narrative, acting, theater and film business practices, production history and financing, and organizational history.

By uncovering the ideology behind profit-driven industry practices that reshape narratives by, about, and for people of color, this provocative work brings to light existing limitations—and possibilities for reworking stories and business practices in theater, literature, and film.
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cover of Shaping the Motherhood of Indigenous Mexico

Shaping the Motherhood of Indigenous Mexico

Vania Smith-Oka

Vanderbilt University Press, 2013

Mainstream Mexican views of indigenous women center on them as problematic mothers, and development programs have included the goal of helping these women become "good mothers." Economic incentives and conditional cash transfers are the vehicles for achieving this goal. With ethnographic immediacy, Shaping the Motherhood of Indigenous Mexico</> examines the dynamics among the various players--indigenous mothers, clinicians, and representatives of development programs. The women's voices lead the reader to understand the structures of dependency that paradoxically bind indigenous women within a program that calls for their empowerment.

The cash transfer program is Oportunidades, which enrolls more than a fifth of Mexico's population. It expects mothers to become involved in their children's lives at three nodes--health, nutrition, and education. If women do not comply with the standards of modern motherhood, they are dropped from the program and lose the bi-monthly cash payments. Smith-Oka explores the everyday implementation of the program and its unintended consequences.

The mothers are often berated by clinicians for having too many children (Smith-Oka provides background on the history of eugenics and population control in Mexico) and for other examples of their "backward" ways. An entire chapter focuses on the humor indigenous women use to cope with disrespectful comments. Ironically, this form of resistance allows the women to accept the situation that controls their behavior.

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cover of Shaping the New Man: Youth Training Regimes in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany

Shaping the New Man

Youth Training Regimes in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany

Alessio Ponzio

University of Wisconsin Press, 2017

Despite their undeniable importance, the leaders of the Fascist and Nazi youth organizations have received little attention from historians. In Shaping the New Man, Alessio Ponzio uncovers the largely untold story of the training and education of these crucial protagonists of the Fascist and Nazi regimes, and he examines more broadly the structures, ideologies, rhetoric, and aspirations of youth organizations in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.

Ponzio shows how the Italian Fascists' pedagogical practices influenced the origin and evolution of the Hitler Youth. He dissects similarities and differences in the training processes of the youth leaders of the Opera Nazionale Balilla, Gioventù Italiana del Littorio, and Hitlerjugend. And, he explores the transnational institutional interactions and mutual cooperation that flourished between Mussolini's and Hitler's youth organizations in the 1930s and 1940s.

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cover of Shared Fantasy: Role Playing Games as Social Worlds

Shared Fantasy

Role Playing Games as Social Worlds

Gary Alan Fine

University of Chicago Press, 1983

This classic study still provides one of the most acute descriptions available of an often misunderstood subculture: that of fantasy role playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. Gary Alan Fine immerses himself in several different gaming systems, offering insightful details on the nature of the games and the patterns of interaction among players—as well as their reasons for playing.
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cover of Shared Selves: Latinx Memoir and Ethical Alternatives to Humanism

Shared Selves

Latinx Memoir and Ethical Alternatives to Humanism

Suzanne Bost

University of Illinois Press, 2019

Memoir typically places selfhood at the center. Interestingly, the genre's recent surge in popularity coincides with breakthroughs in scholarship focused on selfhood in a new way: as an always renewing, always emerging entity. Suzanne Bost draws on feminist and posthumanist ideas to explore how three contemporary memoirists decenter the self. Latinx writers John Rechy, Aurora Levins Morales, and Gloria E. Anzaldúa work in places where personal history intertwines with communities, environments, animals, plants, and spirits. This dedication to interconnectedness resonates with ideas in posthumanist theory while calling on indigenous worldviews. As Bost argues, our view of life itself expands if we look at how such frameworks interact with queer theory, disability studies, ecological thinking, and other fields. These webs of relation in turn mediate experience, agency, and lift itself.A transformative application of posthumanist ideas to Latinx, feminist, and literary studies, Shared Selves shows how memoir can encourage readers to think more broadly and deeply about what counts as human life.
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cover of Shareveillance: The Dangers of Openly Sharing and Covertly Collecting Data

Shareveillance

The Dangers of Openly Sharing and Covertly Collecting Data

Clare Birchall

University of Minnesota Press, 2017

Cracking open the politics of transparency and secrecy

In an era of open data and ubiquitous dataveillance, what does it mean to “share”? This book argues that we are all “shareveillant” subjects, called upon to be transparent and render data open at the same time as the security state invests in practices to keep data closed. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s “distribution of the sensible,” Clare Birchall reimagines sharing in terms of a collective political relationality beyond the veillant expectations of the state.

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cover of Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture

Sharing the Dance

Contact Improvisation and American Culture

Cynthia J. Novack

University of Wisconsin Press, 1990

    In Sharing the Dance, Cynthia Novack considers the development of contact improvisation within its web of historical, social, and cultural contexts.  This  book examines the ways contact improvisers (and their surrounding communities) encode sexuality, spontaneity, and gender roles, as well as concepts of the self and society in their dancing.
    While focusing on the changing practice of contact improvisation through two decades of social transformation, Novack’s work incorporates the history of rock dancing and disco, the modern and experimental dance movements of Merce Cunningham, Anna Halprin, and Judson Church, among others, and a variety of other physical activities, such as martial arts, aerobics, and wrestling.
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cover of Shattered Justice: Crime Victims' Experiences with Wrongful Convictions and Exonerations

Shattered Justice

Crime Victims' Experiences with Wrongful Convictions and Exonerations

Kimberly J. Cook

Rutgers University Press, 2022

Shattered Justice presents original crime victims' experiences with violent crime, investigations and trials, and later exonerations in their cases. Using in-depth interviews with 21 crime victims across the United States, Cook reveals how homicide victims’ family members and rape survivors describe the painful impact of the primary trauma, the secondary trauma of the investigations and trials, and then the tertiary trauma associated with wrongful convictions and exonerations. Important lessons and analyses are shared related to grief and loss, and healing and repair. Using restorative justice practices to develop and deliver healing retreats for survivors also expands the practice of restorative justice. Finally, policy reforms aimed at preventing, mitigating, and repairing the harms of wrongful convictions is covered.
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cover of Shattered: Fragments of a Black Life

Shattered

Fragments of a Black Life

Matthieu Chapman

West Virginia University Press, 2023

From a distance, Matthieu Chapman’s life and accomplishments serve as an example of racial progress in America: the first in his family to go to college, he earns two master’s degrees and a doctorate and then becomes a professor of theater. Despite his personal and academic success, however, the specter of antiblackness continues to haunt his every moment and interaction.

Told through fragments, facets, shards, slivers, splinters, and absences, Shattered places Chapman’s own story in dialogue with US history and structural analysis of race to relay the experience of being very alive in a demonstrably antiblack society—laying bare the impact of the American way on black bodies, black psyches, and black lives. From the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to the offices of higher education, from a Loyal White Knights flyer on his windshield to a play with black students written by a black playwright, Chapman’s life story embodies the resistance that occurs, the shattering, collapsing, and reconfiguring of being that happens in the collisions between conceptions of blackness. Shattered is a heartrending and thought-provoking challenge to narratives of racial progress and postracial America—an important reminder that systemic antiblack racism affects every black person regardless of what they achieve in spite of it.

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cover of Shattering Culture: American Medicine Responds to Cultural Diversity

Shattering Culture

American Medicine Responds to Cultural Diversity

Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good

Russell Sage Foundation, 2012

"Culture counts" has long been a rallying cry among health advocates and policymakers concerned with racial disparities in health care. A generation ago, the women's health movement led to a host of changes that also benefited racial minorities, including more culturally aware medical staff, enhanced health education, and the mandated inclusion of women and minorities in federally funded research. Many health professionals would now agree that cultural competence is important in clinical settings, but in what ways? Shattering Culture provides an insightful view of medicine and psychiatry as they are practiced in today's culturally diverse clinical settings. The book offers a compelling account of the many ways culture shapes how doctors conduct their practices and how patients feel about the care they receive. Based on interviews with clinicians, health care staff, and patients, Shattering Culture shows the human face of health care in America. Building on over a decade of research led by Mary-Jo Good, the book delves into the cultural backgrounds of patients and their health care providers, as well as the institutional cultures of clinical settings, to illuminate how these many cultures interact and shape the quality of patient care. Sarah Willen explores the controversial practice of matching doctors and patients based on a shared race, ethnicity, or language and finds a spectrum of arguments challenging its usefulness, including patients who may fear being judged negatively by providers from the same culture. Seth Hannah introduces the concept of cultural environments of hyperdiversity describing complex cultural identities. Antonio Bullon and Mary-Jo Good demonstrate how regulations meant to standardize the caregiving process—such as the use of templates and check boxes instead of narrative notes—have steadily limited clinician flexibility, autonomy, and the time they can dedicate to caring for patients. Elizabeth Carpenter-Song looks at positive doctor-patient relationships in mental health care settings and finds that the most successful of these are based on mutual "recognition"—patients who can express their concerns and clinicians who validate them. In the book's final essay, Hannah, Good, and Park show how navigating the maze of insurance regulations, financial arrangements, and paperwork compromises the effectiveness of mental health professionals seeking to provide quality care to minority and poor patients. Rapidly increasing diversity on one hand and bureaucratic regulations on the other are two realities that have made providing culturally sensitive care even more challenging for doctors. Few opportunities exist to go inside the world of medical and mental health clinics and see how these realities are influencing patient care. Shattering Culture provides a rare look at the day-to-day experiences of psychiatrists and other clinicians and offers multiple perspectives on what culture means to doctors, staff, and patients and how it shapes the practice of medicine and psychiatry.
[more]
cover of Shattering: Food, Politics, and the Loss of Genetic Diversity

Shattering

Food, Politics, and the Loss of Genetic Diversity

Cary Fowler and Pat Mooney

University of Arizona Press, 1990

It was through control of the shattering of wild seeds that humans first domesticated plants. Now control over those very plants threatens to shatter the world's food supply, as loss of genetic diversity sets the stage for widespread hunger.

Large-scale agriculture has come to favor uniformity in food crops. More than 7,000 U.S. apple varieties once grew in American orchards; 6,000 of them are no longer available. Every broccoli variety offered through seed catalogs in 1900 has now disappeared. As the international genetics supply industry absorbs seed companies—with nearly one thousand takeovers since 1970—this trend toward uniformity seems likely to continue; and as third world agriculture is brought in line with international business interests, the gene pools of humanity's most basic foods are threatened.

The consequences are more than culinary. Without the genetic diversity from which farmers traditionally breed for resistance to diseases, crops are more susceptible to the spread of pestilence. Tragedies like the Irish Potato Famine may be thought of today as ancient history; yet the U.S. corn blight of 1970 shows that technologically based agribusiness is a breeding ground for disaster.

Shattering reviews the development of genetic diversity over 10,000 years of human agriculture, then exposes its loss in our lifetime at the hands of political and economic forces. The possibility of crisis is real; this book shows that it may not be too late to avert it.
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cover of Shaw's Daughters: Dramatic and Narrative Constructions of Gender

Shaw's Daughters

Dramatic and Narrative Constructions of Gender

J. Ellen Gainor

University of Michigan Press, 1992

This book provides a vital intervention in theater history by systematically deconstructing the long-held assumption that George Bernard Shaw was an exceptionally progressive, early feminist playwright. Examining three central character tropes, Gainor introduces previously unexamined reviews and essays written by Shaw’s female contemporaries, revealing a distinct resistance to his depictions of women. She argues that Shaw’s "unwomanly women" were not truly liberated; rather, Shaw anchored his concepts of female equality strictly in masculine attributes, striping his independent female characters of their sexuality to make them fit patriarchal molds. By situating his dramaturgy firmly within the dominant social, psychological, and medical ideologies of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, the book proves that Shaw’s gender constructions were deeply bound to the traditional constraints of his time.
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cover of Shawnese Traditions: C. C. Trowbridge's Account

Shawnese Traditions

C. C. Trowbridge's Account

Edited by Vernon Kinietz and Erminie Voegelin

University of Michigan Press, 1939

C. C. Trowbridge wrote reports on the customs of the Miami, Menominee, Shawnee, and Wyandot tribes. It is believed that he wrote the manuscript entitled Shawnese Traditions around 1824; the University of Michigan published it in 1939.
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cover of She Devils at the Door

She Devils at the Door

Eliza Smith Brown

Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2023

The true story of the Gilded Age’s “political twins” who brought women’s suffrage and political reform to the city of Pittsburgh.

Sometimes troublemakers emerge from the most unlikely of places. This true story follows the lives of two daughters of the Gilded Age—Lucy and Eliza Kennedy—who were educated at Vassar College and became leaders of the suffrage movement. Then, after the Nineteenth Amendment was passed in 1920, they spent the next forty years fighting corruption in politics and government.

Tenacious, smart, and witty, they captivated crowds, disarmed their opponents, and instilled particular dread among the corrupt politicians who were the unfortunate targets of their nonpartisan crusade. Their entry across the threshold of Pittsburgh’s City-County Building would reportedly invoke a flurry of hushed warnings through the halls: “The She Devils are at the door!” Together, Lucy and Eliza fought for the vote, empowered women to use it wisely, forced a mayor out of office in disgrace, took control of the city budget, exposed a series of scandals, spearheaded police reform, and launched a campaign that would eventually clear Pittsburgh of its smoky veil.

Featuring the true story of two powerful women, this book comes at a propitious time, reminding us how far women have come and how vigilant we must remain.
 
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cover of She's Got a Gun

She's Got a Gun

Nancy Floyd

Temple University Press, 2008

In 1991 Nancy Floyd bought her first handgun.  Soon she was participating in Ladies Day at her local shooting range and reading Women & Guns magazine.  In 1993 she began interviewing and photographing women who were fellow gun owners.  In 1997 she started researching "gun women" from the past to see how they were represented in the popular imagination.  Now she has brought her work together in a riveting new book, filled with remarkable photographs and candid first-person stories, accompanied by an eye-opening illustrated history of female gun ownership in America.

Sympathetic but unsentimental, Floyd presents gun-toting women young and old, including an eleven-year-old girl competing in her first gun competition, a woman whose grandmother was killed by an intruder, and a war veteran who experienced firefights while stationed in Iraq.  Whatever you might think about gun-toting women before you open this book, your preconceptions are sure to be shattered by the end.
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cover of Sheep Industry of Territorial New Mexico: Livestock, Land, and Dollars

Sheep Industry of Territorial New Mexico

Livestock, Land, and Dollars

Jon M. Wallace

University Press of Colorado, 2023

The Sheep Industry of Territorial New Mexico offers a detailed account of the New Mexico sheep industry during the territorial period (1846–1912) when it flourished. As a mainstay of the New Mexico economy, this industry was essential to the integration of New Mexico (and the Southwest more broadly) into the national economy of the expanding United States.
 
Author Jon Wallace tells the story of evolving living conditions as the sheep industry came to encompass innumerable families of modest means. The transformation improved many New Mexicans’ lives and helped establish the territory as a productive part of the United States. There was a cost, however, with widespread ecological changes to the lands—brought about in large part by heavy grazing. Following the US annexation of New Mexico, new markets for mutton and wool opened. Well-connected, well-financed Anglo merchants and growers who had recently arrived in the territory took advantage of the new opportunity and joined their Hispanic counterparts in entering the sheep industry.
 
The Sheep Industry of Territorial New Mexico situates this socially imbued economic story within the larger context of the environmental consequences of open-range grazing while examining the relationships among Hispanic, Anglo, and Indigenous people in the region. Historians, students, general readers, and specialists interested in the history of agriculture, labor, capitalism, and the US Southwest will find Wallace’s analysis useful and engaging.
 
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cover of Sheer Presence: The Veil in Manet’s Paris

Sheer Presence

The Veil in Manet’s Paris

Marni Reva Kessler

University of Minnesota Press, 2006

Tamar’s instrument of seduction in the Hebrew Bible, Penelope’s shroud in Homer’s Odyssey, accessory of brides as well as widows, and hallmark of the religious and the wealthy, the veil has historically been an intriguing signifier. Initially donned in France for liturgical purposes and later for masked balls and as a sun- and windscreen at the seashore, face-covering veils were adopted for fashionable urban use during the reign of Napoleon III. In Sheer Presence, Marni Reva Kessler demonstrates how this ubiquitous garment and its visual representations knot together many of the precepts of Parisian life. Considering the period from the beginning of Napoleon III’s rule in 1852 to 1889, when the Paris Universal Exhibition displayed veiled North African Muslims and other indigenous colonial peoples, Kessler deftly connects the increased presence of the veil on the streets and on canvas to Haussmann’s massive renovation of Paris. The fashion of veil wearing, she argues, was imbricated with broader concerns: fears of dust and disease fueled by Haussmannization and class mixing on the city streets, changes in ideals of youth and beauty, attempts to increase popular support for imperialism, and the development of modernist art practices. A veil was protection for the proper woman from the vices associated with the modern city, preserving—at least on the surface—her femininity and class superiority. Kessler explores these themes with close readings of paintings by Gustave Caillebotte, Edgar Degas, and Edouard Manet—including Manet’s perplexing portraits of artist Berthe Morisot—as well as photographs, images from the popular press, engravings, lithographs, and academic paintings. She also mines French fashion journals, etiquette books, novels, and medical publications for clues to the veil’s complex meanings during the period.Positioning the veil directly at the intersection of feminist, formalist, and social art history, Kessler offers a fresh perspective on period discourses of public health, seduction and sexuality, colonial stereotypes, and, ultimately, an emerging modernity.Marni Reva Kessler is assistant professor of art history at the University of Kansas.
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cover of Shelf Life: Essays, Memoirs, and an Interview

Shelf Life

Essays, Memoirs, and an Interview

Thom Gunn

University of Michigan Press, 1993

Born and raised in Britain, Thom Gunn has lived in the United States since 1954. He is well known as a poet and is increasingly gaining recognition as a literary critic. Gunn’s main concern in Shelf Life is with twentieth-century American poets, both the famous and the obscure; he also discusses other matters, including the Elizabethans, Christopher Isherwood as man and stylist, and Gunn’s own poetry, which he touches on indirectly in the first two sections of the book and directly in the last.
 
Gunn’s criticism communicates his own enthusiasm for poetry. He tries to show his readers how to get a first foothold into the work of some of his favorite poets, whether Wyatt or Whitman, Mina Loy or Robert Creeley.
 
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cover of Shellfish for the Celestial Empire: The Rise and Fall of Commercial Abalone Fishing in California

Shellfish for the Celestial Empire

The Rise and Fall of Commercial Abalone Fishing in California

Todd J. Braje

University of Utah Press, 2016

In the 1800s, when California was captivated by gold fever, a small group of Chinese immigrants recognized the fortune to be made from the untapped resources along the state’s coast, particularly from harvesting the black abalone of southern and Baja California. These immigrants, with skills from humble beginnings in a traditional Chinese fishing province, founded California’s commercial abalone industry, and led its growth and expansion for several decades. By the turn of the twentieth century, however, their successful livelihood was stolen from them through targeted legislation of the U.S. and California governments.

Today, the physical evidence of historical Chinese abalone fishing on the mainland has been erased by development. On California’s Channel Islands, however, remnants of temporary abalone collecting and processing camps lie scattered along the coastlines. These sites hold a treasure trove of information, stories, lifeways, and history. Braje has excavated many of these sites and uses them to explore the history of Chinese abalone fishing, presenting a microcosm of the broader history of Chinese immigrants in America—their struggles, their successes, the institutionalized racism they faced, and the unique ways in which they helped to shape the identity of the United States. 

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cover of Shells on a Desert Shore: Mollusks in the Seri World

Shells on a Desert Shore

Mollusks in the Seri World

Cathy Moser Marlett; Foreword by Richard S. Felger

University of Arizona Press, 2014

In Mexico’s western Sonoran Desert along the Gulf of California is a place made extraordinary by the desert solitude, the dynamic sea, and the people who live there—the Seris. Central to the lives of these people are the sea and its shores.

Shells on a Desert Shore describes the Seri knowledge of mollusks and includes names, folklore, history, uses, and much more. Cathy Moser Marlett’s research of several decades, conducted in the Seri language, builds on work begun in 1951 by her parents, Edward and Becky Moser. The language, spoken by fewer than a thousand people today, is considered endangered. Marlett presents what she has learned from Seri consultants over recent decades and also draws from her own childhood experiences while living in a Seri village. The information from the people who had lived as hunter-gatherers provides a window into a lifestyle no longer recalled from personal experience by most Seris today—and perhaps a window into the lives of other peoples who made the Gulf’s shores their home.

The book offers a wealth of information about Seri history, as well as species accounts of more than 150 mollusks from the Seri area on the central Gulf coast. Chapters describe how the people ate mollusks or used them medicinally, how the mollusks were named, and how their shells were used. The author provides several hundred detailed drawings and photographs, many of them archival.

Shells on a Desert Shore is a fresh, original presentation of a significant part of the Seri way of life. Unique because it is written from the perspective of a participant in the Seri culture, the book will stand as a definitive, irreplaceable work in ethnography, a time capsule of the Seri people and their connection to the sea.
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cover of Shelter Poverty: New Ideas on Housing Affordability

Shelter Poverty

New Ideas on Housing Affordability

Michael E. Stone

Temple University Press, 1993

"...the most original--and profoundly disturbing--work on the critical issue of housing affordability...." --Chester Hartman, President, Poverty and Race Research Action Council In Shelter Poverty, Michael E. Stone presents the definitive discussion of housing and social justice in the United States. Challenging the conventional definition of housing affordability, Stone offers original and powerful insights about the nature, causes, and consequences of the affordability problem and presents creative and detailed proposals for solving a problem that afflicts one-third of this nation. Setting the housing crisis into broad political, economic, and historical contexts, Stone asks: What is shelter poverty? Why does it exist and persist? and How can it be overcome? Describing shelter poverty as the denial of a universal human need, Stone offers a quantitative scale by which to measure it and reflects on the social and economic implications of housing affordability in this country. He argues for "the right to housing" and presents a program for transforming a large proportion of the housing in this country from an expensive commodity into an affordable social entitlement. Employing new concepts of housing ownership, tenure, and finance, he favors social ownership in which market concepts have a useful but subordinate role in the identification of housing preferences and allocation. Stone concludes that political action around shelter poverty will further the goal of achieving a truly just and democratic society that is also equitably and responsibly productive and prosperous.
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cover of Shelter for the Night: On Afghanistan, Language, and Detours

Shelter for the Night

On Afghanistan, Language, and Detours

Fatima Mojaddedi

Duke University Press, 2026

Shelter for the Night is an ethnographic meditation on language and psychic life in 2010s Afghanistan, where militarized violence has collapsed social worlds. Across Kabul and the countryside, in poetic and probing style, the book unpacks the precarious relationship between language, violence, and the self. As social and political worlds fracture through militarized violence, economic speculation, interpersonal sabotage, and ruptures in shared understanding, people are set on unexpected detours to discontinuity. Encounters in political life, love, and translation become fragmented, difficult to parse, and entangled in symbolic violence. Yet amid the harsh realities of contemporary life in Kabul, Fatima Mojaddedi finds moments of wonder and rich inner lives of reflexivity, understanding, and social connection. From narratives of modernist ambition and political violence to tragic romance and urbanite translators and their rural interlocutors, Shelter for the Night looks at the challenges of articulating the unspeakable to make a bold claim for the importance of thinking about the contemporary world starting from Afghanistan.
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cover of Shelter from the Machine: Homesteaders in the Age of Capitalism

Shelter from the Machine

Homesteaders in the Age of Capitalism

Jason G. Strange

University of Illinois Press, 2020

”You’re either buried with your crystals or your shotgun.” That laconic comment captures the hippies-versus-hicks conflict that divides, and in some ways defines, modern-day homesteaders. It also reveals that back to-the-landers, though they may seek lives off the grid, remain connected to the most pressing questions confronting the United States today.

Jason Strange shows where homesteaders fit, and don't fit, within contemporary America. Blending history with personal stories, Strange visits pig roasts and bohemian work parties to find people engaged in a lifestyle that offers challenge and fulfillment for those in search of virtues like self-employment, frugality, contact with nature, and escape from the mainstream. He also lays bare the vast differences in education and opportunity that leave some homesteaders dispossessed while charting the tensions that arise when people seek refuge from the ills of modern society—only to find themselves indelibly marked by the system they dreamed of escaping.
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cover of Shelter on the Journey: Humanitarianism, Human Rights, and Migration

Shelter on the Journey

Humanitarianism, Human Rights, and Migration

Priscilla Solano

Temple University Press, 2024

Migration journeys are arduous, with migrants tormented by risk, abuse, threats, and xenophobia. Shelters, staffed by humanitarian workers and volunteers, provide safe spaces for those in transit. Shelter on the Journey examines how these sites, often faith-based civil society associations, create solidarity and help politicize migrants, giving them a sense of themselves as an empowered, rights-holding people.

Solano, who volunteered at shelters in Mexico, chronicles the activity in three of the nearly 100 shelters along a unique humanitarian trail that many Central Americans take to reach the United States. She outlines the constraints faced by these sites and their potential to create social transformation and considers how and why migration security is currently framed and managed as both a criminal and humanitarian issue.

Shelter on the Journey explores the politics of the shelters, their social world, and the dynamics of charity and solidarity, as well as the need for humanitarian assistance and advocacy for dignified and free transit migration.
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cover of Shem Pete's Alaska: The Territory of the Upper Cook Inlet Dena'ina

Shem Pete's Alaska

The Territory of the Upper Cook Inlet Dena'ina

James Kari and James A. Fall

University of Alaska Press, 2003

Shem Pete (1896-1989), the colorful and brilliant raconteur from Susitna Station, Alaska, left a rich legacy of knowledge about the Upper Cook Inlet Dena'ina world. Pete was one of the most versatile storytellers and historians in twentieth-century Alaska, and his lifetime travel map of approximately 13,500 square miles is one of the largest ever documented in this degree of detail anywhere in the world.

This expanded edition of Shem Pete's Alaska presents 973 named places in 16 drainage-based chapters. The names form a reconstructed network from the vantage points of the life experiences of Shem Pete and other Dena'ina and Ahtna speakers. It is annotated with comments and stories by Shem Pete and more than 50 other contributors, plus historic references, vignettes, copious photographs, historic maps, and shaded-relief placename maps. The authors provide perspective on Dena'ina language and culture, as well as a summary of Dena'ina geographic knowledge and placename research methodology.

This beautifully produced edition is a treasure for all Alaskans and for anyone interested in the "personal connectedness to a beautiful land" voiced by Dena'ina elders.

From the foreword by William Bright: "Shem Pete's experience and wisdom as an elder of the Dena'ina Athabascan Indians shine through this work like the sun—as do the skill and devotion of James Kari, James Fall, and the other Dena'ina, Ahtna, Alaska Native, and Anglo-American people who contributed to making the book a reality. . . . We have a volume that offers a vivid picture of Native Alaskan culture, history, geography, and language, with added glimpses of oral literature and music. . . . All Native American Peoples, indeed, all traditional communities in the world would be fortunate and proud to have this kind of record of their life and culture."
[more]
cover of Shem Pete's Alaska: The Territory of the Upper Cook Inlet Dena'ina

Shem Pete's Alaska

The Territory of the Upper Cook Inlet Dena'ina

James Kari and James A. Fall

University of Alaska Press, 2016

Shem Pete (1896–1989), a colorful and brilliant raconteur from Susitna Station, Alaska, left a rich legacy of knowledge about the Upper Cook Inlet Dena’ina world. Shem was one of the most versatile storytellers and historians in twentieth century Alaska, and his lifetime travel map of approximately 13,500 square miles is one of the largest ever documented with this degree of detail anywhere in the world.
 
The first two editions of Shem Pete’s Alaska contributed much to Dena’ina cultural identity and public appreciation of the Dena’ina place names network in Upper Cook Inlet. This new edition adds nearly thirty new place names to its already extensive source material from Shem Pete and more than fifty other contributors, along with many revisions and new annotations. The authors provide synopses of Dena’ina language and culture and summaries of Dena’ina geographic knowledge, and they also discuss their methodology for place name research.
 
Exhaustively refined over more than three decades, Shem Pete’s Alaska will remain the essential reference work on the landscape of the Dena’ina people of Upper Cook Inlet. As a book of ethnogeography, Native language materials, and linguistic scholarship, the extent of its range and influence is unlikely to be surpassed.
 
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cover of Sherabad Oasis: Tracing Historical Landscape in Southern Uzbekistan

Sherabad Oasis

Tracing Historical Landscape in Southern Uzbekistan

Edited by Ladislav Stanco and Petra Tušlová

Karolinum Press, 2020

Sherabad Oasis: Tracing Historical Landscape in Southern Uzbekistan is the second volume of the series examining the Czech-Uzbek archaeological expedition in southern Uzbekistan. While the first book was devoted to the excavations at the central site of the Sherabad Oasis called Jandavlattepa, this volume analyzes the development of the settlement throughout this oasis based on important new data gained in the recent expedition. The methodology used includes extensive and intensive archaeological surveys, revisions of previously published archaeological data, historical maps, and innovative satellite images. Apart from the dynamics of the settlement of the research area, spanning from prehistoric to modern time, the development of the irrigation systems in the lowland steppe is also assessed.
 
Edited by Ladislav Stančo and Petra Tušlová, this volume continues the significant work of Czech researchers in Uzbekistan, a key Central Asian republic at the crossroads of history and culture.
[more]
cover of Sherlock's World: Fan Fiction and the Reimagining of BBC's Sherlock

Sherlock's World

Fan Fiction and the Reimagining of BBC's Sherlock

Ann K. McClellan

University of Iowa Press, 2018

Sherlock Holmes remains more popular than ever some 130 years after the detective first appeared in print. These days, the iconic character’s staying power is due in large part to the success of the recent BBC series Sherlock, which brings the famous sleuth into the twenty-first century. 

One of the most-watched television series in BBC history, Sherlock is set in contemporary London, where thirtysomething Sherlock and John (no longer fussy old Holmes and Watson), alongside New Scotland Yard, solve crimes with the help of smartphones, texting, online forums, and the internet. In their modernization of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s nineteenth-century world, Sherlock creators Stephen Moffatt and Mark Gatiss make London as much a character of their show as the actors themselves. The highly stylized series has inspired an impassioned fan community in Britain, the U.S., and beyond. Fans create and share their writings, which reimagine the characters in even more dramatic ways than the series can. 

Interweaving fan fiction studies, world-building, and genre studies, Ann McClellan examines the hit series and the fan fiction it inspires. Using Sherlock to trace the changing face of fan fiction studies, McClellan’s book explores how far fans are willing to go to change the Sherlockian canon while still reinforcing its power and status as the source text. What makes Sherlock fanfic Sherlockian? How does it stay within the canon even while engaging in the wildest reimaginings? Sherlock’s World explores the boundaries between canon, genre, character, and reality through the lenses of fan fiction and world-building. This book promises to be a valuable resource for fan studies scholars, those who write fan fiction, and Sherlock fans alike. 

[more]
cover of Shifting Blind Identities in Higher Education: Stories of Selfhood

Shifting Blind Identities in Higher Education

Stories of Selfhood

Edited by Alison Cook-Sather

Lever Press, 2026

Shifting Blind Identities in Higher Education features accounts of how blindness and low vision intersect with other dimensions of identity for both students and faculty in higher education. Contributors from a range of institutional contexts illuminate “common but not comparable” experiences, as well as importantly different ones, and explore different intersections of identity while navigating higher education spaces. Each chapter addresses these questions: What is the relationship between seeing and selfhood? What choices do students and faculty make about how they experience and represent the intersections of their vision condition and other dimensions of their identity? What do authors wish others to understand, consider, let go of, and/or embrace regarding their experiences of navigating higher education with blindness or low vision?

Writing in their own unique voices, each author shares details of their lived experiences; analyses of how those are shaped by institutions, social norms, and individuals; and offers action steps for how everyone can make higher education more welcoming to and supportive of not only those with blindness or low vision but also those with a wide diversity of identities and experiences. Shifting Blind Identities in Higher Education inspires both insight and action into cultivating a more accessible and inclusive space in higher education. 

[more]
cover of Shifting Borders: Rhetoric, Immigration And Prop 187

Shifting Borders

Rhetoric, Immigration And Prop 187

Kent Ono

Temple University Press, 2002

"Like articles representing the positions of proponents of the measure, those representing opponents constructing the nation as potentially in danger as a result of undocumented immigration."

How do we learn to recognize the damning effects of good rhetorical intentions? And where will we find arguments which escape this trap that permeates the liberal social policy world? Shifting Borders uses an evaluation of the debate over California Proposition 187 to demonstrate how this quandary is best understood by close interrogation of mainstream reports and debates and by bringing to the fore voices that are often left out of mediated discussions.

It is these voices outside the mainstream, so-called "outlaw" discourses, that hold the best possibilities for real social change. To illustrate their claim, the authors present dominant and outlaw discourses around Proposition 187, from television reports, internet chat sites, and religious discourse to coverage of the Los Angeles Times. Their critique ably demonstrates how difficult it is to maintain a position outside the mainstream, but also how important it is for the press, citizens and scholars to actively search out such voices. The findings are organized through a model that provides an innovative method for understanding events and arguments through their rhetorical and communicative construction. In a world where the mediated word defines so much of what we know, Shifting Borders provides a lucid introduction to analyzing the spoken and written word that constitutes political debate in contemporary U.S. culture. In doing so, it makes an important contribution to any future development of progressive political strategy.

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